In due time, Harry would fix a couple of things for me. Once, I was going into an electrical supply store in Westwood when a guy picked a fight with me. He pushed me, and I foolishly responded by ramming his head into the grille of my car. Technically, this was a felony assault.
Harry took care of it.
Then there were a couple of incidents involving women playing the old badger game. One go-round in a hotel room and they promptly screamed, “I’m pregnant!” even though it was never true.
Harry took care of it.
Zanuck was an incredibly dynamic man who could be seen going up the studio street to the studio café every day for lunch. He would be swinging his polo mallet and behind him would be a retinue of producers, editors, and his French teacher. A few years before I got there, his right-hand man had been William Goetz, Louis B. Mayer’s son-in-law, who brought with him an investment in the studio from Mayer. Darryl took the money, but he never respected Goetz.
When Darryl went into the service during World War II, he handed management of the studio over to Goetz. While Darryl was gone, Goetz never missed a chance to run him down verbally. Darryl heard about this, of course, and when Darryl returned, he and Goetz got into an argument—all the moguls were tremendously competitive and regularly engaged in knockdown, drag-out fights with each other. Darryl finally told Goetz he could hire a valet to do his job. Goetz was offended and left the studio to found International Pictures, which later merged with Universal.
For a replacement, Darryl hired Lou Schreiber, who had been Al Jolson’s valet. He hadn’t been kidding: he literally hired a valet, and nothing much changed around the Fox lot.
I soon heard about Darryl’s idiosyncrasies. Every day at four o’clock the atmosphere around the front office became noticeably hushed as Darryl was serviced by one of the contract girls. Darryl was notorious for his proclivities with women, and he had a bad habit of becoming obsessed by his mistresses; he couldn’t take sex lightly and always had to try to elevate his girls to a level where they would be more than glorified call girls, worthy of Darryl F. Zanuck. Not all of them were anywhere near as interested in a starring career as Darryl was—his ego was more involved than theirs was.
I knew Darryl’s children, and they always seemed to adore him. But Darryl was not the sort of man to play catch with his kids—none of those men were. Their identity consisted of their careers and their responsibilities. Think about those responsibilities for a moment: matching up stories—thirty a year!—with the right writers, the right actors, and the right directors; placating stockholders; and wondering if television was going to obliterate the movie business and trying to make pictures accordingly. Darryl really only saw the kids on the weekends, and there wasn’t a lot of weekend—Darryl worked a six-day week.
When I drove onto the Fox lot as a contract player, I made sure not to have any airs about me. I wasn’t trying to be something I wasn’t. I was very anxious to find out why some people became stars and other people didn’t; I wanted to learn what to wear, how to act, what kind of image to project. I was very analytical about it. I was there every morning whether I was working or not, eager and ready to learn. My life was finally opening before me, and I was smart enough to know it.
I now had my own apartment, at 1298 Devon, off Beverly Glen between Wilshire and Santa Monica. It was a terrific little one-bedroom apartment that I decorated myself and, even better, was paying for myself: $125 a month.
Helena Sorrell began working with me. She would choose scenes, mostly from movies, not plays, because the scenes were shorter, thus easier. After a while we’d get the scene on its feet with an actress and rehearse the material, and we’d end up using it for a test. I was always testing with somebody or another, for some part or another. I tested with everybody and for anything. With actresses, with actors, for westerns, for gangster pictures, you name it. Sometimes I was in a test with another young actor the studio was interested in, so all you could see was the back of my head, but I didn’t care. I was in the movies.
I had motivation in front of me and in back of me. It wasn’t just that I wanted to be a movie star; I didn’t want to have to go back to my father with my tail between my legs. Because I wanted it so badly, I was pretty nervous and carried a lot of anxiety. I got to know the writers, I got to know the directors, and I made it my business to know which scripts were moving toward production and which were moving toward the shelf. Aside from all this, I could fit into the old wardrobes of Tyrone Power and Mark Stevens, which helped.
