radioactive the way everybody backed away from me. I lay down on my
couch and closed my eyes. Presently the director stuck his head in the
door to say sotto voce: ‘Everybody in the company wants to applaud. You
were great.’ But still no one came in until Rosenberg shook my hand,
said he was sorry this had happened, and added: ‘Thank you.’”
Eighteen months after the start, when MGM had poured more than
$20,000,000 into this bounty on the _Mutiny_, Marlon was still acting
up. The final scenes, months behind schedule, were being shot in
Hollywood, costing still another two million. With the financial
future of Metro itself at stake, with millions tied up in a picture
which still had no ending, Marlon played Fletcher Christian in such a
manner that, although the cameras turned, the film was unusable. He
overplayed; he underplayed; he mumbled; he minced. It was a unique
moment in our town’s history. Nobody before him had dared take hold of
a mammoth studio, swing it by the tail, and make the bosses like it.
The actors’ revenge was complete.
It takes avaricious agents with calculating machines for hearts to
encourage stars like Brando to behave as they do. Now that no studio
any longer has its own roster of stars tied by contracts, the agents
and actors run Hollywood, as they always threatened to. The studio has
to go cap in hand to the agent to sign up the big star for a single
picture. No more than a half dozen actors and actresses alive today can
attract an audience big enough to give a picture a hope of success at
the box office.
The first giant among ten per centers hated producers and made no
secret of it. Myron Selznick held it a point of honor to wring every
dollar he could get out of the studios to settle the score for the
wrong that had been done his father, Lewis J. The louder the bosses
yelled “Murder!” the harder Myron squeezed.
Lewis J. was nicknamed “C.O.D.” for “cash on delivery” by starlets he
lured to that notorious item of studio furniture, the casting couch.
He lured plenty when he owned a $60,000,000 film corporation in the
silent twenties. But as a financier he overreached himself. His sons,
Myron and David, blamed rival movie makers for plotting the ruin that
overtook old “C.O.D.”
Myron’s first client was Lewis Milestone, who must have smiled
philosophically to himself when he saw what Brando was doing to MGM.
Acting for Milestone, Myron left his mark on the Howard Hughes studio
when, in 1927, he squeezed out of them exactly twice the salary the
then young director had anticipated receiving. Alva Johnston recalled
the time when Myron went home rejoicing: “Remember what those bastards
did to my father? They paid more than a million dollars for it today.”
Bill Wellman was Selznick’s second client. After him, everybody who was
anybody--Carole Lombard, William Powell, Pat O’Brien, to name just a
sample--rushed to get Myron to do battle for them.
But neither he nor the mob of imitators who followed him in business
managed to hold the entire industry up to ransom as it is being
done today. One reason was that under the star system of that era,
contracts came up only once a year for negotiation, not before every
picture. Another reason: producers and directors, to a great extent,
could make or break a star.
As a tribe, actors and actresses seldom know what’s good for them. They
usually judge any script solely by the number of lines of dialogue they
get. Greer Garson announced to one and all that she wouldn’t be playing
in _Goodbye, Mr. Chips_, one of the finest pictures that came her way,
because “I’m only in a few scenes.”
The day before she left town for England to make the picture, she
poured out her woe to me. “I’ve sat here for months doing nothing,”
she said, “and now I’m going back to my native land in a picture that
gives me a very small part. When I left England, I was a star there; my
friends will think I’m coming home a failure.”
I wrote the story, but before she stepped on the train the next day,
she begged me to kill it: “What if the picture’s a hit? I’d look like a
fool.” So I kept a friend by sitting on the interview. _Mr. Chips_ made
her an international name.
Vanity takes all kinds of shapes. In one of his earliest pictures Gary
Cooper played a location scene so well that it was shot in a single
take. That night Coop went diffidently to the director’s tent. “If
you don’t mind, I’d like to do that scene over again in the morning,”
he said. “I seem to remember at one point I picked my nose I was so
nervous.”
The director knew better. “Listen,” he said. “You were so damn nervous
you were great. You keep acting that way and you can pick your nose
into a fortune.” That bit of advice registered with Coop. After he’d
belly-flopped trying to dive into the deep end of acting with pictures
like _Saratoga Trunk_, he saw his old director again. “Guess I’ll have
to go back to my nose,” he said.
