Mark Griffin
Page 22
Meanwhile, the search for the perfect Rima continued. Life magazine, on orders from MGM’s powerful publicity chief, Howard Strickling, pushed for demure, Italian-born Pier Angeli in the role: “She is a strong contender but hasn’t been promised anything. Our idea is to have her audition for the part for Life’s camera and let her show why she ought to have it… . Pier feels she was born for the role and says she’d wear brown trunks, bra of flowers and wear her hair long and wild as she flies through the forest.”4
In October, Minnelli prepared to shoot one of the most elaborate screen tests in Hollywood history on MGM’s Stage 15. Pier Angeli (minus bra of flowers) would try Rima on for size, and handsome newcomer Edmund Purdom would play the lovelorn fugitive. As though he were mounting a full-fledged feature, Vincente ordered up a lush jungle paradise complete with an artificial lagoon. Branches left over from Brigadoon were strewn with cobwebs. No less than Joseph Ruttenberg would photograph the mini-spectacle. It took two weeks and $130,000 to shoot.
Although all eyes were on Angeli, Minnelli noted that the proceedings were “as much a test of us—to see how we would approach the picture.”5 After viewing the footage, Arthur Freed concluded that there was no sense in proceeding any further, as nothing about the test was persuasive. Pier Angeli was not entirely convincing as Rima, but then again, what actress would be? Once again, plans to bring Green Mansions to the screen were scrapped. In 1959, Hudson’s tale would finally reach the screen, with Audrey Hepburn (as believable as anyone could be as the Bird Girl) and a miscast Anthony Perkins as the rugged revolutionary. The movie, directed by Hepburn’s then husband, Mel Ferrer, was both a commercial and critical disappointment. The film’s failure proved Freed right. Green Mansions belonged on a book shelf, not the silver screen.
“THE TROUBLE ABOUT THE LIVING-ROOM DRAPES …” ignites an interoffice Armageddon in William Gibson’s engrossing 1954 debut novel The Cobweb. The novel is set at the Castle House Clinic for Nervous Disorders, a psychiatric care facility that Gibson patterned after the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts (where Judy Garland had once received treatment). The self-absorbed wife of the head doctor purchases drapes for the clinic’s common room, and this seemingly insignificant act sparks several simmering rivalries among the staffers, who make the patients look perfectly sane by comparison.
For a decor-obsessed director like Minnelli, being handed a story in which interior furnishings play a pivotal role must have seemed like a gift from the cinematic gods. “The Cobweb was a psychological story that appealed to me greatly,” Vincente said. “The thing that attracted me was that it wasn’t about the inmates, although the inmates happen to be strange. It was about the doctors and the foul-ups in their lives… . It was so rich in possibilities that I volunteered to direct.”6 Although he didn’t say so, Minnelli may have also responded to the material for another reason. With an institutionalized brother and an ex-wife who had been attended by several psychiatrists, he must have realized that The Cobweb hit awfully close to home.
Minnelli and producer John Houseman weren’t satisfied with screenwriter John (The Wild One) Paxton’s initial attempts at adapting The Cobweb. Motion Picture Production Code restrictions had forced Paxton to either eliminate or tone down some of the novel’s more daring themes (homosexuality and adultery being the obligatory offenders), but that wasn’t the only problem; it seemed as though any sense of drama had been lost in translation.
“They were having trouble with the script and I could smell it,” says William Gibson:
And I thought it would be interesting to see how movies are made. So, I wrote John Houseman a note and he called me up and said, “Do you want to come out and work with us?” and I said, “Sure.” First they sent me this unsatisfactory script by John Paxton, a well known and well paid screenwriter of the day. I read it on the plane. I thought it was miserable… . When I got out there, I sat with Minnelli and Houseman for eight long hours just talking about that script… . I then returned to the cottage I was staying in, which was owned by one of Freud’s disciples. I worked there and Houseman would pick up my pages every morning… . We only had about three weeks before the cameras began.7
Though he may have been the author of the original novel, Gibson was untested as a screenwriter. Fortunately, he would prove to be a gifted dramatist, as his later plays, The Miracle Worker and Two for the Seesaw, demonstrated. In his hands, a revamped version of The Cobweb might amount to something.
