Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God

by Nat Segaloff

  Once married, Silliphant began looking after Tiana’s career along with her life. One gambit involved reviving Tiana as “the karate princess” in series of 1987 videos directed by Stanley Dorman titled Karatecize with Tiana. Her local profile began to rise, and she had an Oscar-winning screenwriter writing roles for her. “He told all his friends, who were now mine, that I was his fourth and last wife,” she said proudly. “He was my college, my guru, my Vietnam teacher, and I was his ward — educating Tiana.” An eager student, she acclimated to life in Hollywood, life on the sea, and life as the wife of an A-list Hollywood producer-writer. In turn, he saw her as his protégé and was always looking for ways to put her into the films that he was writing. There was resistance.

  “He spent three films trying to give me the role because he believed in me, just as he did Bruce Lee,” she said. “But I was harder to sell. Even Bruce had to go to Hong Kong to prove them wrong. Stirling said it was racism when Warner Bros. TV told Bruce that Americans would be offended by a Chinaman in their living room each week [for Kung Fu]. [200] Stirling went wild furious over this. ‘They’re wrong, wrong,’ he used to say [citing the untapped Chinese market]. ‘One person in four speaks Chinese and they will take over and lead the world.’”

  The Enforcer, a third Dirty Harry film with Clint Eastwood, detailed elsewhere, presented another casting opportunity. Silliphant had conceived Harry Callahan’s new partner, Kate Moore, as not just a woman, but an Asian woman, promising fascinating complexities for the film’s proposed Chinese gang subplot. The idea did not get traction.

  “Clint and John Calley [head of Warner Bros.] were not amused,” said Tiana. “Stirling knew he had a far better story with a Chinatown gang and a gal sidekick. He insisted to Clint and Warner Bros. that my character in a Chinatown tong story with martial arts was good for Dirty Harry. They made him throw it out, made him change it to what Clint wanted. In the end, Stirling was happy I was pregnant so he could say to John and Clint, ‘See? She’s having a baby. I didn’t write for my wife, just see it as a good story!’ Guys from studios hated having someone’s wife, with assumed no talent, forced on them to ruin movies and careers.” Word reached her later that Calley had sighed, “Stirling is in love with his wife too much.” [201]

  Team Silliphant fared better with the 1978 ABC mini-series Pearl, turning it into a showcase for Mrs. Silliphant, who played the key role of Holly Nagata in the sweeping story about the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. But, even there, her casting did not come easily. “ABC and Warner Bros. TV must have resented me. The director, Hy Averback, wanted me, but ABC and Warner Bros. did not want ‘the wife.’ They went to Hawaii, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago but no actress could read what Stirling wrote for me. Stirling said throughout, ‘Bring me the better actress’ and relaxed. ‘Tiana is your best actress. I know her and I wrote it for her.’ There weren’t many Asian women to choose from, but they tried. In the end, they tested me and I still couldn’t get an answer. It was very hard on me. I was blamed during filming when Holly had to be cut down, as Stirling wrote me long monologues, more for a movie or a play.

  “Filming in Hawaii began. I was taking care of the baby. Stirling always said the bastards would come around. But when costumers had no actress to measure, and filming began, I felt blamed. But Stirling had absolute confidence in me. My husband coached me to go in to the President of ABC, Brandon Stoddard, and say, ‘I never did TV because there were no good parts.’ Frank Konigsberg — his partner on Pearl — said later, ‘Tiana, what made you say that?’ I said that Stirling gave me the script and I said it. They hated me but it was the biggest hit for them and made a lot of money. Warner Bros. ran an ad to congratulate themselves for 80 million viewers and listed all the actors, but they omitted me.”

  Away from the studio, times were swinging. There were parties aboard the Tiana II, a seventy-six foot, $1 million Swan yacht built in Finland. [202] Silliphant’s to-do logs for this period show that he was a thoughtful host, bringing rare wines and classy meals for cruises with important guests. He was a celebrity, as when he and Tiana spent his birthday on a sailing trip across the South Pacific to Australia and New Zealand in January of 1975.

