In the Company of Legends

by Joan Kramer

  Richard turned to Joan. “Fleas? What fleas?” he said.

  When we arrived, there was a slight smell of mustiness and extermination fumes, but no sign of the fleas.

  Stage 28, by the way, has always been rumored to be haunted.

  JK Each day we had a catered lunch on tables near our “home base.” All of us, including Richard, sat and ate together, with him telling stories about the making of Jaws, and many of his other films. The crew later told us that this job was one of the best experiences they’d had. It’s more usual for a star to have lunch in his dressing trailer, rather than socializing with the members of the crew.

  Richard Dreyfuss on the Phantom Stage.

  Universal City, CA, 1995. Authors’ collection.

  Our last location was at “Jaws Lake,” where we’d been asked to set up and get our shot quickly, so that the Universal City tour bus didn’t have to be diverted any longer than absolutely necessary. The shark was a main attraction, and people would be very annoyed if they weren’t able to see it.

  The studio’s engineers had agreed to adjust the computer that controlled “Bruce” (the fake shark), so that it would rise up out of the water directly behind Richard at the right point in the script. It turned out to be more complicated than we had imagined, and in take after take, “Bruce” bopped up in the wrong place or at the wrong time.

  Richard turned around and said, “Some nightmares never end,” a reference to the fact that the original mechanical shark used in the making of Jaws was famously temperamental too.

  JK and DH We had planned to send a limo to bring Dreyfuss to the set every morning, but he insisted on driving himself. At the end of each day, we asked him again, and again he turned us down.

  Finally his assistant, Audrey, said, “Richard, do you know why they keep offering to send a car and driver for you? They’re worried about you.”

  The truth was that we were, indeed, worried. He had had a well-publicized problem with substance abuse and had once driven his Mercedes into a tree. He was seriously injured and is lucky to have survived. He checked into a rehab facility and has been clean ever since.

  JK He told me, “If you’re afraid that you’re going to lose your host in a ditch, I’ll make a deal with you. I still want to drive myself, but I’ll arrive fifteen minutes early just to reassure you.” True to his word, he drove onto the lot at 7:45 am each day, parked his car, and when he saw me, did a little dance with arms opened wide, saying, “Ta-dah—I’m here.”

  DH After our four days of shooting at Universal, we started the two days of narration. We played back the rough-cut of the show, which had my voice as a “scratch track” on it, so that Richard could see the visuals as he read his lines. But some of them had to fit in very tight spaces, and when he had trouble speaking fast enough, he took it as a challenge.

  He said, “David, if you can do it, so can I. Let me hear your scratch track in my headphones.” I had never seen anyone do that before. But it worked. He succeeded in reading the script with the exact timings we needed, sounding completely natural and not at all strained or mechanical. However I decided not to tell him that my speed had been faked. Our editor, Scott Doniger (who edited almost every program Joan and I did), had cut out breaths between words, in order to make my narration fit.

  JK and DH By the time the show was finished, we were exhausted. The research had been exciting, even thrilling at times, when we uncovered elusive footage or stumbled across forgotten events. But it had been a very big undertaking, and just getting to the end felt like an achievement.

  Joan and Richard discussing script.

  Universal City, CA, 1995. Authors’ collection.

  Universal was very happy with the program, as was the Starz network, on which it premiered. The Universal Story vividly shows how a second tier Hollywood studio3 survived against the odds, and eventually became one of the most powerful in the industry.

  Glenn Close on the original Columbia Pictures lot.

  Sunset-Gower Studios, Los Angeles, CA, 1998. Authors’ collection.

  Somehow the agonies of production are overshadowed, and all but forgotten, if the show turns out to be a success. The Universal Story was well-received, and we soon recovered from the feeling of being knee-deep in quicksand.

  In the fall of 1996, we received a phone call from our friend, Su Lesser, a vice president at Columbia Pictures. She had licensed clips to us for our first two Astaire shows, and we met soon after while she was on a business trip to New York. When the shows were nominated for Emmy Awards, she volunteered to throw a party at her apartment in LA and invited those from other studios who had also helped us. Su is a friend to this day.