Helena regarded me as her personal project, and she used every trick in her book to get me up to speed. For a long time my voice was a problem—it was too high-pitched and I knew it, so I would throw lines away or mumble. Helena had to pretend to be hard of hearing to get me to speak up. For extra voice coaching, I went to see Gertrude Fogler at MGM. Gertrude had been at MGM for the twenty years since talkies arrived and, beginning with John Gilbert, had worked with practically every actor on the lot. She was an excellent voice teacher, which was good—I was paying for her lessons myself.
When I wasn’t working with Helena or Gertrude, I was in the wardrobe department, the sound department, the camera department, the set department. I was on the stages, watching people act. Hell, I even watched the studio cops. My basic attitude was that anything they asked me to do wasn’t a job but an opportunity. I was working in a movie studio, and I was determined to find out how all those gears meshed.
I had enthusiasm and a lot of admiration for the people at Fox, and I made sure that everybody knew it. I was amazed at how a movie came together, and to be completely honest, that amazement has never left me. I’ve made eighty movies and hundreds of hours of television, and I sit in a theater to watch a movie and I’m still thrilled.
Shortly after I was signed at Fox, the process of casting the two leads for Teresa became a story. Edwin Schallert had been the lead movie critic for the Los Angeles Times since the silent days, and MGM showed him a batch of the tests for Teresa. He came out with a story headlined “Robert Wagner a Dark Horse for ‘Teresa’ Part.” Evidently, Schallert thought I was a lot better than MGM did.
Of course, the people at Fox found this very disturbing, as I had just been signed by them, and here I was almost getting a part at MGM. But it had a very positive effect, because the news that Fred Zinnemann had thought enough of me to direct my test got me in to see Lewis Milestone, another very fine director, who was putting a picture together called Halls of Montezuma—the first time I got billing in a movie.
I played a private, which was appropriate. When I met Milly—Milestone’s nickname—I was very wide-eyed. “You made All Quiet on the Western Front!” I said. “That was a long time ago!” He wasn’t too thrilled and said, “It wasn’t that long ago.” Actually, the movie had been made only twenty years before, but I was only twenty myself, so I pled ignorance.
The script was about the Marines in the Pacific campaign of World War II, and it wasn’t much, but the cast was truly excellent: Richard Widmark, Jack Palance, Karl Malden, Marty Milner, Neville Brand, Richard Boone, and Jack Webb. Widmark was a terrific guy—years later I bought some land from him, so we had adjacent ranches where we raised horses—while Karl and I began a friendship that has lasted for nearly sixty years. Years later, Marty Milner and I went to see Milly on one of his birthdays, and he told us he should have been smarter about his contract and gotten 10 percent of the cast’s future income—he would never have had to worry about money again.
After that, I was a Navy underwater demolition swimmer in The Frogmen, Claudette Colbert’s junior executive son-in-law in Let’s Make It Legal, a doomed Marine in John Ford’s What Price Glory? and the inventor of the Sousaphone in Stars and Stripes Forever. These were all small supporting parts, but they were all well-chosen supporting parts—showy, with highly dramatic or emotional moments attached to each character.
Let’s Make It Legal was one of the early films of Marilyn Monroe, but she wasn’t the proble
m. I was. I was so green that I had to do forty-nine takes of one shot—a number I’ve never forgotten. Not all of it was my fault—Claudette Colbert went up a couple of times, the camera broke down, and the dialogue got changed—but most of it was my fault. Forty-nine takes. Jesus!
Claudette Colbert could have blown me right out of the water for being such an amateur, or she could have insisted that I be replaced, but she didn’t. I found her a very caring, giving woman, with a lot of guts and a very special aura around her—a great star. Over forty years later she came to see me when I did Love Letters in the theater, and I felt honored by her presence.
It would be fair to say that I wasn’t very good in this period, but I was diligent. I was also cooperative and I had enthusiasm, which is probably all that made me bearable to some of the pros I was working with. Now, when I look back at some of those early performances, I cringe a little and silently thank the public and the other actors for their patience.
