by Erik Tarloff
Irma Gold
Not My Fault! put Chance in a whole other league. It was a huge hit, far and away the most profitable comedy of the year, which meant he’d had two boffo starring vehicles in a row. And he’d demonstrated a versatility no one suspected he had. Including me. He did that “oh my God what have I gotten myself into?” attitude with such panache I don’t think anyone besides maybe Cary Grant could have pulled it off nearly so well. And the physical stuff! Dodging around all that furniture in the warehouse scene, it was like he was made of rubber.
So we were able to renegotiate his contract as soon as the smoke from that picture cleared. Metro barely squawked. I got very good terms. Very. He was sitting pretty.
And it’s so sad, but his next film turned out to be his last. Also his best, I think most people would agree. The Judas Kiss was a beautiful, poetic script, and he fell in love with it right away. As soon as he read it, he called me at home—it was almost midnight!—and didn’t even apologize for waking me. He said, “This is it. This is my next one.” The studio wouldn’t have balked no matter what he wanted to do, he had that kind of power now, but they were thrilled with the choice.
They assigned a first-class director, went A-list with the cast. They knew it was going to be their big prestige picture. Their likely Oscar contender for the year.
Bruce Powers (actor)
Chance saw me in a production of The Emperor Jones at a small theater in West Hollywood, this little hole-in-the-wall on Santa Monica Boulevard. The show didn’t get a lot of press attention, so I’m not sure how he heard about it or what brought him into the theater. Maybe one of his jazz friends…he was passionate about jazz, a knowledgeable fan too, not a finger-snapping phony, he used to go to clubs pretty regularly, he had a gigantic record collection. And after he became famous the players were of course thrilled he was in the audience—not too many white dudes went to those places, at least not some of those places, the ones located in iffy neighborhoods, and having a movie star in the club would have been a really big deal—and naturally they were delighted to sit at his table during breaks and have a drink and shoot the shit. I’m guessing it could have been one of them who told him to check me out.
He came backstage after the show and was full of praise for my performance. Which of course is the direct route to any actor’s heart. [laughs] But he also just seemed like a good guy. That whole backstage thing can be so bullshitty, you know—kiss-kiss-you-were-just-mahvelous-dahling—but he made it comfortable in a way that that stuff often isn’t. And he seemed sincere.
And he must have been sincere, because a few days later my agent got a call. Chance wanted to meet with me. He said he might have a part for me in his next picture. So they sent over the script, and I read it through twice, and I was totally flummoxed. I didn’t see any parts for a Negro actor. We were called Negroes in those days; it was the polite term back then. So when he and I met a few days later, in his office at Metro, I said, “Listen, I think you must have sent me the wrong draft. There aren’t any Negroes in the script you sent me.”
And first he laughed, like he thought I might have been pulling his leg, but when he realized I was serious he said, “Well, I thought you could play George. You’d be great in the role.”
So I said, “But the script doesn’t say George is colored.”
And he said, “Doesn’t say he’s white, either.”
Mark Cernovic (producer)
So we were in a pickle. Chance wanted Bruce Powers in the picture. He was pretty adamant about it. Now, Bruce wasn’t a well-known actor yet. Nobody at Metro had heard of him, and there was a lot of resistance. Mostly, although nobody would admit it, because he was black. So at first the studio went through that whole “but the character isn’t a Negro” thing, which Chance batted away easily. And then they said it would cost us business in the South, it would cost us a lot of business. Like there might be boycotts and things. And that that could hurt Chance’s career down the line too. He might acquire a reputation that would hurt him in certain markets, is how they delicately put it.
Well, Chance was still being insistent, he said he was willing to take the risk, he thought it was ideal casting as well as a great gesture in an important cause. And I have to say…I mean, Chance took me to see Bruce in The Emperor Jones, and he was awfully good. I could see this wasn’t just a political gesture. Chance had become much more politically conscious around this time, but that wasn’t his sole motivation here. I could sympathize with the studio’s concerns—for them, the business side of show business was paramount, it’s called show business for a reason, so I thought that was a legitimate point of view—but if Chance was willing to stick his neck out for this, I was willing to go along. It was a worthy cause and Bruce was a worthy actor. So I backed him up. A small risk on my own part. The brass weren’t happy with me. They expected me to be an ally.
Then Sol Siegel raised a new objection, and this one was political. He told us that Bruce Powers had been graylisted. It wasn’t quite as bad as being blacklisted, he’d never been called to testify in front of HUAC—too small a fish, I guess—and as far as I know he’d never officially been a member of the Communist Party. But his name had come up in testimony a few times, he’d palled around with those people and been to some meetings and signed some petitions. Sol told me Powers—who I’d swear he’d never even heard of till Chance recommended him—he told me Powers was absolute poison. He said the American Legion and the VFW and the DAR and a bunch of other groups would organize all sorts of protests. Ironic, considering that Bruce did his stint in the army and no one raised any objection to him back when he was dodging bullets in Korea. But Sol said this one was nonnegotiable.
