by Mark Harris
Beatty took the script and left. A little while later, he called Benton and said, “I’m on Chapter Two and I want to do it.” Benton, knowing that he had yet to reach the scene in which Clyde’s bisexuality was introduced, said, “Wait until you get to Chapter Three.” Beatty hung up. It didn’t take long for the phone to ring again. “I’m on Chapter Three,” he said, “and I know what you’re talking about, and I still want to do it. Who do you want to direct?”35
Beatty has often said that when he first read Benton and Newman’s screenplay, he wanted to produce the film, not star in it: “I didn’t want to play Clyde. I didn’t think I was right for it. You know who I thought was right for it? Bob Dylan. And the person I could see the most as Bonnie was my sister. But I couldn’t see her with Bob Dylan. And certainly not with me! So I was confused.”36 But Beatty soon learned that he was getting ahead of himself, since Elinor Jones and Norton Wright still had five months left on their eighteen-month option. Had Beatty truly wanted to star in the film at that point, he could have called Jones and Wright and told them he was interested, as Benton urged him to do. But as the project’s would-be producer, he was their rival and decided that he would keep his endgame private while their time ticked away.
Benton and Newman were not so circumspect; given the way Beatty was talking about the script, they had every reason to believe he wanted to act in Bonnie and Clyde, not just produce it. “We kissed our wives and broke open a fresh six-pack and started playing Flatt and Scruggs again,”37 they wrote. “I just remember the excitement starting again,” says Leslie Newman. “All the more because it had sagged. This terrible low followed by this incredible high that you hadn’t expected to have!”38 Benton and Newman called Elinor Jones to let her know that Beatty had read the screenplay and liked it. Jones, thinking this might be a further selling point for Truffaut and an effective way to get him away from the improbable idea of casting Terence Stamp, immediately wrote to the director in Paris, asking him, “What do you think of Warren Beatty in the role of Clyde?” and “If [his] participation makes it easier to raise money, would that be an influence on your opinion?”39
Truffaut’s reply was swift and stinging. He told Jones some of the details of his meeting with Beatty and Caron in Paris and said that he had recommended Bonnie and Clyde to them before he heard about Picker’s interest in the movie. However, he added, “truly, I have much admiration for Leslie Caron, but none for Warren Beatty, who increasingly seems to me an extremely unpleasant person. He belongs for me, with Marlon Brando and several others, on a small list which I classify in my head under the heading, ‘Better not to make a film at all than to make it with men like this.’” Truffaut went on to say that he had since spoken to Caron, who he felt was “too old to play Bonnie,” and that he had been “obliged to be very frank with her and to explain to her that actually, this project had been offered to me again, but that it was out of the question that I would make it with Warren Beatty.”40
Beatty may have picked up on Truffaut’s distaste for him at their lunch. When Benton and Newman told him in their first conversation of their passion for Truffaut and Godard, he instantly replied, “You’ve written a French film—you need an American director.”41
EIGHT
The man who wrote the battle scenes for Spartacus did not, judging by his credits, appear to be the ideal choice to try his hand at a new screenplay for The Graduate. Calder Willingham was Stanley Kubrick’s poker buddy and go-to screenwriter, a southerner in his early forties who, aside from the patchwork he did on Spartacus, had written one screenplay that the director filmed (Paths of Glory), one that he rejected (for Lolita), and one, for Marlon Brando’s western cult oddity One-Eyed Jacks,1 that Brando disliked so much, he ended up having both Willingham and Kubrick fired. Willingham was a guy’s guy with enough inherent swagger to be able to look Brando in the eye and tell him, “You’ve gotta have faith in my God-given gifts as a writer.”2 Larry Turman, looking for someone to take on The Graduate, liked the fact that he was a published novelist and that he lived with his family in New England, a proximity that would make a potential collaboration with Mike Nichols easier.
