by Kirk Douglas
The truth was that I was handing this cocky kid from the Bronx control of a picture whose budget far exceeded the combined total of all the movies he’d done before. Was Eddie right? Was I nuts?
Still, there were two things I knew about Stanley. First, even though he was only thirty, he had the talent and self-confidence to step in and take over a picture of this size. Second, his self-confidence often bordered on arrogance, a quality that could be a help or a hindrance when dealing with highly respected, but sometimes hard-to-rein-in, actors such as Olivier, Laughton, and Ustinov.
I’d soon find out how Kubrick would handle himself. After a series of intense meetings to bring him up to speed (“No, Stanley, we’re not going to reshoot in Death Valley; Tony’s scenes are fine. They stay in the picture”), we realized that we had reached a major disagreement over Varinia—Sabina Bethman.
Stanley saw the rushes from her two days of work. “She can’t act. She has no range—there’s no emotion.”
“Stanley, give the kid a chance. She’s trying hard. I think she can do it.”
Stanley looked at me, expressionless. It suddenly struck me as beyond bizarre that a man so devoid of empathy was judging the emotional range of anyone, let alone this young girl.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said. “I’ll prove it to you.”
Curious, I looked at him. “How?”
“Get her over here. I’ll tell her that she’s been fired. It won’t be true—not yet—but she won’t know that. Let’s see how she reacts. I’ll bet you a week’s salary that she shows no emotion at all.”
I was dumbfounded. In a calculated way—so like him—Stanley wanted to demonstrate dramatically that he knew precisely what he was doing.
It was a callous thing to do, but I’d given Stanley the job. I had to trust his judgment, even if I hated his methods. Eddie just threw his hands up in the air as if to say, “You hired him.”
On Wednesday morning, I took Stanley Kubrick over to the set to introduce him to the cast and crew. Virtually everybody except Sabina Bethman and John Gavin was older than their boyish new director. Everyone had heard that Tony Mann was out, but the news of Stanley’s selection as his replacement had not yet been made official.
We were shooting the scene in which Crassus (Laurence Olivier), Helena (Nina Foch), Glabrus (John Dall), and Claudia (Joanna Barnes) are all seated high above the arena, looking down at the slaves-turned-gladiators they had chosen for a fight to the death for their entertainment.
Although not in the scene, Sabina was in costume as Varinia in case she was needed later. I briefly introduced her to Stanley at the side of the set and then walked him directly into the center of the arena.
“Friends, Romans, Countrymen . . .” I began. There was a small smattering of laughter. All eyes were on Stanley.
“Meet your new director, Stanley Kubrick.” Murmuring, then awkward applause. “He has my full confidence and support and I know he’ll have yours. Stanley, would you like to say something?”
Stanley looked uncomfortable, but his voice was strong. “Thanks, Kirk. This is a great picture and I’m honored to be a part of it. Let’s get back to work.”
I introduced Stanley to our veteran director of photography, Russell Metty. Like Tony Mann, Metty was a Universal favorite. During his twenty-five-year career as a cameraman, he’d worked with most of the top directors—everyone from Howard Hawks to Orson Welles. Now fifty-three, Metty was old enough to be Stanley’s father. His gruff manner, along with his crew cut and ruddy complexion, made him an unlikely subordinate to this pale, tousled kid. To him, Stanley looked more like a beatnik than a boss. It was a bad match from the beginning. It would only get worse.
That night, at my invitation, Sabina Bethman came to my house. When I opened the door to greet her, Eddie and Stanley were in the living room. As I gave her a hug, Eddie walked up behind us.
“Hi, Sabina,” he said, putting on his jacket. He turned to me, “Kirk, I have to go. I promised my wife I’d be home an hour ago.” I glared at him, but I understood. He wanted no part of what was about to happen.
“Good night, Mr. Lewis. See you tomorrow,” said Sabina.
Eddie shot me a quick glance. “Good night, Sabina.”
I closed the door behind Eddie and took Sabina into the living room. Stanley was sitting on the couch, waiting.