While Gibson went to work overhauling the screenplay,an Minnelli and Houseman turned their attention to casting. Houseman suggested using Warner Brothers’ smoldering new star, James Dean, in the role of Stevie Holte, an antisocial though artistically gifted patient contemptuous of authority figures. “I would hear a sharp roar of his motorcycle outside the Thalberg Building,” Houseman recalled of the visits he received from Hollywood’s resident hell-raiser, James Dean. “He would sit on the floor of my office and we would chat for hours. I took him over to Minnelli, who was delighted by him and began to develop our boy’s sequence with James Dean in mind.”8
Without question, Dean would have been ideal casting. The young renegade came equipped with an unnerving intensity and a sexual ambiguity—qualities that were perfect for such a conflicted character. “Jimmy Dean had a lot of color and Houseman was absolutely right to be thinking in that direction,” Gibson says.9
But a James Dean performance in a Vincente Minnelli production was not to be. “Suddenly we ran into trouble—typical Hollywood trouble,” Houseman recalled. “Dean had a contract with Warner Brothers at a modest salary, which following his success in East of Eden, he and his agent were trying to raise. He had the right to make one outside film—which would be ours. His agent’s strategy was to use the salary we would pay Jimmy for The Cobweb as the basis for his revised salary at Warner’s.”10 Once executives at MGM and Warner Brothers got wind of Dean’s scheme, however, Minnelli’s movie was out one death-defying thrill-seeker.
After searching for a suitable replacement, Minnelli and Houseman settled on twenty-four-year-old John Kerr, who had garnered good notices playing a similarly tormented character in Elia Kazan’s acclaimed stage production of Tea and Sympathy. In the shift from Dean to Kerr, one crucial element was forfeited. Whereas the rebel from Fairmount, Indiana, had sex appeal in spades, Kerr was the very image of the clean-cut Ivy Leaguer—and about as alluring as balsa wood.
In terms of the film’s other pivotal players, MGM first announced the photogenic trio of Robert Taylor, Grace Kelly, and Lana Turner as the stars of The Cobweb. As script revisions dragged on, however, the studio realized that replacements would have to be found. Ultimately, Richard Widmark, Lauren Bacall, and Gloria Grahame—three of the busiest actors of the Eisenhower era—would star as the clinic manager, his burgeoning love interest, and his love-starved wife, respectively. But it was the casting of the boozy, philandering Dr. Douglas Devenal that was the cause of a major rift between director and producer. “I thought Charles Boyer would be an offbeat choice but John didn’t see it,” Minnelli noted. Houseman countered: “[Boyer’s] sophisticated, accented charm seemed to me to give a false twist to the entire plot… . I gave in—and bitterly regretted it.”11 For the role of the asylum’s waspish administrator Victoria Inch, Minnelli and Houseman hit the bull’s eye, casting silent-screen legend Lillian Gish.
In Gibson’s novel, the character known only as “Capp” is flamboyantly gay, but as Vincente noted, “at that time you couldn’t do homosexuals and Oscar [Levant] had called and wanted to be in the picture, so I patterned the character after Oscar himself [with the] same kind of hang-ups that he had. And he was awfully good in that.”12 Even so, Capp on screen wasn’t nearly as interesting as Capp on the page.
The Cobweb: The love-starved Karen McIver (Gloria Grahame) seems to have more on her mind than changing the drapes. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
Minnelli began shooting The Cobweb in December 1954. William Gibson recalled:
When I turned up on the set, [Richard] Widmark told me, “You’re very lucky to get Minnelli. There are only two directors who could handle this material—Kazan and Minnelli.” I thought that overrated Minnelli’s gift because Kazan was a real theatre person coming out of the Group Theatre and he had been an actor. I never saw Minnelli either in our conferences or on the set doing anything that was corrective of an actor. He had an excellent pictorial sense but he was not really an actor’s director. He was all visual. 13
Lauren Bacall found this out the hard way:
On The Cobweb, I’d arrive on the set and there he’d be up on the boom, zooming up to the drapes, and I thought to myself, “He’s really in heaven now.” The bloody drapes. It was all about the goddamned drapes in The Cobweb. I loved Vincente and we were friends, but I used to joke with Oscar Levant about Vincente’s direction because he was so totally involved with what everything looked like… .
