Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God

by Nat Segaloff

  Silliphant knew things were changing. He knew he had to keep up with the changes in order to survive. But first he had to get through the evening. Accompanied to the Oscars by his third wife, Margot, he looked around the auditorium while Rod Steiger and his actress-wife, Claire Bloom, read the adapted scriptwriting nominees and then announced him as the winner.

  “I can recall that night, every second of it,” he said. [8] “Mostly my disbelief to hear Claire Bloom call my name. And then I was whizzing down the aisles past all those smiling faces — wondering why are THEY smiling? — and, as though fast-forwarded, I was in front of the mike and mesmerized by the backdrop of faces and tuxedos and great boobs of all the dazzling ladies who’d spent all day getting their hair done — all looking up at ME and awaiting something more than ‘I want to thank, etc.’ Not having expected to win (would you — competing against Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate?) I had prepared absolutely nothing. I do remember mumbling something about, ‘We members of the Writers Guild are not allowed to write on spec — and so I have nothing prepared,’ [9] That seemed to do the trick — the audience gave me a warm sweeping feeling of love and support — and I may or may not have said thanks to Norman and Sidney and Walter [Mirish] and especially to [agent] Marty Baum, who got me the job. At least I hope I said that — then I was whisked off with my Oscar®, far heavier than I had imagined — but, then, when had I ever imagined I’d be holding one?”

  In hindsight, the 1968 Oscars were a watershed moment for Hollywood. The Best Picture nominees (the winner was In the Heat of the Night) were not only wildly eclectic, they showed the confusion of a sixty-year-old industry roiled in creative and commercial panic.

  But Silliphant refused to panic. Instead, he changed, as he had changed his entire career, from journalist to publicist to novelist to producer to television writer to screenwriter. He’d seen television go from a writer’s medium to a producer’s medium, and movies go from escapism to realism and back to escapism. He’d watched Hollywood change from a town where everybody knew everyone else to a place too big to know anybody. And he’d watched America change from a nation of innocents to a country where people were starting to acknowledge their place in the world and the responsibility that came with it.

  “I’ve been writing and producing films for thirty years,” he said, looking back on his continual metamorphosis. “I’m into my third decade. It used to be that a decade could last you pretty well. You wouldn’t have to change too much from the start of year one to year ten; as a writer. I find now that I have to change as a writer, in terms of my style, my attitudes, my own internal relationship to life, about every ninety days. I am no more the same person I was in January of this year in any respect than some stranger. Well, that’s kind of frightening. But if I’m going to stay at the top of the heap or the head of the market, I must do that. So I’m constantly re-forming myself. It’s a good idea for any human being to constantly re-form himself, but at the point where it becomes a desperate scramble to keep up with what’s happening, it becomes alarming. When I first started as a writer, for the first ten years, I was sort of dumb and happy, and I just kept doing my work and some things were good and some things weren’t. In the second ten years, it began to accelerate, and I began to see that the world around me was changing faster than I was. So I had to get up to it first, and then ahead of it. That’s what kind of bothers me sometimes. [10]

  But at this moment in 1968, his In the Heat of the Night Oscar still warm, he was the newly anointed Scribe-in-Chief of an industry that was heading for disaster. Ironically, in a few short years, he would create a series of screen disasters that would steer it back on course. But first he had other things on his mind.

  1: The Blank Page

  Stirling Silliphant hit the road even before he drove a car. The man who would make Route 66 a national metaphor practically lived on it and other highways until he was seven, riding with his parents, not because they were homeless, but because it was how his father made a living. Lemuel Lee Silliphant was a traveling salesman for Chicago-based Princess Pat Cosmetics (supposedly named after one of Queen Victoria’s daughters) and purveyed to his share of the 40,000 independent pharmacies, general stores, and beauty parlors that sold makeup in the 1930s before the Depression and chain stores put them out of business. Stirling would recall that the family car always reeked of face powder, and, when his father opened the trunk to remove his wares, the smell of rouge, lipstick, and other ladies’ paint supplies was overpowering. It was also a pheromone for Lee’s female clientele, who doted on him at each sales stop. This, rather than boredom with being a housewife, inspired Stirling’s vivacious mother, Ethel, to make it three for the road, keeping an eye on Lee as well as to teach the baby how to read. She was good at both; by three, little Stirling had picked up the skill, and the marriage held.