It took an eye doctor from South Bend, Indiana, to set up in the agency
business and put the hammer lock on Hollywood; by comparison Myron only
twisted arms. Dr. Jules Caesar Stein is the founder and board chairman
of MCA, a flesh-peddling octopus with approximately one thousand
clients ranging from actors to zither players, before it got rid of
them all in a hurry under pressure from Washington’s trust busters. He
and his wife, Doris, are also devout collectors of antiques; European
furniture dealers used to rub their hands when they saw them coming,
but they were soon crying in their porcelain teacups, because Jules had
set up his own antique shops.
Dr. and Mrs. Stein have climbed so high since his college days--he
worked his way through by playing the violin in little jazz bands--that
they are now helping to refurnish the White House. Mrs. John F.
Kennedy was pleased to announce last year that the Steins, as a gift
to the nation, “will contribute pieces from their collection of
eighteenth-century antiques as well as new acquisitions.”
Soon after the Steins moved to California--they now live in a beautiful
Beverly Hills hilltop mansion--the good doctor told me at a party: “I’m
going to be king of Hollywood one day.”
“You and who else?” I laughed. But I underestimated him. He succeeded,
thanks to the shortsightedness of the producers when big stars are in
short supply and desperate demand.
Besides Brando, MCA spoke for Marilyn Monroe, Ingrid Bergman, Burt
Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Dean Martin, Jack Benny. That’s just a
sample. Agents used to hustle for salary and billing. Jules Stein’s
poker-faced assistants demanded lots more than that. They often weren’t
satisfied until they got a fat slice of the picture’s profits for their
clients.
The first deal like that was made for Jimmy Stewart, whom I originally
recommended to MGM after he and I played on Broadway together with
Judith Anderson in _Divided by Three_. The slice that MCA carved for
him out of Universal-International’s _Winchester ’73_ brought him more
than $600,000. Now he’s a millionaire on the investments he made on the
advice of a keen-brained business friend from Texas and he’s become a
sober-sided industrialist as well as a fine actor.
With Kirk Douglas as a client Jules Stein did even better at Universal.
After running up costs of $12,000,000 on _Spartacus_ in which Douglas
starred and also produced with Universal’s money, the huge, 400-acre
studio fell into a situation where it had to sell out, lock, stock, and
acreage. MCA bought the place for $11,250,000 and set to work churning
out television series. Now it’s called Revue Productions and it’s the
best-run studio in Hollywood. If MCA plans work out now it has beaten
the anti-trust suit--it is concentrating on production and stripping
itself of the agency business--millions more dollars will be invested
in an effort to make Hollywood the movie capital of the world once more.
Once an actor has seen his agent put the pressure on and turn a geyser
of cash into Old Faithful itself, the sky’s the limit where his greed
for money is concerned. Everything else is forgotten, including, of
course, gratitude. William Holden, an MCA prize winner, did mighty well
with _The Key_, though Trevor Howard stole the notices; and much, much
better before that from _Bridge on the River Kwai_, which brought him
millions. The producer of _The Key_ was Carl Foreman.
When Foreman had another picture in the works, _The Guns of Navarone_,
he wanted Holden for his hero. “My price,” Holden declared, “is now
$750,000, plus ten per cent of the gross.”
“But not with me, not after _The Key_,” Foreman said.
“With you or anybody else, that’s my price,” Holden replied.
Foreman had a few forceful words to say on the subject of gratitude,
then hired Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn together for
less than Holden demanded. To keep his bulging bank account safe from
the hands of tax collectors, Holden moved his family to Switzerland,
that temporary haven of fugitive American fortunes--temporary because I
understand that President Kennedy has some fancy plans for correcting
that state of inequity.
William doesn’t spend much time in his Swiss home, though his wife,
formerly Brenda Marshall, does, together with their two sons. Her
daughter by a previous marriage preferred staying behind in Hollywood
as an interior decorator. When Brenda Marshall married, she was a
happy, fun-loving woman. The last time I saw her, at a party Norman
Krasna gave for me at Lausanne, Switzerland, her old contentment had
gone bye-bye.
* * * * *
When Tony Curtis was fourteen, he wrote me a six-page letter from his
family’s one-and-a-half-room flat in the Bronx, where his father worked
as a tailor. The boy was then Bernie Schwartz, and he wanted to know
how to become a movie actor. He’d beaten a path to Hollywood, but he
wasn’t rated as much more than a curly haired pretty boy by most people
when MCA started to steer him. No matter how hard he was asked to work
to promote his career, he gave the same answer: “I’d love to.” He was
eager and fun to be with, and I invited him to all my parties. There
he got to know, among others, suave, immaculate Clifton Webb, whom he
looked up to as the epitome of social form.