  She was calling about Columbia Pictures’ birthday. “The studio will turn seventy-five in January, 1999, and I think we should be celebrating with a documentary like the one you did for Universal. Would you be interested? I’ve already mentioned it to Jeff Sagansky4, and told him about you, and he was enthusiastic about the idea.”

  Without too much hesitation—actually none at all—we said, “We’d love to do it.” We didn’t even pause to think about the magnitude of taking on another studio’s story.

  JK On the day after Christmas, I happened to be in the office alone, cleaning up some paperwork, when the phone rang.

  The voice on the other end said, “Hi. This is Jeff Sagansky at Columbia Pictures. Is Joan there?”

  Somehow I recovered quickly enough. “Yes, this is Joan.”

  “Su Lesser gave me your number. As you probably know, she’s suggested that you and your partner produce a seventy-fifth anniversary special about the studio. Are you still interested and do you have the time? I confess I haven’t seen the show you did about Universal. Could you send me a cassette? Su told me it’s terrific.”

  “I think she’s a bit prejudiced, since we’re old friends, but yes, we have the time and we’d be happy to do it. By the way, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.”

  “The same to you. I’ll be in touch again after the holidays.”

  However, January came and went with no further word. We asked Su what was going on, but she didn’t know, so we decided to take the lead. We called for an appointment to meet Sagansky, and booked a trip to Los Angeles.

  JK and DH Sony Pictures was, and still is, based in Culver City on the old MGM lot, which we knew well from the shows we’d done on Spencer Tracy and James Stewart. Jeff Sagansky’s office was in the legendary Thalberg building. He shook hands and introduced us to Andy Kaplan, head of Columbia Television. Andy was cordial, but not particularly friendly. We wondered if his coolness was because he was being handed a project that he hadn’t initiated, basically being assigned to oversee it by his boss. However, Jeff said that he wanted to make this program a reality and it was up to Andy to find the money for it. By now both of them had seen The Universal Story, and had been impressed by it.

  The meeting ended with a short discussion about who might host the show, and we were told, “Don’t worry about that. We have relationships with many stars that we can approach and we won’t have to pay them a lot of money.”

  JK Our contract negotiations were not easy. In fact, at one point, Andy Kaplan told me that he was getting a “visceral” feeling that this project wouldn’t happen. I then called Jeff Sagansky and asked if the studio had changed its mind. He assured me it hadn’t. After that, our lawyer, Anita Shapiro, ironed out the rest of the deal with Michael Viebrock, the attorney at Columbia.

  We were beginning to wonder if our relationship with Andy, to whom we were reporting, would be fraught with tension. As it turned out, we needn’t have worried. He was very supportive, always helpful, and always available.

  JK and DH Columbia had a close relationship with HBO and Andy saw the possibility of them financing the project. He asked us to go with him to a meeting in Los Angeles with Chris Albrecht, HBO’s Chairman and CEO. We were flown out first class and put up at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills—very different from the way that do
cumentary producers usually travel.

  The meeting with Albrecht seemed to go well. He knew of our Universal Story, which had been broadcast by HBO’s competitor, Starz. But when we told him that Universal had been pretty much hands-off editorially, he said, “You won’t find it like that here.”

  A few days later we were in Andy Kaplan’s office to get the bad news that HBO was not interested. But in the conversation he mentioned a new deal that Columbia now had to supply Starz/Encore with product, and we reminded him that Starz had been very pleased with The Universal Story. Maybe they would want this new program about Columbia. Within a week he’d made the sale, and we had the money to produce the show.

  DH In order to get a full picture of the business side of the studio, Jeff Sagansky arranged for us to meet the renowned corporate investment banker, Herbert Allen, Jr. We spent an entire morning with him in his New York office, and were fascinated by the behind-the-scenes power that he wielded when he was instrumental in rescuing Columbia from the brink of bankruptcy a number of years back.

  In fact, during Harry Cohn’s reign, while often tumultuous, the studio never was in the red. Only after he died, when top management seemed to change every few years, was the financial stability of the company on a roller coaster, several times plummeting to near-disaster. Herb Allen was able to give us the details that led to the downfalls and how he and producer, Ray Stark, managed to put the studio back on a sound financial foundation.