I will never forget, when we were rehearsing this one scene, I was sitting on a sofa between Lillian Gish and Oscar Levant, and I had my left leg crossed over my right and I was just sitting there. Vincente was walking back and forth in front of us while we were rehearsing and he’s humming the whole time, “Hmmm Hmmm Hmmm, …” and he suddenly walked over to me and lifted my left leg and put it on the floor and then picked up my right leg to cross over my left leg. What that meant to him I’ll never know. But Oscar and I laughed about that for quite awhile, let me tell you.14
On the first day of principal photography, Houseman invited Gibson to come and observe:
So, I went on the set and that’s when I realized that a lot of the dialogue that I had taken out of the script was suddenly back in because Houseman and Minnelli were apparently writers also. I remember Houseman said to me, “It doesn’t matter who holds the pencil… .” Now that’s the key to the entire operation out there. In my life, the man who holds the pencil is named Shakespeare. It’s not part of the concept there. You just become part of the machinery… . Then I saw things like Lauren Bacall walking in front of the camera, in a scene where she’s crossing a field, and there she was swinging her ass very sexily and I thought, Has she not read the part? This character has just lost her husband and her child. She’s in a state of mourning. She’s not swinging her ass. But nobody cared about that.15
The scene Gibson witnessed would wind up on the cutting-room floor along with a sizable chunk of the movie. Vincente’s original cut of The Cobweb ran two and a half hours, unusually long for a Metro release. Minnelli and Houseman clashed bitterly over excisions that Houseman felt were necessary in order to bring the picture in at a manageable length. “Our worst time was during the editing of the film, which came out far too long—by artistic and commercial standards,” Houseman remembered. “Yet Vincente obstinately refused to lose anything—even after the previews… . When I ran it for him after hacking close to half an hour out of the film, including entire scenes he had shot with loving care, he made a violent, lachrymose scene in the projection room, accusing me of insensitivity and treachery. I offered to let him recut the film, but he refused.”16 It was an unpleasant scene that Minnelli would find himself replaying frequently throughout the latter half of his career.
Even at a significantly reduced running time of 124 minutes, The Cobweb still seems ponderously paced, a fact that was not lost on the critics: “A select minority among filmgoers may find the even-keeled clinical study interesting, but there’s not enough contrast between its dramatic highs and lows, nor sufficiently developed sympathy for the characters to attract the entertainment fancy of the majority,” Variety decided. Film Daily noted, “The picture is on the cerebral side, lacking the impact and mood which would have made for more emotional appeal.” The most memorable review belonged to Philip T. Hartung, who famously dubbed the picture “The Drapes of Wrath.”
And as for the author, William Gibson says, “I found it totally boring.” And what’s more, he was finished with Hollywood. “I thought … this is not where I want to spend my life. It’s a choice between their money and my words and I think I’ll go home and live with my words.” Gibson was so turned off by his experiment in movie-making that even when Minnelli and Houseman dangled a plum assignment before him, he could not be moved. “On my last day, they offered me the chance to write their next movie. I said, ‘No, I’m going back to Stockbridge to work on a play of my own. They kept talking about this movie they were going to make about van Gogh, Lust for Life. Minnelli said to me, ‘I think it can be a masterpiece.’”17
21
Stranger in Paradise
IF MINNELLI COULDN’T WAIT to get to Lust for Life and explore the tormented psyche of Vincent van Gogh, he couldn’t have been less interested or more uninspired by Kismet, which was standing in his way. Although Vincente had turned down Arthur Freed’s invitation to direct a lavish screen version of the Broadway show, Dore Schary simply wouldn’t take no for an answer. “We need you desperately for Kismet,” Schary implored. “You could direct it before you go to Europe for Lust for Life.”1 Although the studio chief reached out to Vincente in the form of an impassioned plea, there was an implicit ultimatum behind Schary’s words—if Minnelli didn’t direct Kismet, there would be no Lust for Life.
