Who the Hell's in It

by Peter Bogdanovich

  After a little while I asked if I could borrow his phone for a quick call. I was preparing a picture for M-G-M and was late in calling its president, Frank Yablans. Grant was on the M-G-M board of directors, and exclaimed Frank’s name with affection, then said, “I’ll get him on the line for you! That’ll impress ’im.” He laughed mischievously, then led the way conspiratorially to the phone in the foyer, dialed M-G-M, asked for “Frank Yablans, please,” and then, when the secretary answered, with perfect Cary Grant aplomb, said, “Hello, I’m call-ing for Petah Bogdanovich—can Mr. Yab-lans speak with him now?” There was a pause and then Cary said, “Yes, it is.” He winked at me; the secretary had obviously asked him if he was Cary Grant. “All right, dah-ling …” Pause. “Yes, you can tell him it’s me hold-ing for Petah.” Pause. “All riiight …” Covering the speaker, he told me she was seeing if Yablans could take the call, he was in a meeting, and on another line. Cary seemed to be having a great time, and looked genuinely disappointed when she came back and told him that Yablans would phone back because he couldn’t take the call right now. “Can’t he, dah-ling? All right.” And he thanked her, hung up, and told me that Yablans must be in an important meeting; he shrugged. “Too bad—we tried,” he said, and I thanked him. (Little did either of us know at the time that Yablans was under tremendous corporate pressure, and that his tenure at M-G-M would shortly be ending. Or, that I would never do the picture there, either.)

  Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr in Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember (1957), which starts out with sparkling light comedy. The film was a color and CinemaScope remake of McCarey’s own black-and-white Love Affair (1939), co-starring Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne. Writer-director McCarey preferred the original, and it is better, but for many the later version packs the bigger emotional wallop.

  We went back into the living room; Cary sat in a large easy chair and Barbara draped herself comfortably on its arm and around him. I sat in a straight-backed chair and told them both the current mess I was in. Cary had asked me what I was up to and, privately, I thought if he knew what was going on in this matter, maybe he could help. In fact, I was a bit desperate because the studio picture I had recently finished, Mask with Cher, was caught in the middle of a corporate struggle, both internal and external, with another mega-company. Everything centered around using twenty-five minutes of Bruce Springsteen’s music right at the peak of his phenomenal success with the Born in the U.S.A. album: we had several of his songs for our use when not only was that record number one, but every single other album Springsteen had ever recorded was in the top forty. And, at that point, Springsteen had almost never allowed anybody to use any of his music in a movie, much less so much of his best and most famous songs.

  Cary listened very closely. Because the movie studio was Universal—where I had first met him and where he and his company had a production deal for years—and because Lew Wasserman was still top man there, and still the most feared and respected man in Hollywood (and who actually liked my picture), I hoped Grant might ultimately intervene in some way on my behalf. If the situation had occurred in a movie of his—Holiday, for example, or The Talk of the Town, or People Will Talk—Cary Grant would surely have gone to bat for the artists against the money.

  But this wasn’t a movie. Cary had a remarkably empathetic expression on his face, and by the end of my tale of woe, anger and frustration, his look was sad, his eyes tearing, but not out of happiness now. I could see that both he and Barbara were affected by the absurdity of the situation, yet when I had finished, all he basically said, apart from a touch of genuine commiseration, was: “Well, I am cer-tain that com-mon sense will pre-vail.” In the agitated state I was in, looking for crumbs, I took “common sense” to mean the studio would have to eventually see the light; I took it as a vote for our side. (And Cary proved right again, though it took twenty years: in 2004, Universal finally put out a DVD of my Springsteen version.)

