Pieces of My Heart

by Robert J. Wagner

  Even marinated in alcohol, Hjordis retained much of her beauty, but she had a bleak, dark, driven personality, and his invariable response was to do everything he could to placate her, to no avail. When he was diagnosed with ALS, I told her, “Hjordis, you have to be here for David now; he needs you.”

  Her response was a simple declaration: “I never loved him anyway.”

  My reaction was a combination of shock, anger, and despair. As long as I knew them, Hjordis never gave any indication that she did love him, although if ever a man was deserving of love, it was David. It’s possible that he stayed with her because a divorce would have been very expensive, but his attitude toward her didn’t seem based on finances. It was more like he was doing penance. But for what?

  While the disease had its way with David, Hjordis was elsewhere—drinking, having affairs. In the spring of 1982, we went to France to shoot The Curse of the Pink Panther, which Blake Edwards put together as a last hurrah for the series. Niv played his old part, I played my old part. It was just a couple of days of shooting, but we all wanted to do it for David. After he did his last scene, he said, “I’m afraid you’ve just seen the last of an actor who had quite a career.” Tears came to my eyes.

  Unfortunately, the ALS had slurred Niv’s voice. Before a take, he would work at enunciating the dialogue clearly, sounding it out syllable by syllable, but when the camera was rolling a word like “gorilla” would come out “golilla.” Blake felt he had to dub David’s voice with Rich Little, who didn’t sound anything like David, which made the situation that much worse. Niv was terribly distressed; it’s one thing to acknowledge a disease privately, but to have its effects paraded before the whole world is something else entirely.

  Niv had always intended that The Curse of the Pink Panther would be his last movie, but the fact that Rich Little’s dubbing job became a matter of public knowledge meant that it was no longer David’s choice.

  Toward the end, David knew he was dying, even though he had always been determined to beat the illness. Sometimes he would talk about death and how different his life would have been if Primmie had lived. He would like to be reincarnated, he said, as a cat.

  As if the agony of his illness wasn’t bad enough, the last couple of weeks of David’s life were disturbed by a paparazzo who used a long lens to get a picture of David in his garden looking mortally ill. The pictures were published all over the world by the jackal press, and I’m glad to be able to report that a group of us made sure that it would be a long time before that son of a bitch was able to take any more pictures.

  David died on July 29, 1983, with only his nurse present. David Jr. and Jamie had been completely attentive to their father, but he died unexpectedly and nobody was there. Just a couple of days before, a drunken Hjordis had taunted David to the effect that he was no longer a man. The doctor called to tell me that David was gone, and I called Roger Moore. Roger was close by, in the south of France, and drove to David’s house immediately. He was the first on the scene, and Roger, his daughter, and a few others organized David’s funeral. About a day after David died, Hjordis finally showed up, half-pissed. They took a rug and threw it over the windshield so the photographers couldn’t get any shots of her drunk. They managed to get her inside David’s villa, and Roger was already there.

  “I knew you’d be here for the publicity” was the first thing out of her drunken mouth. I would not have been able to contain myself—I would have knocked her on her ass. But Roger has impeccable self-control and just walked away. I was in London when David died, but I couldn’t bear to see Hjordis and pretend I had any sympathy or affection for her. I waited until after the funeral and then went to the cemetery and left flowers at David’s grave, as I have continued to do whenever I’m in Europe.

  It’s a mark of David’s personality that the porters and baggage handlers at Heathrow airport sent a giant wreath to his funeral. He had always treated them generously, and they felt it was the least they could do.

  After David died, most of his friends simply shut Hjordis out. One of the few people who was close to David who was also fond of Hjordis was Grace Kelly. I heard later that Hjordis quit drinking and filled up her time by socializing. David’s will made it possible for her to continue living in the house; when she died, the house was sold and the estate split the money up.

  David’s sister was a very talented artist and did a remarkable bust of her brother for the immediate family. David’s daughter and sons Jamie and David each have a copy, Roger Moore has one, and I have the other. It’s among my most treasured possessions—as was my friendship with David.

  This was a time when the generation of actors I had idolized as a child were growing old and frail. The last time I saw Jimmy Cagney was around 1983, at a restaurant in Beverly Hills. He came shuffling in, a shrunken little man who had obviously had a stroke and was barely recognizable as James Cagney, the titanic talent who had been very kind to a green kid thirty-odd years before.

  I went over to him. “RJ!” he said brightly. And then, realizing how he appeared to people at this stage in his life, he sort of waved a hand at himself and said, very quietly, “These things happen.” His simplicity, his acceptance of the frailties of his age, made tears well up in my eyes. It still does.

  When my father died, my mother sold the house, packed up all the china and cookware, and gave it to my sister. She never did another domestic chore for the rest of her life. She was out from under—she was free. She didn’t want to live in a house, she didn’t want any responsibility for taking care of anything. She wanted to live in a nice hotel, so we got her into the Bel-Air Hotel, where she and my dad had always been connected. Joe Drown, the owner, knew her and knew me, and my lawyer and I arranged a deal whereby her rent rose with the cost-of-living index.