  “We sailed into Sidney Harbor,” Tiana reported, “and the press was there. Three cameramen in shorts with three movie cameras boarded the ship, so Stirling followed them around. He asked, ‘Who is it you’re looking to interview on our boat?’ They said, ‘Some bloke named Silliphant. His movie’s big here, The Towering Inferno.’ Stirling said, ‘I am he!’” He was so surprised. This went on to when Sir Run Run Shaw sent his hunter green Rolls-Royce for us in Hong Kong. Stirling said you could play football in our living room suite at the Peninsula, and Run Me Shaw himself in Singapore hosted us, veddy VIP. We got addicted to five-star this and five-star that.” [203]

  They moved to Marin County in Northern California around the time that the Killer Elite (q.v.) was green-lighted not long after their return. The timing was right; Silliphant had long since tired of Hollywood even though he was not only its beneficiary but one of its leading practitioners. “The move away from Hollywood was a major event in our lives,” said Ti-ana. “This move was crucial for Stirling to see how much he hated the eel pit here. His press attack on the Los Angeles industry and way of life he bought into, and dragged me into, lasted less than a year. But his turning publicly against them, and then our move to Marin and then Thailand, left me with no friends upon his death.” Their Marin home on Strawberry Point, overlooking San Francisco Bay, had a swimming pool, sauna, den, and rooms that contained spoils from the couple’s extensive world travels. “It’s real, but it’s eight to ten hours a day, seven days a week at the typewriter,” Silliphant told gushing KTUV-TV interviewer Bob MacKenzie in 1989 who visited them there, asking, “Why do you live up here when the action is down there [in Hollywood]?” “Well, that’s the trouble,” Silliphant answered. “It’s Hollywood action, it’s not what life is about. I just feel much closer to people up here. See, up here, you have to remember, that the film business is less than the ice cream business. In other words, you can go to an ice cream place and know they do four hundred percent more business a year selling ice cream cones than we do in the movie business. I find it refreshing to be reminded of our place in society, which is vastly overrated. We’re not curing cancer, we’re just makin’ flicks.”

  One such “flick” was Catch the Heat (a.k.a. Feel the Heat, 1987). Directed by Joel (Yoel) Silberg, a Palestinian filmmaker whose career began when he worked with Otto Preminger on Exodus (1960), it was an avowed action film (written with more flair than the genre requires) designed to showcase Tiana’s acting and martial arts abilities. As “Checkers Goldberg,” a drug enforcement agent, Tiana goes undercover as a stripper in order to track and trap a ruthless talent agent (Rod Steiger) who is using his young female clients to smuggle drugs into the country. Set in San Francisco and Buenos Aires, it also starred David Dukes and Brian Thompson. Although it follows the numbers plot-wise, Tiana’s moves are slick and clearly performed by her.

  The Stirling-Tiana marriage lasted twenty-two years. The last two years — 1994 to 1996 — were spent largely apart by irreconcilable schedules, not irreconcilable differences. While Silliphant was ensconced in Bangkok writing, Tiana was editing her documentary, From Hollywood to Hanoi, in New York. Throughout the project, her biggest booster was her husband, especially after her parents felt that returning to Vietnam — particularly the North — would open old wounds. She persevered, and the film reflects her tenacity.

  “It is solely the dream, the hard work, the film of my wife, Tiana, who conceived of it, wrote it, directed it, and has now almost finished her final touches in post-production,” he enthused in October of 1992. “She had an initial showing of the film (it’s intended for theatrical release as a non-fiction film in the genre of Michael Moore’s Roger and Me — matter of fact, Michael is one of Tiana’s principal backers) at the Telluride Film Festival a mon
th or so ago, then took the film to the Chicago Film Festival, is due in November at the Virginia Film Festival, followed by the Hawaiian Fest, then London. She’s hoping to get a nomination for the Academy. It is a remarkable motion picture. She shot more than seventy hours in Vietnam and has edited it into eighty-eight minutes — a truly remarkable work. So maybe after all these years of my efforts in behalf of Vietnam, I’ve finally succeeded — through Tiana’s film.” [204]

  “It was a film that took great courage to make,” he said to Tiana in an interview with Japan’s NHK-TV (NHK Sōgō terebijon). They sat on the beach, she dressed in Asian colors and he in that white plantation suit. “To go against the wishes of your parents is monumental. You went there and defied all that conventional wisdom about ‘you’ll be put in prison’ and ‘the communists will eat you alive.’ And you discovered, instead, the truth: a nation has no animus against this country, is trying to forget the war. And we’re still caught up in it here. We just can’t let go of it. I don’t believe it’s because we lost, I believe it was a terribly wrenching act of being against everything this country stands for. And it cut the conscience of the American people.”

