Peter Bart

by the Mob (And Sex) Infamous Players: A Tale of Movies

  Now a fresh set of eyes saw the test—those belonging to Bob Evans. Worried that Peerce, too, lacked experience, he had originally wanted an accomplished actress for the part, but now he liked Ali, even though, as he admitted, “I can’t figure her out.”

  Goodbye, Columbus proved to be a modest hit, and Ali MacGraw suddenly had a career—one that both excited and troubled her. Hollywood scared her, she acknowledged. “If I’m going to be an actress, I want to do sophisticated movies like The Great Gatsby,” she told me. “I don’t want to be manipulated into doing crap, and the only studio people I meet are manipulative.”

  But she coveted the script to Love Story. Jenny and Oliver were smart and they were in love. If only a director of taste and talent could be lured to the project, she said.

  The only director Ali really knew, however, was Larry Peerce. Columbus had worked, she said. Why not reassemble the team?

  While this made sense to Ali, it didn’t to Peerce. The son of the opera star Jan Peerce, he, like Ali, was frightened of Hollywood power. He, too, wanted to make “serious” pictures, not studio pictures, and Love Story didn’t fit that description.

  Peerce had become enamored of a densely constructed, rather cerebral thriller titled The Sporting Club. When I met with him, ostensibly to discuss a start date for Love Story, I could sense his interest was waning. If he were to do Love Story, he said, the character of Oliver would have to be rewritten. Perhaps he could be a wounded Vietnam vet who was caught up in the political anger of the moment.

  “We have an opportunity here to make a statement about the times and we’re blowing it,” Peerce told me.

  “Larry, face it, this is Love Story. It is about two lovers, not Vietnam. It’s by Erich Segal, not Philip Roth,” I responded.

  Larry was a good-natured man. We shared a good laugh about our dilemma. But he clearly wanted out.

  A new list of potential directors was prepared by Stanley Jaffe, and Ali, too, had some suggestions. They were the hot directors of the moment—filmmakers who I knew would pass on the script, if they hadn’t done so already. It was clear that Evans and I needed a reality check.

  As we drove to work one morning, our focus was firmly on Love Story. The previous night Bluhdorn had shouted on the phone that the studio was developing too many projects, but nothing was yet in production. “Make a fucking picture already,” the boss had screamed.

  Grasping at straws, Evans pointed to Love Story and said Larry Peerce would be directing Ali MacGraw and that the Columbus team would have another hit.

  “Good. Make it for $2 million. If it goes over budget, it comes out of your pocket,” Bluhdorn retorted.

  Now Evans was clearly troubled as we sped through traffic. “You know ... it’s not happening with Peerce,” I said quietly.

  “We’ve got to make the movie,” Evans said.

  “I’ve been talking to Arthur Hiller,” I said. “He has a slot open. Everyone’s talking about ‘arty’ directors like Anthony Harvey, but this is a commercial movie. I like Hiller for it.”

  “Hiller will be OK,” Evans replied. “I’ve always liked Hiller. Bluhdorn will never remember. Peerce, Hiller ... he wants movies.”

  “There’s an Ali problem,” I said. “She’ll say Hiller is Hollywood commercial.”

  “She thinks she’s Audrey Hepburn,” Evans said. “She also needs a job.”

  A few quick phone calls reinforced my apprehensions. When Martin Davidson told his client about Hiller, she immediately had a tantrum. “How dare Paramount assign a director I’ve never heard of and without my approval!” she raged.

  “Talk her down,” I told Davidson. “Tell her if he’s good enough to do a Jack Lemmon picture (he’d just wrapped The Out-of-Towners) then he’s good enough for Ali MacGraw.”

  A compromise was quickly reached. MacGraw agreed to see a cut of The Out-of-Towners, which was still in postproduction. A screening for MacGraw would require a trip to Los Angeles. And it would have to be a furtive trip—if Hiller or his agent, Phil Gersh, learned that Hiller was being “auditioned” for Ali MacGraw, they’d likely have tantrums of their own.

