by Erik Tarloff
But as I was saying, we were forced to give up on Bean, we had to find a replacement. And since this was the younger brother of the protagonist, we were willing to cast an unknown…indeed, it almost had to be an unknown. Returning veterans who were already established actors would likely be too old to be convincing in the part. So the word went out, and Irma Gold sent us Chance Hardwick to read for it. Along with another of her clients as I recall, although I can’t for the life of me remember his name. But she sent along the two of them. Hedging her bets, you might say. [laughs] This was for the role of Chip, troubled younger brother of the lead, who at that point we thought was going to be Alan Ladd, although Ladd eventually dropped out. We replaced him with Jeff Harte. A compromise choice, although Jeff turned out to be marvelous in the role. Quite the best performance of his career, I daresay.
But Chip was a great part, and that may in fact have been the reason Ladd bailed on us. Meatiest role in the script, in my opinion. Not a lot of lines, but a number of bang-up scenes, and at key plot points. We looked at a good many young actors, some of whom became quite successful soon after. Russ Tamblyn came in, Nick Adams, Steve McQueen, Roddy McDowall, Dean Stockwell. Many actors who were to make their name in the near future, as things turned out. Well, I suppose Roddy already had a name, as did Dean—he’d been in The Boy with Green Hair, hadn’t he?—but some of the others, their success was a few years off. But my point is, the way things unfolded in Hollywood in those days, the rumor mill was always churning, people somehow knew things before they were meant to know them. It remains a mystery how rumors spread in that odd town, but the word was apparently out that this was potentially a career-making role. So agents were sending us their best. In retrospect, just considering the quality of the people we turned down, I guess you’d have to say it was a damned stellar cattle call.
And we finally went with Hardwick. He had a quality. I saw it right away. Saul was somewhat hesitant at first, he felt the boy might be a little too soft, he said—[laughs]—“Only a fucking limey would think this candy-ass has the balls for Chip.” [laughs] That was Saul for you. Not the most delicate of sensibilities. In point of fact, he could be a total twat sometimes, with all the subtlety of a two-ton lorry. He did come ’round eventually, of course. Admitted he’d been blind. By the time we wrapped, it was impossible to deny. But I on the other hand saw Hardwick’s appeal immediately. Maybe because I’m a fucking limey. [laughs] It was hard to define, the nature of that appeal, although many, of course, have tried in the years since his death. Whole books have been written on the subject, haven’t they? Scholarly monographs. You’ve probably written one yourself. Forgive me for not knowing of it. Books on cinema don’t really engage me. That’s often true of practitioners and theorists, don’t you find? They inhabit separate realms.
The thing of it is, Hardwick had a way of giving you the feeling he was suffering from a pain so deep—so intense, so mysterious and personal—that your heart couldn’t help but go out to him. Everyone wanted to mother him, even men. Even heterosexual men. And women found him enormously sexy while men didn’t find him especially threatening. He wasn’t a macho bruiser and yet, pace that twat Saul, he didn’t seem like a pantywaist either. D’you know what I mean? His vulnerability didn’t have the…pardon me for being so frank, but the rather sniveling quality you found in an actor like Sal Mineo. A very good actor, please don’t misunderstand me, but I think he was destined always to be the second lead. His kind of vulnerability was very real, and reasonably touching, but it wasn’t the sort that translates into the leading man species of stardom.
During the shoot, Hardwick wasn’t a huge presence on the set. He was quiet. Shy, perhaps. Sitting back, watching. Perfectly pleasant to the crew. Agreeable, accommodating, not hiding out in his trailer, but rarely initiating any interactions. He may have still been a little awed by what was happening to him, of course. This would be a huge leap forward in his career, and he must have been aware of the fact. He may not have been entirely ready for it, emotionally speaking. Indeed, considering the way his life ended, he may never have learned how to deal with it. [sighs] Such a tragedy.
