by James Garner
Hilts was a great character and Steve did a good job. He had a persona he brought to every role, and people loved it, which is fine, but you could always see him acting. That’s the kiss of death as far as I’m concerned.
Someone once asked me if Steve was “trouble.” Steve was trouble if you invited him for breakfast. He didn’t like anything. Like Brando, he could be a pain in the ass on the set. Unlike Brando, he wasn’t an actor. He was a movie star, a poser who cultivated the image of a macho man. Steve wasn’t a bad guy; I think he was just insecure. His wife Neile told me that he’d coveted the turtleneck sweater I wore in the picture. If I’d known that, I’d have given him the damn thing. Neile said that Steve had always been envious of tall, dark men, and that he was jealous because she and I had known each other during the Broadway years, when she was in Kismet and I was in Caine Mutiny. Though Neile and I were only casual acquaintances, Steve was convinced, she said, that we’d had an affair.
Yet Steve and I were good friends for a long time, probably because we had a couple of things in common besides acting. We both liked cars, and we raced together in the Baja 1000. We were also next-door neighbors.
Steve and Neile had a unique house in the hills above Los Angeles. It was built like a castle, out of stone, with turrets and secret passageways. Lois and I were there one day and noticed the property next door. It was a good-size piece of ground and we could see the potential. I told Steve, “I think I’ll try to buy that,” and he was all for it. We wound up building our dream house there.
As neighbors, Steve and I hung out a lot. We’d tinker in the garage and ride our motorcycles on a nearby fire trail. After The Great Escape, we both brought Mini Coopers back from Europe and we’d race them up and down our street. There were big speed bumps, so we’d shoot down either side, just a few inches from parked cars.
One thing Steve and I didn’t have in common was our politics, because Steve was a Republican. The only saving grace was that he somehow made Nixon’s enemies list, an honor I would have given anything to have achieved.
Steve liked to lob his empty beer cans into my backyard. Claimed he couldn’t resist because it was always so neat, with the flowers trimmed and no newspapers lying around. He thought I didn’t know it was him. That was Steve. Deep down, he was just a wild kid. I think he thought of me as an older brother, and I guess I thought of him as a younger brother. A delinquent younger brother.
Charlie Bronson was a pain in the ass, too. He used and abused people, and I didn’t like it. Charlie Buchinsky. He’d been a coal miner in Pennsylvania and a B-29 tail gunner in the Pacific. He was a bitter, belligerent SOB. I don’t know why he had a chip on his shoulder. He wasn’t a barrel of laughs on the set, I can tell you. His character, a claustrophobic Polish prisoner nicknamed Danny the Tunnel King, is loosely based on Wally Floody.
About a year after we made Great Escape, I had a little set-to with Charlie during a poker game at my house. He made a bet and then withdrew it after it was too late. I said, “Sorry, you can’t do that.” I wasn’t even in the hand; Charlie was against a street kid who was working extra in Hollywood. I made Charlie pay him, probably no more than fifty bucks, because that money meant a lot to the kid. Charlie got upset and we got head-to-head, but it didn’t come to blows.
After that, Charlie went around swearing he’d never work with me again. Throughout my life, there have been a few guys who didn’t like me because I was outspoken. Hell, I never thought I was outspoken, I just told the truth.
A few years later, I was in an Italian restaurant in Beverly Hills waiting for Lois. I’m back in a booth having a beer and I look up and there’s Charlie and he says, “How are ya, Jim?” and I say, “I’m fine, Charlie, how are you?” Next thing I know the four of us are having dinner together—Lois and me and Charlie and his wife, Jill Ireland. It was all so very pleasant. But I think Charlie held a grudge. I know I did.
Sturges called one day while he was editing the film and invited me to lunch. “Jim,” he said, “the two best scenes in the picture are with you and Donald, but they’re on the cutting room floor. I had to stay with the goddamn motorcycle.”
They were touching scenes. In one of them, Donald and I are looking out the window in a blackout. All you could see was explosions, with us silhouetted in the distance light. I thanked Sturges for being considerate enough to break the news to me in person, before I saw the movie and got upset. I told him that I understood, and I did. The motorcycle action is exciting and gives the film a more upbeat ending.