  And then we lost our most powerful ally. In a typical Hollywood upheaval, Jeff Sagansky resigned. We were stunned; even though we had a contract and were in production, Jeff wouldn’t be there to see the project through to completion.

  Fortunately Su was still there. We spoke with her every day, sometimes more than once. She made the vital process of getting screening cassettes of movies as easy as possible. And we soon became friends with Maria Blanco, who was responsible for making and sending us the tapes, often a dozen or more at a time. Su also pushed all the right buttons in all the necessary departments to get us through the maze of legal clearances. She was essentially one of our executive producers, along with Andy Kaplan. Unfortunately though, when it came time to finalize the on-screen credits, Columbia took the same position as Universal: no credits for any studio employees. Su was disappointed, but she could hardly argue the point when Andy, himself, was not getting a credit.

  But we’re leaping too far ahead here.

  JK It didn’t take long for us to remember how daunting it can be to tell the story of a studio, and how we needed to find a way to make an audience care about a corporation, however glamorous the business. Again, we felt as though we were drowning in a surplus of riches. Here was a producer’s dream of having access to all the material in the archives—thousands of feature films, television series, cartoons, shorts, serials, plus photos, posters, contracts, scripts, memos, etc.—offset by the nightmare of having to look at and analyze as many as possible, and then decide what should be used to move the story along.

  DH Columbia started out in 1924 as a “Poverty Row” studio, with its headquarters on the notoriously low-rent Gower Street. At the other end of the spectrum, also founded in 1924, was the star-studded MGM, located on a luxurious lot in Culver City. They couldn’t have been further apart in all respects.

  One of Columbia’s most colorful characters was its founder, Harry Cohn. He was known to have been rude, ruthless and vulgar. None of the Hollywood moguls was especially beloved, but Harry Cohn was probably the bottom of the heap. When he died in 1958, huge crowds turned out for his funeral, about which Red Skelton famously quipped, “You give the public what they want, and they’ll show up.”

  But Cohn had a remarkable eye for talent, nurturing actors such as Jean Arthur, Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, Jack Lemmon, Judy Holliday and Kim Novak, and—perhaps most importantly—director Frank Capra, who put Columbia on the map with It Happened One Night, which swept the Oscars for 1934. But Cohn also made blunders. After Marilyn Monroe appeared in a film for him, he decided not to sign her to a contract. “She can’t act,” he said.

  JK and DH We found that one of the ways to grapple with telling this story was to do what we had done with Universal and create segments focusing on several stars and directors who made their marks while working at the studio. An obvious one was Margarita Cansino. She became one of Harry Cohn’s most famous “creations.” He changed the color of her hair, and her hairline, as well as her name—to Rita Hayworth. And he cast her opposite Cary Grant, Glenn Ford, Gene Kelly, and Fred Astaire, to name a few. With her smoldering sexuality, she became Columbia’s biggest moneymaker in films such as Gilda, Miss Sadie Thompson, Only Angels Have Wings, and Cover Girl. And the public was just as captivated by her off-screen life. Her marriage to Prince Aly Khan caused ripples around the world, and a tidal wave in the office of Harry Cohn when she announced she was giving up Hollywood for the life of a princess. Four years later, she and the Prince were divorced, and Cohn not only welcomed her back, but reveled in the publicity generated by her return.

  It was fairly well known that Rita Hayworth lip-synched her musical numbers to other voices, such as Anita Ellis’s. But there had long been a rumor that in one scene in Gilda, Rita had done her own singing while strumming a guitar. We wanted to either confirm or deny the rumor. So we sent a cassette of the film to her daughter, Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, who lives in New York. She called back a few days later to say that the voice was not her mother’s.

  DH Soon after we were hired to produce the program, we had dinner in Los Angeles with our friend, Roger Mayer and his wife, Pauline. They both had worked at Columbia years before, and he told us about an ill-fated project called Joseph and His Brethren.

  He said, “It was at a time when Hollywood was captivated by Biblical epics, and Harry Cohn wanted one of his own. Rita Hay-worth was set to play the lead, and while work was being done on the script, director William Dieterle took a second unit film crew to Egypt and shot hours of footage of camels in the desert. But the project was bogged down with one problem after another. I wonder if any of that footage still exists.”

