Pieces of My Heart

by Robert J. Wagner

  Ford’s group, as well as other people who had boats, began a series of softball games. I never pitched but could play anywhere in the infield or outfield; first base was an especially good position for me. All of these men had been athletes—“Duke” Wayne and Ward Bond had been teammates on the USC football team—and they knew how to play baseball. They were good athletes, and good athletes have a certain native proficiency at any sport, but what I found surprising was that they were also extremely competitive; it might have been only a pickup game of softball, but they played hard and they played to win. John Ford was around but didn’t play much, which, now that I think of it, was odd because he had been a jock when he was a kid.

  It was while I was spending a lot of time around Catalina that I met a sailing man named J. Stanley Anderson. His daughter had been hurt in an accident, and I used to cheer her up by doing imitations of famous actors. Anderson had connections in the movie industry and, in due time, would lend me some of those connections.

  On those rare occasions when I wasn’t thinking about acting, I discovered that you can learn a lot about a man’s nature by observing how he plays sports. Bing Crosby, for instance, was a very fine golfer, but beyond that, he was a smart golfer. He knew the game, had a great swing, and was very consistent. He worked a course the same way he worked his career: he made it look easy, but he was thinking all the time, and he had good instincts. Fred Astaire was a good golfer because he had superb timing and rhythm, which is the essence of sport as well as of dance.

  By comparison to today, golf was in its infancy. There wasn’t a profusion of courses, and those courses that did exist weren’t all that crowded. It was a more leisurely sport and a more casual time, so it was easy to strike up a conversation with the players if they were so inclined—or even if they weren’t. Randy Scott said he could be right in the middle of a back swing when I would interrupt with some question about the movie business.

  Clark Gable was charming, engaging, very unpretentious, the sort of person you felt comfortable talking to about almost anything. One day I told him I wanted to be in pictures. He liked the way I looked, and oddly, he liked the way I caddied, so he took me over to MGM to meet Billy Grady, the head of talent. Grady told me I needed to go to New York, go on the stage, and get some seasoning. “You need help,” he said. “You need an edge.” MGM and the other studios covered the stage, and they’d watch my progress. “Read a lot of books,” he said. “Read them aloud in the backyard, to roughen and lower your voice.”

  I realize now that this was his Acting 101 speech to anyone who came to his office, but at the time it was a very important conversation. I also went to see Lillian Burns Sidney, who was the drama coach at MGM and who sang my praises to her class later on.

  And then Stan Anderson, whose daughter I had entertained with imitations, sent me to see Solly Baiano at Warner’s. I did my impersonations of Cagney, Bogart, and the rest for Solly, and all he said was, “Well, that’s all very well, but we’ve already got Cagney, and we’ve already got Bogart. What about doing you?”

  That rocked me back. I thought about it and sensibly pointed out that “I can’t do me. I don’t know who me is.”

  In spite of my unformed state, Solly liked me and was going to put me into a movie. But fate intervened when the studio was closed down by a strike, and I had to go back to St. Monica’s, where I was going to high school. After that, I tried Paramount, where a lovely woman named Charlotte Cleary treated me with great kindness and enthusiasm. I auditioned in what they called “the fishbowl.” The fishbowl looked like a projection room with a small stage area in front of the screen. At the back of the room was a glass window, and you couldn’t see through it to find out who was watching you. It was like being in a police lineup, and it was unnerving. When the scene was over, they’d talk to you through a PA system. You couldn’t see who you were playing to, and it didn’t work for me at all.

  My father’s response to all this unvarying: “What the hell are you doing? What makes you think you can act?”

  “I want to try it.”

  “Well, you’re not going to try it. Go work in a steel mill this summer and learn about alloys.”

  This exchange, with minor variations, went on for years. For a while I was out there with a briefcase, fronting “Robert J. Wagner and Son.” I didn’t know much, but I knew I didn’t want to be the back half of “Robert J. Wagner and Son.”

