by Garry Wills
I told her John Wayne was such an outsize figure—a political symbol as well as a film monument, for some the very epitome of patriotism and manliness. His movies had been used as recruiting tools for the marines. Yet John Ford had mocked his favored actor for the way he dodged military service during World War II. Liberals were so offended by his political stands that they foolishly belittled his acting achievements. Since Ford was my favorite American film director after Orson Welles, I welcomed the opportunity to spend many hours with the people who had worked with him and with Wayne. I haunted the film archives at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Library of Congress, whose curators (Charles Silver and Madeline Matz, respectively) became friends. I read the Ford Papers at the Lilly Library in Indiana, and went to see Andrew McLaglen on his island off the coast of Washington State.
Oliver Stone
But I had never seen a film being made until Oliver Stone’s publicist called and asked me to come talk with him about his new project, Nixon. I hesitated, because I thought Stone’s JFK was a laughable distortion of history. He had turned a flamboyant liar, “Big Jim” Garrison of New Orleans, into a quietly wise Atticus Finch, with a porch scene where he rocks his daughter taken straight from To Kill a Mockingbird. There were rumors that Stone was going to push his conspiracy theories onto Richard Nixon. But the publicist assured me that, while this was true of the first draft of a script, people who had read it, like Robert Scheer, persuaded him against the idea. These people included Anthony Hopkins, who was playing Nixon in the film. He had at first refused when offered the role—he thought it improper for a Welshman to participate in an attack on an American president. But Stone told him the characterization of Nixon would be sympathetic—pitying but sympathetic—and the publicist confided to me that Stone had given Hopkins my Nixon Agonistes, indicating the approach he would take. So I went to Los Angeles.
The filming was in progress when I arrived. I talked at length to Hopkins. Though he is a wonderful mimic, treating me to takeoffs on Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, he said he was not going to do a Nixon impression, but would try to get inside the man. He had interviewed his daughters. He had ruled against the effort of makeup people to give him a false nose. Though he did suggest Nixon’s hunched-over walk, as a way of getting his spirit, he did not imitate his voice. The result is that this movie draws on Citizen Kane, not To Kill a Mockingbird. It is the picture of an emotionally wounded man who rises to power without ever becoming a full human being. That was roughly the picture drawn in my book.
Stone had read my Ruby book, because he reads everything about the assassination of Kennedy. He still has a picture of Jim Garrison on his mantel. He wanted to argue about the assassination, but I had learned from experience that discussions with conspiracy theorists are a waste of time. Still, I admired some of his other movies—Platoon, The Doors, Salvador, Natural Born Killers. And I was curious about his days studying with Martin Scorsese at NYU. He said, “Marty’s love of movies is what he conveyed. In those days, the only place you could see some foreign films in New York was late at night on Channel 11. He would come in the next morning with red eyes and a hungover look from being up all night in front of the TV.”
Stone had learned that I was a classicist, and he told me that his fondest dream was to make a movie about Alexander the Great. He had written a script and scouted out locations. Why hadn’t he made it? “Not enough money.” He wanted an epic scale for this film. I said that Scorsese had made The Last Temptation of Christ on a modest budget. “Yeah, and it looks it.” When Stone later published his autobiographical novel, I found out what intrigued him in the Alexander story. Stone’s French mother, who was separated from his father, tried to seduce him (according to the novel), just as Alexander’s mother seduced him. This idea so enthralled Stone that, when he did make Alexander, he ridiculously cast Angelina Jolie as Olympias and Colin Farrell as the king, though Farrell is only one year younger than his supposed mother in the movie.
I had heard that Stone bullied his actors. That may have been true in his earlier days, when he was still uncertain of his authority and was using drugs. But he was a model of patience and understanding in the scenes I saw him shoot, and the actors I talked with on the set showed great admiration for him—not only Hopkins but Paul Sorvino (playing Henry Kissinger), James Woods (as H. R. Haldeman), J. T. Walsh (John Ehrlichman), and others. When Stone wanted to instruct an actor, he would take him or her aside rather than correct the person before others. And he took suggestions graciously.