  11: Master of Disaster

  It’s a perverse statement about our media-driven world that, whenever a natural disaster or horrific accident occurs — anything from earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, or tornadoes to 9/11 — the first thing terrified witnesses usually say is, “It was just like a movie.”

  Hollywood is almost entirely responsible for that disaster imagery, and the man who was mostly responsible for Hollywood’s disasters was Stirling Silliphant. During the decade of the 1970s, he earned the sobriquet “Master of Disaster,” although those who worked on those and other films coyly preferred to call them “group jeopardy” pictures.

  “Let me begin,” Silliphant said with the wearisome sigh of an oft-repeated response, “by saying that the person most in peril from working on group jeopardy films is the writer.” He should know. Between 1971 and 1980 he wrote The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974), The Swarm (1978), and one that turned out to be an actual disaster, When Time Ran Out (1980), all of which were produced and sometimes directed by Irwin Allen. A showman of the old-fashioned school who was as star-struck as any of his audiences, Allen was driven by, and dearly loved, movies and the movie business. Born in 1916 in New York City and trained as a journalist at Columbia University, he entered TV and movies by way of the advertising industry and won his first Oscar in 1953 for the documentary The Sea Around Us. Gaining studio access, he produced and directed The Animal World (1956), famous for its animated dinosaur sequence, and The Story of Mankind (1957), a nutty, cameo-filled version of Henrik Willem van Loon’s best-selling one-volume chronicle of the human race. His first real hit was the 1960 remake of The Lost World, after which he branched into television and established his legend with Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Lost in Space.

  The Poseidon Adventure confirmed a trend that had arguably begun with Krakatoa, East of Java (1969) and Airport (1970), although the latter successful adaptation of Arthur Hailey’s 1968 novel involved a human villain instead of Nature’s wrath, as in Krakatoa (which, incidentally, is west of Java). Others produced during, and inspired by, the Silliphant-Allen canon included Hurricane (1974), Earthquake (1975), Hindenburg (1975), The Cassandra Crossing (1976), Avalanche (1978), and Meteor (1979), as well as sequels to Poseidon (Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, 1979) and Airport (1975, 1977 and 1979), most of which seemed to star George Kennedy, and some of which were made by Allen sans Silliphant. [205] The trend was so shameless that it even inspired an equally shameless joke: “Did you hear, they’re making a double feature out of Earthquake and The Towering Inferno? They’re going to call it Shake and Bake.” The laughter stopped when the profits started. Airport, for example, cost $10 million and grossed over ten times that; Earthquake cost $7 million and grossed eight times as much. And The Poseidon Adventure, which had to seek partial outside financing because its studio was on the fence about spending $5 million, grossed nearly twenty times its negative cost and returned $42 million in film rentals. And all of these were in the days when a U.S. movie ticket cost around $2.

  If anyone had perspective on the genre, it was Silliphant. “I was doing great with the first two,” he said, “Poseidon and Towering. But the downward spiral was my getting involved in those two classic golden turkeys, The Swarm and When Time Ran Out. [206] I have never been able to bring myself to screen When Time Ran Out, so horrendous was the experience of being within a thousand miles of it. What respect my [then] sixteen-year-old son may or may not have got for me has, over the years, been in great jeopardy of fusing out because of my involvement with these final two gasps of the ‘GJ genre.’”

  Disaster movies were nothing new; the silent cinema offered actual scenes of destruction as early as 1906 with newsreels of the San Francisco earthquake and fire. The Last Days of Pompeii, featuring the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, hit the screens in 1913. But they didn’t form a notable genre until American self-esteem was shaken by world events and only the movies, according to Irwin Allen, could offer hope.

