Robert Altman

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  ART GOODELL: He was always respectful of the people he worked with. If you had a suggestion for a little different camera angle, he always listened to those suggestions. But he was also very encouraging about wanting you to learn more. He was great up to the last minute. When the action started he was in charge.

  ROGER SNOWDALL: Caterpillar had a Number 12 loader-grader, and we went and shot motion pictures of this loader-grader in every aspect of its use—on the road and how it worked. The motion picture was shown to prospective customers. It was a sales tool. Bob tried to make it a more personalized thing. He’d shoot over the driver’s shoulder instead of out on the roadway. He’d talk to the operator—“What do you like about this?” “Why do you like this one better than something else?” “Does it fulfill your needs in the snow? On the gravel roads?”

  FRANK W. BARHYDT: One time he was doing an agricultural film and he figured how to rig a camera on the side of the car or mount it in a way that gave it a different look. The Calvin Company was a place where he could learn the craft, be around people he could learn from. He learned the basics so he could springboard into a higher realm.

  Robert Altman, with foot on bumper, directing a Calvin Company film

  ROGER SNOWDALL: We did this one safety show around Kansas City and we staged a crash on Truman Road out toward the armaments building, near Seven Highway. We staged this wreck where one car came down and hit another car—a beautiful, beautiful scene. Bob made arrangements to buy the automobiles, because both of them were going to be destroyed. Somehow or other he ended up with a new Ford Mustang, which somehow or other got buried in the cost of these pictures. Everybody knew it, but I guess nobody knew how to do anything about it [laughs].

  He was a wheeler-dealer, I know that. He’d spend your money until it was gone and then he’d spend somebody else’s. You’d go on a road trip with him, you bought the booze, you bought the drinks, and when you ran out somebody else would have to buy because he never had any money. If he did, he didn’t spend it.

  One time we almost got thrown out of a restaurant. Bob and I were discussing religious things. He was three sheets to the wind and he got a little loud. The people next to us left and we didn’t realize that we had driven them away. We went up to pay the bill, and the woman said, “You know of course that you ran those people out of here because of your loud talk about religion.” And I said, “No, I didn’t know that. I’m really sorry about that.” Bob made some comment to the effect of, “Who cares? If they don’t like it, it’s too bad.” His take on religion was just being argumentative. It’s not that he had a strong opinion one way or another, he just wanted to argue. I think he would have liked to be a practicing atheist, but nah, he wasn’t.

  Another time we were going down South, to Bartlesville, Oklahoma. We were shooting a Phillips Marlex plastics show. Bob and Art Goodell and another cameraman and myself were on this trip. They took the light fixture down from the ceiling in Bob’s motel room, and put in a bunch of fruit and a bunch of booze, and they made a punch bowl out of it. Everybody got really soused. They started cleaning the place up, and somebody poured this stuff in the toilet, and of course it stopped up the toilet. The next morning somebody flushed the toilet and this stuff ran all over the bathroom floor—red water and booze and fruit and everything. Bob called the manager, and the lady came in who ran the place, and she was all aghast. With a straight face, Bob said, “Somebody must’ve killed a fruit-eating monkey.” She screamed and ran out of the room. And we very quickly left the motel.

  * * *

  JOAN ALTMAN SARAFIAN: I’d go down to Calvin and watch him directing. He seemed to know what he was doing. I tell you, if you wanted to see a really good film, you would film Bob making a film.

  SUSAN DAVIS (actress and cousin): He treated all of us as part of his own rep company. “Suze, I’ve got to use your baby.” It was a Calvin Company thing and Bob needed an eighteen-month-old baby, and he had to be able to take direction. I said, “Bob, you’re kidding.” And he said, “Let me just work with him. And you can be the mom.” I said, “Sure, why not?” I was always the mom or the wife or the widow. So I hand my son Jeffrey the spinach and Bob is directing him. And Bob said, “If you throw that on the floor as hard as you can, I will give you an ice cream.” So there’s film somewhere of my oldest son, after Bob bribed him, throwing spinach on the floor. It was brilliant.

