Who the Hell's in It

by Peter Bogdanovich

  The “runner” is that you would have to go to the bathroom?

  Once the “runner” was established, then you go into “bits and pieces.” “Bits and pieces” were little quickies. Large number would come down in about thirty minutes. We had to do a substantial number together to show that we are indeed an act.

  What did you do?

  I wrote a parody on [the old song] “Side by Side,” which was wonderful. “Oh, we ain’t got a barrel of money. / That’s why we’re tryin’ to be funny. / And we’ll travel along, singin’ a song, side by side.” And it was a nice number, and you knew it was rehearsed. The music was playing. It was arranged. It had body. I was a stickler for it. He hated it.

  Why?

  Because he’d rather have fun. It was important to establish that we rehearsed and worked. This is business, it’s not bullshit. And because everything we did had that air of spontaneity, how do you let an audience know that this is hard work and it’s well prepared and so on, and he would give me, “Ah, you’re flag-waving again.” I’d say, “No, no, no, no. We got to where we are because of what you call a flag-wave.” Yeah, I used to say to him, “When Sophie Tucker comes into the room, it’s not flag-waving to introduce her. You have to acknowledge the excellence of that performer. And we have to acknowledge when they’re there. Now, what looks like a selfless act on our part is very selfish. We want to be tied to the names we introduce. I want them to know that Sophie Tucker knows us. That’s why I make that introduction.” Then he got clear on it and then it was OK. We worked in gray suits at the 500 Club. I said, “This will never do.” He said, “Why?” I said, “You don’t want to get dressed in a tux because it’s uncomfortable. Being homeless is also uncomfortable. You’ve got to wear a tux.” “Why?” “Because when I take a fall in a gray suit, there’s nothing too fucking funny about it. ’Cause you can go down on the Bowery and see a hundred gray suits laying in the streets. You fall down in a tux, when you get up all of the dirt is on a tux, it’s funny. And you’re the balance of who I am and you need to stand there and be clean when I get up dirty. It’s that simple.” And he respected my knowledge and respected what I knew about the business and went for it. All the time we were fitting him for the tux, “You and the goddamn fucking tux! I gotta wear a fucking tux!” He hated it. But then, after we broke up, he worked some twenty years by himself, always in a tux. And always wore the watch that I gave him—it was never off his wrist—the watch I gave him in 1950.

  So you knew that he loved you, in his own way.

  He had wonderful ways of showing it. Because he knew I had to see it. I remember one night somewhere—I remember the subject matter but I don’t remember the why of it—I said to him, “You know, you have a responsibility and obligation to me, and you never mean to pay off on it.” He said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “Whenever I talk about you, I tell people how much I love you and how strong that affection is and all that. You never tell that to nobody.” He said, “Maybe I don’t love you.” “That’s horseshit. I couldn’t love you if you didn’t love me.” He said, “Is this Freud?” I said, “No, it’s not Freud. It’s the truth.” It’s the same truth that I’ve been pontificating since I was twelve years old: You cannot love anybody unless you can hate. Now the person that says to me, “I hate nothing,” I say, “Do you love your wife?” “Oh, yes.” “You can’t have only one of those—you have to have both. You have to have the capacity to hate so that you have the capacity to love as deeply as you say you do.” And everything would always come true and he’d come to me a year or two down the pike and he’d say, “You were right about that. I hate that you were right about that but you were right about that.” And what we were doing was, we were giving one another two educations. He was educating me in the world of society, the structure, the place where we lived, and I did it with him with theatrics. We were constantly teaching one another. I was on him about taking the bow, about cutting the number, about doing this bit. And he was on me constantly with “Stop being naive.” You know, I took everyone in—whoever was around—I would be there to help him. And because of his upbringing, he was against my doing any of that. “Why are you giving him money?” I said, “He’s a man in trouble, that’s why. What’s it your fucking business?” “But you don’t have to do that.” I said, “I don’t do what I have to do, I do what I want to do.” I never could crack that—never.