  Lemuel Lee always had an independent streak. Born in Kensington, Prince Edward Island, Canada, in 1894, he crossed to America just after World War I, arriving in Detroit. The family name has several variants and two possible origins. Silliphant is the most common in America, but there are also Sillephants and Sellifants. Stirling always claimed it was of Norman origin and could be traced back to William the Conqueror. “It used to be Silliphanté,” he told interviewer Reed Farrell. “My father was constantly reminding me that he was very proud about that lineage. ‘We conquered England.’ He seems to think we must have done it single-handedly.” [11] According to his half-brother, Allan, its roots connect to Donal Cam O’Sullivan, the “last prince of Ireland,” who stood bravely but unsuccessfully against the English crown to preserve his country’s independence at the Battle of Kinsale in 1602. The phonetic Gaelic is “O-sool-le-phan,” which became, over time, O’Sullivan on the one hand and Silliphant on the other. [12]

  His mother, Ethel May Noaker, born February 25, 1898, in New York, was the daughter of a large New York clan from English, Dutch, and German stock. When she married Lee in 1916, the couple rented a house at 155 East High Street in Metamora, Michigan, sixty miles north of Detroit. She was eighteen, he was twenty-one, and Sterling (sic) Dale Silliphant was born on January 16, 1918. [13] Soon after, they moved to Detroit proper, settling into a home on Pingree Street. [14] A second son, Leigh Arlington, was born there in 1921.

  Lee was a charismatic and restless man with varied interests, traits that he passed to his sons. By 1925, he abandoned Princess Pat and had taken the family to seaside San Diego, California. Though only seven at the time, young Stirling remembered, “I got my first boat in San Diego — a surfboard. I learned more about sea swells and wind and tide aboard that board than they can teach you at Annapolis. Then I cranked my way around San Diego Bay in a Sabat and learned about wind-shadow from passing aircraft carriers. A Sunfish taught me to enjoy capsizing.” [15] From San Diego, the clan moved to a house on Linden street in sleepy Glendale, just north of Los Angeles.

  With Ethel now tied to a home and two children, Lee started seeing other women; by 1930, Ethel found out about it and the couple divorced. She would later marry Fred Wellershaus, leaving the boys to be raised by an aunt, Lucy Sun, who was chief nurse at Burbank Community Hospital (near Glendale), and her husband, Mont. They were enrolled in the Gardner School for Boys in Glendale.

  Lee kept the Silliphant name alive with two more marriages yielding one more family. His second ended in tragedy when his young wife suffered a fatal aneurysm. His third, in 1935, to Virginia Mary Abraham, age twenty-one, produced two sons, Robert, born 1937, and Allan, born 1941. In between, in 1938, he became an American citizen.

  He was always restless; in years to come, he would do a stint with Canada’s World At Home Circus, was Chairman of the Speakers Bureau at the National Association of Manufacturers, tried acting, and had a radio show in Long Beach, California. [16] When Stirling and Leigh outgrew the Gardner School, they were sent to the San Diego Army and Navy Military Academy. The exile affected him profoundly; although he stayed close to his mother, he would cite his f
ather’s emotional distance and recognized that he had absorbed that trait himself, struggling to overcome it later in life. This may have been Stirling’s own perception of Lee, because, by the time Lee married Virginia, he had become a warm and giving father to their two new sons. “He was a very, very good man,” Allan Silliphant stated. “We’d give him a back massage and he’d make up radio plays of ‘Jack and Bill,’ and he’d always leave a cliffhanger. My dad was very articulate and he was into a lot of romantic history novels, always reading things like swashbuckling and so forth. My mother was even smarter than him, and he was brilliant. He knew history inside and out. He could quote poetry and Shakespeare. My mother founded a group that now has thousands of women volunteers in the fifty-two Shriners hospitals, a group called the Fatimas.” [17]

  Transferring to Herbert Hoover High School in Glendale, Stirling took up fencing. “I always had swift reflexes and sharp eyesight,” he told writer and martial arts historian John Corcoran in Kick magazine, “and because I always had a sense of other people’s auras, bio-rhythms, and movements, I was able to respond to my opponents’ moves with exhilarating ease — almost precognition.” He chose fencing, he explained, because, “I was fascinated with self defense as opposed to offense as early as age six or seven.” [18] The sport likely appealed to the romantic in him, with its conjuring of the Knights of the Round Table and their chivalric code.

