I said, “What the hell are you doing here, Bobby?”
He says, “Well, you know, the cards didn’t run with me tonight, and I broke up with my girlfriend, Helene, and she doesn’t want me to come home, at least not now. Can I stay with you for a while?”
I said, “Sure.”
He said, “I don’t have any money.”
I said, “I don’t care, you can stay as long as you want.”
So he stayed two years.
Robert Altman in 1958, trying to get his career rolling
Why’d he come to me? I was there. And it was free. And I never begrudged him anything. I was a cardiologist, and anytime I could help him I would. If had to slip him a few bucks I did, and that was okay. He was paying his way just by being around, telling stories and laughing and making fun and introducing you and bringing people by. Worth his weight in gold. You could tell right away he was going to be a big winner. It was a pleasure to see a meteor about to take off.
* * *
The James Dean Story (1957)
Bosley Crowther, review in The New York Times, October 19, 1957: What should be an effective contribution to the perpetuation of the legend of the late James Dean is achieved in “The James Dean Story.”… This eighty-two-minute memorial … is edited into a sort of cinematic elegy, with a commentary that throbs with deep laments. Obviously, it is angled to that audience that found in young Dean a symbol and sanctuary for the self-pity and self-dramatization of youth. It says he was wracked with doubts and torments, nursed a childish belief that he was “bad” and did reckless things as rebellion against the insecurity and loneliness in his soul.
GEORGE W. GEORGE (writer and producer): One day I sat in my apartment and nothing was happening. I was desperate to make a living. I had some money, so I didn’t need to be desperate, but I was. Suddenly I saw that James Dean got killed in his car. That was it. I called up Altman—he had given up the motion-picture business by then, he had gone back to Kansas City, but now he was back in California, trying again. I knew a guy at Warner Brothers who I thought could help us.
I said to Bob, “You want to do a picture about Jimmy Dean? Have you thought about it?”
He said, “That’s a good subject.”
He hadn’t made a documentary. I hadn’t made a documentary. I didn’t even know what a documentary was.
He said, “Do you know Jimmy Dean at all?”
“No, I never met him. What about you, you know him, ever have a meeting with him?”
Bob said, “No, I never met him.” Then he said, “Let’s go do it.”
Which is just like Bob. Fearless. If I had been by myself I wouldn’t have done it. It would have been too much. I would have figured out a reason not to do it. You find out in life most things in life are not done. Fear of failure, fear of stupidity, fear of some shortcoming on your part. Luckily, we were all there at the right time, including Jimmy Dean.
We made the picture. We went to Indiana—everybody else was talking to his representatives. We went and did it. We went and made the picture.
ROBERT ALTMAN: After Calvin, I had the experience of being able to make these documentary films. George still wanted to be the director. I said, “I’m the director now.” So we shared—written and directed by—together.
George fronted the money for The James Dean Story because we took a trip to Fairmount, Indiana, and interviewed Dean’s uncle and aunt and little brother and the farmer down the road, all that stuff.
GEORGE W. GEORGE: I got the guy who wrote Dean’s movie Rebel Without a Cause to do our screenplay. Stewart Stern. That was the making of our picture. It gave it a point of view. Our picture dealt a lot with his loneliness. Our picture in a sense grew out of their picture.
STEWART STERN (screenwriter): I was, I think, the first after Henry Ginsberg who heard about Jim’s death. Henry had produced Giant and was a close friend of my cousin, Arthur Loew, and an acquaintance of mine since childhood. The phone rang and it was Ginsberg looking for Arthur. He said, “The kid was killed an hour ago,” or something like that. He had just had the call from the head of publicity at Warner Brothers.
This was an odd situation. Jim’s death was a terrible personal loss to me, and I felt it as I had felt no other death in my life. I almost can’t explain why because it was such a short relationship and so scattered. But he was an absolutely unique human being. He was an astonishing person, and given the background he had—which never would have pointed in that direction—it was a kind of visitation. You couldn’t account for it any more than you could account for the genius of Mozart as a child.