“Hello, Mr. Koobik,” she said, smiling warmly at her new director. Stanley ignored the mangling of his name.
“Sit down, Sabina,” he said, not rising to greet her.
She took a chair opposite him and I remained standing in the hallway. Stanley wasted no time with pleasantries.
He took a sip of his soft drink, cleared his throat, and said coldly, “Sabina, you are not right to play Varinia. I have to get someone else.”
I studied Sabina’s reaction. Nothing. She registered no surprise, no shock, no indignation. In that instant, I knew Stanley was right. I owed him an extra week’s salary.
For a few seconds, Sabina stayed frozen in her chair. Then, without a word, she got up and went directly to the bathroom.
The door locked. Immediately, her wailing was audible to Stanley and me.
“Stanley, I hope you’re happy.” I pointed down the hall to the sobbing Sabina. “You finally got some real emotion out of her.”
Stanley looked at me, his heavy-lidded eyes expressing no remorse. Without a word, he walked to the front door and left.
I hurried down the hall and called through the bathroom door, “Sabina!”
“Lass mich in Ruhe!” (Leave me alone.) She was sobbing uncontrollably.
“Es ist nicht deine Schuld!” (It’s not your fault.) I tried to comfort her by also speaking in German.
“Go away!”
“Sabina, the director wanted a star. All the other principals are stars. He insisted a star should play Varinia.”
Through the door, she cried, “All Germany papers print stories—show pictures—me in Spartacus.” Her sobs had subsided, but the anguish in her voice was painful.
“Meine Familie! What do I say?”
“Tell them the truth—the director wanted a star.”
Suddenly, the crying stopped. There was only silence.
“Sabina?! Sabina, are you all right?” I started pounding on the door.
I heard the lock click and the door opened a crack. Sabina looked up at me, her face flushed. Still sniffling, she asked quietly, “What star?”
I heard myself blurt out the first name I could think of. “Jean Simmons.”
“Oh,” she said, taken aback at the name of an international star. “She is beautiful.”
“Not as beautiful as you, Sabina. But she is a star, and our new director insisted on her.”
She came out of the bathroom and I put my arm around her shoulder. We walked toward the front door. “Come, my Schatz. There’s no shame in losing out to a star. It happens to all of us. It happened to me. Someday someone will lose a part, and the director will say, ‘I need a star! Get me Sabina Bethman!’”
“Das würde mir helfen.” (That would help me.) She had stopped crying.
We were at the car. I held the door open for her and she got in. “Beverly Hills Hotel,” I told the driver. Then I leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. Now she was smiling, at least temporarily. I watched the car pull away. I felt so sorry for her. People say the definition of an actor is one who loves rejection. If that’s true, this was Sabina’s first defining lesson.
“Oh, my God!” In a flash, I realized what I’d just done. I’d let Stanley fire our leading lady without knowing if Jean Simmons was still available. What if she’d taken another picture? I ran back into the house and pressed the button for my office. “Please get me Jean Simmons. She’s in Nogales, Arizona.”
I slumped down in the chair. It was a tense few minutes. While I was waiting for the call to go through, I found myself looking at a picture of my mother that I always kept on my desk. I studied her half-smiling face. It had only
been two months. I missed her.
The phone rang. I picked it up.
“Is that you, Jean?”
“Kirk?”
“Do you still want to play Varinia?”
“Yes! Yes, of course I do!”
“Get your ass up here pronto. We have costume fittings tomorrow.”
“Whee! I’ll be there!”
I looked again at my mother’s picture as I hung up the phone. Her enigmatic smile looked back at me. My Mona Lisa. What was that word she used so much—beshert? It means “destined to happen.” Some things are meant to be; maybe this was one of them.
Beshert.
What a fool I was for not having hired Jean right from the start. I’d been hung up on accents, when acting ability was the only thing I should have cared about. Anne had been right.
Jean and I had only one disagreement during the whole picture.