  Ethel’s early reading lessons paid off. When Stirling was five, he wrote a short story called “Little Whisperers” [19] and, by the time he was at Hoover, he was freelancing to The Los Angeles Post and The Los Angeles Times. He was was graduated in the winter of 1953 with honors from the California Scholarship Federation. A scholarship brought him to the University of Southern California, where he not only continued to write for the Times but joined USC’s three-foil fencing squad and “[scoring] ninety percent of my touchés via counter-attacks. An opponent would make a move and I’d counter it while he was still engrossed in having delivered it — and skewer him where he stood.” He was also a member of several USC health care service fraternities and served as president of the Quill club. After three years, he was graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.

  The Friday after Silliphant received his diploma, he married Iris Garff, twenty, a teacher from Salt Lake, Utah. The pair had met when Silliphant visited the city in 1936, and their friendship resumed at Yellowstone National Park the next summer where she was working a summer job as a chambermaid in one of the lodges. Iris was graduated from the University of Utah, dabbled in dramatics there, and was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Reginald Garff. The ceremony was performed June 10, 1938, in the Garff home, and Stirling’s brother Leigh was his best man. Ethel attended, Lee did not.

  After a honeymoon in the Grand Tetons, the Silliphants returned to Glendale, where Stirling took a publicity job at the nearby Walt Disney Studios. With the phenomenal success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, Disney had begun an ambitious slate of films including Pinocchio, Bambi, and Fantasia, and needed to keep a curious world at bay. In those days, the Disney studio was still a homey, if increasingly cramped, campus on Hyperion Avenue in the Silverlake area northeast of LA proper. The handsome, garrulous Silliphant fit right in.

  On August 8, 1940, Iris and Stirling produced a son, Stirling Garff Silliphant. [20] “She was raised a Mormon,” the boy recalled of his mother, “but by that time had started an intellectual quest that moved her away from her dad’s more rigid interpretations. Funny thing is that, because of her travels in the world (Turkey, Japan, Bangladesh, and India), she wound up religiously in the same place my father did, very Buddhist-like. She even recalled in detail several reincarnation experiences.” [21]

  In 1939, Disney moved lock, stock, and mouse to the company’s present site on Buena Vista Street in Burbank. But, by then, Silliphant had moved on to a publicity job at Twentieth Century-Fox where he survived until 1942, when he entered the Naval Air Service in World War II. As Lt. (j.g.), he did not see combat, but was stationed at Treasure Island, San Francisco, in the Navy’s informational services unit. With his fellow informational officer, Raymond Katz (later to become one of Hollywood’s leading talent managers and producers), Silliphant went to Pearl Harbor, New York, and other cities as their services were required. As men in uniform during the war, they also had their pick of women.

  While Silliphant was thus occupied, Iris and little Stirling Garff moved to New York, then San Francisco. When the boy was in the first grade, Iris sent him to live with her family in Salt Lake City, while she went to New York to get her Master’s degree in Psychology at Columbia.

  After the war, the Silliphants reunited in New York, and Stirling resumed his Fox job where he was exposed to studio operations and Hollywood politics. He was also exposed to Spyros Skouras, the bombastic businessman who, in 1935, had helped finance the merger of Darryl F. Zanuck’s Twentieth Century Pictures with William Fox’s floundering Fox Pictures. When Zanuck went off to fight Hitler in 1942, Skouras took over the studio and, in a series of business decisions not inaccurately called a Greek tragedy, nearly buried the company until Zanuck returned. [22] By 1951, Silliphant was running Fox’s east coast publicity, a position that placed him in close touch with book publishers and national magazine editors. It was here that he perfected his ability to pitch stories that met the needs of each individual reporter or editor, a talent that not only sharpened his narrative skills but would make him a confident, compelling salesman of his own material to network and studio brass.