But Nichols, at the moment, had his hands full. When he wasn’t busy preparing for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, he was working with Neil Simon, directing the author’s first Broadway play since Barefoot in the Park. The Odd Couple, with Walter Matthau as Oscar Madison and Art Carney as Felix Ungar, opened in March and extended Nichols’s winning streak; he now had four hit shows running simultaneously in New York, and that spring, he won, for the third straight year, the Tony Award for Best Director of a Play. Almost as soon as Willingham signed on and The Odd Couple opened, Nichols was back in Los Angeles to supervise rewrites and preproduction on Virginia Woolf, and The Graduate’s new screenwriter was on his own. Willingham had already adapted one of his own novels, End as a Man, into the 1957 military drama The Strange One, a film about repressed homosexuality that, thanks to the Production Code, ended up becoming an example of it. He told Turman that the experience had taught him that “doing an adaptation of your own novel is like performing an appendectomy on yourself.”3 But Willingham felt no compunction about doing surgery on someone else’s novel; he took the sexual triangle at the center of The Graduate and coarsened it, turning in a draft that both Nichols and Turman felt was “vulgar.”4 “It was in every way unacceptable,” says Nichols. “And when I asked him if he’d like to work with me on it, he said no. So that was the end of his screenplay.”5
Knowing Nichols was displeased with the progress the script was making, Turman took two paths at the same time: He held on to Willingham, urging him back toward Charles Webb’s novel, its scenes and its dialogue, in the hope that his screenplay could be rescued.6 And when that began to appear less likely, he hired another screenwriter for The Graduate, a newcomer named Peter Nelson. Turman had represented Nelson before quitting his job as an agent to become a producer, and Nichols, while he was directing Barefoot in the Park, had read and enjoyed a spec script by the novice writer called The Surprise Party Complex. “Mike Nichols said, ‘I read your script and I think it’s funny and touching. Call Sam Cohn,’” says Nelson. “It was one of those wonderful calls that you hope to get as a writer. I never got Sam on the phone. But I think [Nichols] liking my script impressed Larry enough to use me.”7
Nelson remembers taking the job, for which he was paid $5,000, with the understanding that it was urgent work. “When Mike was going to do The Public Eye, and then when that fell through but he took Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Larry was scared shitless that he was going to lose him, as any producer would be,” says Nelson. “When somebody takes a movie before your movie, you have no idea what that movie is going to lead to. He knew it was important to have a script ready when Mike came back.”
Soon after he got the assignment, Nelson was temporarily derailed by the illness of his young son, and it took him longer than he expected to turn in a draft. Turman never showed him Willingham’s script, only Webb’s novel. “I just went right to the book,” he says. “My script was faithful, and sort of kicky and long.” But Turman was no happier with this version than he had been with Willingham’s. Nelson was off the project before he even had a chance to meet with Nichols. “I don’t think my script was even considered,” he says.8
Although Nichols would eventually play a strong role in the shaping of the screenplay for The Graduate, that spring he had to face an even larger and more pressing crisis involving Ernest Lehman’s script for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The decision to retain Albee’s scabrous dialogue was already an issue. Phrases like “screw you,” “goddamn,” “hump the hostess,” “monkey nipples,” and the like had never been heard in a motion picture that received the Production Code’s seal before, and in 1963, before the Code’s powerful chief administrator, Geoffrey Shurlock, had even seen a draft of the script, he had warned Warner Brothers that all the profanity would have to come out. Lehman, terribly nervous about
running afoul of either the studio or Shurlock, had written several early versions with no profanity, but Nichols told him to go for close to broke, eliminating just a few words and pushing as hard as they could to keep the rest. “Ernie, for example, changed ‘you son of a bitch’ to ‘you dirty lousy dot dot dot,’” he said. “[But] disguising profanity with clean but suggestive phrases is really dirtier.”9