Technically, Let’s Make It Legal wasn’t the only time I worked with Marilyn. She had tested with me for several parts that she got, and I think I was in the test that got her a contract at Fox. I adored her. At this point in her career she wasn’t troublesome at all. She knew her lines cold, was terribly sweet and eager to please, and I loved her. My God, we were so young! I took her out a couple of times, but nothing happened. There were a lot of people in line before me, if you get my drift. It was a tricky situation, but she was a darling, and I thought the world of her.
Then Darryl sent me the script for a movie called With a Song in My Heart, a Susan Hayward picture about the singer Jane Froman, who had been terribly hurt in a plane crash but revived her career anyway. I had precisely two scenes and a couple of lines of dialogue. In the first scene, I meet Froman in a nightclub, and she brings me up on the little mobile stage she used after her accident and sings two songs to me: “Embraceable You” and “Tea for Two.” My response, as indicated by the script, was to smile and look bashful. Well, that was certainly in my skill set.
The second scene took place after I’d gone off to war and become a victim of shell shock. Although my character hasn’t said ten words since he got hurt, I manage to tell Hayward/Froman I’d like to hear her sing “I’ll Walk Alone.” Bingo! I’m cured.
I’m embarrassed to say that I read the script and didn’t see it. “This isn’t very much,” I told Darryl. And with great patience, he told me, “This will be the biggest break you will have had in your career. You will be on the screen for three minutes. When people come out of the theater, they will want to know who you are.”
That was the last time I questioned Darryl Zanuck’s judgment about the movies. I was too young to realize that Darryl was placing me, sculpting moments for me that would compel the audience’s attention. He was taking very good care of me.
When we shot my scenes for With a Song in My Heart, Walter Lang directed me almost exactly as he would have directed Rin-Tin-Tin. Let me explain: Dogs have only a couple of expressions—if you’re making a movie and you want a dog to look intense and his ears to spring up, you show him a cat. Well, Walter wanted me to cry, and he didn’t want me to fake it, so when he directed the scene, he was crying. And even if the dramatic construction of the movie was slightly corny, that moment—what passed between Susan and Walter and myself—was absolutely true.
When Susan was playing to me, I responded automatically. I didn’t have the craft to produce tears on my own, and Susan realized it. She was completely focused on me, giving me what I needed to give her back an emotional reaction. And when she sang “I’ll Walk Alone,” I cried. It was as if I were a child actor, which, in a very real sense, I was. And after the scene was over, it was Susan who fell apart. She was sensational in the picture, and Watson Webb, who would become a good friend, edited my scenes beautifully.
In my callowness, I thought the power of a part was judged by the amount of time the character is on screen; I hadn’t seen Bill Wellman’s Wings, which featured Gary Cooper in a scene that lasted about two minutes. Before that, Coop was just another young actor; after that, he was a star. After With a Song in My Heart opened, Susan was nominated for an Oscar for best actress, the film was a big hit, and I wasn’t exactly a star but for the first time people knew who I was. The Korean War was on, and to the women in the audience that boy I played represented the men in their lives—mothers thought of their sons, wives thought of their husbands, and girls thought of their sweethearts.
I was good enough in these pictures, but I was so terribly young. The energy and innocence you can see in With a Song in My Heart and Stars and Stripes Forever isn’t acting—that was me. Walter Lang and his wife Fieldsie liked me, and Walter often took me fishing. Walter was a very solid human being, and Fieldsie was a ballsy, lovable woman. She had been a bathing beauty for Mack Sennett, and after that she had been Carole Lombard’s secretary. Clark Gable remained close to them after Carole’s death; he would often come to their house to play poker. The result was that Gable and I became closer than we had been as golfer and caddy.
My first real trial by fire was John Ford. Believe me, if you can survive John Ford in a bad mood, you can survive anything. Jimmy Cagney and Dan Dailey were the stars of What Price Glory?, which was originally a very strong antiwar statement in its theatrical version and in Raoul Walsh’s 1926 silent version. In Ford’s version, it became mostly about male camaraderie. Besides Cagney and Dailey, the cast was dotted with wonderful character actors—Bill Demarest, James Gleason, Wallace Ford—and then there was me, the green kid, which in Ford’s world was a euphemism for “designated patsy.”