When Joan Allen, playing Pat Nixon, was seated in the front cabin of the Air Force One mockup, she had to listen to Haldeman and Ehrlichman making anti-Semitic comments against the absent Kissinger. She told Stone she felt uncomfortable just sitting there and listening to such talk. Could she do something to signal her lack of ease? Stone said that was a good idea, but what could she do? She suggested that she take a magazine out of the rack in the plane and pointedly start leafing through it. Stone approved the idea, and reshot the scene that way. It did not make it into the commercial cut, though one never knows what factors go into the editing of scenes.
Paul Schrader
I reviewed Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Temptation of Christ for the New York Review of Books. It fascinated me—I still think it the best movie about Jesus—and I called up its writer, Paul Schrader, to discuss it. The film is formed at the confluence of three religious traditions, the Greek Orthodoxy of Nikos Kazantzakis, who wrote the novel on which it is based; the evangelical Protestantism of Schrader; and the Italian Catholicism of Scorsese. The film was widely condemned by religious people. Patrick Buchanan denounced it without ever having seen it. What upset them is that Jesus is seen in bed with Mary Magdalene. But that is a fantasy which Jesus rejects. His “last temptation” is to give up his divine mission and become an ordinary human being, avoiding crucifixion, and having children in a happy home. Instead, he returns to the cross.
As I got to know Schrader better, he told me of his Calvinist upbringing, being forbidden to see movies. His father rejected him when Last Temptation came out, even demonstrating against the movie when it ran in a nearby theater. Schrader’s alma mater, Calvin College, denounced it (though some students sneaked away to see it in Detroit). Only after many years did the college honor its alumnus with a festival of his films. Schrader invited me to interview him onstage during the festival. His hometown, Grand Rapids, Michigan, had forgiven him for an earlier offense, when he made it the locale of the first film he directed as well as wrote, Hardcore (1979). He used the site and its citizens for a scathing picture of Calvinist religiosity and hypocrisy. He said he had to use the town, since he had so little money for this, his first directing job.
I asked, then, how he could afford to hire George C. Scott for the role of the religious father who seeks his straying daughter. Scott had been a big star after he played General Patton in 1970. Schrader explained that Scott was in one of his heavy drinking phases, increasingly hard to insure. Schrader was warned that if he let him get started on a bottle, he would probably not finish the picture. Late one afternoon, there was just one scene that had to be finished before they moved to a new location. Setting the lights was taking a long time, so Scott went to his trailer. When at last the set was ready, Schrader sent for Scott, but the messenger returned and said he would not come. Fearing the worst, Schrader went to the trailer and found Scott with a half-emptied bottle. The director pleaded with him to come out for just one quick scene, the last chance to get the segment finished.
Scott was surly. “I should never have agreed to do this picture. It is a shitty picture, and you are a shitty director.” Schrader humored him, and kept pleading. At last Scott said he would go back out on one condition only—that Schrader promise never to direct another picture, for the good of the movie industry. Schrader solemnly promised, to get the thing done. Years later, Scott spotted Schrader in a Los Angeles restaurant, stomped over, slapped down a Variety with news of
Schrader’s new picture, and said, “You promised never to direct again.” Schrader was astonished that he remembered out of his alcoholic mist. He said: “What can I say, George? I lied.”
