by Kirk Douglas
I turned around. “You were right about him all along!”
“Darling, anger won’t solve anything.”
“So what am I supposed to do? Just take it? Let him fuck me? Let him steal from us?” Now I had tears in my eyes. The betrayal, the sense of helplessness—it was all hitting me at once.
I stood there in the middle of the room, staring at my wife. She came over and put her arms around me. She held on for a long time.
Finally, she said, “Let’s fix you some scrambled eggs and I’ll tell you what the accountant thinks we can do. It’s bad, but it may not be as bad as it looks.” She smiled now, just a bit.
I looked at her. What a wonderful girl. Anne had saved my life once because I listened to her and didn’t get into that airplane.
If I’d done that when she’d first warned me about Sam Norton, maybe I—we—wouldn’t be in this fix now.
I smiled back at her. “I’m starving. Let’s eat.” I followed her into the kitchen.
In the days that followed, Anne and I met with a battery of accountants and attorneys. Their plan was a smart one. Instead of beating up Sam, I’d play him like he’d played me. I’d go to him with the audit and say that I knew he wasn’t capable of such duplicity. He must have been duped by his partner, Jerry Rosenthal. I’d convince Sam that I still trusted him. I would ask Sam to leave his partner and became president of my company. All he’d have to do was sign some papers that revoked their firm’s power of attorney over my finances.
It was the performance of my career. It took all my self-control not to dangle him by the ankles out of his office window. Greatly relieved that I wasn’t blaming him, Sam Norton bought the whole pitch. He signed on the spot. I left him behind his big desk—the desk I’d paid for—convinced that he’d hear from me shortly about moving over to Bryna to oversee Spartacus.
We never spoke again.
Fortunately, the tremendous success of The Vikings helped soften the blow of Sam Norton’s thievery. I could pay back what I owed the government, but I was still effectively broke. That meant Spartacus was an even bigger risk than I thought. Should I just back away before I got in too deep?
I got a call from Vernon Scott, the respected Hollywood reporter for United Press International. He wanted to talk about my plans for a follow-up to The Vikings. I didn’t hesitate.
“At the end of this year I’m starting production on Spartacus—about the uprising of the Roman slaves. It will be bigger and more expensive than The Vikings. If you aren’t going ahead in this business, you’re sliding back. And I’m willing to gamble, rather than slide.”
I still hadn’t heard from Olivier. Then, in mid-September, this letter arrived:
I have now contracted myself to go to Stratford-on-Avon for the fourth play of the season next year, which is “Coriolanus,” and to start rehearsing in June. I imagine this decision will fairly knock me out for any further consideration as director of the film. If, however, you can still see your way to improving the part of Crassus in relation to the other three roles, then I should be more than happy to look at it again as it is such a gallant enterprise and one I should be extremely proud to be part of. Could you be so kind as to let me see something just as soon as you possibly can?
Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov, and now Laurence Olivier! All three had signed on and I was now free to play Spartacus without offending Larry. Yul Brynner and The Gladiators were all but history.
The only thing The Gladiators had that we didn’t have was a director, Marty Ritt.
Ritt and I ran into each other at the annual meeting of production heads and distributors in Miami. Each studio would be announcing its slate of films for 1959.
Marty cornered me in the lobby of the Fontainebleau Hotel. He knew we’d secured Olivier, Laughton, and Ustinov for Spartacus because he’d been chasing them too.
“Kirk, what do you say we join forces?”
“That ship has sailed, Marty.”
“But United Artists owns the name ‘Spartacus,’ you know that.”
He was right. Our lawyers had been working on it, but the Motion Picture Association’s Title Registration Bureau had ruled in United Artists’ favor.
“Marty, let’s just see what happens.”
Inside, the studio chiefs were seated around the conference table in alphabetical order, so “Universal” was up last, immediately following “United Artists.”