  Marty Davidson had been a champion of Love Story for some time. Marty also understood that Evans and MacGraw knew each other superficially—their relationship had consisted of a few random encounters in New York.

  “If I can talk Ali into going to LA, where would she screen the movie?” Marty asked me.

  “Probably Evans’s screening room at his house; it’s got to be off the lot so Hiller won’t find out.”

  There was a pause at the other end of the line. “What happens if Evans makes some moves?” Davidson asked. “She has plans to marry a young actor, Robin Clark.”

  “Evans needs this movie to go forward,” I told Davidson. “He’s obsessed.”

  The events moved forward with a certain clumsy inevitability. Ali got on a plane. She was met by a limo which took her to Evans’s house. She saw The Out-of-Towners. She said she liked it. She and Evans then shared a few glasses of champagne, after which she stripped and jumped into Evans’s swimming pool.

  I never received a detailed report of the postscreening activities. The official word was that Ali MacGraw had decided to stay over for a day or so at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She wasn’t meeting with anyone because she had suddenly contracted a bad cold.

  And not surprisingly, Arthur Hiller was approved by her. A short, stolid Canadian, Arthur Hiller was a no-nonsense filmmaker who liked to keep working. While other self-styled “auteurs” spent years in development, Hiller moved quickly from movie to movie.

  Hiller liked Love Story, but for him it was a job. He’d finished shooting his Neil Simon comedy, The Out-of-Towners, and was scheduled to shoot yet another, Plaza Suite, but that had been delayed. Hiller didn’t like the slim upfront money offered on Love Story (a mere $250,000), but he liked the 25 percent of the net that was added as an inducement. His “yes” to the deal would turn out to be the smartest business decision of his career, ultimately netting in north of $5 million.

  During preproduction meetings, Hiller didn’t present any ideas for a rewrite. Love Story was a script that he felt he could shoot, and that’s what he knew how to do—shoot.

  Similarly, he was not intimidated by the list of actors who had turned down the role of Oliver. The list was daunting; it included Michael Douglas, Michael York, Michael Sarrazin, Jon Voight, Jeff Bridges, Peter Fonda, and Keith Carradine. One actor who’d been vaguely receptive was Ryan O’Neal, but Hiller balked. Love Story’s problem had always been that it was too much like a soap, and O’Neal had just concluded a five-year stint on Peyton Place—the ultimate TV soap.

  After making an eleventh-hour pitch to test some unknowns, Hiller finally capitulated. A start date was staring him in the face and it was clearly Ryan or no deal.

  “Ryan’s a good pro,” Hiller said. “He’ll be a reinforcement for Ali, but we’ll need rehearsals—at least a week, maybe two.”

  Love Story was at last on track. The budget had been approved, the Boston locations nailed down. After the first couple of days of rehearsals, Hiller checked in with a positive report. The chemistry between Ali and Ryan was strong, he said. “Almost too strong.” There was something in his voice that set off an alarm.

  Ali had only recently become Mrs. Evans. I assumed, therefore, that her relationship with Ryan would remain on a professional level, and Hiller clearly wanted me to assume that as well. The important thing, he said, changing the subject, was that Ryan was a good enough actor to sell himself as a Harvard student even though he had, in fact, never cracked a book, let alone pulled all-nighters in the study hall.

  Hiller was delighted, too, that he’d succeeded in persuading Ray Milland to play Oliver Barrett’s father. Milland had even agreed to play the part without his usual toupee. To Hiller, this would enhance Milland’s credibility as a Boston Brahmin.

  John Marley, another fine character actor, signed on to play Ali MacGraw’s father. Tommy Lee Jon
es, an actual Harvard man who was later to become a star in his own right, was signed to play Hank, Oliver Barrett’s friend.

  With work finally going well on Love Story, my interest shifted to other intrigues. Some promising projects were coming together—many of them volatile. They ranged from Harold and Maude to The Godfather, from Rosemary’s Baby to The Longest Yard. Yet each movie in development seemed to have its own self-destruct button—a writer with a drug problem, a director with a divorce problem. The danger was always there, as well as the promise.