  Another dead-end job was selling cars, although one day I got in to see Minna Wallis under the pretext of selling her a Buick. Minna Wallis was Hal Wallis’s sister and a well-regarded agent. Years earlier, she’d had an affair with Clark Gable and gave him a considerable career boost with her advice. I was a lot more interested in impressing her with the sleek beauty of Robert Wagner than I was in impressing her with the sleek beauty of a Buick. She was very encouraging, and years later I gave her an autographed picture on which I wrote, “Any time you want to buy a Buick, let me know.”

  Finally, my father capitulated slightly. My mother had been working relentlessly on him, and it had become increasingly obvious that I wasn’t going to college. I was offered scholarships to USC and Pomona, for diving and swimming, but I don’t think I could have made all-state. I was ranked about thirty-second in the state in tennis, which wasn’t bad, but I wasn’t really good enough to be a professional.

  There were really only two paths: my father’s way into business, or my way into show business. I remained adamant. Finally, my mother threw herself into the fray. She insisted that they had to let me at least try my way, so my father and I came to an agreement. When I graduated from St. Monica’s, he gave me a convertible and $200 a month for a year. If I couldn’t get into the movies in a year, on that money, I had to go into business with him. It wasn’t a great deal, but it was a better deal than anything he’d offered me up till then. We shook on it.

  I had met William Wellman on the golf course at Bel-Air. He was a friend of my dad’s and a very fine, successful director who had given a lot of people their start, including Gary Cooper in Wings, Wellman’s great World War I epic that won the first Oscar for “Best Picture” in 1927. My father swallowed hard, went to Wellman, and said, “I’ve got this kid who wants to be in the movies. Can you do anything?” Wellman probably heard this same line two or three times a week, but he gave me a small part in a good film he was making at MGM: The Happy Years. You never saw me—I was behind a catcher’s mask, and you would have had to have been my mother to recognize me—but I was in a movie. Needless to say, I was over the moon.

  Wellman had the reputation of being a wildly enthusiastic but temperamental taskmaster, but he was great to me; he even put me in another scene I wasn’t supposed to be in. It was my first movie, but I didn’t have a sense of how movies worked overall. I earned precisely $37.50 on The Happy Years, which I’m sure didn’t make my father feel any better about my choice of a career. Far more important than the money was the fact that I was now entitled to membership in the Screen Actors Guild—not bad for eighteen years old!

  With an appearance in a major studio film behind me, I went to Phil Kellogg, a well-regarded agent about town. Kellogg was with Berg-Allenberg, and he was Bill Wellman’s agent. With the bravado of youth, I asked him if he would handle me. I was really just grasping at straws, and Kellogg responded by giving me a talk about how difficult the business was, how many kids there were like me, and so forth. In a very nice way, he was trying to discourage me. After half an hour, he suddenly stopped, and I went away without an agent. But I’ve always been a positive, basically optimistic person, and I had a bumptious self-confidence—you couldn’t dissuade me. I just figured that if Kellogg didn’t want to handle me, someone else would.

  Fully forty years later, I was having a talk with Kellogg and thanked him for taking so much time with a green kid. And he told me that he’d actually been told to talk me out of being in the movies, but my enthusiasm got the best of him, and after a while he had to stop.

&
nbsp; “Who told you to talk me out of it?” I asked, although I already knew the answer.

  “Your father and Bill Wellman,” he said.

  Well, at least my father was consistent. For the year that he financed me, I worked as an extra and did everything there was to do so long as it was on a movie lot. I was always trying to get meetings with a producer, and if I was working in a crowd scene, I’d try to get placed in the front. For a time I was going out with Gloria Swanson’s daughter Michelle. Gloria was preparing Sunset Boulevard, and she listened as Michelle and I told her how much we wanted to be actors. Gloria gave us a copy of the script of Sunset Boulevard, and Michelle and I worked up a scene. Then Gloria had her friend Chuck Walters, a good director at MGM, come and watch us do the scene, then give us notes.