Arthur Krim, speaking on behalf of UA, announced The Gladiators, a film starring Yul Brynner based on the Roman slave revolt led by Spartacus. Then Milton Rackmil, president of Universal International Pictures, said, “Universal will begin production in January on Spartacus, a story of the Roman slave revolt starring Kirk Douglas.”
The room erupted in laughter. Even Krim and Rackmil were laughing. Game on.
When the meeting adjourned, I walked over to Krim.
“Arthur, we’ve done pretty well with The Vikings, haven’t we? And we’re going to be doing business together for a long time. Maybe not on this picture, but there’ll be plenty more down the road. Let’s not let a stupid title get in the way of that.”
Arthur was silent for a moment. “Let me get back to New York and talk to our people. Have a safe flight home, Kirk. Give my love to Anne.”
“You too, Arthur. And mine to your new bride.” Arthur had just married a brilliant Swiss doctor named Mathilde (who would later become a pioneer in AIDS research).
A telegram from United Artists was waiting for me when I got home:
DEAR KIRK - AT ARTHURS REQUEST YUL BRYNNER HAS AGREED IN THE INTERESTS OF GOOD WILL TO YOUR USE OF TITLE “SPARTACUS.”
The white flag. The Gladiators had surrendered. Now all we needed was a director.
New discovery Sabina Bethman and the cast of Spartacus
CHAPTER FIVE
“Singer of songs . . . that’s my work. I also juggle.
I can do feats of magic.”
—Tony Curtis as Antoninus
DESPITE THE ODDS, WE’D WON our race with The Gladiators. But the victory was not without cost. Spartacus was now careening into production without a director, a leading lady, or a finished script.
Actually, we had too many scripts. Dalton Trumbo (still known on the leather-bound script covers as “Sam Jackson”) would later say he generated a quarter of a million words in the course of writing Spartacus. Many thousands of these came in the form of the multicolored pages that had expanded and deepened the roles of the English actors—Sir Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, and Peter Ustinov. Their parts were now central to the film. That would come back to haunt us when we started shooting.
Our start date was now three months away. My immediate problem remained finding a strong director. With Olivier out of the running (which came as a great relief to Laughton), we were back to square one.
I briefly considered Marty Ritt. It would be a consolation prize of sorts after he lost out on The Gladiators. Not available. He and Yul Brynner were still finishing their screen version of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.
With each passing day, Universal was growing more excited about the prospects for Spartacus. At a budget of $4 million, this was by far the biggest picture on their production schedule. Their future was on the line with this picture, not to mention mine. The rumors of the studio’s insolvency (and its possible sale) were swirling around the lot. Decca Records, which owned Universal, denied them repeatedly. In Hollywood, that often serves as confirmation.
Lew Wasserman remained the patron saint of Spartacus. Without his sage counsel and powers of persuasion, we wouldn’t have a cast or a studio. Now I needed his help again.
In early November of 1958, I went to see him. Surprisingly, Lew was uncharacteristically expansive. Never one for small talk, he casually asked me how I was getting along with “the boys at Universal.” There was an odd look on his face, an almost devilish glint in his eye. This wasn’t like him at all.
“Ed Muhl is calling me every day, Lew. He’s
my new best friend.”
It was true. Now that he had given us the green light, Universal’s production chief was taking a hands-on role with Spartacus. So far, it was a good working relationship. They were going out of their way to accommodate me and my entire team.
“That’s good.” Lew was smiling. He knew something that he wasn’t telling me.
“Is there something happening with Universal that I should know about?”
I wouldn’t have believed it possible, but Lew was actually beaming.
“Kirk, can you keep a secret?”
“Lew, you know I can.”
He cleared his throat. “Next month, MCA is going to buy the entire Universal lot—367 acres, the soundstages, all the offices—everything but the studio itself.”
I whistled. So that was why Lew seemed to know so much about the inner workings of Universal. He was buying the lot! My agent was about to become my landlord.
“That’s terrific!” I extended my hand. “Congratulations!”