  What actually happened was that by then Rita was married to singer Dick Haymes, and the last straw was when he decided he wanted to play Joseph. That’s when Harry Cohn threw in the towel and finally abandoned the film. It had cost him over two years and close to two million dollars.

  A few months later, when we interviewed Jack Lemmon, he said that while he was a contract player at the studio, often butting heads with Cohn, he was tested for the part of Joseph.

  “But I told Harry, ‘I’m not Joseph, for God’s sake. Find someone else.’ And Harry said, ‘Okay, you don’t have to play Joseph, but if you give me any more trouble, I’ll show that test all over the Bel Air circuit.’”

  I had asked both Su Lesser and the studio’s head of Asset Management and Film Restoration, Grover Crisp, about both the footage from Egypt and also Jack Lemmon’s screen test. They couldn’t find any trace of either.

  Then, just before I was leaving for a trip to Los Angeles, I received a call from Grover. He suggested I spend a morning with him looking at some film he’d found.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “You’ll see. It’s a surprise.”

  I always tell people that Grover is one of the “good guys” in Hollywood. He cares deeply about the Columbia film library and maintains and restores its pictures with a meticulous attention to detail. And indeed, he had “surprises” for me. He’d found costume, hair and makeup tests of Rita Hayworth doing a scene for Joseph and His Brethren, as well as Jack Lemmon’s test for it. And there were also screen tests of Harrison Ford, Warren Beatty, Kim Novak with Tyrone Power, Barbara Streisand with Omar Sharif, and Joan Perry, Harry Cohn’s wife-to-be. And finally, two shots of camels walking in the desert—all that was left of the twenty-seven-thousand feet Dieterle had filmed in Egypt. It was a treasure trove, all of which we used in the program.

  JK Another of Harry Cohn’s “c
reations” was Kim Novak, who was groomed to replace Rita Hayworth as she grew older and her star began to fade. Cohn carefully crafted Novak’s sex-goddess image in Phffft with Jack Lemmon, and in Picnic, when she slow-danced in the moonlight with William Holden. Then, to make it absolutely clear that she had reached that lofty goddess position, Cohn cast both her and Rita Hayworth opposite Frank Sinatra in Pal Joey. Only one of them “gets the guy.” Of course, it’s the young, blond Kim Novak.

  We tried to reach her, but she never responded to our letter. However, in addition to Jack Lemmon, we did interviews with Dustin Hoffman, Dennis Hopper, Evelyn Keyes, Richard Dreyfuss, Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn, Barbra Streisand, and producer Ray Stark; and we found archival recordings of Clark Gable, Jean Arthur, Irene Dunne, and directors Frank Capra, Orson Welles, and David Lean. I also attempted to convince socialite, Leonore Annenberg (wife of former US Ambassador to Great Britain, and philanthropist, Walter Annenberg) to participate in the program. She was Harry Cohn’s niece, and was raised by him from an early age after her mother died. I found a number for Mrs. Annenberg and she answered the phone herself. When I told her why I was calling, her response was immediate and abrupt. “I don’t discuss the Cohn family,” she said, and hung up.

  However, we were able to get a glimpse into Cohn’s personal life thanks to some home movie footage of him, his second wife, Joan Perry, and their children. Our associate producer, Mary Bell Painten, tracked down his daughter-in-law, who not only had that footage, but also Cohn’s personal scrapbooks filled with news clippings and photographs.

  JK and DH As with The Universal Story, the right host was crucial. And even though the studio had told us that they’d be able to find someone for not a lot of money, they discovered that it wasn’t all that easy. We wanted a big star who’d made a number of films there. Our top choice was Glenn Close, and fortunately everyone agreed.

  DH The narration session was in New York at Sony’s Columbia Records on Manhattan’s West Side5, prior to the on-camera shoot in California. We were given a studio that had been built for Mariah Carey’s recording sessions; it was elaborate and comfortable. Glenn came in from Bedford Hills, just north of the city. She was not steeped in Columbia’s history, but was fascinated by the story and eager to learn more about it. We worked together well, and the day felt very relaxed.