  JERRE STEENHOF: After high school, I saw Bob again when he was at Calvin. Some of us girls acted for him. In one scene I was pushing a perambulator. And he thought that was just the funniest thing in the world—me, his old girlfriend, with a baby buggy.

  ROGER SNOWDALL: He made a lot of these service-station films, driveway-type scenes where you’d see the customers driving through. Phillips Petroleum made a big deal of that. That was in the days when you had a full-service filling station, and in the movie they made a point of describing what a good driveway technician should do—check the water, check the oil, clean the windshield, check the fan belts, make sure they don’t need new ones. They had an opportunity to sell, and they emphasized that.

  LOTUS CORELLI ALTMAN MONROE (second wife): I was an actress, and I got a casting call from the Calvin Company. Bob was going to be directing. This was one of his first directorial things—he was very new to it. They had hired William Frawley—you know, Fred Mertz from I Love Lucy. He had a continuing role in the Phillips Petroleum movies that they made. Each one of these little half-hour films was to demonstrate different things to the Phillips company employees—how to keep a station clean, how to sell TBA—which I learned was tires, batteries, and accessories—how to run their gas stations. The first one I did for them was Keeping the Station Clean.

  My little bit was that I was supposed to be getting out of my car and walking up to the ladies’ room. They had a guy cleaning the ladies’ room, and I was supposed to try the door. He was supposed to say something, and I was to turn around and leave.

  So I walked up to the door and tried the handle and this voice came out, “I’ll be through in just a minute, ma’am.” At the sound of his voice, I stepped back in shock to see if it was the ladies’ room—I looked up to the sign in bewilderment, then turned around and left immediately. Bob cracked up.

  I’m an actress, and that bit of business is what I do. I think that’s the first time Bob realized that if you hire an actor, you tell him what the situation is and let them go. That’s what he’s always done with his women, particularly. And that’s why everybody, every actor, loves him.

  JOAN ALTMAN SARAFIAN: Lotus was a New York actress who had come to Kansas City with her first husband. She was very smart, very hip, and he fell in love with her.

  CHRISTINE ALTMAN: My parents fought a lot. They got into a huge fight and he broke the mirror before he went out. This mirror was like the Empire State Building to me, and this mirror came crashing down. That’s the memory that keeps coming back. It was a catastrophic memory. The wood in it was six inches wide, with carved cherubs. A few years ago was my fiftieth birthday, and he had it restored and fixed and sent it to me for my birthday. That was wonderful. But my parents weren’t together very long.

  Why’d they divorce? I think it’s because of his unquenched desire to do and be whatever he wanted to do or be. From racehorses to tattooing dogs to all kinds of strange little scams on his way to trying to figure out what he really wanted to do, which he figured out at the Calvin Company, which was to make movies.

  LOTUS CORELLI ALTMAN MONROE: After that film for Phillips, we became acquainted. He asked me if I wanted to have a drink afterwards. I was amenable. I was having kind of a little split in my marriage, and I was very unhappy. We were not separated, but he was going his way and I was concentrating on my work and keeping busy. So Bob and I went to dinner a couple of times and of course he’s a delightful raconteur. Most women like a man with a sense of humor.

  He was already divorced from LaVonne. I had to straighten Christine out about that. She thought, “You came along
and took my father away.” But her mother was already living in Fremont, Nebraska. I had nothing to do with their breakup.

  Bob came to a couple of our parties when I was married to Max. Bob was looking for a hostess, and he decided that I was a perfect hostess. Just before I left my husband we had a big bash. Bob looked at my husband and said, “I’m going to marry your wife, you know.” Max laughed and said, “A lot of people have said that.” I turned to him and said, “I think you should listen to him.” Later on my husband and I talked, and I said, “Yes, I’m going to leave.” This was during the holiday season. I said I was leaving on New Year’s Eve, and I did.

  Bob said, “Well, let’s move in together.” I said yes—I was ready to leave. It was New Year’s Eve, 1951, and so we lived together for almost a year. We didn’t tell anybody. He continued to work at the Calvin Company. I continued to do my plays and my television. I had a series of little things. One was called Name That Sketch. We had some of the announcers who were popular in Kansas City in that time. We had a panel and a sketch artist with a huge sheet of blank paper who would draw these charcoal sketches and we were supposed to figure out what they meant. A long fence with a knothole with a fish looking through it. I said, “Pike’s Peek!” That’s how dumb these shows were.