During the first week or so of shooting, I had no complaints about his work, he was very professional and definitely delivering all we expected of him, but it was only when I looked at the rushes on the evening of the day we’d shot his first really big scene, a scene where he confesses to his brother what he’s done, that it suddenly struck me he might in fact be extraordinary. It was in his eyes, you see. The most complex emotions, all there, transparent, residing behind his eyes. Not so visible from the director’s chair, but the camera found them. He let the camera find them.
The next day, I sought him out. And this is possibly the thing I recall about him most vividly from that whole shoot. I had him summoned to my trailer. I offered him a cup of coffee and I told him to take a seat. He looked very uneasy, but he plopped himself down on one of the easy chairs. And I told him that, as usual, Saul and I had screened the previous day’s dailies in the evening after everyone had left for the day. And he grimaced—you know the look, no doubt; it became something Chance Hardwick was known for—and he said, “Am I gonna be replaced? Is that it? Am I doing it wrong?”
[laughs]
Isn’t that sweet? He thought I had called him in to fire him! He was being very stoic about it, very brave, very stiff upper lip. Maybe in deference to my national origins. [laughs] I must admit, I was charmed. “No, no,” I hastened to tell him. “Not a bit of it, silly boy. Quite the opposite. You’re giving me great stuff! Wonderful stuff! I invited you in to praise you.” So at that his whole posture slumped. It’s interesting to watch a great actor when he isn’t acting, don’t you find? He’s still acting. Can’t help himself, can he? I went on, “I just wanted to tell you, whatever it is you’re doing, do please keep doing it. It’s working a treat. You own this character. By the time we wrap, you may own this film.”
And of course I was right on both counts.
Irma Gold
Almost everybody in this town hated the blacklist. Even most conservative Republicans. Not John Wayne, not Ward Bond, not—[feigns vomiting]—Hedda Hopper. Those bastards were happy as pigs in shit. Ruining people’s lives, and being able to do it while patting themselves on the back for their patriotism…it was like they’d died and gone to heaven. A place they’ll never actually see, by the way. Not after the way they behaved. But anyway, most of the people in this business, regardless of how they voted, they still believed in the First Amendment. Artists tend to be like that…they have a vested interest in free speech and free thought, don’t they? Hell, you take a guy like Gary Cooper. Coop was as conservative as they come, but his father had been a justice on the Montana Supreme Court—were you aware of that?—and he detested the blacklist. He didn’t like witch-hunts. You didn’t have to be a lefty to hate the blacklist.
And besides, just from a practical point of view, that kind of outside interference, it made it harder to get the work done. The blacklist made it impossible to hire some of the people you wanted to hire. A talent like Dalton Trumbo or Waldo Salt—no matter what your politics were, you didn’t care about theirs if you could get them to write a screenplay for you. They always delivered. But now you couldn’t. If you did, you might be blacklisted yourself. Hedda Hopper or Mike Connelly would write a column about you, say you were giving aid and comfort to the Reds, and your career would be in tatters.
Of course, that whole horrible period also represented an opportunity for some people. The rats, of course. They suddenly had more work. They could almost write their own ticket, taking the jobs their former comrades might otherwise have gotten. Most of ’em never paid a price for their treachery either. Lee J. Cobb, Elia Kazan, Sterling Hayden, Lloyd Bridges, Abe Burrows, Burl fucking Ives…I mean, the list is long. Their careers prospered, they never looked back, no regrets, not unless their conscience ever bothered them, not unless they woke up in the midd
le of the night in a cold guilty sweat, like Kazan confessed happened to him once, or like Lee Cobb and Sterling Hayden used to whine about all the time. But those mamzers mostly did all right for themselves. You don’t always get justice in this life. There are murderers who die in their sleep.