In the bathing scene, where she was supposed to be in the nude, Jean modestly insisted on wearing panties and a bra. This forced her to stay almost completely underwater so that the camera wouldn’t pick up any part of the bra. Kubrick didn’t like the shot and asked me to speak with Jean. I remember our conversation in that little stream very well:
KIRK: “Jean, it doesn’t look right. You have to take off your bra.”
JEAN: “I will not!”
KIRK: “Please understand, Jean, your bosoms will be buoyant in the water, but they will only see glimpses of them instead of flashes of your bra.”
Jean started grinning.
KIRK: “What’s so funny?”
JEAN: “I bet you’ve had a lot of experience getting girls to take off their bras.”
She had me there. I started to stammer. Jean was laughing. Standing there in the water, she took off her bra and threw it on the shore. She had beautiful breasts.
After the bathing scene, we played the night scene between Spartacus and Varinia, lying together under the stars. Even though it’s not in the script, I’ve always believed this was the night that the son of Spartacus was conceived. I thought we should dramatize this scene but Jean was against it.
Friday the thirteenth was a particularly unlucky day during the filming of Spartacus. A month earlier, Anthony Mann lost his job on that inauspicious date. Now, on Friday, March 13, with Charles Laughton’s first arrival on the set, the main cast was assembled for our initial table read—a gathering where all of the principals sit together and read their parts aloud. The problem, of course, was that some had studied earlier versions of the ever-changing script. Olivier was still lobbying for an opening narration from his character, Crassus—the original flashback approach that had attracted him to play the part. He began the table reading with that version. Later, in an interview for the Criterion Collection’s edition of Spartacus, Peter Ustinov described that painful scene in hilarious detail:
And I remember that first reading with enormous clarity . . . Charles Laughton was in a dressing gown with his hair in curlers. And Olivier was dressed normally with a sports jacket. Kirk Douglas was dressed as a slave, and covered in dirt and grime. He had already been leaping from things. And John Gavin was dressed in the full regalia of an important Roman chief of the period.
We started the reading, and it was quite different [from what we’d been sent previously]. It started out with Olivier in this version. And he put on a pair of glasses, very relaxed, and started reading the script. And it was like a litany in church, I couldn’t hear what he was saying.
This went on, getting more and more awkward as we began to realize the script was rather different to what we had been led to expect, until Laughton suddenly stopped dead, and said: “I don’t understand this scene. I thought for a moment, a little while back, that I might eventually understand it. Now I’m afraid that I’m completely lost.”
And one smelled trouble.
We abandoned the reading. We all went back to our places and that was largely why Laughton became extremely difficult and wouldn’t do what he was given. And that’s when I was . . . asked to write the scenes between him and myself, which I was glad to do.
Ustinov’s willingness to rewrite his scenes with Laughton helped mollify Charles, but there were other issues: we were having increasing problems with the press about the true identity of our principal screenwriter.
Both Walter Winchell and the Hollywood Reporter had printed items suggesting that Dalton Trumbo was the real writer on Spartacus. Hedda Hopper and the American Legion were predictably up in arms at the prospect of Communist sympathizers creeping back into the movie business. More congressional investigations were apparently in the offing. After a dozen years, no studio wanted to be the first to hire a blacklisted writer. I was only an independent producer. I had no power to change the system.
Luckily, not all the action in Spartacus took place off camera. I tried to forget all the production problems, by doing my other job—acting.
Whenever possible, I did all my own stunts. In Spartacus, that had many risks—climbing to the top of a fifteen-foot-high fence and jumping off; hand-to-hand fight scenes with the slave guards; realistic swordplay with the Roman soldiers.
Even the preparation for the battle sequences was dangerous. I trained on a device of rapidly spinning swords, padded and sheathed in leather for rehearsal. To prevent bruised shins or a sharp crack to the head, I quickly learned to jump high and duck low.