Schrader asked me to do another interview-on-stage event in the East, but I had a different engagement at the time. Then he invited me to see him film a movie in Toronto. The two of us had dinner at an Italian restaurant on the night of my arrival in Canada. One of the first things he asked was, “Do you still go to church?” I answered, “Yes. Do you?” “Yes, but my father would not count it as really going to church. We attend Episcopalian services.” Then he told me about the film he was making, Forever Mine. It was an old script he had sold years ago. Since the studio did not use it, he bought it back—resenting the interest he had to pay for the intervening years. In the story, a gangster (Ray Liotta) marries a young woman (Gretchen Mol), takes her to Miami, and then neglects her as he gambles. She meets a young beachcomber (Joseph Fiennes) and spends the night in his cabin. When Liotta finds out about this, he has his gang beat and mutilate Fiennes. Sixteen years later, Fiennes, who has had cosmetic surgery and become a gangster himself, goes back to get revenge. Schrader said he was having trouble with Fiennes, who had contracted for this movie before the release of his 1998 hit, Shakespeare in Love. He had arrived on the new set with a badly swollen ego, was demanding changes in the script, and generally acting like a spoiled brat.
I asked Schrader about his relations with Martin Scorsese. After great success as a director-writer team (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ), they had a noisy breakup. Schrader said that Scorsese had insisted he be listed as co-scenarist and have the right to change Schrader’s scripts. Friends had tried to bring them back together, and after a time they had a tense lunch meeting at which Scorsese promised not to make a single change if Schrader would do a script from the real-life story Bringing Out the Dead. Schrader agreed, and Scorsese was making the film in New York even as Schrader made his movie in Canada. I asked if Scorsese was keeping to his agreement. Schrader said he knew that he was because his (Schrader’s) wife, Mary Beth Hurt, was acting as the nurse in Bringing Out, and she assured him that the script was being observed exactly.
A handsome young man had been eavesdropping on our conversation in the restaurant, and after his dinner he came over, gave Schrader his card, and said he was an actor and would like to audition for Schrader. After he left, Schrader flipped me the card and said, “Look at its credits. He is not an actor. He’s a model.”
The next day, on the set, I saw what Schrader meant about Fiennes. He was being fitted with a wig and he objected to all the models being given him. The dramatic time of his meeting with Mol was the early 1970s, when men wore their hair long. He did not want that. Schrader kept explaining that his look had to be different from the time of his reappearance in the late 1980s. What did he want? He wanted to wear his own short hair in both eras. The discussion was going nowhere. Schrader came over and whispered that Fiennes might be showing off with a writer on the set, could I step outside for a while?
I went out and talked with one of my heroes, John Bailey, the great director of photography for Schrader’s masterpiece, Mishima, which is full of dazzling camera effects in both color and black-and-white. Before he did Mishima, he did Schrader’s American Gigolo and Cat People, so he knew the man’s habits well and enjoyed working with him. I asked Bailey about a film released at the same time as Mishima, Laurence Kasdan’s Silverado, another tour de force of Bailey’s lighting. Bailey would go on to make many fine movies (like As Good As It Gets). We shared enthusiasms for directors, past and present, cooling our heels while Fiennes threw his tantrum. After almost half an hour, Schrader came out, and we asked if he had made any progress with the temperamental star. He shook his head dejectedly.
When I met with Schrader a year later, I asked if Fiennes had ever become cooperative. He said he had not, and the morale of the whole team suffered because of it. The movie never did take off. Though it was shown in Spanish and Japanese theaters, no distributor was found for an American release. It went straight to television. Schrader’s other film of 1998, Bringing Out the Dead, did run in theaters, but it was not a success. I asked Schrader why. “It should have been a gritty little picture, like Mean Streets. But Marty cannot do anything small anymore. He has a big entourage he must support, and he needs big stars. The hero of this movie is an emergency ambulance attendant who burns out young because of all the horrors he witnesses. Marty cast Nick Cage in the role, who was too old. He used the wrong music—music from our Taxi Driver days. The whole tone was wrong.” I asked whatever happened to Joe Fiennes. He shrugged, “Not much.” It has been mainly downhill for him since the brief glory of Shakespeare in Love.