Lehman had taken it upon himself to identify another “problem”: the death of the imaginary baby over which George and Martha quarrel throughout the play. On Broadway, the nonexistence of the baby had generated reams of what-does-it-all-mean discussion; many critics embraced the then voguish notion that Virginia Woolf was really an encoded play about a homosexual couple with only an imaginary child to show for their “false” marriage—an idea that Albee himself repeatedly dismissed but that Lehman believed10—and others expressed honest uncertainty about the viability of introducing a metaphor or symbol and then turning it into a concrete plot point. Lehman decided that what Woolf needed was a third-act rewrite: In the screenplay he first presented to Nichols, George and Martha’s child had become real, a son who had hanged himself on his eighteenth birthday in the family’s living room closet, in which George says “the whole rotten truth of our lives is hidden.”11 His grieving parents had then sealed it forever.12
If Lehman had imagined that his dual role as writer and producer would give him the upper hand with an inexperienced movie director in creative disagreements, he was soon disabused of that notion. Nichols, feeling the new twist was closer to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? than to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, immediately vetoed his alterations and, over the course of two months in early 1965, supervised a rewrite that, step by step, took the screenplay back toward Albee’s original dialogue and vision. Virginia Woolf still needed to be cut—even at 131 minutes, it omits large sections of Albee’s three-act play. But in the course of making those trims, Nichols got to know the text intimately; it started to belong to him. Lehman, he said later, “wasn’t suited to the Albee stuff, and he wasn’t used to being a producer. And I didn’t have the patience. I would get pissed off and probably be rougher than I needed to be.”13
Nichols had spent his time in Los Angeles well, screening European movies (Fellini’s 8 1/2 was a favorite) to help him find a look for the film and learning everything he could about camera movement and technique, an area in which he was self-conscious about his lack of knowledge. His reputation as a New York theater hit maker alone would have made him something of a visiting eminence in Los Angeles, even at the age of thirty-four, but coupled with the enthusiastic endorsement of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, he landed at the top of everybody’s invitation list. He got to know his way around a Hollywood party, and, never lacking confidence, he discovered with remarkable alacrity that once he stepped onto the Warner lot, he had some weight to throw around.
Nichols insisted on three weeks of rehearsal time with his stars, an almost unheard-of luxury in the movie business then and now, and he got it. He also won a major showdown with Warner Brothers over the way the picture would be shot. In 1965, some of the rules of the old studio system were still firmly entrenched, and one of them was that first-time directors didn’t select their own crews. On Virginia Woolf, Warner simply assigned Nichols a cinematographer, Harry Stradling. Stradling was sixty-four; he had shot over 120 movies, the first of them in 1920, and had received a dozen Academy Award nominations. Though he had photographed the black-and-white A Streetcar Named Desire for Kazan fifteen years earlier, most of Stradling’s notable work since then had been in color—brightly lit amusements like Guys and Dolls, The Pajama Game, Gypsy, and My Fair Lady. In Hollywood, black-and-white films and color movies had coexisted for twenty-five years in an increasingly uneasy aesthetic détente (complete with separate but equal Oscar categories for Art Direction, Cinematography, and Costume Design). Although the decision about which way to shoot a movie was sometimes monetary, it was just as often based on a set of shaky artistic principles in which color was reserved for musicals, westerns, scenic spectacles, and fantasy, and black and white, which was considered more “realistic,” was used for anything serious, adult, or controversial.
This unwritten rule, a division often forced on filmmakers by the fact that the inconsistencies of color-processing labs were still yielding sloppy, overbright, unrealistic hues, was followed by directors until 1966, when the conversion of network television to color (and the refinement of processing techniques) led studios to abandon black and white entirely within a matter of months. But given that most color films in 1965 still looked more like That Darn Cat! than Lawrence of Arabia, Nichols had no interest in breaking with tradition. Fellini’s films were in black and white; so were Truffaut’s and Godard’s; so were the social-issue dramas of Stanley Kramer, and theatrical adaptations like Arthur Penn’s The Miracle Worker, and Production Code envelope pushers like Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker. Nichols wasn’t about to shoot Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in color—aside from everything else, he felt that the heavy makeup that would be used to turn the thirty-three-year-old Taylor into a harridan in her late forties would be too evident in color. But Stradling, an old-fashioned guy who had little use for European films and thought 8 1/2 looked like “crap,”14 was insistent, and Nichols suddenly found himself at loggerheads with Jack Warner, fighting him one-on-one as his producer sat by silently.