  She lived at the Bel-Air for more than twenty-three years. When she would walk into the hotel bar, Bud, the piano player, would swing into “Hello, Dolly,” and she would have a glass of champagne and talk to the waiters, who always made sure to make a fuss over her. She was just a fabulous character. She kept her great sense of humor, even after her eyesight began to fade, and when she and Jill’s mother, Betty, got together, it was hilarious—two women obsessively devoted to their adult children.

  After a certain point, it became obvious that she wouldn’t be able to stay at the Bel-Air, which is not, after all, a geriatric care facility. She developed macular degeneration and then fell and broke her hip. Kathy Constantino was working at the hotel and helping my mother out with things like writing checks and letters. Cliff May built my mother a very comfortable house on our property in Brentwood, a kind of southwestern-style cottage with a fireplace and an extra bedroom for Kathy, who came to work for me and helped take care of my mom.

  She lived with us very happily, even as she grew increasingly frail. By November 1993, she was ninety-five years old. I had told the staff that if anything happened, I didn’t want extreme measures taken. But when I was at our ranch one day, she collapsed. The fire department was called and climbed all over her trying to resuscitate her.

  They got her heart beating and took her to the hospital. The doctor asked me what I wanted to do. I told him that we should just see how it went. A little while after that, she just stopped breathing. My mother’s beautiful blue eyes were still open. I looked right at her, and for the first time in my life she couldn’t see me. My friend Sister Marie Madeline came in the room, put her hands on my mother’s eyes, and shut them. At that precise moment, I felt something rush past me. I believe it was my mother’s soul.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “YOU HAVE TO HAVE IT.”

  Jill and me on our wedding day, May 26, 1990. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEX BERLINER © BERLINER STUDIO/BEIMAGES)

  I had gone from playing a charming rogue in It Takes a Thief to playing a charming rogue in Switch to playing a charming non-rogue in Hart to Hart. My public image was—and probably remains—a cross between Alexander Mundy and Jonathan Hart.

 
; I realize that there are actors who bridle at being typecast; they find it limiting, or even insulting that the public fails to recognize their versatility. But about the time I was doing Switch I had a crucial realization. I was in Palm Springs, standing in a supermarket checkout line. A woman in back of me said, “Oh, how are you?”

  “I’m just fine, thank you.”

  “I’d like to invite you to come over to my house for dinner tonight.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I have plans. But thank you so much for the invitation.”

  “But I’m really a very good cook, and my husband’s a nice man. You’ll like him.”

  Well, I managed to beg off, but I realized that something remarkable had just happened. This very nice woman wanted to invite me to her house. It struck me then, and it strikes me now, that this is lightning in a bottle. The public sees me as a member of their family. They love me and want me, not just in their living room, but in their kitchen or dining room. I was and am delighted. More than that: I’m honored.

  When I was a kid watching movies in Westwood, I was in the dark, looking up at the screen at people who seemed more than human—larger, grander than life. I wasn’t talking to anyone—hell, I was barely eating my popcorn, because I was totally involved in that glowing silver frame on the wall. You didn’t actually imagine that you’d ever see Clark Gable in the flesh—that’s why I was so stunned that day at the Bel-Air Country Club. The proper response to actually seeing Gable or Cary Grant was gaping awe.

  But when viewing habits changed, when more people started watching actors in their living room than in theaters—in other words, with the lights on and with occasional conversation—it signaled a sea change. As an actor, you were in people’s living rooms, and that meant you could be a part of their lives in a way that the great movie stars of my youth weren’t—if the people in that living room accepted you.

  I don’t think it’s an accident that great stars like Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, and Bing Crosby all failed on television. They were somehow too big for the medium, and in trying to scale down their personalities to be more domestic, more approachable, they lost what made them interesting in the first place. Jimmy Stewart’s volatility, the possibility of rage, was gone; likewise Fonda’s remoteness, which always translated as integrity. Great actors, great stars, wrong medium.

  The change has continued, and not just at the movies. Now in a theater people are talking and cell phones are ringing. It’s one of the reasons movies are so loud—so they can be heard over the din of the audience. When I used to go on an airplane, I wore a jacket and a tie. Now people get on board in tank tops and flip-flops. For a half century, I worked in front of cameras loaded with film; now I work in front of cameras loaded with digital tape. It’s all changed, and some of it’s an improvement and some of it isn’t.

  But one thing never changes: then and now, in movies or television, millions of people arrange their lives so that they can watch actors who mean something to them. For those of us lucky enough to be singled out, there can be no greater compliment.

  Hart to Hart went off the air in 1984, and a year later I was back with ABC on a show called Lime Street. My part was not dissimilar to Jonathan Hart; this time I was a horse breeder who also investigated insurance fraud. I had two children and a father, played by Lew Ayres. I had admired Lew ever since I observed the quiet grace with which he endured being blackballed at the Bel-Air Country Club for being a conscientious objector.

  Lew was pushing eighty when we did Lime Street, but the wonderful thing about good actors is that the varying ways in which they prepare themselves for work fall away when the director says, “Action.” Acting is acting. Men like Lew Ayres or Melvyn Douglas weren’t method actors, but no method actor would think Lew or Melvyn had anything to apologize for.