They began calling me, various producers in Hollywood. “Hey, we got to make this documentary. Got to document Dean’s life because he’s such an icon and it’s just going to build.” When all these offers came I really didn’t want to do it. I really didn’t want to contribute to what I felt was a kind of quick-buck mentality, to make profit out of a relationship with Jimmy. I didn’t like it. So I turned down two or three.
Then I had a call from George George, who said, “I know what your feeling is about doing this, but it’s not going to be that kind of film.” He said, “At least come in and talk with us. I have a partner I like—Altman.” So I did and he convinced me. He said, “We will not put anything in that you do not want in. You’re going to be the writer and you will have access to all the interviews that we shot with people. You can write your script and I promise you that script will stay intact.” That sounded safe to me.
I made it poetic because I felt that Jim was poetic. It was succulent. It was purple. It wasn’t nice, crisp, uninvolved, objective storytelling because I didn’t feel that way. I wanted to be very sure that Jim came across as human, flawed, searching, lonely, complicated, all those things. But I didn’t want to get into anything that I didn’t know about and I didn’t want to add to the unhealthy side of the legend.
GEORGE W. GEORGE: When we were making it, one incident was pure Bob. You know Dean got killed on the road, running into that car. So Bob said, “We’ll get that for the picture.”
I said, “How the hell are you going to do that?”
He said, “I’ll figure it out.”
Well, son of a bitch, he goes and figures it out by lashing a camera onto the end of a long piece of wood and putting it on the bumper of his car. And driving down the road that Jimmy Dean had taken that day! It looked like Bob was going to have a crash, but son of a bitch, he missed crashing by about two feet. He was driving the car!
I said, “Bob, you’re crazy.”
He said, “Yeah, I guess I am.”
STEWART STERN: I tried in the worst way to get Marlon to do the narration. He said, “I’ll only do it if it’s for free, but nobody else can take any money either.” I said, “Well, that’s not the way it’s going to be.” There was too much money in the movie and they needed to make it back. Then I said, “Dennis Hopper. You need to have a young voice. It’s a young subject.” They came to me with the idea of Martin Gabel. He was a great narrator with a deep, booming voice. I said it would ruin the film to have that voice, and it did. You might as well have Rabbi Magnum. I had no power. They got him, and whatever was pretentious about my script, the narration only added to it.
I liked Altman very much personally. He was going through analysis at the time. I forget who it was with, but Altman absolutely worshipped him. He used laughter, humor, the analyst did, and Altman so respected that. It made it possible for him. He never felt judged. He felt freed and better, and it was really all he talked about. I was being analyzed too, and so we shared that in odd moments. But we almost never talked about Jimmy or the picture. I don’t know what he did or when he did the work. It might have been in the editing room with George. When I finished the script that was it for me. He liked the script very much because even if it didn’t mention analysis, it certainly was talking about the movements of the psyche. We just found that in common. I was even thinking of going to his analyst. Altman might have been encouraging me to try. H
e was so smitten with him.
I had no idea that he was a talented director until years later, when that first movie came out, That Cold Day in the Park. That was a revelation to me.
ROBERT ALTMAN: When we got it all together, we met a guy named Lou Stoumen who had this method of shooting stills where it was like animation—it was ahead of its time, really. I hired Lou Lombardo, who had been a cameraman on the set, and I taught him editing, and he became a rather famous editor. It came together pretty well, I think.
STEWART STERN: Afterward, the only thing I kept saying is “When am I going to see any money?” I never got a red cent out of it. After finally battering George George, I think I got fifteen hundred dollars out of all the profits. It just seemed to pass from hand to hand and nobody saw anything, at least not according to George.
* * *
Robert Altman, to David Thompson, from Altman on Altman: My agent at the time showed The Delinquents to Alfred Hitchcock. I went and had a meeting with Hitchcock, who had liked the picture. He thought it was different. He hired me to go to New York to produce on Suspicion, a series of hour-long shows.