The actual great escape took place in March 1944. Seventy-six prisoners got out before the tunnel was discovered. Only three made it to freedom. Yet the escape accomplished its goal: the Germans had to divert thousands of troops to round up the escapees. Hitler was so enraged he ordered fifty of the recaptured prisoners shot. The film’s dedication, “For the fifty,” refers to those men. In one of the closing scenes, Kommandant von Luger informs Group Captain Ramsey, played by James Donald, that the men were “shot while trying to escape.”
“How many were wounded?” Ramsey asks.
“None,” von Luger replies.
After the war, British Intelligence tracked down the murderers and brought them to justice. Most were convicted and either imprisoned or hanged.
Though the German government had been cooperative, the picture went over budget. Sturges cut scenes and used crew members in bit parts to economize, but the studio still wanted to pull us back and finish the picture at Arrowhead. To avoid that, a few of us deferred salary for the overage. We never expected to see any money—you rarely do in that situation. But the movie turned out to be a summer blockbuster, and we all got paid.
I knew Great Escape was going to be good, I just didn’t know how good. It had a little bit of everything: humor, pathos, and a wonderful sense of camaraderie among the fliers. Its pacing and suspense are a tribute to Sturges and to film editor Ferris Webster, who was nominated for an Oscar. The movie was both entertaining and educational: it introduced the younger generation to World War II and got people to look up the real story. It’s one of the few pictures I’m in that I’ll watch when it’s on television, even though it’s almost three hours long.
But the greatest accolade came prior to the picture’s release: Just before The Great Escape opened in movie theaters, Sturges took a print to London and screened it for a group of survivors, and they loved it. Sturges said he felt vindicated by their approval, and that he was glad he’d been true to what he called the “nobility and the honor” of the brave men of Stalag Luft III.
Early in 1963, the producer Martin Ransohoff signed William Wyler to direct and William Holden to star as Lieutenant Commander Charles Madison in an MGM feature about a cowardly US Naval officer. After a few weeks, Wyler backed out of the picture. I’m not sure why. I’d heard that MGM wouldn’t pay him what he wanted, but the real reason may have been that the script was just too radical for the man who had directed two great World War II pictures, Mrs. Miniver and The Best Years of Our Lives.
I was already cast as Lieutenant Commander Paul “Bus” Cummings when Marty Ransohoff asked whether I would play Charlie Madison if Holden dropped out. “Oh, you bet!” I said. I knew it was a hell of an actor’s part. It was a different kind of role than I’d been doing, with a brilliant script by Paddy Chayefsky from William Bradford Huie’s novel. A lot of drama and a lot of humor. The only possible drawback: it required me to deliver long, dense speeches.
Bill Holden was having trouble with the IRS, something about doing his banking in Hong Kong, and there’d been some publicity about it. A columnist accused him of being unpatriotic. On top of that, Holden kept making one demand after another, and Marty Ransohoff got fed up. He provoked an argument with Holden’s agent, Charles Feldman, and offered him $200,000 to get out of the picture. Feldman grabbed it. I don’t think he wanted his client doing an antiwar picture at a time when he was being skewered in the press as un-American.
A long line of direc
tors had turned the picture down before Marty reluctantly offered it to Arthur Hiller. Marty didn’t think Arthur was ready for it because he was still young and hadn’t tackled anything so meaty. As it turned out, Marty needn’t have worried.
By then color had become the standard, but Arthur wanted to shoot the picture in black and white because he thought it would be more realistic. MGM balked—they were afraid people would think it was an old movie. But Arthur fought for it and the studio finally gave in.
I’d worked with Arthur on The Wheeler Dealers and we got along fine. He has a gentle demeanor but knows what he wants, and for me that’s the first quality of a good director. I’m not looking for a pat on the back; I just want to know if I’m on the right path. Arthur gave me a valuable bit of direction early on. He told me I was trying too hard to protect the writing, that I was delivering each line as if it were the most important in the movie. He explained that you can’t do that because it turns everything into a monotone. You have to have ups and downs. “Just play the character,” he said, “and don’t try to peak on every line.”