  Bob wanted to get to California, so he quit Calvin. I think it was November 21, and it had to be 1952. We rented a house right off Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. Bob was trying to get work, but he wasn’t getting any. Bob and Jim Lantz, who had been an anchorman in Kansas City and was a very good friend, collaborated on writing things. He and Bob worked up one idea where they were going to make millions: Play-A-Tune. It was a strip of paper with musical keys on it. They had numbers on the keys. You put the strip of paper behind the keys on the piano. The book was written so it had numbers under the notes. You’d play the number under the note and that’s how you’d learn to play the tune. Jim and Bob filmed an ad, and it ran on television. They got a P.O. box and waited for the orders. They had about ten responses. Well, that wasn’t going to work.

  This was about the time they came up with the all-purpose country song “Give Me a Girl Who Will Love My Dog and Teach My Kids to Pray.” They tried to get a truck in there somehow but they couldn’t manage it.

  Lou Lombardo came out with us, too. Louis latched onto Bob when he was in his late teens or something—he had done work on the sets at Calvin. Bob was a flame that attracted lots of moths. Louis claimed to have quasi-gangster affiliations. “You want anybody taken care of, I can get their knees broken. Just one if you want.” Louis attached himself to us. So he was part of our little crowd.

  Nobody was making any money, so Bob said, “I’ve got to go back to the Calvin Company.” So we went back, but Louis stayed on and got a job in the studios.

  FRANK W. BARHYDT: Bob would go out to Hollywood for a while, and when he could not find work he would come back to the Calvin Company. I think he did that three or four times.

  ROBERT ALTMAN: I was broke. I couldn’t get a job. I couldn’t do anything. And I went back to them. And each time I’d go back, I’d take a salary cut.

  Robert Altman, from a speech to the Calvin Company, circa 1964: I started in the film business not too long ago, right here on this sound-stage. It was a stormy beginning, and as I remember, I was in such a hurry to “make it” that I often forgot to stand still long enough to do what it was I was trying to do. I’m not sure—even today—that I knew what it was I was trying to do, but I do know that I tried very, very hard, and ran around and around my goal until either I or it became like tigers turning into a circle of melted butter. And never once stopping to wonder what it was I was chasing—or was it, by then, chasing me.

  Anyway, I was hired and quit. Rehired and fired. Came and went. Until one of the brighter fellows around here remarked—as I was storming out of the front door one day with a chip on my shoulder, and none in my pockets—“If Altman comes back a third time, they’ll get to keep him.”

  LOTUS CORELLI ALTMAN MONROE: When we came back from California, we lived outside Kansas City, at Lake Lotawana. It was a charming little place, built like a little lighthouse. It was two cabins on one lot. The inside wall was also the outside wall. It wasn’t meant for winter living. To heat the place was a fireplace. The stove and the sink weren’t important—we had a bar.

  Bob got me a job at the insurance company where his father was working, Kemper. They gave me a job to send out notices to people that their premiums were due. We went out on the lake and Bob taught me how to cast for bass. We’d get home from work and change our clothes and get in our boat and fish for bass.

  With his second wife, Lotus, in 1952

  RICHARD SARAFIAN: One time Lotus managed to catch a big one. I don’t know what kind of fish it was. She kept it on a string in the water, for weeks. If anybody floated by and asked her how she was doing, she would pull up this fish. She had humor, not just humor but mischief.

  LOTUS CORELLI ALTMAN MONROE: Bob’s sister Joan and her first husband, Chet Allen, and Bob and I were a little group. They moved into the cabin next door. Chet and Joan were absolutely the most gorgeous couple you’ve ever seen. Joan was classic. She looked like she’d just stepped out of Vogue, this porcelain beauty and this naturally dark blonde hair. Joan was brilliant. She and I got along very well. We would catch fish and cook and feed all these people. Nobody had any money. It was a fine time.