BARBARA TURNER (screenwriter/actress/producer): The first time I met Bob he was working for Alfred Hitchcock. I got the part out here in California and I went to New York. Bob came to the hotel to pick me up in the car. David Wayne was the star. Warren Beatty had a bit part in it. It was about a guy who had a bad heart and had a new doctor and he goes to the office and gets checked out. They say, “There’s something wrong with these X-rays, there’s nothing wrong with your heart. You’re fine.” But they’ve mixed up the X-rays. So the rest of the episode is them searching for him. So he does all the things he’s never done before. And goes to Coney Island and we’re all on the same bus and the guy I’m with, Warren Beatty, sort of dumps me and Wayne befriends me. We spend the day at Coney Island and I’m supposed to be sixteen. Then we go back to the city and we sit and have coffee and he asks to see me again and I say, “Well, my folks wouldn’t like it,” or some such thing. But I thanked him for the day and I leave, and he collapses and he dies.
My first impression of Bob was that he was kind. He was kind and funny and Bob, you know? You know how much he loved actors. He just loved actors. I was very, very shy then, so I didn’t say too much and he didn’t press. He was just funny and kind.
ROBERT ALTMAN: I realized early on to rely on the people you work with. When you have a crew, the crew becomes kind of a mirror, or a barrier that you don’t go beyond. In other words, your first audience for your film is your crew. The minute we start rehearsing a scene and I say, “Well, let’s put the camera here, and so and so,” a collaboration starts.
I remember I was doing Hitchcock Presents, directing, and I did one at Universal and there was a cameraman named Curly Lindon. Curly Lindon was a big-name cameraman. I’m doing a Hitchcock with Joseph Cotten and Christine White, and Curly Lindon was the cameraman. And I went in and I said, “Okay, there’s a phone on the desk. Let’s have the phone in the foreground and you’ll see these people back there, and she’ll come in the door and he’ll be over there. And you’ve got the phone and then they’ll come over and pick the phone up.”
He kinda looked at me and said, “Yeah? What kind of lens are you going to use?”
I was asking for something that was not in the range of the tools that I had. So I was embarrassed in front of everybody, because this was out on the set and I realized that I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about.
I had a friend, an actor named Johnny Alonzo, who later became a rather well-known cinematographer, and he worked with me on a lot of things. He was a still photographer. And I said, “You’ve got to teach me how to shoot stills.” And he did, and we’d do our own developing and printing. I bought a camera, and I had a long lens on it. I had a zoom lens on it. So I spent three or four years shooting still photography. And I became pretty good at it. It was one of those things where I would take my camera wherever I went, and by doing that I think I helped myself learn the tools that I needed. I learned the responsibility of what I could do and couldn’t do. And the zoom lens got me.
* * *
Robert Altman, to David Thompson, from Altman on Altman: I decided that television was the world I was shooting for. There were lots of opportunities at that time to do low-budget, offbeat films, but they were always bad, and I always said I would keep doing television until I got a film that I really wanted to do. I didn’t want to go out and make a feature just for the sake of it and then find out that was the end of it.
Directing an episode of Whirlybirds
From a letter to Alfred Hitchcock from Robert Altman, February 26, 1958: I want to preamble this presumptuous little note by stating that it is neither a complaint nor an indictment, but rather a vague query. Sometime ago, in a meeting at your office, you and I discussed, in the presence of Mr. Manning O’Connor, several ideas relating to the possibility of doing a television show against a ready-made realistic background of some scope, such as the building of a dam, the waterworks of the city and things of that ilk…. This is the last I heard of the matter until yesterday. My agent called me, quite upset, and said that you were going ahead with the project, but without my services. … I have no legal claim to any participation in this project and I believe that words like “integrity” and “moral obligation” are primarily used by people as a sort of dubious court of last resort. I am merely writing these facts because I feel sure that you are not aware of these events and I would like you to be informed. (No response from Hitchcock found.)
Television Directing
Alfred Hitchcock Presents—1957–58 (2 episodes); Peter Gunn—1958; Bronco—1958; The Troubleshooters—1959; U.S. Marshal—1959; Whirlybirds—1957–59 (14 episodes).
