Who the Hell's in It

by Peter Bogdanovich

  I came to the rehearsals of a controversial prison drama he was directing in Los Angeles, John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes. He yelled in exasperation at the actors, then turned to me and winked. One day he gave me a paperback of a novel he said he had always wanted to buy and make into a movie, but felt he was now too old to play the lead; he thought I would like it. The book, by Larry McMurtry, was called The Last Picture Show. I invited Sal to the first New York running of that movie, at Columbia’s projection room on Fifth Avenue, and he sat next to me. I was a nervous wreck, so he kept squeezing my hand and whispering what I wanted to hear. When the picture turned out to be a critical and popular success, nominated for eight Oscars, Sal never even took a small bow for being the one who gave me the book. I always credited him but this was rarely printed.

  The months flew by—and the busy, giddy years—for me one film after the other. We weren’t in touch so often: somehow we rarely seemed to be in the same city at the same time. Once we had lunch at Claridge’s in London. Sal talked openly of his troubles then, but never with any remorse or even a hint of resentment at my improved circumstances. We spoke of an important part I wanted him to play in a picture, Bugsy, from a script by playwright Howard Sackler; Sal would do the gangster Bugsy Siegel’s closest friend, who is nevertheless killed by Bugsy. The picture kept getting postponed. He was doing dinner theater around the States, had optioned a novel of Robin Maugham’s which he wanted to direct, did any television part he could get, was promised a lot more than anyone ever delivered. He never railed against the system, never even questioned why the studio powers considered him so undesirable. The audiences that came to see him on the little stages across the country still loved him, still cheered his perfectly erect, strutting figure, his soulful brown eyes.

  On another picture of mine, an ill-fated Cole Porter musical (At Long Last Love), Sal came to visit one night while we were shooting Burt Reynolds and Cybill Shepherd in a heated Beverly Hills swimming pool. Sal just hung around quietly and watched; I would go over and stand beside him and talk as often as possible. He was smiling a lot.

  The last time I saw him, in 1976, when we bumped into each other at 2 a.m. in an all-night news and magazine store on Santa Monica Boulevard, he still looked like a teenager. We embraced. He was rehearsing a new play, James Kirkwood’s P.S. Your Cat Is Dead!, a comedy that would open in L.A. soon; I was shooting a picture. Somebody waved at him, yelling, “Hey, Sal Mineo!” as we walked out to sit for a while in the car I had then, a big old Rolls-Royce. His Volkswagen Bug was parked in front of it. The jokes he made were at his own expense. You never felt any awkwardness around Sal—he made sure you were at ease—and somehow it never seemed like more than a day or two since we had seen each other.

  A couple of weeks later, we were filming on a Western exterior outside Los Angeles. It was early—sunny and freezing cold. As I stepped out of the car, there was a solemn little group from the crew huddled together looking forlorn. I came over with a joke about their grim looks; I said, “Who died?” The assistant director glanced up. “Sal Mineo,” he said.

  That Sal was stabbed to death in an alley was so horribly in keeping with many of the movie deaths he died that its bitter irony on some level no doubt must have amused him. After all, he had a black sense of humor and a firm grasp of the absurd. How could he not? A teenage symbol in his late thirties who never had a childhood. To see that newspapers plastered his murder in banner headlines around the world—especially in Los Angeles, the town in which he couldn’t get arrested—probably would have made him drop his head to the side and snore: “A lotta good that does me.”

  A Hollywood cynic was heard to call Elvis Presley’s death “a smart career move,” but Sal’s more violent passing did not give rise to similar demonstrations of concern or grief. Usually, when confronted with anything especially unpleasant—such as the Manson killings—respectable members of the community look for ways to place the blame on the victim. Odd sexual habits or drug-taking or whatever peculiarity might come to light posthumously would invariably lead to the conclusion that the victim was just asking for it in the first place and such are the wages of sin.

  That comfortable rationale makes it easier to live—not only in Hollywood—and any guilt which could momentarily be felt about the job that might have been given or the call that could have been returned can pass quickly and painlessly. Soon after the murder, a close friend of Sal’s, public relations advisor Eliot Mintz, sent out letters to some of Sal’s old friends and associates asking for contributions toward a $10,000 reward he wanted to raise for information leading to the arrest of the killer. Only a tiny fraction of that amount was sent in: virtually none of the letters, he told me, were even answered.