When Chance started to protest, Sol asked him if he’d be equally willing to work with a Nazi. I got the impression he thought this argument was a clincher. And Chance said, “Maybe not, but that would be my decision, not a decision imposed on me by some cultural commissar. I refuse to be bullied that way. And I despise this industry-wide effort to destroy people’s careers. Bruce Powers is a terrific actor and he’s right for the part and his politics don’t concern me and shouldn’t concern anyone else.”
Notice that Sol never mentioned race at all. But I’ll go to my grave believing it was a factor. Not that Sol was racist himself, but he was worried the issue would kill box office in the South and in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, which back then were pretty important foreign markets. And combined with the graylisting, I think he anticipated double trouble.
But—and I’m unbelievably proud of Chance for doing this, and proud of myself for backing him up, since, honestly, I’m no hero and it could have gone either way—Chance told Irma Gold, who was his agent, he told her to tell the front office that either Bruce was in the picture or he himself wouldn’t be. She tried to talk him out of it, she told him this was a fight he couldn’t win, and he might hurt himself badly in the process, but he was rock solid. “Just tell them to consider us a package,” he said. And fuck me if they didn’t fold.
Now, the world gives a lot of credit to Kirk Douglas and to Otto Preminger for ending the blacklist a couple of years later by hiring Dalton Trumbo for Spartacus and Exodus, and maybe to Frank Perry for hiring Howard Da Silva a year or two after that for David and Lisa. And they all certainly deserve that credit. But Chance put an early crack in the wall, and I don’t think anybody who wasn’t directly involved knows about it.
Bruce Powers
The Judas Kiss made me. The movie was a huge success, and audiences accepted my character without any fuss. All that fear turned out to be based on nothing. People might not have wanted me in their living rooms or dating their daughter, but they seemed to be fine with me as Chance’s pal. The reviews for the movie itself, for Chance, for me, were outstanding. There was no boycott from any of those right-wing groups the studio was so scared of, we did good business in the South, it all went incredibly smoothly. And I was laun
ched. Never looked back. For a while there I was the busiest African American actor in show business besides Sid Poitier. I owe my entire career to Chance Hardwick. He was, as we say in Hollywood, a mensch.
Briel Charpentier
Around the time he was making The Judas Kiss, we started seeing less of each other. Not a break-up, just a leveling off. It was partly practical…he was busy on that movie and all sorts of other projects, and he was living out in Malibu, which felt quite remote to me. And he had this whole new life based on his being a big star, and most of the time he said he hated it, and I believed him, but still, it came with the territory. Famous friends, a different kind of social life. Glamorous doings. He would have let me be part of it, but I was not comfortable with those people, I did not feel I belonged, and I also had a little feeling that sooner or later he might not like having me around at those times. I was from a separate part of his life. He might not want his two worlds to collide. This could have been my imagination, but I felt it and did not want to put it to the test.
And he had become very nervous about going out anywhere. Anywhere he couldn’t control, that is. Restaurants, movie theaters, shops. Public places where fans might recognize him. Might mob him. The prospect of that really made him anxious. For example, we were at Pickwick Books one evening, just browsing before dinner, you know, and a crowd suddenly appeared, seemingly from out of nowhere. They surrounded him, and if you could have seen the look on his face…he was terrified. Terrified and angry. He tried to be a good fellow, he braced himself and forced a smile and signed some autographs and shook hands and thanked everybody, but he pulled me out of there as fast as he possibly could. We had planned to walk down the street to have dinner at Musso’s, but he was too shaken. He said “No, let’s just go back to your apartment, we can scramble some eggs or eat some cold cuts.”
And also, I was starting to sell my pictures, and I was getting some commissions, so I was quite busy too. I could no longer just drop everything if he wanted to see me. He still used to come over to my studio while I painted when he had some free time, but it was rarer than it once was. I think he liked it when it happened, though. He could just be Chance Hardwick, not [holds up hands to indicate a marquee] Chance Hardwick, and he valued that. And he said he loved my work. He bought one of my canvases. It was one of my first big sales, and it was the first picture he bought for his new house. “Don’t give me a discount on it,” he said. “I mean to pay full price.” And he did!
Things were different between us, though. I still loved him and I think he still loved me, but his life had changed so drastically. We couldn’t pretend things were still the same. He was famous, he was rich, he was a star. That changes you in ways you can’t imagine. He used to talk to me about it. Not happily. It was the opposite of bragging. He often sounded despairing. I think the last couple of years of his life were very unhappy, I’m sad to say. He had got what he wanted and he discovered he did not want it after all. He didn’t like it. But there was no giving it back.
