I enjoyed interviewing the most and want to show you the sort of thing I was doing issue after issue. You may ask what interviews are doing in a story collection. Well, it isn't a story collection, it's a Bester collection, and there's no reason why there can't be variety. I'll trouble you not to object. It will only remind me of Whistler's libel action against John Ruskin. On cross-examination, Ruskin's barrister asked Whistler how he could call one of his paintings "A Study in Blue" when there were so many other colors in it. Whistler shot back, "Idiot! Does a symphony in F consist of nothing but F, F, F?"
Colorful man, Whistler. Deadly opponent. I'd love to have interviewed him.
Starlight, 1976
John Huston's Unsentimental Journey
When I was a kid, I knew all about movie directors. The movie director was an extravagant genius with an exotic name like Sandor Von Satyr, and his private life was scandalous. He wore boots and riding breeches on the set and shouted at actors through a megaphone. If his leading lady did not play her romantic scenes convincingly, he made love to her (after hours) to get a realistic performance. When the film was finished, he coldly cast her aside, breaking her heart. He ended up a has-been, either chauffeuring for a new star who never heard of him, or swimming out into the Pacific until he drowned.
Now I keep telling myself that all this is absurd. The movie director is usually an ordinary guy with an ordinary name; a combination of artist and businessman. He is talented but not scandalous; he may break hearts but he does not swim out into the Pacific; certainly he does not behave like an 18th Century rake. Or so I keep telling myself. And then along comes the last of the Regency bucks, a Corinthian, elegant, charming and seemingly cold hearted: the extraordinary John Huston.
Mr. Huston is one of the most colorful and successful of the Hollywood directors. His most recent films are The Roots of Heaven (which he admires) and The Barbarian and the Geisha (which he loathes). The Roots of Heaven was unfairly scorned by many critics for those obscure reasons which critics seem to devise in the dark. Most of the public agreed with Huston and found the picture admirable; nature lovers found it inspirational.
Huston admits that he loathes The Barbarian and the Geisha because he quarreled with his producers and washed his hands of the entire affair before the film was completed. He swears that this will not happen with the two pictures he's making this year: The Unforgiven for Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, and Arthur Miller's The Misfits, starring Marilyn Monroe. Other Huston credits of the past are: The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Moby Dick, Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, Red Badge of Courage, Moulin Rouge and The African Queen.
In these days of disaster, with movie companies retrenching and slashing staffs, with top stars turning to TV Westerns and TV commercials, when even lordly producers are reduced to writing plays, Huston is more in demand than ever. He can write his own ticket and even thumb his nose at the tycoons, which indeed he did in the case of A Farewell to Arms. What sort of natural selection has made him fittest to survive in this catastrophic environment?
In a Packaging Age when all women look as though they have the same mother, and all men conform to the Ivy League denominator, John Huston is uncompromisingly an original. He is as tall and lean as a basketball player and co-ordinated like a cavalryman. He dresses like a horseman in narrow twills, hacking jackets and Tattersail waistcoats. His thin grooved face, brown as teakwood, looks Chinese; his iron-gray hair is cut in no discernible fashion-say, halfway between Buster Brown and Boris Pasternak. He is an attentive listener and a courteous disputant.
His father, the beloved star Walter Huston, was a vaudeville actor when John was born in 1906, and the boy grew up touring the circuits With his father. Bred in the same sort of environment that produced such rake-hell Corinthians as Wilson Mizner, wit and con man, and John Barrymore, young Huston lived the lunatic Bohemian life.
He trained as a prize fighter, switched to horses, studied singing, got a commission in the Mexican cavalry, turned writer and sold a few stories to The American Mercury and Atlantic Monthly, went to Paris to study art, got a job with Gaumont-British as a script writer, returned to America as an actor, and finally landed a job as a writer with Warner Bros., where he collaborated on Jezebel, Juarez, High Sierra and Sergeant York. Then Huston got his big break.