He was right.
I’d worked with James Coburn in The Great Escape. He was a good guy and a terrific actor. When I recommended that Jimmy take over the Bus Cummings part, Marty Ransohoff and his assistant, John Calley, agreed. It turned out to be a great choice.
Arthur Hiller once said that Paddy Chayefsky was the only genius he’d ever worked with. Same here. He saw the insanity of life and described it with wit and compassion. I’ve never had finer words to say on a movie screen.
His given name was Sidney. He got “Paddy” in the army, when an officer woke him at four o’clock one Sunday morning for KP. Sidney asked to be excused so he could go to mass.
“Mass?” the officer said, “I thought you were Jewish!”
“Yeah, but my mother’s Irish,” Sidney lied.
“Okay, Paddy, go back to sleep,” the officer said, and the name stuck.
Paddy was an intense man, short and stocky and bristling with energy. He had an irreverent sense of humor and an explosive temper. And he was the most articulate person I’ve ever known. His dialogue is like fireworks, it crackles. Paddy once said that he collected words “the way other people collect postage stamps.” He was fascinated by the English language and he delighted in the sound of it. I don’t think this exchange could have been written by anyone else:
EMILY: That’s a piquant thing to say, wouldn’t you agree?
CHARLIE: Yes, I think I’d call that piquant.
Some people complain that Paddy’s scripts are too “talky.” To me that’s like saying Van Gogh’s paintings have too much color. To this day Paddy’s the only screenwriter to have won three solo Oscars, for Marty, The Hospital, and Network. He died of cancer in 1981 at the age of fifty-eight. Imagine what he could have done with another twenty years.
One of my proudest moments happened at a preview of the picture in Beverly Hills. Paddy said, “Let’s take a walk.” As we strolled around the block, he told me he was pleased with my performance. It thrilled me to hear that from a writer, especially one I respected so much. It felt like I’d won an Oscar.
Set in London in the weeks before D-Day, The Americanization of Emily is the story of Charlie Madison, who, as the opening credits explain, is a “dog robber,” the personal attendant of a general or admiral whose job it is to keep his man “well-clothed, well-fed, and well-loved during the battle.” Charlie is an admitted coward who likes his job because it keeps him out of combat. When he meets Emily Barham, a driver in the local motor pool who has lost her father, brother, and husband in the war, she despises him at first.
The meaning of the title is revealed in an exchange between Emily and Charlie early in the picture: “I don’t want oranges, or eggs, or soap flakes, either. Don’t show me how profitable it would be to fall in love with you, Charlie. Don’t Americanize me!” Emily isn’t just talking about little wartime luxuries, but also about Charlie’s cynicism and cowardice. Despite her grief, she’s still patriotic. It takes Charlie’s supposed death to finally Americanize her, to make her abandon her conventional view of war.
When we began shooting, Julie Andrews had just completed her first film, Mary Poppins, but it hadn’t been released. She was nervous at first, and so was I. We’d met seven years earlier when we were both on Broadway. I was playing a judge in The Caine Mutiny Court Martial and Julie was starring in the hit musical The Boy Friend. Later I saw her as Eliza Doolittle opposite Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady and, like the rest of the world, I was bowled over by her talent.
Julie was just wonderful as Emily. She stepped out of the Broadway mold to play a complex character convincingly: an outwardly priggish but inwardly passionate war widow. Though Julie wasn’t nominated for the role, it showed her range as a performer, which may have helped her win the Oscar for Mary Poppins when Academy voters realized that she could play a serious character without having to sing.
Julie and I have made three films together (Victor/Victoria in 1982 and One Special Night in 1999 are the other two). She’s always been a joy to work with. She’s a team player who cares about her colleagues and coworkers: in 1996, Julie turned down a Tony nomination for the Broadway version of Victor/Victoria because no one else in the production had been nominated, including the director, her husband Blake Edwards. Julie explained that she preferred to stand with the “egregiously overlooked.” That’s Julie.