  But at the time, everything couldn’t have gone worse. At one point, in a last ditch letter to Wasserman, I invoked Cary’s name and quoted his remark, using it to bolster my point. Nothing helped. Later, I felt badly about having used his name at all, especially without his permission. Whether or not he definitively knew of my letter to Wasserman, he certainly didn’t ask me what I was talking about when I eventually called and apologized to him for using his name in the matter. He simply took a positive note and said he’d heard the picture was terrific, but underneath his letting me totally off the hook was a feeling that he still wished he could have helped me, saved the day. Soon after, I sent him the most valuable thing I could possibly give: one of my late father’s paintings, each of them a treasure to me. He took it in kind and responded by doing something he had once told me that he never did unless it was really important: he wrote me a letter. It was neatly typed on his personal blue stationery, his name in very small type at the top; in ballpoint, he had written the salutation, “Dear Peter,” himself, and signed “Cary” at the bottom. Between were two paragraphs of praise for my father’s work, saying what a pleasure it was to wake up each morning to the painting’s “vibrant colors.” He wrote that while he understood why I had sent the gift, it had not been necessary in any way. Nevertheless, he was happy to receive it and appreciated the spirit in which it was sent. His signature was under the word, “Gratefully.”

  We spoke after that, of course, and he even told me once that he was having it put into his will that when he died, my father’s painting would be returned to me. I objected to this and told him the present was for him and for whomever he wished to leave it. He thanked me again, even more enthusiastically.

  Yet the last time Cary and I were together in person was the evening I went over to see “the little Cary Grant” and told him my troubles. He and Barbara had walked me back to the entrance, both of them sympathetic and gracious. Cary seemed a little more tired and was a trifle more slouched over than usual, but warmer than ever. Barbara moved back into the house and, with the full moon now directly over the house, Cary gave one final wave from his doorway. By the time I pulled my car out, the big white front door was closed and I never saw Cary again.

  When I heard, eighteen months later, that he had died in Iowa, preparing to do one of his Evenings, it seemed somehow touchingly appropriate. The death of Cary Grant came in the heartland of the country which adopted the Bristol boy named Archie and for over fifty years had taken him to its heart, as the rest of the world had, too. Barbara would tell me they had just been saying that if Cary lived to be as old as his mother, they had at least another thirteen years together. And then suddenly, backstage in Davenport, ready to go on, he had a stroke. It was over very fast. He held her hand.

  Thinking of all the laughs, human insights and sheer pleasure he has given millions across the planet through those pictures in the dark, it adds up to something pretty substantial as a legacy. Looking back now, nearly two decades since his death, there is a lovely irony in his remark that even he wished he “could be Cary Grant,” because, of course, that was exactly who he did become, and will remain. And there will never be anyone like him again, not even close.

  Born Archibald Alexander Leach, January 18, 1904, Bristol, England; died November 29, 1986, Davenport, IA.

  Selected starring features (with director):

  1932: Blonde Venus (Josef von Sternberg)

  1933: She Done Him Wrong (Lowell Sherman); I’m No Angel (Wesley Ruggles)

  1935: Sylvia Scarlett (George Cukor)

  1936: Big Brown Eyes (Raoul Walsh); Suzy (George Fitzmaurice)

  1937: Topper (Norman Z. McLeod); The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey)

  1938: Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks); Holiday (Cukor)

  1939: Gunga Din (George Stevens); Only Angels Have Wings (Hawks); In Name Only (John Cromwell)

  1940: His Girl Friday (Hawks); My Favorite Wife (Garson Kanin); The Philadelphia Story (Cukor)

  1941: Penny Serenade (Stevens); Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock)

  1942
: The Talk of the Town (Stevens); Once Upon a Honeymoon (McCarey)

  1943: Mr. Lucky (H. C. Potter)

  1944: Destination Tokyo (Delmer Daves); None But the Lonely Heart (Clifford Odets); Arsenic and Old Lace (Frank Capra)

  1946: Notorious (Hitchcock)

  1947: The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (Irving Reis); The Bishop’s Wife (Henry Koster)

  1948: Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (Potter)

  1949: I Was a Male War Bride (Hawks)

  1950: Crisis (Richard Brooks)

  1951: People Will Talk (Joseph L. Mankiewicz)

  1952: Room for One More (Norman Taurog); Monkey Business (Hawks)

  1955: To Catch a Thief (Hitchcock)

  1957: An Affair to Remember (McCarey)

  1958: Indiscreet (Stanley Donen); Houseboat (Melville Shavelson)

  1959: North by Northwest (Hitchcock); Operation Petticoat (Blake Edwards)

  1963: Charade (Donen)

  1964: Father Goose (Ralph Nelson)

  1966: Walk, Don’t Run (Charles Walters)