“You’re getting up there,” Clifton cautioned him as the months rolled
by, “so you must dress better. That suit isn’t good enough for you, and
your tie is awful.”
As soon as Tony could afford it, he bought himself a custom-tailored
suit, which he christened at another party of mine where Webb was a
guest. “Look, Hedda,” Tony said with pride, “isn’t it wonderful? All
hand-sewn.”
“Lovely,” I agreed, “and that’s a good-looking pair of shoes, too.”
“A producer I know couldn’t wear them, so he gave them to me. They
pinch a little, but aren’t they beautiful? They cost him $75.”
Clifton wandered over to add a word of praise for the suit. “But you
can’t wear that tie with it.”
“What kind should I wear, Mr. Webb?”
“Come over to my house tomorrow and I’ll give you some.”
Tony found a wife who was used to being kept on a tight financial rein
when he married Janet Leigh in 1951. Her father, Fred Morrison, who
ten years later took an overdose of pills that ended his life, held the
purse strings after her career got going. I remember coming across her
at Rex, the mad hatter, where she was aching to buy a sweater for $75,
but her dad said no. When he died, she was on the French Riviera with
Mrs. Dean Martin, guests of Joe Kennedy.
Tony and Janet bought an eighteen-room house in 1958. (“Did you ever
believe I’d end up a country gentleman?” he asked me.) They had enough
money left to furnish the dining room, but not enough to buy much else.
He was around at my house when I mentioned that I had a handsome,
carved oak chair down in the basement, which I couldn’t use. “If you
want it, take it. Go down and see.”
He came back conveying the heavy chair in his arms. “It’s wonderful,”
he said. “I’ll put it in my car.” He’d started the motor to drive
straight home before I caught him. “Come back here. We’ve got a party
going. Janet can see it when you get home.” It still sits in their
front hall, bleached and upholstered in white brocade.
MCA maneuvered Tony’s affairs so astutely that he now owns his own
picture company, makes millions, drives a Rolls-Royce. “I hope that
in a few years I’ll have enough security so I can drive around in
an old battered station wagon if I want to,” he says. He lost Janet
Leigh after he made a picture in South America with Yul Brynner, which
featured a girl named Christine Kaufman, to whose apartment in the
Château Marmont, in the company of her mother, Tony would go to have
coffee on his way home.
He sent me another letter after I’d criticized him in the column last
year over the postponement of _Lady L._ “I wonder,” I’d asked, “if
actors realize they’re killing the goose that laid the golden eggs and
are ruining their careers.”
“You might well have asked whether the studios realize what they are
doing to actors,” Tony wrote back. “Because of the delays and stalling
on this project, I have not made a film for eight months. True, I was
paid a salary for part of that time but money alone can never make up
for the fact that I might have two films during that period, that
I could have been working in my chosen profession, could have been
improving in the only way an actor can improve--by working.
“As a star, I have the right to pick my own parts, to decide whether or
not a script is right for me. That is clearly understood by everyone
who seeks to employ me.
“If the final script does not meet my requirements, the burden must
remain with the company and not with me. The studio did submit a script
I liked, which is why I signed to do the picture in the first place.
Before we could get into production, they began making changes and the
script they were finally ready to shoot bore little resemblance to the
one I had approved.” He was right, the picture has never been made.
* * * * *
When press agents nudge an actor hard enough, he imagines he can write,
produce, direct, and act simultaneously, as busy as a one-armed paper
hanger. That was a delusion Clark Gable avoided.
“Why don’t you want to direct, like everybody else?” I asked him not
long before he died.
“It’s hard enough to act without going into all those monkeyshines,” he
said. “I just want to act and get the money. Let them take the grief.”
Clark loved money all his working life. I don’t remember that he ever
gave a party. He nursed a grievance against Metro from the time Mayer
loaned him to David Selznick to make _Gone With the Wind_. Clark
thought he should have received an extra bonus for that, not simply
continue on his salary of $7000 a week, fifty-two weeks a year.
When he cast off from Metro in 1954 and entrusted his business affairs
to MCA, he boasted that he had “never really made any big money” until
then. Like the rest of the monarchs of the movies, he wanted what they
call “the most”--highest salary, biggest percentage.