But my point is, some of the youngsters, the up-and-comers, the new faces…nobody would have thought to subpoena them, you know? They weren’t well known, for one thing, so there was no good publicity in it for the Committee, and besides, they were mostly new in town. Now, as far as Chance Hardwick is concerned, he and I had never discussed politics—for all I know, he didn’t have any at that time, he might have been one of those guys who couldn’t have cared less—but in any case, whatever he’d been up to before he got to town, it wasn’t on anyone’s radar, and there was no way he was going to be named or subpoenaed.
And Plains and Hills was a perfect example of the kind of thing that was happening in those days. If Orson Bean hadn’t been smeared by some self-dealing prick or other, he’d have played Chip in that movie and his life would’ve been very different, and as a result Chance’s life might’ve been very different too. Just another example of the way forces outside your control end up determining your fate.
Gil Fraser
Chance and I were both up for the same part. Chip in Plains and Hills. It was bound to happen eventually, I suppose. We were about the same age, the same approximate type. Maybe I was more rugged, he was more sensitive, but if we’d been a Venn Diagram, there would have been a lot of overlap.
We’d talked about the possibility before that. I mean, I’d been in town a lot longer than Chance, I’d been in that situation. You and a friend, or a number of friends, are competing for the same role. It can get intense. It can get tense. True, you might all lose out, but on the other hand, one of you might win, which means the rest of you are going to lose. That can feel really shitty. So one night fairly early on, over a couple of beers, I warned him that something like that could easily arise. And that if it did, we had to be colleagues, we had to be friends, we couldn’t let ourselves become rivals. Or, I mean, of course we’d be rivals, we’re competing for a job for Christ’s sake, but we couldn’t let that become a problem, we couldn’t let it become so destructive that it screwed up our friendship. And I told him that it was particularly important with roommates, because if things get nasty between you and your roommate and things get said that you regret, there’s no chance to go off and lick your wounds in private and settle yourself down and come back with everything resolved in your mind. You’re like cellmates. Or ferocious animals in a single cage.
And I’ll never forget this…I was lecturing Chance about all this, carrying on at great length, you know, preachy, big brotherly, and he finally interrupted me, he said, “Listen, Gil, relax, I’ve already been there.” So I looked at him sort of quizzically, and he went on, “Back in New York, a friend of mine and I both tried out for the Actors Studio, okay? And he made it, I didn’t. He got three ones, I got two ones and a two, the two was from Lee himself, which meant come back sometime and try again, and that was that. It was a totally shitty experience, I felt horrible, but we handled it. We stayed close friends, all right? I didn’t begrudge him. If you get a part we’re both up for, I’ll be disappointed but I’ll still be happy it was you rather than some random jerk. Trust me, it’s gonna be fine either way.”
And then, when Plains and Hills came along, it was obviously gonna be such a prestige picture, and just looking at the sides when they sent them over you could tell Chip was a fabulous part, almost an actor-proof part. It was obvious to me that anyone who got cast in that role was probably gonna be a star. You’d have to be unbelievably awful to fuck it up. It almost played itself, a pre-punched ticket to the next level. No, not just the next level, a quantum leap up a whole shitload of levels. A rocket to the fucking moon.
And the irony—if you want to call it irony—is that when they signed Chance, I was a real shithead about it. I’d given him my big lecture, but I guess when I did it I assumed I was at the head of the queue and he was the one who would have to be a good sport. And here it was, a few months later, and the ball was unexpectedly in my court. And I fumbled it big time. I groused and complained and questioned his skills and in general behaved like an asshole. Said he got the job only because of his pretty face. Talked about my training versus his lack of training. Just was impossible in every conceivable way. And to his credit, Chance didn’t gloat or anything like that, didn’t seem to take great umbrage, didn’t even defend himself. He was a perfect gentleman. He told me he thought I’d have been great in the role but he just happened to win the coin toss and that that sometimes happened. And he said he couldn’t be sorry about how it had turned out, but that if it hadn’t been him, he would have been thrilled if it was me. And then he gave me a lot of space to get over it. He was a model of good sportsmanship and collegiality, and I was…I was a fucking John McEnroe.