  7

  JACK LEMMON

  First meeting Jack Lemmon in January 1961, on my initial trip to Hollywood, I interviewed him briefly in the Beverly Hills Hotel’s famous Polo Lounge, at that time the epicenter of glamour. Jack then had been living in Los Angeles only about seven years. I remembered seeing him on New York television in the early fifties in a little daytime serial he was doing with his first wife, and then on Broadway in a not very successful revival of the classic farce Room Service. Lemmon was virtually the ideal comedy juvenile. There was only a small section on him in my first Esquire article, but a couple of years later, the magazine assigned me to do a profile on Lemmon, so I spent two weeks watching him work on Billy Wilder’s adaptation of Irma La Douce with Shirley MacLaine.

  Of course, by the time we did that piece, Lemmon had acted in seventeen pictures in eight years, among them such highlights as his very first, It Should Happen to You, in which he is “introduced” opposite Judy Holliday, original screenplay by Garson Kanin, directed by George Cukor. There was also Mister Roberts, starring Henry Fonda, directed by John Ford and Mervyn LeRoy, for which Lemmon—in only his fourth picture—won the Oscar as Best Supporting Actor. Other popular and challenging works included the zany Operation Mad Ball, co-written by Blake Edwards (with playwright Arthur Carter); Wilder’s two comedy classics, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment; and an achingly painful and moving portrayal of an upper-middle-class drunk in Blake Edwards’ film version of Days of Wine and Roses, a role that evidently mirrored Jack’s own problems with alcohol during a certain part of his life.

  The funny thing is that I had seen Jack in person for the second time (after the Broadway play) one night in 1959 when he and Wilder were doing a scene in Manhattan’s theater district for The Apartment. They had a call out for a bunch of theatrical extras; I was one of them, but didn’t even get close to Lemmon, who was standing outside waiting while we all went inside. (Worse, I never could find myself in the finished film.)

  Singing at the piano, Jack Lemmon in his first movie role, opposite the divine Judy Holliday, in the poorly titled It Should Happen to You (1954); writer Garson Kanin originally called it A Name for Herself, which is only what the picture is all about. It was directed beautifully (with locations in Manhattan) by George Cukor.

  Jack was one of the last major contract players in picture history, starting out with a seven-picture deal at Columbia. When we sat down at the Polo Lounge, the first thing he talked about was why he thought his Columbia contract films (this was at the tail end of the old studio star system) had not been as successful as those (The Apartment, Some Like It Hot) he had made on loan-out. He said, “Some of the Columbia pictures were damned good, too, but I think what screwed them up were the titles. No, really, titles are important. Look at the ones I’ve been stuck with: It Should Happen to You, You Can’t Run Away From It, Phffft.” He smiled. “When we were shooting Phffft, they stopped production right in the middle of the day so they could discuss that title. Everyone waited while they went into a two-and-a-half-hour huddle upstairs. When they broke, I asked the director about it, and he said they’d decided to take out one ‘f.’”

  Esquire never got around to running my profile of Jack, but this is pretty much how it went:

  “When I first got out here, I thought they were pulling my leg,” Jack Lemmon said, excitedly. “Private dressing room. Mister Lemmon. This is your chair. This is your stand-in. Stand-in for what? And, of course, your private bungalow is outside. I was a New York actor. For me, the theater was it. What did I know about being a movie star?”

  Angrily: “I get livid when people call me a comedian. I could no more get up in front of a microphone and do jokes …”

  Warmly: “Andover’s really a great school. I’m hoping to send my son Chris there. Had a lotta fun, too. In the senior year, we put on a revue—I’ll never forget a lyric some nut wrote: ‘I’m going into the Army / And if Hitler ever saw me / He would never, never harm me now …’ And he graduated, too!”

  Wistfully: “My parents both came out here when I did. Pop was retired, so they just came. They were very close—they just weren’t living together when Pop passed away.”

  Broadly: “I was born in Boston, but I never got that accent because my parents both came from Baltimore. But I remember while I was at Harvard—I was in the Ritz Bar—and this college girl came in. She was wearing bobbysox, a camel’s-hair coat—you know, the whole thing. One of the guys knew her and asked her to sit down. And she said, and I quote, ‘No, ay cahn’t—Mums, Dad and Poopoo are waiting in the car …’ I fell out of my chair. ‘Mums, Dad and Poopoo …’? It’s classic.”