“Why do you fight so hard for those enormous salaries?” I asked him, as
I’ve asked them all. “Why can’t you put back some investment in the
industry when it’s done so much for you?”
“I want the most because you’re only important if you get it.”
Money helped kill Clark Gable. That and his refusal to acknowledge that
he was growing old. He couldn’t resist earning the most he’d ever get,
when the offer came along for _The Misfits_; $750,000 plus $58,000 for
every week the picture ran overtime.
On location in the Nevada desert, where the heat jumps to 130 degrees,
he roped and wrestled with wild horses to prove to everybody who
watched, including me, that he still had his old virility. “This
picture will prove he is America’s answer to Sir Laurence Olivier,”
said the ever-present Mrs. Paula Strasberg. He was encouraged by John
Huston, a director with no qualms about making actors sweat. And he was
outraged by the behavior of Marilyn Monroe.
He was habitually early on the set, ready to work at 9 A.M. Some days
she wouldn’t show up until lunch time, sometimes not at all. Though
he seethed inside, Kay Gable told me, he curbed his feelings by iron
self-control. Clark was not a pretty sight when he blew his top, as he
did when _The Misfits_ was completed, but Huston wanted one more retake.
The retake was never shot. Huston was still working the final cut of
the picture when Clark died, nearly a million dollars richer, leaving a
beautiful widow in Kay Gable and a handsome son he never saw.
_Seven_
Hollywood was always heartbreak town, though most of the world fancied
it to be Shangri-La, King Solomon’s mines, and Fort Knox rolled into
one big ball of 24-karat gold. We used to see the hopefuls stream in
from every state of the Union, tens of thousands of them, expecting
that a cute smile or a head of curls was all it took to pick up a
million dollars. Many were old enough to know better, but not the
children.
They came like a flock of hungry locusts driven by the gale winds of
their pushing, prompting, ruthless mothers. One look into the eyes of
those women told you what was on their minds: “If I can get this kid
of mine on the screen, we might just hit it big.” I used to wonder
if there wasn’t a special, subhuman species of womankind that bred
children for the sole purpose of dragging them to Hollywood.
Most of the women showed no mercy. They took little creatures scarcely
old enough to stand or speak and, like buck sergeants, drilled them
to shuffle through a dance step or mumble a song. They robbed them of
every phase of childhood to keep the waves in the hair, the pleats in
the dress, the pink polish on the nails. I’ve had hundreds of them
passing through my office asking for help.
Stage mothers are nothing new. I remember as far back as the Tartar we
lovingly called “Ma” Janis, who took care of all the cash her daughter
Elsie earned. When “Ma” died, Elsie got so lost in the tangle of her
financial standing that she wondered whether she had $100,000 or a
million in the bank. She found she had little left except a note signed
by “Ma” certifying that she owed Irving Berlin $10,000. Elsie had
never made out a check in her whole life, never had more than $5.00 in
her pocketbook.
What motion pictures did was to encourage the breed and give them
better opportunities to ruin their children while they were beneath
the age of consent. Peg Talmadge, mother of Norma and Constance, was a
sweetheart. Anita Loos wrote her book _Gentlemen Prefer Blondes_ from
choice bits that fell from the lips of Peg, but even she ruled with
a whim of iron. We all laughed at Peg when she said these things but
didn’t have the wit to write them down. Anita did.
Jackie Coogan’s boyhood earnings were so scandalously dissipated by his
family that the law was changed to protect child actors--but Jackie was
left penniless.
When I worked for Metro, stage mothers lingered outside the gates at
the Culver City studios, waiting to catch some dignitary’s eye or for
a chance, which seldom came, to slip past the guards into the maze of
narrow streets that wound between the big barns plastered with stucco
which were called sound stages.
Some children made it, though not by waiting like beggars at the
gates of paradise. Louis B. Mayer needed appealing youngsters for the
all-American family pictures which this Russian-born Jew from New
Brunswick delighted in making because they earned fortunes for him.
There were two children in particular, a boy and a girl, who captured
the imaginations of all.
The boy had once had his hair dyed black by his mother so he could
get a job in two-reel silent comedies. She wanted to change his name
to Mickey Looney, but the “L” became an “R” when he was signed on at
Culver City.