  What was it like those first four years, before the movies? From ’46 to ’49?

  It was wonderful. It was the Katzenjammer Kids. We had so much fun, it’s ridiculous. We played football in a suite in Philadelphia, broke windows, lamps. Like two monkeys on a fucking high. We just played. And he played golf and I’d write. Then I said to him, “I’ve written some wonderful shit here, we’ve got to work on it.” “Later.” Uh-oh. “No, no later—because I’ll quit and then you won’t have any good shit to do.” “Later.” And I knew not to push him. He wanted to play golf during the tournament in Philadelphia, I didn’t push him. We left there, we went to Chicago, I said, “Now you’re going to practice.” And he did. But the thing of it was this—impossible to understand was—I would write him a bit that would run four minutes, spotting the positioning on the stage and the geography within that bit. I would do it that night and he was right on the fucking money. And he had a favorite line, he said, “You only have to tell me once.”

  But there were certain things that you always did, right?

  Oh, yeah. We had a foundation. We had a nucleus of thirty-some minutes that were locked. And we were doing an hour and twenty.

  So the thirty minutes was not consecutive. You started that way and you might go off and you come back.

  Which was necessary. Well, the two of us watched one another very carefully. And that wasn’t something we sat down and agreed to do—it was something that was instinctive. He watched me like a hawk.

  I see that in the Colgate Comedy Hours. You can see him watching you.

  Yeah, so that he knew where I was going, and he knew when … Did you ever see the “Ventriloquist” sketch on the Colgate Comedy Hour?

  Where you’re playing the dummy? Yeah.

  I looked at it the other day—I had a reason to see it—and I’m watching the timing between the two of us. I’m supposed to have incredible timing—that’s what I worked my whole life to hone—but his is up to that level, instinctively. With me, it’s in my bones. My dad had it—he put it in my bones: you can’t do it bad. There were times when Dean laid back in a sketch because we’d gotten some mail that berated him about picking on Jerry. I said, “Dean, you know who writes these letters? Some lady from Denver who lives on a farm and raises bat guano. What is the matter with you? The secret of what we do is the beauty of the heavy and the innocent, or you can call it Romeo and Juliet for all I give a shit. But it’s two factions working as one or pulling apart. It’s a comedy procedure that in research we can show you: we can do a lobotomy on the nature of comedy and I’ll show you how it works.” “Oh, well, I don’t want that.” “So, don’t do it. So that one fucking woman is going to be served? You’re not going to do it? The stronger you are, the funnier the kid is. Then, when you make up with the kid, there’s a wonderful feeling of fulfillment in the audience that’s good. We’re touching a lot of emotional buttons here. There but for the grace of God go I. There’s a man sitting in the audience who interprets you as his boss and me as him. If he identifies with me, it’s funny. He’s getting it, not me. And there’s a very, very fine line there, but we can’t fuck with it. We have to be very careful.” And, after about seven years of pontificating, he was getting very tired of me challenging the work.

  He felt challenged?

  Well, when I’d say, “You gotta get stronger in that bit tonight,” he knew I was right. He never said I was wrong about our work. I might have been wrong about something personal, something emotional, something passionate. But not about the work.

  Are you saying, he kind of got tired of it? Not re
sentful, but tired of your being right?

  He was tired and resentful. Because he was never given his due…. If the tables were turned and I had to succumb to the value of this team effort, I wouldn’t have made a year, no less ten.

  How exactly do you mean, Jerry?