  Reverently: “Alec Guinness wrote me a letter after The Apartment—at least four pages, handwritten—about his attitude toward acting, talked about my work. I was delirious with happiness and shock at what this man had taken the time to do. That letter is as valuable to me as anything I’ve ever received.”

  Earnestly: “Used to play an awful lot of squash. Two or three hours a day when I was at Harvard. Just can’t find anybody around here who knows how to play.”

  The Irma La Douce set took up all of Stage 4 on the Samuel Goldwyn lot, being a realistic re-creation of a Paris street. The fabled Alexandre Trauner designed it. This was October–November 1962. In the film, Lemmon plays a French policeman who gets fired and inadvertently becomes the pimp for the best whore on the block, a role taken by Shirley MacLaine. Bruce Yarnell plays her former pimp, who is bested in an extensive fight sequence which the company was in the process of shooting at the “Chez Moustache” bistro.

  Wednesday afternoon. The shot: Lemmon, sitting on a billiard table, was to get sprayed from across the room by Lou Jacobi holding a seltzer bottle. Revived, he was to pick up a (latex) billiard ball and, after a couple of lines, to come over to Yarnell and shove it into his open, laughing mouth. Whores, pimps, and gamblers stood about as spectators. Rehearsal: “I don’t have anything to tell you,” said Billy Wilder. “I should, because I’m the director, but I can’t think of anything. Somevon should write material for me.” Lemmon was tossing the ball in the air and glowering at Yarnell. A bell rang signaling silence. “OK, let’s try it vonce,” Wilder said and imitated a seltzer bottle: “Spritz-spritz-spritz-spritz-spritz …” Lemmon (angrily tossing the ball in the air): “Now I’m mad. Now I’m really mad. And when I’m mad, I’m like a tiger.” Yarnell (laughing): “Did you hear that, boys, he’s a tiger.” Wilder (interrupting): “Yeh, vell, dat’s da line, Bruce.”

  Lemmon stopped tossing the ball and wiped his face nervously. Actress (playing whore): “Are we supposed to laugh, Billy, when he sticks the ball in his mouth?” Wilder: “Are you kidding? The audience is supposed to laugh. Ve hope. I have a thing like Hitchcock—I try to put von joke into every movie.” The crew laughed. Lemmon (dropping the ball): “Oh, oh, wait, I lost the prop.” Wilder: “Yah, make it a little dirty before you shove it down his throat.” Le
mmon took a sponge from Harry Ray, his makeup man, and wet his hair and face with it.

  The takes: Wilder called for another ball. “Magic time,” said Lemmon, anxiously. The seltzer-spray missed Lemmon’s face and hit his stomach. “All right, hold it,” said Wilder. Two short bells rang. Wilder turned to a particularly busty actress: “Susan, you gotta breathe out, ozzervise ve don’t see Harriet’s face.” For the next eight takes, the spray continued to fall short of Lemmon’s face; his clothes were soaking but he did not seem to notice.

  “You know the difference between falsies and the real thing?” Yarnell asked of no one in particular. “Falsies taste like rubber.” Take 12: “C’mon kids,” said Wilder. “It’s the usual siphon shot we’ve done before.” The bottle finally worked right. “Print dat von,” said Wilder. Four or five of the whores began screaming and chasing each other about the set. “Vish ve had dat kind of audience at a preview,” said Wilder.

  Lemmon meandered out of the bistro; one of the male extras came up to him and began a conversation. The actor was telling Lemmon some of his problems and he listened with concern. When the young man mentioned that he thought Lemmon might win another Oscar for his performance in Days of Wine and Roses, Jack pantomimed picking up a telephone receiver. “Hello, operator,” he said, “this is a bad connection—I can’t hear a word you’re saying….” The extra laughed quietly. Lemmon excused himself hesitantly and moved away. At every opportunity, Lemmon retired to an upright piano outside his portable dressing room and practiced for a television appearance he was to make on The Dinah Shore Show. “Where was I?” he said, resting his cigarette at the edge of the piano top. Nearby, several actresses hummed along with the music.