  All my scrounging and determination got me a lot of one-day jobs, and one thing led to another, as it usually does. One night I was at a club called the Beverly Hills Gourmet, where a songwriter named Lou Spence was playing the piano. I was up there by the piano singing some comedy lyrics that Spence had written to the tune of “Tea for Two” when a well-known agent named Henry Willson came in with his secretary. He sent a card over to the piano with a note that said if I was interested in being in pictures, I should come and see him. Well, I knew who Henry Willson was; everybody knew who Henry Willson was—a very important man at Charles Feldman’s Famous Artists Agency. I also knew he was gay, although he wasn’t mincy.

  Famous Artists had strong connections at Fox, and that’s where he sent me over to test. Years later, after I made it, a reporter asked Willson what he had seen in me. God knows, I was curious about that myself, because as Natalie Wood would say about me, “He was a star before he was an actor.”

  Willson replied that what had impressed him was “the changing expressions on his face. I watched his face mirror every thought and word—that, together with his looks and bright, clean-cut personality. I saw a sincerity and relaxed quality that would come right across the screen. Given the opportunity, I was sure he couldn’t miss.”

  During the time that he represented me, Willson never made a pass, although if I had put myself out there, he would have been on me in a second. He always treated me professionally, but there’s no question that Henry was sexually acquisitive. Once, he hitched a ride with me to the Racquet Club in Palm Springs. I was going there because there was a girl there I wanted to see, but Henry picked up a guy at the club using me as bait, which pissed me off royally.

  Years later Mike Connors and I counted up the number of straight clients Henry had at that time. We were able to come up with three: the two of us and Rory Calhoun. It was really another time. In those days most gay men were in the background. To get together, they’d rent houses or go on beach parties, because there weren’t that many gay bars around. Now there’s a book for every town telling gays where to go, and gays are in the foreground.

  Henry was a very tricky guy, and I don’t think he was an admirable person. He pulled a particularly horrible stunt on Rory Calhoun, when he leaked Rory’s juvenile record of grand theft auto to Confidential magazine in order to get them to sit on a story about Rock Hudson being gay. He gave up one client—Rory—to save a more important client—Rock. Years later, after Natalie Wood and I had remarried, Henry called and wanted us to pick up the mortgage on his house. He’d blown all his money, among other things, and he couched his request for help in the sinister overtones of a threat. He wouldn’t want anything derogatory about us to come out, and so forth. We ignored him.

  Just before I tested at Fox, I heard about a script at MGM that Stewart Stern had written. It was called Teresa, and it was about a young American soldier and his Italian war bride. The director was Fred Zinnemann, not yet the major figure who would make High Noon and From Here to Eternity, but clearly a rising star, one who already had the reputation of being a wonderful director. I got an interview, and Stewart and Fred both were very encouraging, even though I was painfully inexperienced. Stewart very kindly worked with me for about a week, taking me through the scene moment by moment. After a week, I went to MGM and made the test, which Fred directed himself.

  MGM took one look at my test and gave the part to John Erickson. I don’t blame them; I was just too green. A little while later I received a wonderful letter from Zinnemann, telling me that although I wasn’t right for this particular part, I was a genuine talent and I had a wonderful career ahead of me. In the sixty years since, I have never been turned down with more class. It was completely misleading in that I thought Zinnemann’s graciousness and style were a nominal part of the movie business. It took me a couple of years to figure out that Zinnemann was one of the few people of that era who would show such kindness to a young actor. It was Fred Zinnemann who taught me that the mark of a gentleman is how he treats people he doesn’t have to be nice to.

  Fade-out.

  Fade-in.

  Forty years later, Jill St. John and I were in London, and Fred Zinnemann was getting an award at the National Film Theater. We went over for the evening, and not only did he remember my test, but he remembered the letter! Fred Zinnemann was a great director, of course, but what is more important is that he was also a great man.

  It was around the time I was testing for Teresa that I met Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, who was an agent at Charles Feldman’s Famous Artists before he became a producer and achieved deserved fame and fortune with the James Bond films. Cubby came up through the trenches. Before he was an agent and producer, he sold jewelry, he sold Christmas trees, he worked in a studio mailroom, and he was an assistant director at Fox.