Warner Bros, had a story on their shelf which they'd tried twice—once starring Bebe Daniels and Ricardo Cortez, and again starring Bette Davis and Warren William. Both pictures were abysmal flops, so Warner Bros, decided to use the story a third time. After their top stars, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and George Raft, turned it down in disgust, tile head brain decided to do it as a low-budget picture with second-string actors. He asked Huston to write the script. Huston wanted no part of this turkey, but agreed to write it if he could direct it. Warners wearily gave in and that was the big break. The picture was The Maltese Falcon, which revived the fading careers of Humphrey Bogart, Sidney Greenstreet and Mary Astor.
"In The Unforgiven, the picture I'm working on now," Huston said, "the gross salary of any of the stars—Audrey Hepburn, Tony Curtis, Burt Lancaster—is more than the entire cost of The Maltese Falcon. It was made for less than $300,000."
The phenomenal success of The Maltese Falcon started the ascent of the Huston rocket. Since that film Huston has, in rapid succession, directed a dozen more, served as a major with an Army film unit making war documentaries, married a fourth wife, Ricki Soma, a former ballet dancer (actress Evelyn Keyes was his third), bought a castle in County Galway for the riding and racing, and moved his family to Ireland. He joins them between pictures.
Gangling in a chair between a bottle of whisky and a box of black cigars, Huston said in a nicely managed voice: "The physiology of picturemaking is a fascinating study. I'll give you an example. Look at the left corner of the room."
I looked.
"Now look at the right corner."
I looked.
"Did you notice what you did? You blinked your eyes when you looked from left to right. That's a picture cut. Now here's something else. What do you do when you've got something emphatic to say?" Huston heaved to his feet and advanced on me, waggling his cigar. "You move closer to the person you're talking to. That's a truck shot and close-up. But if there are three or four of us in a room, all talking, we automatically spread out. That's a full shot. This is the technical art of picture making. It must correspond to what we unconsciously know to be the physiological truth." He laughed hesitantly, almost self-consciously.
"Is that how you first think as a director?"
"No. First I think in terms of story, just my own interest in a story atmosphere. Not coconut palms, but the mood in which the author has set the story."
"For example?"
"Almost any of the pictures I've done. I quit A Farewell to Arms because Selznick and I couldn't agree on the mood I wanted."
"What did you want that Mr. Selznick didn't want?"
"Well, in the book do you remember the billiard game in the hotel with the old nobleman—just before the lovers escape across the lake to Switzerland? That sort of mood. And the atmosphere in the officers' mess."
"Do you ever disagree with authors about the mood?"
"I've rarely worked with contemporary authors. Never with Tennessee Williams, for instance. I'm about to work on a script by Arthur Miller from a short story he wrote. He told me about it while Marilyn was in the hospital having her miscarriage and we were in the waiting room together. Every day we'd meet in the waiting room and he'd develop the idea instead of reading a magazine. A couple of months later he sent me the script."
"Anything about it you disagreed with?"
"No. It was a hell of a script and I'm going to do it with Marilyn. Now, when the director has a script, he's got to find people who'll reflect its qualities, and then look for a way of doing it that's unlike any other picture that's been made. You have to find the thing that makes this story like no other story, and tell it in its own
way."
"Are there any particular problems in casting?"
Huston winced and gave his little laugh. "When you cast, there's the ever-present danger—one steels oneself because the threat is always there—to use someone whose name is thought to be box-office. I think big box-office names have ruined as many pictures as they've made successful. The temptation to use box-office names can lead to disaster."
"After you've cast a picture do you ever have trouble directing your actors to get the quality you want?"
"I never direct my actors," Huston said. "The work is all done in the casting."
He insisted this was no exaggeration, but I was suspicious. I checked with Miss Juliette Greco, star of The Roots of Heaven. Miss Greco, exotic in bronze slacks and black sweater, her beautiful mouth pale, her sloe eyes Egyptian, was volatile about her experiences with Huston.