There was a lot of pressure about the script. The Motion Picture Association of America’s production code office was afraid of it. They thought it put US servicemen in a bad light and they worried about a box-office backlash that would sink The Americanization of Emily and maybe even taint other films. They thought the movie was just too extreme for the American public.
Well, we weren’t a bunch of wide-eyed pacifists; we knew what we were talking about. I’d certainly experienced the stresses of combat. (I am, by constitution, a coward, so you could say it was typecasting.) Paddy had been wounded by a land mine while on a patrol as an infantryman in Belgium during World War II. He stepped out of line to relieve himself, went into the woods, dropped his pants, and sat down on a mine. The wounds were serious, but Paddy used to roar when he told the story. Arthur Hiller had been a navigator in the Royal Canadian Air Force and Jimmy Coburn a radio operator in the US Army. Melvyn Douglas, who played Admiral Jessup, had served in both world wars. We’d all witnessed the kind of snafus, inter-service rivalries, and insanity portrayed in the film that cost people their lives.
In those days, censorship was unpredictable. We couldn’t use the F-word—that’s why a British officer berates two enlisted men by calling them “featherheaded.” We thought there might be a problem with the censors because of Jimmy Coburn’s character. Every time you see him, he’s got another girl in bed, including Judy Carne, who has a ten-second nude scene. But nobody complained about it, except maybe Burt Reynolds, who was married to Judy at the time.
We had zero cooperation from the US Navy, which usually pulls out all the stops for war movies. So long as the movies are gung-ho. The navy brass knew we were making an antiwar movie and they didn’t want anything to do with it. (When Marty Ransohoff made Ice Station Zebra a few years later, the navy remembered The Americanization of Emily and refused to cooperate. They gave in only after he convinced them that Ice Station Zebra was pro-navy.)
Without support from the navy, we had to improvise. We used the same damn landing craft over and over. Arthur shot it every which way. We couldn’t get right-hand drive British army trucks, so Arthur had to have them mocked up and he “cheated” the shots where they appeared.
After ten days’ filming in London, we came back to LA. The MGM lot in Culver City was already booked, so we shot the rest of the picture at the Selznick Studio in Century City. We also used the Santa Monica Airport, where we created our own rain—a lot of rain—and we went up to a beach near Oxnard aptly called Hollywood-by-the-Sea for the invasion sequence.
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p; Admiral Jessup is determined that “the first dead man on Omaha Beach must be a sailor” because he feels the army is getting all the glory and too big a share of congressional appropriations. He wants a record of the event, so he orders Charlie to accompany the first wave with a camera crew. It’s nothing but a public relations stunt to help Jessup persuade Congress to create a “tomb of the unknown sailor.” Charlie begs to be excused, then refuses to go. But Jessup is adamant, threatening to have Charlie “brigged” if he disobeys the order, and Charlie soon finds himself in a landing craft heading into Omaha Beach. When the door opens, Charlie refuses to move, but Bus is right behind him with a .45 and he shoots Charlie in the leg, just to kind of encourage him.
The beach scene runs only a couple of minutes on the screen, but it took a week to shoot and cost a quarter of a million dollars, a big chunk of the movie’s budget. With all the explosions, it had to be choreographed just right or we could have been seriously injured or killed. There’s a moment of unintentional realism in the scene. If you look closely when I stumble onto a land mine and get blown into the air, you’ll see me do a little bounce when I hit the ground. That’s because I cracked two ribs on the point of the metal canteen on my web belt. (The movie gods were getting even for what I’d done to Doris Day on the set of Move Over, Darling. In one scene, she was standing on a bed and I reached up, grabbed her by the waist, and carried her off. In the process, I broke two of her ribs. I didn’t know it until one of the assistant directors told me the next day, because Doris never complained.)
On Friday, November 22, 1963, while we were shooting the party scene, someone came in and said that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. We all gathered around a radio. Everyone was stunned. Some were crying. We quit work and didn’t come back for several days. It was Arthur Hiller’s birthday that day, but we never celebrated it.