But only for a while. Let me say that in my own defense. I needed a day or two to get past it and pull myself together. Then I gave him the biggest apology I was capable of, downright abject, which God knows was appropriate, and I bought us a bottle of expensive champagne to celebrate his having got the part, and I took him out to Scandia for a celebratory dinner, and of course we fought over the check. He said, “Hey, I’m finally making real money here, let me get this,” and I said, “No, ain’t gonna happen, there’ll be other dinners and you’ll be buying those, you can be sure of that, but tonight’s on me.” And I’d really like to believe that made everything okay again. He acted like it did. But then again, he was a great actor, wasn’t he?
Mike Shore (stand-in)
My best buddy was Jeff Harte, who you’ve surely heard of. Kids today might be only vaguely familiar with the name, but you’re a film guy, you must know his work. Me and Jeff were friends going back to the old neighborhood when we were kids, and we stayed best friends right up till the day he died. He was a pretty big star back in the day. Among other great pictures, he was the star of Plains and Hills, the movie you’re asking me about. And he was a good guy. Success didn’t go to his head, he stayed a good guy the whole time, just a regular guy who looked after his pals—there were a group of us who hung out together.
People sometimes referred to us as his entourage, but it wasn’t really like that. Not really. We weren’t like a bunch of hangers-on. I guess he was kind of at the center of things, being a big star and all, and, you know, if there was money to be spent it was probably going to be his, he was a generous guy that way. But he never made us feel like he was the king and we were his court. It was more free-wheeling and democratic than that. I mean, yeah, we mostly did what he wanted, I guess ’cause he was footing the bill, so if he said, “Hey, let’s all go to Vegas for the weekend,” no one was going to say, “Nah, take us to Rosarita Beach instead.” That would’ve been bad form. No one ever thought of doing anything like that. But he didn’t make it feel you were being bossed around or anything. And anyone could make a suggestion, you know, and sometimes, if he liked it, he’d take you up on it.
And like I say, he looked after his friends. So, for example, he’d get me the gig as his stand-in whenever he was making a picture. It wasn’t a big leap or anything; we were pretty close to the same height and the same build, so for blocking and lighting and so on I was at least as good in the job as the next guy. I could stand still with the best of ’em. It was boring work, undemanding work, but it was a paycheck, and he liked having me around, you know? It was a way of taking care of me and at the same time seeing to it that we could hang out together and shoot the shit between takes. Play a little gin rummy, tell jokes, flirt with the gals on the set, reminisce about the old days.
And Plains and Hills was an interesting shoot, I’ll tell you that. Jeff was recently back from the army—a couple of years ago, might be—he’d made a couple of pictures since getting discharged, but for all those guys who b
ecame stars before the war, they were a little nervous about where they stood now, now that years had gone by and the world had changed. Would audiences still want to see them? Would that weird chemistry that made them stars still be working? Was a new generation taking over? So this picture was damned important to him. The two pictures he’d made before this one weren’t stinkers, but they weren’t big hits either. Things were becoming a little iffy. I think he even took a pay cut for Plains and Hills. Me and Jeff didn’t talk about money much, except for the times he might ask me if I could use a little help, but he kind of hinted to me that that that was the case. I guess he figured a prestige picture, if it did good, it could put him back on top. Might be worth giving up some up-front money for that. And he might collect the difference on the back-end. Which he did. Big time.
And like I suggested, there were all these new actors who’d come up in the past few years. And they were a whole new breed. A lot of ’em had trained, for one thing. Studied acting. Like it was an academic subject or a musical instrument or something. Jeff’s generation, they just got up in front to the camera and did it, learned their lines, noted their marks, did the job. But these new guys, they’d been to…to…I don’t know, conservatories or something. Most of ’em were from New York, I think, studied The Method or whatever. Had a whole complicated process, made a big deal about preparing themselves, they had to go through all sorts of rigmarole. The idea of just getting up there and giving a performance…it’s like they sneered at that.