"We live in little huts on location in Africa. I was the only woman. I had the filling at night I was in a military house. All dose men snoring.
"You learn very much when you wek up, and you learn so much when you see others wekking up. Some men are wekking up very nicely. Like Trevor [Trevor Howard]. Always happee and alive. Mr. Huston—all depends. Not always in a good mood in the morning. You have the same thing in the middle of the day. As though he just wek up. In a dream. Always he is in a dream. He had a very friendly way to us. He say: 'And now, kids, show me.' And he sit like this. . ."
Miss Greco slumped back in her chair with her knees up. She wrapped her right arm across the top of her head, with fingers over mouth; her left hand took hold of her right toe. "He sit like this and say: 'Now, kids, show me.' Other times he sit like this."
Miss Greco spread her knees and leaned forward between them with her hands drooping on the floor, like a gibbon. "He never tell us when we are good or bad. That drove me mad the first day. I was crying. I said: 'He does not like me. I take the plane back to Paris.' But sometime he look at you like a snake and say: 'Fine, fine' through his teeth. 'Fine, honey,' is the most he can say. 'Fine, honey.'"
"Didn't he ever direct you? Tell you what to do?"
"I tell you how he work. You remember the scene where I take Paul [Paul Lukas] to my bedroom? Well, it was a new set. We never see it before. We come on the set, Paul and I, and we are looking around, trying to find a way to do the scene, and Paul was grumbling. He has a very bad temper. And Mr. Huston, he sit like this . . . ."
Miss Greco went into posture Number One.
"And he say through his teeth: And now, kids, what do you fill? Tell me. Show me. Show me what you are filling. Do what you want to do.' And we did. And he never say a word. He never tell good or bad. He say: All right. All right. Put camera here. Put camera there. Lights like so.' And we did what we wanted and he followed us with cameras."
This is Huston as the actors know him, controlled and reticent, looking like a snake and talking through his teeth; but there's another Huston—the drinking, riding, Corinthian Huston, loving the small hours in Jimmy Glennon's Third Avenue saloon, where he will sit and drink sometimes moderately, sometimes for broke, and gab with strangers, get bets down on races, argue with jockeys, and tell stories about stag hunts with the Ward Union near Dublin.
It was this Huston that made Katharine Hepburn regard him as a ruffian when she first started work on The African Queen.
"But Katie's a little bit high-tone anyway," Huston grinned. "I noticed she was acting suspicious so I sat down with her one night and had a little talk. Now we're the best of friends."
"Yeah," an old friend of Hus grunted. "He gave her the Huston Treatment."
The Huston Treatment, hypnotic, coolly applied with 18th Century elegance, ranges from discourses on Japanese metaphysics to practical jokes. When Huston was on location in Africa, money-man Sam Spiegel became impatient with some unavoidable delays and flew from Hollywood to Africa to straighten things out. Mr. Spiegel has the reputation of being a scourge, and the entire company quailed. "I'll take care of this," Huston promised.
When Mr. Spiegel arrived at the airport, he was met by one hundred African natives hired by Huston. They banged their drums and chanted: "Wel-kum Sam! Wel-kum Sam! Wel-kum Sam!" The serenaders followed the bewildered Mr. Spiegel wherever he went, deafening him with their chant.
"It's no use, Sam," Huston said. 'You're too popular here. We'll never be able to talk business and you'll never get anything done. You might as well go home."
Money-man Spiegel departed without scourging anybody, and the picture got under way again.
Again flanked by a bottle and cigars, but this time sitting in the gibbon pose, sketching quick caricatures of me on paper napkins on a coffee table, Mr. Huston said: "The pressure in movies comes from the men who put up the money. They were the dictators of taste before the war. They are no longer."
"Why? What's happened?"
"They were engaged in turning out a mass product. They aren't now."
"What about the question of public taste? We hear so many stories about studios' trying to make good pictures but being forced to make bad ones because that's the only kind the public will buy. Is that true?"