  JOAN ALTMAN SARAFIAN: Lotus was the greatest cook in the world. She could cook anything, and it would taste good. Out at the lake, we would hunt frogs at night, because she cooked frogs’ legs. Bob and I would go out with our spear. The lake had been populated by hundreds of frogs, but by the end of that summer there wasn’t a sound. I always felt bad about that, but not too bad.

  LOTUS CORELLI ALTMAN MONROE: So then I got pregnant. We all had gone to see The Bridges at Toko-Ri, and I’m waiting for this kid to pop. We’d already been to Bob’s sister Barbara’s wedding, and we decided to play poker. This is like midnight. Finally I said to Chet, “Does your watch have a second hand on it?” Joan said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m timing my contractions.” They did the situation-comedy thing. They all jumped up and ran around and I’m standing there with my bag. They forgot me!

  It was a fun time. Our first son, Michael, was born in 1955. Bob said, “We’re going to call him Michael Bernard, for my father.”

  What kind of father was Bob? Terrible. Michael was in his crib and Bob was lying on the couch in his usual position, with his arms on his head. I come home and Michael is screaming—he has his head between the bars of the crib. “Why didn’t you go in there and help him?” And Bob says, “I thought he always did that.”

  The child could do nothing for him, nothing to bolster his ego. In fact, one night Bob and some friends were playing poker, and he ran out of money and picked up Michael and put him on the table and said, “Okay, I’ll bet the kid.” The men who were with him were horrified. I just came over and took Michael off the table. Was he joking? He wasn’t laughing when he did it. Well, he was drunk.

  * * *

  RICHARD SARAFIAN: I was working for the Army Hometown News Center in Kansas City. I rented a house right near him, in fact, right next door at Lake Lotawana. I remember he floated by in an inner tube. As he passed me he tried to get into a conversation with me. I was pretty much a wise-guy New Yorker. Whatever he said, I told him to fuck off. Subsequently I was cooking shish kebabs for my Army buddies. The aroma from the fire pit lured him. He came over and tried to talk with me again. I said, “Listen, I told you before, fuck off.” He sent Lotus over, and then we got friendly.

  LOTUS CORELLI ALTMAN MONROE: Dick Sarafian lived near us at Lake Lotawana with some Army buddies. One day, Bob said, “Go down and ask those guys if they want to come over here for a drink.” We ended up singing and dancing. They all became good buddies, and Dick and Bob hit it off immediately.

  RICHARD SARAFIAN: One day we marched into a restaurant. Bob had
the hots for the waitress. I looked rough—needed a shave, a clean shirt. He said, “Pretend you’re blind—but underplay it.” He held out his arm and marched me in. Sat me on a stool next to him. The waitress was well-endowed. I went along with it. He was talking to the waitress. She asked about me, and Bob said, “He’s blind, but he doesn’t want anybody to know it.” All of a sudden she became the earth mother, the one who wanted to hold me. It’s like her milk flowed—like a mother to a needy baby. Drinks came at me from every direction. The waitress was now in my lap. He slammed the keys on the bar and said, “Sarafian, you son of a bitch, you drive her home!” [Laughs]

  LOTUS CORELLI ALTMAN MONROE: The beginning of our marriage was the affair part, when we were madly in love. The song “It Was Just One of Those Things” reminds me of Bob, especially the lyric, “It was too hot not to cool down.”

  He was still young and hadn’t gotten into a pattern yet, but I should have recognized it. He was pretty wild. One night he got very drunk and he smashed one of my mother’s tea sets that I was very fond of. Then he took a knife and tore up these posters that my mother had sent from her silent-movie days. Later, I had one of his mistresses calling me and saying he broke this or that. I said, “Why are you calling me?”

  He would say things to people if he got to know them, if he could see any chink in their armor, he would strike verbally and could tear a person apart in a second. And not in private, but in front of large groups of people. He had to have an audience because that was the point. He had to destroy people to make himself feel real. I don’t know. He had a tremendous ego, and God knows he knew he was brilliant and so did everybody else. But he was just compelled to do this.