ROBERT ALTMAN: Television gave me Kathryn. I met her on Whirly-birds. She was an extra. She came out one day with her own white stockings and played a nurse.
CHAPTER 8
Kathryn
*
KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: Everybody has their own interpretation of what happened. I say it was April Fools’ Day, 1959, and he says it was April 2. So we never clarified that. He just assumed he was right and he always felt that way, and I just assumed I was right. I was working different jobs within the film business. I had a daughter I was helping to support—supporting, actually. And so it was a great way to work because I could work in blocks—whether I’d be swimming or standing in, or doubling, or working as a showgirl, or as an extra, or whatever, and I had time to be a mother. So it was ideal.
I got into doing all that because of swimming, on an Esther Williams picture. They had a call. I knew how to swim—I was born and raised in California. They had a call for girls with showgirl looks who could swim, and, God, what a huge call it was. A couple of girlfriends and I went on it, and I ended up getting it. But I had to do a lot of stuff—diving out of trapezes and going down slides. It was a famous number in Million Dollar Mermaid.
It was perfect timing for this meeting. I got the call because of Tommy Thompson—unfortunately he passed away. God, he was such an important part of Bob’s early career—he was his assistant director. Anyway, I knew him. We were buddies and all that.
He had said to a girlfriend of mine, “God, Kathryn would love this guy. He is so clever and he is so funny.” Her name was Dee Sharon, and she told me, “He’s getting a divorce, he has two little kids.” He really had three, with Christine.
And I said, “Oh boy, that sounds just great.”
“But he’s funny and he’s interesting,” she told me.
Kathryn Reed Altman
So I got the call to be a nurse and bring my own white stockings, which became a joke for forty-seven years. Actually, the truth is I didn’t bring any white stockings. The night before I had done something very social and very late, and I had really a terrible hangover. I had to be on this bus with everybody else at about seven in the morning. By the time we got to the location, which was up in the Malibu mo
untains somewhere, on a ranch, it was so hot, oh horrible. As I stepped off the bus, I was surprised, because no director ever comes to the bus to meet the extras. And I knew why he’s there, because they set him up with me, too. Tommy was sure I’d be crazy about him, and my girlfriend was, too. She and Tommy were kind of dating, and they both arranged it. I had kind of forgotten about it, I was feeling so crummy, and I hadn’t dwelled on it much. Until I started getting off the bus, and then I realized this was the guy. And he just looked terrible. He was overweight. He had his shirt off. Sweaty. He had a wet rag on his head. He was standing next to Tommy, who was terrific looking and a terrific guy. And so I got off and he introduced me.
He said, “This is Bob Altman. Kathryn, this is Bob Altman.”
He didn’t say hello, he didn’t say anything. He just said, “How are your morals?”
I was so annoyed. And I said, “A little shaky, how are yours?” That was the beginning.
He invited me—ha!—over to have a cappuccino, which meant going over to the bench that was set up with hot chocolate and hot coffee in the middle of this hot day, and he mixed the two together and made a cappuccino. And that was it.
He was directing all day. We hung around during lunch, and then he made sure I was on the callback. That day his boys were visiting the set and Lotus was there, too. She was still his wife, though they were separated. At lunchtime he came walking through the lunch tables with the littlest boy, his Stevie, and he had him on his shoulders.
Dee, my girlfriend, said, “His pants are on backwards.” He was two and a half years old.
Bob said, “I know it and I’m going to keep it that way.”
I’ll never forget that line. That was the first line that really broke me up.
Then he invited me to go up in a helicopter, which I didn’t really want to, but I did with a couple of other people and the kids. It was just a helicopter ride. I didn’t like them.
LOTUS CORELLI ALTMAN MONROE: Bob called and said, “We’re out in Thousand Oaks and we’re making Whirlybirds.” Thousand Oaks was the place they shot when they needed wide-open spaces, for cowboy movies and things like that. “Why don’t you bring the kids and we’ll give them a helicopter ride?”
Robert Altman Page 10