Dick Cusack
When I moved to Evanston in 1980, my principal contact with the movies was through Dick Cusack. Though his children are the actors best known to the public, Dick appeared in nineteen movies himself, wrote one of them (Jack Bull), and wrote and acted in plays for the Piven Theatre Workshop, the Evanston institution where all the Cusack children trained as actors—Johnny, Joanie, Annie, Susie, and Billy (to give them their Evanston family names). Since Dick often played judges in the movies, he was a natural for the part of Pontius Pilate in our church’s annual Lenten enactment of the Passion of Christ. I was always amused by the fact that the director of this event got all her other actors to memorize their parts, but Dick—the only professional in the group—refused to do that. He just read it straight from the Bible.
One of the movies where Dick played a judge was Eight Men Out, with his son John and Chicagoan Studs Terkel in the cast, which led to a three-way friendship. I brought Studs and Joan Cusack to my American Studies class to talk about movie-making. (I would have brought Dick, but he had died by then.) The Cusack home was on a park beside Lake Michigan, and every Thanksgiving during Dick’s lifetime the family and friends played a game of touch football in the park. Dick, who was on the championship basketball team at Holy Cross with Bob Cousy, had back troubles that kept him from playing, but he served as referee, making up creative penalties, such as “Five yards for calling a stupid play.” Dick’s wit never deserted him. When he was dying of cancer, and his son John asked if there was someone he wanted to see before he died, he answered, “Yeah. Ava Gardner.” John and Joan both left the movies they were making to spend their father’s last months with him. John took him to the Mayo Clinic and other places to see if there was any way the cancer could be arrested. John told me that when one medication caused diarrhea, Dick came out of the bathroom saying, “That was the most massive evacuation since Dunkirk.” At Dick’s funeral, after the service in our campus church, the pianist was called up, and John said to the congregation, “Don’t think we’re being irreverent. This is what Dad asked to be played.” The pianist launched into “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” by Fats Waller.
7
Voices
When I met Natalie, my wife-to-be, one of the first things we learned about each other was that we love opera. We did not agree on everything. Among tenors, I preferred Beniamino Gigli while she liked Giuseppe di Stefano. I later learned that Luciano Pavarotti and his tenor father had the same split, the father staying with Gigli while his son defected to di Stefano. Most of the time, though, Natalie’s and my tastes were in accord. When we were dating, we could go in from New Haven to New York on Saturdays and line up for standing-room tickets at the Old Met, both matinee and evening performances. After the afternoon show, I would take up a position in the night line while she bought sandwiches and brought them for us to eat as we waited. After the evening performance, we took a late train back to New Haven.
Standing in those lines was a real education, since the devotees were old-time aficionados. They had institutional memories of the place, and encyclopedic recollections of their favorite singers’ past performances. I experienced that fanatical devotion to singers that James McCourt has so compellingly depicted in his nove
ls. Standing in line reminded me of the music students who jostle for a place in the cheap gallery (“the gods”) of the movie The Red Shoes. When I got back to Yale, I would compare notes with a fan of Anna Moffo—he had followed her on tour, but was now forced to sell his records to stay in graduate school.
A friend of mine is writing a book about his early attraction to music—all about the complex interplay of parts, the meeting of mathematics and sensuous pleasure, acoustical structure, and all that. My interest was from the outset more simple and visceral. I loved the many uses of the human voice. Even in high school, four recorded voices especially thrilled me—those of Judith Anderson, John Barrymore, Fyodor Chaliapin (as it was spelled then), and Jose Ferrer. I heard records of Judith Anderson performing Robinson Jeffers’s Medea and her Lady Macbeth with Maurice Evans. As Medea, she baritoned the linesMen boast their battles. I tell you this, and we know it.
It is easier to stand in battle three times, in the front line,
IN THE STABBING FURY, than to bear one child.
As Lady Macbeth, she answered her husband’s fear of failing: “We? Fail? But screw-your-courage-to-the-sticking-place, and WE’LL / NOT / FAIL!” Hers was the best woman actor’s voice I knew till I heard Pamela Brown do The Lady’s Not for Burning or Glenda Jackson as Chorus in Murder in the Cathedral.