  Skouras made Silliphant his personal assistant in addition to his PR duties, and Silliphant learned to write in character to take the edge off his boss’s penchant for mangling the English language. The Silliphants and the Skourases (Spyros and Saroula Bruiglia Skouras) also spent time together away from the office on the Skouras yacht. On one occasion, Spyros approached Iris to become his mistress. She declined. “Lovely place, Hollywood,” her son appraised. [23]

  But the marriage was already crumbling when Skouras offered to breach it. Stirling and Iris divorced in 1946. Their son stayed in touch with his grandmother, Ethel, and would later reconnect with his father, but his mother never did. “I have a picture of her, years later, standing overlooking Yellowstone Falls,” he said, “that, to me, represents that she never lost the love for my dad.” In 1947, Iris met and married James Rasmussen, whose surname young Stirling took to become Stirling Rasmussen. It was just what the boy needed.

  “Jim was a solid, loving person,” he said. “He was a civil engineer, also a graduate of USC. They met in 1947 and married then. By the time I was in fifth grade, we had moved to La Cañada, California, and Jim became the city engineer for South Pasadena. When my mother then wanted to travel, he got jobs overseas. In 1955, we moved to Japan where he built airfields for the US military. We were there for a year and a half and for me it was a marvelous time.” Family travels broadened the boy’s horizons.

  “In 1959 they were off to Turkey,” he said. “In 1960, taking a year off from college, I joined them. I played basketball on a Turkish basketball team. I taught English as a second language for the Georgetown University English language program, with students twice my age from the Turkish military, business and writing worlds who were going to head to the States for extended projects. After I returned to the States, they moved on to Bangladesh, where Jim built sea walls, a very necessary item there. During that time my mother spent time in India, going to the area where the Tibetans had come across, and there met the Dalai Lama, and helped them set up their initial education program. India made a large impression spiritually. Jim died in the mid-1980s.”

  Following his divorce, Silliphant’s man-about-town status in New York made him a visible, attractive catch. “He was a very handsome guy at that age,” said Allan Silliphant. “He looked a lot like some of the lead characters that he hired later on, like James Franciscus. There was something about the brightness of his eyes. He looked for people he could identify with and then
he would create a character based on his affinity, like having a puppet.”

  His single status did not last long: that same year he married Ednamarie Patella. “Pat” Patella had been a successful cover girl for national fashion magazines. She was glamorous and exuded an earthy sexuality. She put her career on hold to become a wife and mother, but disenchantment simmered inside the Sicilian beauty. They would have two children: a son, Loren, born in 1951, and a daughter, Dayle, born in 1955.

  “I could see that wasn’t gonna to last after a couple of years,” Allan said, “and I guess he was trying to get away from someone who thought they were a world-class glamour symbol. She didn’t choose to be a celebrity, she just was a natural celebrity. That wasn’t a happy situation.”

  “There was the time she made this elaborate meal for him,” recalled Stirling Linh Silliphant — Silliphant’s son by his fourth wife, Tiana. “He had cheated on her and she was going crazy, so she was waiting for him to come home one night. She cooked this elaborate meal — a sumptuous meal, as it was described — and, as he sat down to eat, she wrapped everything off the table and threw it in the trash.” [24]

  Meanwhile, Silliphant’s Fox duties included taking movie stars around on publicity interviews. For Deadline, USA (1952) the studio sent him Humphrey Bogart, who had just won the Academy Award® for The African Queen and easily attracted press attention. “This is a bit presumptuous of me,” the thirty-four-year-old Silliphant asked Bogart as they were getting out of a cab, “but I hope to be a screenwriter. What do you think is the key to success in Hollywood?” Said Bogart, “One word: survival. Stick around long enough and everybody else will die or retire. Just hang in, kid, and you’ll end up with all the awards and all the cups.” [25]