  “Everybody assumes that, if they had an opportunity, they truly would be heroes,” he once explained, “and the disaster films give them an opportunity, within a vicarious moment in time, that they’re able to become Errol Flynn.” [207]

  Silliphant’s plunge into the genre was on The Poseidon Adventure, drawn from the 1969 book by seasoned novelist Paul Gallico. The project had begun at Avco-Embassy Pictures in 1969, when that company’s distinctive president, Joseph E. Levine, acquired the Gallico story and signed Irwin Allen to produce it and three other pictures. [208] In short order, the deal was off, and Allen brought the project to Fox with a $5 million price tag. Fox, which was just climbing back into the ring after a disastrous run of pictures in the late ‘60s, couldn’t afford a tab beyond $2.5 million, so the resourceful Allen prevailed upon exhibitor Sherrill Corwin and distributor Steve Broidy to invest the other half as individuals. [209] Gordon Douglas was announced as director. [210] Almost immediately, Douglas was replaced by Ronald Neame and a January 10, 1972 start date was set for exteriors on the Long Beach, California, dry-docked location of the ocean liner Queen Mary. [211] The first few drafts of the script were written by Wendell Mayes, who couldn’t please Irwin Allen, and asked to be released from his contract. That’s when Allen postponed the shoot and went to Silliphant in 1971. [212] Silliphant wrote at least four drafts: July 23, 1971, February 10, 1972, February 25, 1972, and the Third Revised Shooting Final, March 24, 1972, which went before the cameras, although there continued to be the usual revisions during production.

  It was Silliphant’s rewrite that gave Poseidon her sailing orders. [213] “Poseidon was a straight-out story,” he said, “with some — because of Paul Gallico — well-written, flesh-and-blood characters. The narrative line is simple: a passenger liner turns hull up and is sinking by the bow, its time afloat unknown, but hardly more than a matter of hours. A group of survivors has to work its way up toward what had previously been the bottom and, if they can achieve that level, attempt to break through the hull before the liner sinks. The group more or less remained intact, despite arguments among them, chiefly a difference of opinion between the Ernie Borgnine character and the Gene Hackman character as to which way is the only way to survival.

  “The matter of making the characters empathetic was not a problem because I had a simple and central conflict going between Borgnine and Hackman. In their conflict they exposed their own fears, and therefore their humanity. And as this impacted on the several other characters, we inevitably had to see them as facets of ourselves. And how can you go wrong with an actress of the brilliance of Shelley Winters, whose chubby rump has to be pushed upward — and her face of complaint at such a rude contact — and then, when she has to dive and swim a hazardous course underwater in her bloomers — dies in the arms of her husband before they can get to Israel? Come on,
that’s really snatching candy from a baby.”

  Poseidon at once established the genre and transcended it. Stock though its characters may have been, they tagged all the bases and provided one person from every age, gender, and temperament (though not race or ethnicity) for anyone sitting in the audience to identify with. This same trick, incidentally, was used three years later in Jaws and became an unspoken casting convention.

  With an unexpected smash hit, the race to wreak more havoc on humanity was on. Unfortunately for Silliphant, the disaster wasn’t only on the screen, it was also in progress at home. One morning, in October 1972, he kissed Margot goodbye, left their house at 585 Challette Drive in Beverly Hills, and went to work. That afternoon he faxed her to say he wasn’t coming home again. His secretary, Nona Joy, typed it for him.

  Margot retained famed divorce lawyer Marvin Mitchelson, sued Stirling for $2 million, and took out a restraining order against him. Shortly thereafter, columnist Dorothy Manners linked him with actress France Nuyen, the ex-Mrs. Robert Culp, but that wasn’t the case. He had met Tiana and was living with her in a house at 2375 Kimridge Road in Beverly Hills that he had rented from actor James Darren.

  Silliphant wanted just three things from the divorce: the stand for his dictionary, his Oscar, and the stamp collection he had been building since he was a teenager. He left Margot the Rolls-Royce, the house, and, carelessly, his credit cards. He was able to retrieve his dictionary stand and his Oscar, but not the stamps or his credit rating. “He showed up here with nothing,” Tiana said, “and started all over again.” [214] It was nearly a year before the divorce was finalized by Santa Monica Superior Court Commissioner Philip Erbson, who accepted the couple’s claim of irreconcilable differences and awarded Margot $500,000 and their Beverly Hills house. The divorce was granted on September 6, 1973. [215]