The girl’s mother had seen her child walk out onto a vaudeville
stage when she was two years old to join her two older sisters in a
song-and-dance act. Mrs. Ethel Gumm took her three children slogging
through West Coast theaters for years. Frances, the youngest, developed
the hungriest drive of them all, battling to show her big sisters that
she could sing louder and longer than either of them.
It was a cheap act, and it made very little money for anybody. One
Christmas saw the traveling Gumms chewing on tortillas at a corner
drugstore near the theater they were playing. Frances Gumm had been
rechristened Judy Garland when Lew Brown spotted the trio playing The
Lodge at Lake Tahoe and decided she might have something.
In the typical Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance switching that usually makes
it possible for half a dozen people to claim they “discovered” a star,
Brown put Judy and her mother in touch with an agent named Rosen, who
knew Jack Robbins, a music publisher with offices in Culver City.
With Rosen, Judy was in Robbins’ office when he telephoned down to
Ida Koverman, who made a point of hunting for fresh talent to keep
the wheels turning at MGM. Judy was twelve; round as a rain barrel;
stringy hair; dressed in an old blouse, blue slacks, dirty white shoes.
Ida heard her sing with a zing in her heart, and she flipped. She
called Mayer, who grudgingly came up to see what was causing all the
excitement. Ida had got hold of the words to the Jewish lament “_Eli,
Eli_” and coached Judy in the pronunciation. That’s what she sang for
Mayer, but he wasn’t impressed. He tossed the ball right back at Ida.
“If you want her, sign her up.”
But Ida was too knowing about the foxy ways of Mayer to fall for that.
She needed a second opinion, or else if Judy failed, Mayer would
never let Ida forget it. She had Judy sing again, this time for Jack
Cummings, a producer who just happened to be Mayer’s nephew.
Jack was called one of the “Sons of the Pioneers,” a walking
testimonial to the fact that it never hurt to be somebody’s relative
at Metro. “A producer produces relations” was a stock gag. Later on,
however, in pictures like _Seven Brides for Seven Brothers_, Jack
proved that he could fly when they gave him wings.
Long before that, he made a picture with a young girl named Liz
Taylor and a collie dog: _Lassie Come Home_. The picture was sweet,
sentimental, and I went all out in praise of it. A loyal friend in
Metro’s New York office wired me after reading the review: YOU SURE
STUCK YOUR NECK OUT THIS TIME HOPPER STOP IT’S NOTHING BUT A POTBOILER.
But the picture made a fortune, got Lassie a lifetime contract, helped
get Liz _National Velvet_.
Cummings could see the potential appeal of Judy, a roly-poly girl with
eyes like saucers and a voice as clear as a gold trumpet “This kid’s
got it,” he told Ida. “Let’s sign her up.” While he went off to set the
legal wheels in motion, Ida took Judy to the commissary for some ice
cream.
She tried to introduce her there to Rufus Le Maire, head of casting,
but she got the brush-off. Mr. Mayer hadn’t given the little new girl
the nod, so she wouldn’t receive any favors. He was starry-eyed over
another schoolgirl MGM had signed. Deanna Durbin was the real talent,
in his book. The two children made a musical short together, _Every
Sunday Afternoon_, but Deanna was the one given the big build-up. After
that, Judy had nothing to do but hang around the lot--and get some
education at the school Ida had established with academically qualified
teachers to meet the requirements of California law.
Mayer had decided to let Judy go and keep Deanna, but the plan turned
sour. Universal, looking for a youngster to play in _Three Smart
Girls_, wanted Deanna. By a fluke, Metro had let her contract lapse.
Mayer was away on one of his many trips to Europe. He knew nothing of
this until he returned and found his prize pigeon had been allowed to
fly the coop. He went berserk.
For days he ranted and raged at everybody in sight until some anonymous
prankster won revenge. In Mayer’s exclusive, private bathroom one
morning, Louis found that on every sheet of toilet paper the face of
Deanna had been printed overnight.
Deanna got stardom and the royal treatment from Universal with _One
Hundred Men and a Girl_, which followed _Three Smart Girls_. There was
a fancy premiere, and she planted her footprints in wet cement in the
forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, a pastime which was one of the
glorious bits of nonsense in those days. Deanna is now quite plump and
leading a happy married life with husband and children in Paris. Once a
year newspapermen descend upon her home, but she won’t receive them or
allow photographs to be taken. She’s had her fill of Hollywood and you
couldn’t lure her back for a million dollars. The only singing she does
is with her children.