  Evans, meanwhile, had still more urgent issues to confront. Charlie Bluhdorn had lost the confidence of his board of directors at Gulf & Western. The directors admired their chairman’s gift for buying new companies, but they wanted industrial companies—not movie studios. Their demand was now quite specific: Sell Paramount and get out of the movie business.

  Bluhdorn clearly did not want to leave the movie business. He loved the action, and the women. His married status did not deter him from dating an array of beauties around the world. He remembered all too well his pre-Paramount days. Several top restaurants had once barred him for his boisterous behavior and foul language. Now those same places eagerly courted him. Socialites who once turned their back on him were now his best friends.

  Now he needed ammunition to fend off his board, and Evans was ready to supply it. He’d once played Thalberg in a film; now he thought, what would Thalberg have done in this sort of situation?

  The only way to save a movie studio was to make a movie, Evans decided. Pulling together writer and director and crew, Evans devised a fifteen-minute film in which he would passionately talk about the new day coming to his studio. The centerpiece would be Love Story, a movie not yet finished, but a “surefire hit,” by his testimony.

  Evans and I prepared the script for his short film. He would wear a sharp sport jacket and black slacks. He wanted to look young, but savvy, hungry but knowledgeable. He knew his limitations as an actor, but this was one performance he could bring off.

  The cameras rolled: “Love Story will be the start of a new trend in movies,” Evans intoned. “A trend toward the romantic, toward love, toward people, toward telling a story about how it feels, rather than where it’s at.”

  Evans went on to explain that his production team had adopted austerity measures to cut costs. “The money we spend is not going to be on extravagances. It’s going to be on the screen,” he declared.

  He then showed some very brief excerpts from Harold and Maude, A New Leaf, Plaza Suite, and The Conformist—a dizzying mix of films. He talked about the hot new novel The Godfather.

  His final pitch: “We at Paramount look at ourselves not as passive backers of films, but as a creative force unto ourselves. I promise you Christmas ’70 will be very special throughout the world. Paramount’s gift, Love Story, will make it that. It’s what life and love and Christmas is all about.”

  After the screen went black, Bluhdorn told Evans to wait outside for further instructions. Within a few minutes, Bluhdorn and Martin Davis burst from the boardroom. They congratulated Evans effusively and said the directors had reversed their decision. Davis gave Evans a quick hug and whispered: “You’re even a bigger fraud than I thought.”

  Evans called me with the good news. He was exultant.

  “We bought some time, kid,” Evans said.

  “And we’re way out on a limb for a movie neither of us has seen,” I said.

  “It’s all we got,” Evans replied.

  A week later, Arthur Hiller called to say he was ready to show a first cut of his film. He warned that the cut was rough; there was much work to be done.

  The screening was a disaster. The movie was deadly. Key scenes between Ali and Ryan simply didn’t work, and Ali’s performance was the problem. Her eyes fluttered, her voice quavered; her performance was self-conscious. Ryan’s timing, too, was suffering.

  Evans was distraught. “Where’s my movie?” he demanded. “Where’s the emotion? The key love scenes are flat.”

  His stolid director stayed calm. “It just needs more work,” Hiller said in his usual taciturn manner. “Just needs more time. Needs more cutaways.”

  “The scenes are flat ...” Evans was almost in tears.

  Hiller was glacial. “When I took this job I knew I would not just be shooting Ali, but I’d also be shooting around Ali. It will come together just fine. Even the key love scene.” In the next cut, he said, the two lovers wouldn’t even be seen; the camera would be focused on Harvard Yard or the exterior of the dorm, and we’d hear the voices of Ali and Ryan.

  Hiller clearly knew he needed his bag of tricks. Evans was worried whether the bag was big enough. “You need to shoot more footage!” he said.

  “I could use more,” said Hiller. “With another couple of shooting days ...”

  That was all Evans needed to hear. A week’s additional work on location in Boston was promptly authorized. Further, the forecast was for snow. Some romantic scenes with the lovers frolicking and tossing snowballs in Harvard Yard would be perfect.