Huston arose like a derrick and strolled for a moment. "I'll have to answer that with a story with which I console myself rather often. There was an old man sitting in a doorway with his old hound-dog." Huston sat in a doorway with his old hound-dog. "And another old man came tottering up the street carrying a paper bag full of candy." Huston tottered up the street with a paper bag full of candy. "He stopped, looked at the dog, and said: 'That's a mighty nice dog you got there. You think he might like some candy?' And the man in the door said: 'Well, he eats garbage, so he ought to be crazy about candy.'
"Unfortunately, the taste for garbage can be developed like a taste for olives. Does the public really want it? They do now. The point is, there are many directors and producers who like it too. Not to mention any names. Cecil B. DeMille didn't lower his standards for the public, and who's to say he was wrong? Because a large segment of the public agrees with him."
"Can a director fight this?"
"Those who try, and try to put quality on the screen, have a special obligation. The canvas of the motion-picturemaker and his palette are enormously expensive.'" Huston grinned. "Permanent Green: $300,000. Flake White: $275,000. Ivory Black: $150,000.
"When these costs are tied up in a movie, it must be with some judgment or high hopes that it will be accepted. And if it isn't, not only will you not be permitted to make candy the next time but other directors too. They'll all say 'Look at The Red Badge of Courage!'"
"Was that a disaster?"
"It was a bomb. And that makes it harder for directors like Billy Wilder and George Stevens to do anything they want to that comes under the heading of candy."
Huston's father-in-law, the famous Tony Soma, proprietor of New York's Tony's Wife Restaurant, does not believe his son-in-law's talk about the gamble of costs and the risks of expense.
"He has no respect for money," Mr. Soma says. "He is not sensitive. With me, love and money are sacred. They should never be abused. But he has no respect for women. He uses them for a picture and then ignores them. And he has no respect for money."
"He has supreme confidence in his ability," Mrs. Soma objected.
"No. He is reckless. He has no consideration for others."
"He has faith in himself, so he can afford to be reckless," Mrs. Soma persisted.
"He's accustomed to going his own way," Mr. Soma said angrily. "All co-operation must come from the other person."
It was evident that Mr. Soma was annoyed with Huston for having kidnaped his daughter to Ireland, three thousand miles away from her adoring parents.
He showed me some photographs of Ricki (short for Erica), and I mourned the loss too. She is beautiful. She studied ballet with George Balanchine who said of her: "Ricki will never become a ballerina. She is too intelligent."
"You say Huston has no respect for women, Mr. Soma. Is that why he married
four times?"
"No," said Mr. Soma. "Because the first three did not give him children. But Ricki has two. Tony—eight. Anjelica—seven," he counted proudly. Then he relented toward the kidnaper. "John is an egoist, but not an egotist. He is very objective. He has taste and immense patience with people. He never loses his temper. But he is a dual personality."
"How do you mean?"
"I will show you." Mr. Soma produced a framed linen napkin. "He was sitting here at this table and I was bawling him out; and he was answering very sweetly, but all the while he was drawing this picture of me. An evil one. Look." Mr. Soma showed me a pencil drawing on the framed napkin. It made his chubby face look somewhat cruel and Mephistophelean.
"You see? He is two people. He's a mystery to himself. He doesn't want to be analyzed. He has no self-criticism. He likes sincerity and is sincere himself. If he lies, he's unaware of it. But it's only the sincerity of the moment because he has so many things on his mind."
Mr. Soma, who is a vegetarian and studies yoga, suddenly pulled his foot up into his crotch and stroked his toe. "If he could do this, he would be a better man."
But there is a cool, pervading sincerity in Huston that is perhaps best demonstrated by his reverence for the late Robert Flaherty, first and greatest maker of documentary films.
"He was a great man," Huston said. "He was a man who really believed that mankind at his source was good, and that he was only corrupted by civilization. And that the hope of man was to took at his original image."
"Do you agree?"
"I'm inclined to agree with him. I think the best art was the original art."
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