  Meaning that if it were physically switched. If, when you got up in the morning, you opened the Copacabana and the whole thing’s about the silly, fucking crazy Jerry? Wait a minute. The silly, fucking crazy Jerry was only there because of him. And he wasn’t mentioned? Oh, “He sang three songs and they were OK.” He got that all the time. I don’t know how he ever dealt with it. With the exception of him saying to me, “I know where my bread-and-butter is. Don’t worry about it.” I said, “But Dean, if you don’t deal with this, if we don’t get it fixed or in some way pat you on the shoulder, it’s going to fall apart. You need it, as I need it. And don’t you resent the guy that got this whole column who you work with? He wasn’t entitled to that whole column or review.” I would always speak in the second person, or third person. I did a movie because of that. I wrote The Caddy [1953] so Dean would have a substantial movie of his own. That’s how it happened, and it worked very well. It worked for him psychologically. I never said a word to him. We just went ahead and made a movie, that was it. I told him it was about golfing—he was thrilled. But I repeat, he took ten years of sucking hind tit. But he became a big star in that decade—a big fucking star. Demanding all kinds of money and everything was wonderful for him. But I never could have made it.

  With Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, there wasn’t a clear differentiation. Hardy often was very funny, too.

  There was no split. It was always both guys were funny.

  But nobody wrote, “Oh, Laurel is the genius!” Even though people didn’t know that Laurel actually wrote the material.

  Never—Stan and I talked about that many times—it never happened. You couldn’t say “Laurel and”—you had to say “LaurelandHardy” as one word. And Martin and Lewis became that. And Stan and Ollie, interestingly, had the same relationship that Dean and I had: Ollie was on the golf course all the time. But if you took one without the other, without changing any of the other elements—structure, wardrobe, preset, practice—all that had to be the same. And you take one out of the mix, nothing works. And Stan told me that Ollie was the happiest at the country club, drinking at the bar, playing poker, doing all the things that Dean loved to do. But when Stan called, Ollie was there, on his fucking mark, and knew the material. He never gave Stan one bit of angst. He was just a consummate professional when he got on that set. But it was almost like Stanley had a piece of himself cloned into Ollie. For that matter, the reverse as well. Because Stan had this infinite time, the breathing time, the beating time, to fill all of Ollie’s motion and movement. You never saw Stan just look at Ollie. His body movement was like a great juggler.

  What was it like, coming to Hollywood for the first time?

  Frightening.

  You came to Hollywood when the studio system was still at its height. How was that?

  It was just like you think it would be. It was like Cagney and Bogart, Robinson, Claire Trevor, Jane Wyman, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis. I mean, it was Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy—it was movie time!

  Were you a movie fan?

  Oh, God, yes. I wrote Lana Turner a love letter, eight pages.

  When you were a kid?

  Yeah, I was about eleven or twelve. So now I’m dancing with her at Ciro’s and I can’t believe my fucking eyes. I’m dancing with Lana Turner and I can’t say anything. “Hi, how you doing, sweet?” “Nice to see ya.” “Hi, kid.” Scared shitless—peeing in my pants—holding her close to my body. Oh, my God. And I didn’t do her—that’s what pisses me off.

  I didn’t come out there until 61 and it was really ending by then.

  Well, from ’50 to ’60, we were royalty. We were taking over the Crosby-Hope mantle. All of the stuff being made was incredible work when we went out there. The Heiress [1949; William Wyler] was just being completed. Great work. All About Eve [1950; Joseph L. Mankiewicz] was just being completed. I became very friendly with Joe Mankiewicz and we had a great friendship for all the time until he died. And he was like you are—he did interviews with his friends—if he was enamored by something or someone. He only wanted me to tell him about comedy, then he married my secretary. We were there when, on Monday night, it was [George] Burns and [Gracie] Allen’s house; Wednesday night, Danny Kaye; Friday night, Jack Benny—all year long.

  Who went?

  Van Johnson and [his wife] Evie, Keenan Wynn and his wife, Clark Gable, Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland—which you shouldn’t have both in a room at the same time, but it was OK—Danny Kaye, Leo Durocher, Astaire, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney—all of the Metro people. I mean, it was nothing for Jack Benny to have a twenty-eight-person dinner party. It was like every Friday night.

  Did you go with Dean?

  Dean and I socialized in that Hollywood swing for the first two or three years.

  With your wives.

  Right. And then we started to get a little annoyed with having to go to parties all the time, so I started to back off, and so did he. We were happier being home. We were working very hard.