  Then there was the issue of the ending. While a hint of Jenny’s fate would be dropped at the outset, the doctor’s final verdict would be saved for the ending. That was the way Arthur Hiller wanted it, but that was not the way Erich Segal had written it. In Hiller’s mind, the final Ali-Ryan scene in which Oliver hugs the bedridden Jenny would melt the audience. At least, that was the hope.

  But it would only work if the music was right, and that was yet another topic under dispute. Hiller’s suggestions were predictable—the solid Hollywood composers. Evans had a brainstorm.

  “I want Jimmy Webb,” he insisted. “And I want a sound like ... like Bach.”

  This one floored me. I knew Evans well and I respected his instincts, but I knew he wasn’t a Bach aficionado.

  Webb went off and wrote a theme for Love Story. It was the closest he could come to Bach. Evans hated it, but he now had a better idea. He had just seen the Claude Lelouch film A Man and a Woman, and had fallen in love with the theme by Francis Lai. The problem: Lai was neither available nor interested. And since he spoke no English, he wasn’t interested in discussing it.

  But Evans had a good friend in France who spoke English and Evans begged him to intercede. Alain Delon, at the time Europe’s biggest star, made a few phone calls. Lai agreed to come aboard.

  Billy Wilder once explained to me that once a film is finished and the cut is locked, an inevitable “soufflé effect” sets in. For reasons no one can explain, it either rises or it sinks.

  In the case of Love Story, it rose, and a media fever took hold. Time magazine did a cover story on Ali. Ed Sullivan invited Ali to read Christmas poetry, and every columnist demanded a story. The book soared to number one on the bestseller list.

  The sheer noise level of the promotion baffled and amazed me. As a former creature of the media, I had never seen anyone massage the press with the skill of Evans. The premiere at Loew’s State Theater on December 16, 1970, was pure red carpet theater. It was followed by a Royal Command Performance for the Queen Mother in London, then a gala in Paris for Madame Pompidou.

  Evans somehow had turned this wisp of a film, made on the cheap with a cast of nonstars and a director with little cachet, into Gone with the Wind. It was suddenly being ballyhooed as a seminal filmmaking event, a product of, in Time’s worshipful words, “The New Hollywood.”

  It wasn’t “New Hollywood” at all, of course, but rather a throwback.

  During the buildup to Love Story, Ali and Bob, even as they argued over the script and over its director, also had been quietly conducting their own love story. When Evans intimated to me that marriage was imminent, I thought he was joking. He simply was not a marrying man. He’d tried it twice before with dire results. But on October 24, 1969, he and Ali impulsively drove to the town hall in Riverside for their license and then got married before a judge in Palm Springs. The witnesses were his housekeeper, Tollie Mae, his butler, David Gilruth
, his brother, Charles, and a friend of Ali’s from New York, Peggy Morrison.

  Their honeymoon lasted two days before she flew to the location in Boston to begin shooting and Evans flew to Europe on business.

  CHAPTER 6

  Modus Sexualis

  Several weeks after joining the studio, I was walking toward my car after a difficult day when I spied someone leaning against its trunk. I quickly recognized her. She was a lissome young actress who had aspirations to become a producer. A few days earlier an agent had introduced her to me in the corridor after she had been in to see Evans.

  Now here she was waiting by my car, and she looked downright stunning in the fading June sunlight. Her jeans clung to her like a second skin and her blouse provided maximum cleavage. She was holding a screenplay.

  “I was just leaving the lot and thought I’d check whether you’d gotten my script,” she explained, flashing a smile that was at once winsome and sexually inviting.

  OK, she had a script, and she knew which car was my car. “Didn’t you see Evans the other day?” I asked, trying to figure out the setup.

  “You know Bob. He’s a honey, but he doesn’t read. That’s why I thought you and I should get to know one another.”

  “Look, it’s late and ...”

  She took a step forward. “... and that’s why I’m going to buy you a drink and not just thrust my script on you.”

  It didn’t take great insight for me to realize the actress was pitching more than a script. It was more like a package deal, and she was part of the package. “It’s been a long day. I’ve got to get home,” I said lamely.

  The actress was peering at me. “My movie is really interesting.”