Woody Strode, God bless him, kicked me so hard in our fight-to-the-death scene, I thought he’d broken my ribs. Woody’s character of Draba is executed by Laurence Olivier’s Crassus. As an example of what happens to rebellious slaves, Draba’s body is strung up by his feet in frightening display. In 1959, there were no stunt doubles for a six-foot, four-inch black athlete-turned-actor. So Woody himself was hung upside down, motionless, for take after take.
It was amazing to me that no one was killed in the making of the picture. Sometimes it came close.
In the slave uprising scene, I found myself in a battle with my fellow actor Charles McGraw. The script called for me to drown him in a cauldron of soup. As I wrestled with McGraw, he resisted being held facedown in the big bowl of liquid. As he got closer and closer to being submerged, he pushed away from me. I pushed harder, shoving him down into the iron bowl. I felt terrible when I accidentally broke his jaw. McGraw finished the scene, but we couldn’t use it. The shot in the film had to be done by his stunt double.
Stanley decided that a realistic depiction of ancient battle would include dismemberment. He hired amputees, actors missing legs, arms, even parts of their faces. (The art department created prosthetic body parts that could be hacked off during the scene.) One of these actors was an actual one-armed man, Bill Raisch. I was required to hack off his prosthetic arm, leaving only a bloody stump. This was the only time I refused to do a stunt. How would you like to swing a sword with a sharp edge at someone, cutting off his fake limb without injuring his real flesh?
Despite my misgivings, Stanley finally talked me into doing it.
We shot it twice with me graphically cutting off Bill’s “arm.” Stanley called for one more take. I said, “No!” I wasn’t going to risk hurting Bill Raisch with a third swing. Stanley looked up from the camera quizzically. I said, “We’ve got it, Stanley.” He looked at me for a long moment and then said, “That’s a print.”
Many serious health problems occurred even when we weren’t shooting. The daily call sheet began to resemble the nurse’s station list in an emergency ward.
A month into production, Jean Simmons required female surgery that kept her bedridden for almost six weeks. When we got the news, Eddie Lewis said to me caustically, “Do you want me to call Sabina? I hear she’s still available.”
Tony Curtis was seriously injured while we were playing tennis at my house. He’d just returned my backhand shot, when suddenly he crumpled to the ground, grabbing his leg in agony. As I helped him limp off the court, he said he was fine; it was just a charley horse. The next day, the doctor told him otherw
ise. He’d split his Achilles tendon, a severe and painful injury that required a cast for his lower leg. This made it impossible to film any of his scenes, since he was bare-legged in every shot. We had to work around him for five weeks. How stupid did I feel? It happened at my house and on my court.
Even I fell victim to the curse of Spartacus. For the first time in my career, I couldn’t answer the bell. The flu hit me so hard that I was out for ten days, another expensive delay. “Exhaustion,” said the doctor.
I switched doctors.
Peter Ustinov and Charles Laughton: one witty story too many?
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Corpulence makes a man reasonable, pleasant, and phlegmatic. Have you noticed the nastiest of tyrants are invariably thin?”
—Charles Laughton as Sempronius Gracchus
SOMEHOW, THROUGH ALL OF THIS, production on Spartacus continued. But all these unanticipated delays only added to the mounting budget. By spring, we were dealing with a $7 million production that was growing more expensive every day. It felt like a cross-country taxi ride with the meter on.
Still, Spartacus wasn’t always stressful. There were many enjoyable moments. Whenever I could find the time, I loved to sneak over and watch the scenes between Charles Laughton and Peter Ustinov. Jean Simmons did too. This was risky, because she could barely control her giggling. On more than one occasion, she almost spoiled the take.
These two pros trying to outdo each other was really something to watch. It was like a game of verbal tennis, in which either player was capable of the most extraordinary shot, just inside the line. For the most part, I think Ustinov got the best of it. Of course, that was probably because, at my behest (and to Dalton’s continued chagrin), he had written most of their scenes.
Returning one afternoon from one of those verbal jousts, I entered my office and my secretary immediately said, “I have Lew Wasserman on the phone for you.” I grabbed the phone.
“Lew?”