  You guys were doing two movies a year.

  Yeah, and nightclubs and concerts and The Colgate Comedy Hour.

  You were working pretty much all the time.

  I was having a wonderful time. I was never tired, per se. But it’s pretty tough, you know, getting up at four in the morning, you’re at your office at the studio a quarter to five and you go until maybe eight, or I see rushes and I give my cutter all of my information. I’m home at nine and I’m at a party at someone’s house at ten. And you don’t leave there until twenty to four. And I’m at the studio in twenty minutes. Many times I’ve left the party and went right to the studio. And it was great fun until you get a little tired of it. But the education that I got in those first ten years was just absolutely incredible.

  The first ten years in Hollywood, or the first ten years with Dean?

  The first ten years at Paramount—from the end of ’49. I was in the camera department more times than I was on the set making the movie—miniature department, editing, scoring, dubbing. I was in every department making friends with all the right people so that I could sneak and hear and watch and listen and learn.

  You obviously wanted to make your own pictures.

  Oh, yeah. I don’t think I knew it at the time. What I think it was, was my bones that my dad gave me—just so curious. Little did I know that what I was doing was preparing myself—I didn’t know I was doing it.

  But didn’t you make some home movies?

  Home movies, oh, classics! The Re-enforcer was also good. Watch on the Lime—um-hum.

  But how did you do those?

  I stayed up at night writing a screenplay to shoot on a Sunday. Now I would write it on a Monday night and I’ve got Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday at the studio to get all the props and cast it. By Saturday night I knew I had Jeff Chandler in it, Janet Leigh, Tony Curtis, Dean, Sammy [Davis, Jr.]. Sammy was so cute—he said, “Why do I always have to play a black guy?” “What would you play? A tall, white, fucking Wasp? What would you play?” Oh, we had such fun. What I was doing was, I was spoofing what we did all week in the studio. I shot my own main title.

  You must have known you had some interest in doing it for real.

  I loved it. I still didn’t know the depth of it until around 1959.

  The Bellboy didn’t have much dialogue, right? Wasn’t it all pantomime?

  No—the kid was pantomime.

  When I think about the picture, it almost seems like a silent movie.

  There’s a lot of talking and a lot of everything, but nobody knew that he didn’t talk. That was something that I devised and didn’t think I could pull off. And it worked. But Frank Tashlin said, “Do it yourself. You got a great piece of material here. Go
with it. You know what to do.” I said, “Frank, I don’t know what to do.” We shoot the first day in Florida and I call Frank after the shoot. He said, “Well?” I said, “Frank, I was doing things I never knew I knew. I was terrific. I got great stuff. I must have six fucking minutes of screen footage, and I shot wonderful stuff and I knew what to do, Frank.” It was incredible, because I did. I have no idea how I knew it. And then that night I’m sitting with my production team and I’m telling them what I’m gonna do tomorrow. I’m giving them setup for setup … You know that my greatest education came from learning what not to do. Did I learn? Whew.

  You mean, from some of the directors who weren’t so hot?

  Oh, yeah. But I also learned the psychology of them being not so hot. They don’t know they’re not so hot. They think they’re hot, and that’s when it’s like a magnet that draws me to them to watch very closely. I remember saying to one director, who has to remain nameless, I said, “When you say ‘Print,’ do you have any fucking idea what that means?” He didn’t half understand what I was talking about. I said, “When you say, ‘Print it,’ do you know what that means?” “What are you trying to say?” “I’m trying to say that when you say ‘Print,’ you open the optic of a billion children around the world. You can’t dog it. You can’t just say ‘Print’ because it’s expedient, or you want to get on with the day. You had no right to print that—it was inadequate material.” “I thought it was funny.” I said, “Yeah? Do you have a sense of humor like your rectum?” I could have killed him. But I had to get through it, because it was a [producer Hal B.] Wallis picture and I had to do it. But did I learn from that?!