He shook it. “Thank you, Kirk.”
Then, Lew’s smile instantly disappeared. Once again—all business.
“We need to find you a director. Muhl wants Anthony Mann.”
“Anthony Mann?!”
“Kirk . . . I agree.”
“Jesus, I don’t know, Lew. Do you really think he’s up to it?”
“I do. And Universal does. Trust me on this. He’s good.”
I swallowed hard. I didn’t think he was the right director, but a bird in the hand . . . ? “Okay, it’s Mann.”
As I drove back to my office, I mentally ran through the Spartacus list: studio, check; director, check; Olivier, Laughton, Ustinov—check, check, and check. It had taken us eight months of hard work and strategy to defeat The Gladiators, but we did it. Checkmate.
As I pulled into my parking space, I couldn’t shake the worrisome feeling that we’d won the battle but might still lose the war.
In order to preempt the competition, we were now locked in to a late-January start date. Location scouts were already in Death Valley looking for a barren stretch of sand and rock to replicate the Libyan desert, where the Thracian slave Spartacus was captured and sold to the owner of the gladiator school to be trained for the amusement of his Roman masters.
This crucial scene would eventually start the picture, but Olivier still believed that his character, General Crassus, would open the film with a narrative description of Spartacus’ emergence as the leader of the slave revolt. This flashback device had persuaded Larry to play the part.
I knew that we weren’t committed to doing it that way. Olivier did not.
The unfinished script was the chief dilemma facing our new director, Tony Mann. My biggest problem was the one major casting decision left to be made: the female lead, Varinia, a slave girl who falls in love with Spartacus.
To me, it was important that this girl should have an accent that was distinctly different from the patrician Romans, and those parts were all being played by British actors.
As a favor, I did test one American actress, my old girlfriend Gene Tierney. I felt sorry for her. Like Vivien Leigh, Gene suffered from severe mental health problems. Two years earlier, after numerous electric shock treatments failed to cure her chronic depression, she walked out on a building ledge, ready to jump. Rescued at the last minute by police, she was hospitalized again for many months. Slowly, she improved. Even before I saw the footage, I could tell she wasn’t right anymore. Gene—the beautiful girl I once dated, the actress who captivated movie audiences as “Laura”—was gone. The spark in her eyes just wasn’t there anymore.
My first serious choice was a stunning blond French girl, Jeanne Moreau. Her smoldering sexuality and deeply expressive eyes evoked a young Bette Davis (a comparison that she later told me she hated—“I can’t stand Bette Davis”).
Jeanne’s recent film with director Louis Malle, The Lovers, was garnering international attention. Her performance as a young married woman who abandons her family after a casual sexual affair was suggestive to the point of controversy. The film was banned in parts of America for its “obscenity.”
A theater owner in Cleveland was convicted of obscenity for showing The Lovers. The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which eventually threw out his sentence. This led Justice Potter Stewart to make his famous statement about pornography: “I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”
In the prefeminist 1950s, few actresses would take a risk like that. That’s why I thought Moreau would be perfect for the role of a slave girl who’s literally liberated from a life of indentured servitude.
When I went to see Jeanne in Paris, she was in a play, La Bonne Soupe, at the Théâtre du Gymnase. I took her out for dinner. She was even more beautiful in person than on-screen.
I offered to buy out the run of the play if she would come to America and portray Varinia. I told her she would become the biggest star in the world. None of this mattered to her. Politely, Jeanne turned me down cold.
I was disappointed. Orson Welles subsequently called Jeanne Moreau “the greatest actress in the world”—but she was not going to prove it in Spartacus. I still needed a leading lady.
Somehow, Jean Simmons got a copy of the script and was badgering me to play Varinia. She was living on a ranch in Arizona with her husband, Stewart Granger. I had great respect for Jean, a beautiful girl and lovely actress, but she was British—that just wasn’t the accent I wanted.