At the height of a 1953 newspaper strike that deprived several Broadway shows of some well-deserved accolades, Kismet got lucky. Thanks to good word-of-mouth, audiences flocked to this “musical Arabian night.” With its Robert Wright-George Forrest score adapted from Alexander Borodin’s music, the show produced two hit songs that would become piano bar staples, “Stranger in Paradise” and “Baubles, Bangles and Beads.” Alfred Drake was roundly applauded for his bravura turn as Hajj, the street poet—though even as the actor was taking his curtain calls, theatergoers were already wondering who would end up playing Drake’s part when Hollywood mounted its own version of the show.
Of course, Broadway’s Kismet was only the latest interpretation of the shop-worn tale of a poetic beggar who ascends the social ranks to become Emir of Baghdad. Edward Knoblock’s operetta had debuted in 1911. And by the time Minnelli found himself saddled with it, there had already been three film versions of Kismet. The most memorable incarnation had arrived in 1944 and featured Ronald Colman in the lead. This exercise in exotica was best remembered for the indelible spectacle of Marlene Dietrich writhing seductively in a “dance” sequence, her legendary legs coated in gold body paint.
On May 23, 1955, production began on Minnelli’s Kismet. Stars Howard Keel, Ann Blyth, and Dolores Gray were initially enthusiastic about bringing the Broadway smash to the screen, though, from the outset, their director exhibited impatience with nearly everything concerning the production. It was readily apparent to both cast and crew that of all the films Vincente had helmed so far, Kismet was the one project that failed to engage him on any level. “Kismet was doomed from the start. Nothing planned fell into place,” an embittered Howard Keel remembered.2
Minnelli gritted his teeth and soldiered on, but he proceeded with greater haste than ever before. The quiet, infinitely patient auteur of Meet Me in St. Louis was suddenly replaced with a tyrannical, Otto Premingerish alter ego. Vic Damone, fresh from warbling Sigmund Romberg in Stanley Donen’s bloated biopic Deep in My Heart, had to contend with an openly hostile Minnelli. As Keel remembered it, “Vincente was terrible to Vic. Instead of trying to help him, Minnelli berated him at every opportunity and in front of everyone.”3
And Minnelli wasn’t the only one throwing tantrums. “I was on the set of Kismet and I witnessed a nasty scene that Dolores Gray made,” recalled artist Don Bachardy, nineteen at the time and an unpaid assistant to Tony Duquette, who designed the costumes. “Arthur Freed was forcing her to be photographed by daylight. Seeing her in daylight, I couldn’t help but understand her objections. She had a bad complexion and daylight is just murder for that. Especially with make-up over her face … and a bad nose job besides.” 4 Gray’s sizzling renditions of “Not Since Nineveh” and “Rahadlaku
m” more than made up for the actress’s display of temperament, and her scintillating delivery manages to liven things up on screen.
When Gray is not around, there is always the decor—plus Tony Duquette’s outré Arabian apparel. As Don Bachardy remembered it, Minnelli and Duquette strove to improve upon the work of their predecessors: “I think they were in total agreement about the art work on the previous MGM version of Kismet with Dietrich. I think they both agreed that the art work in it was pretty awful.” Determined to outdo Cedric Gibbon’s uninspired settings, Minnelli decided on a monochromatic Mesopotamia but also one that was “like Olsen and Johnson in Baghdad … very beautiful and chic.”5 Duquette let his imagination run wild, conjuring up enough colorful Arabian finery to satisfy a thousand and one nights.
Dolores Gray in Minnelli’s screen version of Kismet. As the alluring Lalume, Gray enlivens the film and her sizzling rendition of “Not Since Nineveh” is a knockout. The showstopper also kept things hopping off screen as well. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
“Vic Damone looked prettier than the girls in that movie,” recalls assistant director Hank Moonjean, referring to the outlandish ensembles that the former Vito Farinola found himself tarted up in:
The Tony Duquette clothes were something else. Even the dancers couldn’t dance in their costumes. Jack Cole’s dancers had to twirl and spin around a lot but the girls were wearing these huge, elaborate headpieces and every time they spun around, their head gear fell over. Finally, they had to get rid of all those heavy hats and start over. You know, it was my first musical and I remember it in great detail. I couldn’t believe movies were made this way but I learned very quickly.6