Ford was a tall, lean man who had had a distinguished career in the Navy during World War II (he would eventually rise to the rank of admiral) as a break from his distinguished career in Hollywood (he won five Oscars). He wore a slouch hat and dark glasses and had a sharp, pointed command personality, although he never raised his voice. Ford didn’t call me RJ and didn’t even call me Bob. Throughout the picture, he called me Boob. One day we were shooting on the French street that had been built for The Song of Bernadette. I was to come out of a house with Bill Demarest, Wally Ford, and Dan Dailey. We did a take, Ford said, “Cut,” and then he walked the length of the street and came up to me.
“You know, Boob, if you can’t see the camera, the camera can’t see you. You be clear to the camera.” And then he pushed me, hard. I wasn’t expecting it, and I fell flat on my ass. By the time I hit the ground, he’d turned and was walking back up the street. I was too stunned to be angry. I struggled to my feet and said, “My God!”
Jim Cagney was standing next to me and said, “Don’t worry, kid. He does that. You’ll be all right. Just remember your lines, that’s all you have to do.”
If Ford had had the camera running when he knocked me down, I would have gotten the Academy Award. Another time he picked up a rock and started to throw it at me. He was basically interested in destabilizing me, and he succeeded. He scared the living hell out of me. The fact that he had scared the living hell out of John Wayne, Harry Carey Jr., Ward Bond, and practically every other person who had ever worked with him was very small consolation.
One day on the set Ford was sitting in his director’s chair when he turned to me. “Boob?” he said.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Ford!”
“Don’t look now. Over there? That man? That’s Barry Norton. He played your part in the original picture. He’s the king of the queens. He’s an extra now. That can happen to you.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Ford.” I turned around and bumped into another man. “That’s King Baggott,” Ford said. “He used to make $27,500 a week. See where he is now, Boob?”
What a tough son of a bitch. I didn’t find out until years later that the second guy wasn’t King Baggott; King Baggott had been a high-priced actor and director who drank himself out of the business and ended up as a security guard at MGM. He died in 1948, the year I signed with Fox and a couple of years before I worked with Ford on What Pric
e Glory? But it might as well have been King Baggott, because whoever that man was, Ford used him to scare the hell out of me, and I’ve never forgotten the lesson. He was telling me that making movies was a brutal business, that things end, and I needed to hold on to my money. He was telling me something I needed to learn, and for that I thank him, if not for the way he told me.
My primary consolation during What Price Glory? was Corinne Calvet, a gorgeous woman but one who didn’t have the clarity needed for a major career. As for Jimmy Cagney, he was as wonderful to me as Ford was harsh. I had known Cagney when I was a kid, when I had jogged his horses for him. Jimmy kept Morgans and trotters, and he was a very giving, generous man whom I had admired for years. Here I was, only a couple of years into my career, and I ended up dying in his arms in a John Ford movie!
As an actor, Cagney was very free and open. The emotional coloring of his work could vary quite a bit from take to take, although he was always very concerned about matching his action. Among that generation of actors, the only one with whom I worked who I found to be uninterested in much variation was Henry Fonda. He didn’t vary much, and he didn’t use much. He didn’t even use other actors much.
Throughout this period I trusted in Darryl to do right by me, and I must say that he never failed me, not once. The studio system could be emotionally difficult, because I wasn’t the only hopeful juvenile leading man being groomed for a career. There were a dozen or so at each studio, all starting out at $75 a week, all more or less good-looking, all more or less types who could conceivably replace an older leading man who was already at the studio. I was tagged as a possible replacement for Tyrone Power, as was Jeffrey Hunter—a fine man, a good actor, and a valued friend. One of the small tortures of the way the studios operated was that there were plenty of other people who were something like you. Every time you looked around, you saw someone who was a living, breathing implication that you were replaceable. And the sad fact was that you were.
Pieces of My Heart Page 4