MCA sent the script to Ingrid Bergman, who I didn’t think was right for the part. Fortunately, she didn’t like the story, calling it “too bloody.”
Elsa Martinelli, my “fan” from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, was no longer under contract to my company. She’d wanted the freedom to do other pictures, so I let her go as she’d asked—and now her career was floundering. She was back in Italy making low-budget films.
I’ve never stood in the way of someone’s career. A contract is just a piece of paper. If it doesn’t represent an artist’s true commitment, no amount of money can make up for that.
If Elsa had stayed under contract to Bryna, I probably would have given her the part. Unfortunately—for both of us—she was no longer a credible choice.
We were under the gun. As Thanksgiving approached, we decided to put out a worldwide casting call. If an established actress wasn’t available, why not a newcomer? It would be a funny story—“Slave girl wanted for $5 million picture; no experience necessary.” The columnists would love it, and we’d get a lot of free publicity out of the search itself.
Eddie Lewis and I looked at reel after reel of beautiful young European women. My eyes were bleary and I went home.
Anne wasn’t sympathetic to my “plight.” She just looked up from dinner and said, “I thought you wanted a good actress. What does it matter where she comes from, so long as she can act?”
“Jesus, Anne! How many times do I have to tell you that Varinia can’t speak with a British or American accent?!”
Wiping the corner of her mouth with a napkin, she held my gaze steadily. I knew that look. “Then why did you do a screen test with your old girlfriend Gene Tierney?”
“How did you even know about her?” Anne had a third eye when it came to the women in my life.
She folded the napkin back into her lap and continued eating. “I know a lot about you, Mr. Douglas,” she said, her blue eyes twinkling.
Finally, we found the right girl. She was a twenty-seven-year-old German beauty named Sabine Bethmann. The screen test captured her incandescence—a breathtaking, almost ethereal loveliness. Her blond hair and blue eyes would be striking in Technirama, the new wide-screen format we’d decided to use for Spartacus.
She looked even younger than her twenty-seven years. This, too, was an important asset. The character of Varinia, a girl who falls in love with Spartacus, must be able to convey the innocence and optimism of youth. Sabine Bethmann, on camera, had that quality. Eddie a
nd I looked at each other in relief.
There was still a huge amount of preparation we had to do, just to get her ready for the part. The problem was she barely spoke any English. Her short film experience was entirely in the German cinema. She would be very difficult for American audiences to understand. We hired the best coach available, Jeff Corey, a blacklisted actor who, out of necessity, had become a respected drama teacher.
Universal’s publicity department created a whole campaign around our new “star.” They started by changing the spelling of her name, replacing an “e” with an “a” and dropping an “n.” Sabine Bethmann became “Sabina Bethman.” In a town filled with Tabs, Troys, and Rocks, I’m sure someone thought this was a brilliant idea.
In the middle of all this, my friend Bernie Schwartz called—he had also changed his name . . . to “Tony Curtis.”
“How’s it going, Big Panther?”
I laughed. Tony once told a reporter that I was like a panther with a thorn in his side, muscles taut, prowling the set. In those days, it was true.
“Tony! How’s Janet?
“She’s doing great. Big as a house. The baby is due any minute.” Tony and Janet Leigh already had a young daughter about Peter’s age—Kelly. The new baby would be named Jamie Lee.
“That’s great! Tell her that Anne and I send our love.”
“I will. I will.” A pause. “So, when do you start shooting Spartacus?”
“In two months. We just found this beautiful German girl for the lead.”
A longer pause.
“Hey, Tony, what’s the matter?”
“I’m kind of hurt there’s no part in it for me. Don’t you love me anymore?”
That was all I needed right now—friends hitting me up to be in a picture that didn’t even have a finished script.
“Are you schnorring me, you sonofabitch?” I deliberately used the Yiddish word, which means wheedling a person until he gives you something for free. I wasn’t angry, just annoyed by his brashness. But that was Tony. He could be very persistent.