  To know Cubby was to be his friend, and it was Cubby who took me around to some of the studios. I was with Cubby when we were both thrown off the MGM lot. It seemed that Charlie Feldman had begun an affair with an actress in whom a certain MGM executive had a deep and sustaining personal interest, so Feldman and everybody who worked with him were deemed persona non grata.

  Despite that faux pas, Cubby and I hit it off, and for years I was invited to his house for Christmas and New Year’s. He and his wife opened their arms to me, and when Cubby’s health began to fail, I made sure to return the favor. I visited him regularly, as a great many people did. When he died, I gave the eulogy at his funeral—a small favor for a man who had done so much for me—and many others.

  After testing for Teresa, I went over to Fox. I had known the Zanuck kids—Susan, Richard, and Darrylin—socially, not that that would cut me any slack when it came to business. I made my test, and Darryl Zanuck looked at it the next night—Darryl always worked a late day. He ran the footage and said, “I don’t think so. Too inexperienced.”

  But Helena Sorrell, the studio’s drama coach, asked him to run the test one more time. “Look at his smile,” she said. “I think I can do something with that smile.”

  So Darryl ran the test again, sighed, and said, “Okay, Helena, if you say so. We’ll give him six months.” I signed a standard studio contract that started at $75 a week. I was eighteen years old, and since I was still a minor, part of my salary was withheld under the Coogan law. There were options—all on the studio’s side—every six months, with a slight salary boost with each option that was picked up. My $75 a week would become $125 a week, for instance. If you were picked up for an entire year, you were guaranteed forty weeks of salary out of fifty-two, but the studio could put you on furlough anytime it wanted, during which time you weren’t paid.

  During the forty weeks you were being paid, you could be making movies, of course, but the studio could basically tell you to do anything else it wanted as well—publicity tours, testing with other actors, whatever the studio chose. Since we were being paid, nobody much minded.

  The fact that I could make $75 a week caddying at Bel-Air, or selling cars, or working for my father didn’t bother me at all. Far more important than the money was the fact that the contract got me inside a movie studio. The contract didn’t arrive quite within the year my father had given me, but it
was close enough so that I didn’t have to go back to being the back half of “Robert J. Wagner and Son,” which was all I cared about.

  Twelve years later, Fox was paying me $5,000 a week.

  THREE

  “BABY, I WAS IN THE MOVIES!”

  Susan Hayward helping a very eager and very inexperienced actor through his paces in With a Song in My Heart. (WITH A SONG IN MY HEART © 1952 TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX)

  Twentieth Century Fox was a studio by, for, and about Darryl Francis Zanuck. It had been formed in 1935 when Zanuck and his friend and business associate Joseph Schenck merged their Twentieth Century productions with the moribund Fox organization. Before that, Darryl had been head of production at Warner Bros. until he realized it was primarily a family business and somebody named Zanuck could never be a member of the family.

  In 1933 Darryl went independent with Twentieth Century, which released through United Artists and had a great success. But Twentieth Century had to rent studio facilities, which cost a lot of money, so when the Fox organization became available, acquiring it solved both companies’ problems: Darryl got a first-rate studio complex, and Fox got a production head who understood how to make movies people wanted to see.

  Physically, Darryl was a small man, and like many small men, he was commanding and very competitive. He had to be good at everything he did, so when Darryl played polo or croquet, it was always at a very high level. Luckily, he also had a very good sense of humor and was fond of practical jokes, a trait I understand he picked up from Douglas Fairbanks Sr., who had mentored him when he was a young man.

  Zanuck staffed his studio with top-notch people throughout the departments. The head of publicity was a wonderful man named Harry Brand, who looked just like what you’d imagine a studio publicity chief would look like. Harry usually wore a fedora and was, as they say, heavily connected. He had an in with every police department in California, knew everything that was going on, and could fix anything that needed to be fixed.