  For an actor, there are two key questions: Do they believe me? Can I move them? Nothing else really matters.

  Lew was always looking for the reality of a scene—the emotional truth. I loved working with him. He was a very good, kind human being. For years he had devoted himself to a study of comparative religions and the different ways people worship God, but near the end of his life he switched to something a little more quantifiable: meteorology.

  One of my daughters on the show was played by Samantha Smith, the little girl from Maine who had become famous when she wrote to Yuri Andropov, the leader of the Soviet Union, urging peace. Andropov had then invited her to Russia for a lot of Kodak moments.

  Lime Street was a good idea, and I loved Samantha Smith, although I can’t take credit for her presence in the show—casting her was the idea of Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and her husband Harry, who were producing the show and who had brought in sufficient budgets to allow for European location shooting. I kissed Samantha good-bye on Piccadilly and flew to Gstaad for some location shooting. Samantha and her father were flying home to Maine, then were due to quickly turn around and come to Switzerland to join the shoot.

  When I got off the plane in Geneva on August 25, 1985, they took me to a private room, where Ray Austin was on the phone from Gstaad. It was Ray who told me that Samantha and her father had been killed in a plane crash. This lovely, gifted child was thirteen years old.

  It was as if the breath left my body. My own kids and Samantha had played all the time. She had a career and, more importantly, a life ahead of her that would have been wonderful. I had just said good-bye to her the day before. I had given her a bracelet that became one of her treasured possessions; she never took it off, and she had been wearing it when she was killed. It was another stunning death in my life.

  By the time I recovered my equilibrium and got to a phone, Columbia, the studio that was producing the series, was already making noises about recasting her part. I said flatly that I wasn’t going to be party to that. I went to the wire services and told them I was closing production down, and that was the end of Lime Street. Harry Thomason and I flew to Maine for Samantha’s funeral. Her mother was wearing the bracelet I had given Samantha.

  The first episode of Lime Street ran on September 21, the last on October 26.

  Columbia continued to behave very badly. Samantha’s tickets had been bought from American Express, and the studio didn’t want to acknowledge that she was being relocated for the show. They should have just shut up and made a settlement, but they fought it by saying that she wasn’t on the company payroll at the time, even though she was flying to Maine to pack up and go back to Europe for studio work.

  This went on for a couple of weeks, and one day as I was driving to the studio for a conference, I noticed that I was gripping the wheel so tightly that my knuckles were white. Finally, I told the studio that if this matter went to court, I would testify for Samantha’s mother and I would make sure to bring as many of the press as I could get into the courtroom.

  With the exception of Natalie’s death, Samantha’s death and its aftermath was the most emotionally upsetting thing I’ve ever gone through, and it drained a lot of the affection I always had for the business.

  Lime Street would be the last TV show I starred in, and that wasn’t by accident. I’ve continued to appear in TV movies and individual shows, and a few series ideas have come up that never came to fruition, but those were all ensemble projects, not shows in which I would pull the train. Samantha’s death and what came after were the events that finally convinced me that it was time to begin a judicious retreat from the business that had defined my life.

  Also contributing to my disaffection was my terrible disappointment in the Thomasons. They wanted to run the show their way, and their way was the way it had to be. I had heard incredible stories out of the set of Designing Women, and most of them turned out to be true.

  We had been shooting in Amsterdam, and Ray Austin, a great and loyal friend who had directed a lot of Hart to Hart, and I had gone over the rushes on tape, making notes. When I got back to California, I found the box of tapes and notes sitting unopened in Harry and Linda’s offices. The
y had no interest in anybody’s ideas but their own. As it turned out, Designing Women was their lightning in a bottle; nothing else they ever did really succeeded on that level.

  I am indebted to them for one thing, though. They introduced me to Bill Clinton. A few years before he was elected president, he came over to the house for three hours, and we talked about everything under the sun. I have seen a lot of people in Hollywood who have lofty ideas about their own charisma and fancy they can work a room. Occasionally, I’ve imagined I had some skills in that regard myself. But I have never seen anybody who’s the charming equal of Bill Clinton.

  After Lime Street, I remained in high demand and threw myself into producing a lot of TV projects. Throughout the years that followed Natalie’s death, work did what I hoped it would. Everything in my life had stopped, and I had to rebuild myself piece by piece. Throwing yourself into work does many things, but mainly it embeds you in a different reality, one that’s more manageable than the one you’re avoiding. A couple of the TV movies—a form I like a lot more than series—were very good, and the run of projects culminated in six two-hour Hart to Hart TV movies.

  It was a great deal of fun to be reunited with Stefanie Powers and Lionel Stander, although the changes in the business created some resistance to hiring Lionel. The studio thought he was too old. “What if he dies?” some executive asked me. “If he dies, we’ll write it into the shows,” I said. I pointed out that Lionel was a large part of the show’s chemistry and that, aside from being disloyal—and I don’t believe disloyalty should ever be tolerated—it wouldn’t have been Hart to Hart without him.

  I concluded the conversation by saying, “If you’re not interested in having Lionel in the show, there will not be a show. I will not make Hart to Hart without him.” That ended the conversation, but it was not a conversation I should have had to have.