“Warner said to me and Lehman—who never spoke—‘I’m sorry, boys, but New York says it has to be in color.’ There was no ‘New York.’ He owned the whole studio! I said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Warner, it’s not possible, it’s way too late, the sets are built, everything is designed for black and white.’ We went back and forth forever with all that shit, and he finally said, all right, black and white.’”15 A week after that, however, Stradling came back to Nichols with a final proposal to shoot the film in color but print it in black and white; Nichols, with no particular animosity, fired him and replaced him with his own choice: Haskell Wexler, who was twenty-five years younger than Stradling and had recently shot striking black-and-white films for Kazan (America America), Franklin J. Schaffner (The Best Man), and Tony Richardson (The Loved One).16
The day he started production on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Nichols finished one of his first shots, and a first assistant director sauntered by him, muttering, “Oh, well—it’s just another picture.” Nichols fired him on the spot. “I had to prove I was going to be strong,” he said later.17 That may have been the case, but Nichols also had to prove that the first AD wasn’t right. If Virginia Woolf turned out to be “just another picture,” his career as a movie director would begin with a failure on a massive scale, and he knew it.
“You would think that as a director, slowly, as you got to be a geezer, you would become more and more irascible,” says Nichols, “until you ended up like George Cukor, screaming at Candice Bergen and Jacqueline Bisset for an entire movie [Rich and Famous]. But with me, it was the other way around. I started out as a prick on the set. Not to the actors so much, but by and large to everybody. I don’t know who I was then or what was happening. And I got nicer as time went by. But I was a prick.”18
On July 4, 1965, Jane Fonda threw a party in the oceanfront home in Malibu that she had recently rented with the man she was about to marry, director Roger Vadim. The party spilled out of the house, which had once belonged to Merle Oberon, and onto the beach, where she had set up a giant tent and laid down a dance floor.
Fonda wrote in her autobiography that the party was one of the first occasions on which old Hollywood and new Hollywood came face-to-face, and her guest list—with one faction represented by William Wyler, Gene Kelly, Darryl Zanuck, Lauren Bacall, Sam Spiegel, and her father, Henry, and the other by Warren Beatty, Tuesday Weld, Jean Seberg, Dennis Hopper, and her brother, Peter—bears that out.19 Fonda was in the mood to celebrate; after a half-dozen films in which the young actress had seemed to try on different personae—ingenue,
seductress, rebel, hellcat—without finding anything that quite fit, she had just opened in her first hit, playing the title role in the comic western Cat Ballou, a movie that arrived just when the clichés of an aging genre were becoming ripe for parody. Now she was shuttling between France, where Vadim seemed to be building his body of work around her (actually, around her body), and Los Angeles, where she was suddenly being offered a better class of project: She was currently working with Robert Redford and Marlon Brando in Arthur Penn’s The Chase. Her father, who had just turned sixty, roasted a pig on a spit and, surrounded by his own friends, enjoyed the event as a belated birthday party; her twenty-five-year-old brother hung out with the Byrds, the band he had hired to play for the crowd. The group’s electrified version of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” had reached the number one position on Billboard’s singles charts the week before; by the end of the month, Dylan would take his own song electric at the Newport Folk Festival.
Few people were better suited to broker a summit meeting between the Hollywood establishment and its upstarts than Jane Fonda, who even in 1965 had a foot in both worlds. She had not yet been stirred by political activism; that would happen, for the first time, a few days after the party, courtesy of Penn, who invited her to a Hollywood fund-raiser for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that he was co-hosting with Brando.* But her life in Europe had begun to give her a currency beyond her status as a second-generation movie actress, and perhaps because her own sense of identity was far from settled, she knew how to blend in anywhere, from an old-guard industry function to an all-night talking-and-smoking French house party to an L.A. “happening.”
The party Fonda threw that Fourth of July was a little bit of all three, plus a taste of the New York underground in the form of Andy Warhol, a perfect witness to the spectacle of celebrity, who arrived on a visit from New York with two of his self-created “stars” in tow. “Hollywood’s social events were very compartmentalized in those days,” wrote Vadim. “We decided that ours would be more democratic.”20 There’s no question that Fonda and Vadim succeeded in that goal, but the party was not, and could never have been, a conscious intermingling of old Hollywood and new, since in 1965, “old Hollywood” did not yet know it was soon to be overthrown, and “new Hollywood” was nothing more than a cast of players who didn’t yet realize that they were about to start running the show. But the two groups were aware of each other, and there seems to have been a sense of unspoken but mutually-agreed-upon territoriality.