I will tell you one happy memory, though. It’s a little embarrassing, perhaps, a little intimate, but I think I am too old to allow myself to feel embarrassed about such things anymore. He once suggested we go to a drive-in movie. We could sometimes go to regular theaters, we would call the theater and make arrangements to be slipped in and seated in the back after the theater was already dark. But that still made him nervous. He was afraid he might somehow be recognized, and it was also something of a bother to arrange. So he suggested we go to this drive-in instead, where no one would see us. It was a thing I had never done, watch a movie in a car, and it sounded like fun. A typical American experience. And after we parked and put the loud speaker in the window, he suggested we sit in the back seat, he said it would be more comfortable. And after a while…well, okay, what happened was, we actually made love in his car while the movie was playing. “This is how American teenagers first have sex,” he told me. Is that true, do you think?
Well, true or not, I have to say it was really fun.
From Proteus—The Films of Chance Hardwick
by Gordon Frost
“…In The Judas Kiss, his swan song and by general consensus his greatest performance, Hardwick plays Lucas Penny, an investigative reporter who has gone undercover, infiltrating a fascistic terrorist group as research for a magazine exposé. But as he develops relationships within the group, forming unexpected friendships and one love passionate affair, his loyalties begin to divide in ways he has not anticipated. No one ever played ambivalence better than Chance Hardwick; every pained emotion and agonized spasm of guilt can be read in the actor’s eyes. And when his character ultimately finds himself in a position where he must kill or reveal his true identity and thus be killed himself, Hardwick wordlessly conveys the essence of a divided, mortified soul. His work here has remained a touchstone for serious actors of every succeeding generation, a legendary cinematic performance.”
Mark Cernovic
One afternoon I was in Chance’s office on the Metro lot, we were discussing possible future projects, and his telephone rang. And he picked up and listened for a minute, and he looked very surprised, even shocked, and then he said, in that menacing low growl he used when he was really angry—either when he was acting angry or when he was angry for real—he said, “Tell him to go to hell,” and hung up. And then muttered something like “fuck” or “shit” or “Christ.” He looked…I don’t want to say shaken, but…put out. More than put out.
Well, it’s rude to ask people about their phone calls, and especially when it’s a person as private and reserved as Chance, so I exercised some self-control and didn’t say anything. But the look on my face must have said plenty, because he shrugged and laughed a little self-consciously—revealing any genuine emotion in front of anyone else always made him uncomfortable, is my impression; he reserved displays of feeling for his work, so he must have felt he’d permitted me a glimpse of something he didn’t want anyone to see—and he said, in this amazingly off-hand, casual way, which I assume he must have struggled to achieve, he said, “My father’s at the studio gate. My biological father. Wendell Hardwick Sr. I’ve never even met the motherfucker, but now it seems his paternal feelings have awoken.”
I didn’t know whether I should respond at all. There were so many ways any answer might be the wrong answer. But saying nothing obviously wouldn’t do either. So I said, “You aren’t curious?”
And he said, “Not in the slightest.”
And that was apparently that. Now, looking back, it’s hard for me to believe the guy gave up after one shot. If I had to guess, I’d guess that he kept pestering Chance, and Chance finally had to buy him off to get him to go away and stay away. Probably gave him some money and at the same time threatened him with a restraining order. But that’s just speculation on my part. It’s not something I would have asked Chance about, not in a million years.
Letter from Jerome Goldhagen, MD (psychiatrist)
Dear Professor Frost:
I am in receipt of your letter of 5th September.
It is with sincere regret that I must decline your invitation to be interviewed on the subject of Chance Hardwick. Not only would the contents of our sessions together be privileged, if he in fact had ever been a client of mine, but I regard it as ethically impermissible to either confirm or deny that Mr. Hardwick or anyone else ever consulted me professionally. Clients need to feel their therapy is and will remain a matter exclusively between themselves and their therapists.
This should in no way be interpreted as confirmation that I ever met with, or indeed ever even met, Mr. Hardwick. It is simply a statement of general professional principle to which I unfailingly adhere.
I trust you will understand my position. I do, however, wish you every success with your book and indeed I look forward to reading it.
Sincerely yours,
Jerome Goldhagen
Briel Charpentier
So that’s how that Life Magazine spread came to be. They came to my studio, which I guess they thought was the most photogenic location, or maybe Chance wouldn’t let them into his house on the beach. He came over and hung out the way he sometimes did—that wasn’t fake—and they took pictures of him lounging around on the sofa watching me work and of me pretending to paint, and of the two of us eating lunch on a blanket on the floor of the studio, picnic style. Then, later, they took us down to Beverly Park, that dinky amusement park on Beverly Boulevard right near La Cienega, to pretend to go on some of the rides. Very cheesy!