  In this racket, when you’re not hot anymore—when you’re cold—you’re dead anyway, so a lot of movie folk turned the page on Sal’s murder and shrugged: he wasn’t up for any picture.

  Sal’s murderer was caught in 1978, and a year later, found guilty of second-degree murder (and ten armed robberies); the sentence was fifty-one years to life. A light-skinned black from the South, he was nineteen when he stabbed Sal, who was thirty-seven. In passing sentence, L.A. Superior Court Judge Ronnie Lee Martin said, “I don’t think he’s susceptible to rehabilitation, considering his escalating conduct of committing [since age fourteen] more and more serious crimes.” Nevertheless, the man who brutally and senselessly ended Sal Mineo’s life was paroled in 1990, after serving eleven years. Sal would have been forty-eight. Soon after, this killer was again arrested and convicted of robbery and murder.

  Sal Mineo with James Dean and Natalie Wood in the empty-mansion sequence of Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), released two weeks after Dean’s fatal auto accident. All three actors suffered shockingly violent, early deaths.

  With all the filmland speculation about Sal’s death involving sexual gangs or cults, and the media’s pontifications on the wicked ways of Hollywood, the most brutal irony was that his assailant had no idea at the time of the murder who the victim was, that Sal had been killed for his money, and that the $38 he had on him was about all he had.

  I remember my mother didn’t approve of Rebel Without a Cause, indeed thought it was a dangerous picture. She said it painted all the teenagers as poor mixed-up kids and all the parents as insensitive simpletons, without showing any responsible alternative behavior. Certainly Rebel’s huge success led to countless spin-offs on that same theme, of misunderstood childhood and “teendom,” leading to an ever more tolerant and therefore ever more permissive society. Sal’s killer had been born two years after Rebel first hit, and was thus a direct product of the society the film helped to spawn. All three stars died young, and violently: Mineo by knife; Dean by car; Natalie Wood by drowning, after falling off her yacht five years after Sal’s death.

  During all the lurid media speculation following the murder and until his killer was caught, only Mineo’s family and friends knew the truth. Because they understood that Sal was a talented artist, and also the kind of generous pal you are lucky to find once in a lifetime.

  Born Salvatore Mineo, Jr., January 10, 1939, Bronx, NY; died February 12, 1976, West Hollywood, CA.

  Selected starring features (with director):

  1955: Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray)

  1956: Crime in the Streets (Don Siegel); Somebody Up There Likes Me (Robert Wise)

  1957: Dino (Thomas Carr); The Young Don’t Cry (Alfred L. Werker)

  1959: A Private’s Affair (Raoul Walsh); The Gene Krupa Story (Don Weis)

  1960: Exodus (Otto Preminger)

  1964: Cheyenne Autumn (John Ford)

  1965: Who Killed Teddy Bear? (Joseph Cates)

  11

  JAMES STEWART

  James Stewart’s wife, Gloria, told me over the phone—before I visited their home early in 1994, for what I didn’t know would be the last time I’d see or speak with either of them—that Jimmy always enjoyed my visits, and so did she. By then
I had known them both for about thirty years. Within what seemed like maybe two or three months, with virtually no warning, Gloria Stewart died of cancer and Jimmy Stewart disappeared from sight or sound until his own death about a thousand days later at age eighty-nine. I spoke with his daughter Kelly a year before he died, and she said he had seen no one but family and maybe five of his closest friends, and those only briefly. Mostly he just stayed upstairs in his bedroom, ate hardly at all, refused to hear any suggestions of maybe going out for a walk or stopping by the office. “You know my dad,” she said, ruefully, “he’s a Taurus—he’s stubborn.” Clearly, after Gloria’s sudden death, following a close public and private marriage of more than forty-five years, Jimmy felt his life was over, too.

  There was perhaps more than grief involved, but of course we’ll never really know. Certainly a complicated tension existed between Gloria and Jimmy that last time I saw them. She had just returned from seeing a doctor and slightly visible near her neck were some doctors’ X-ray markings which she clearly had not had time to wash off. I believe I happened to have a date with them for a drink around five in the afternoon on the day Gloria was told she might have, or in fact did have, cancer, but she hadn’t informed Jimmy yet. After I heard about her illness and then her death, I have often thought about that final time with them, and the emotions which the Stewarts seemed to have boiling just below the surface.

  Jimmy hadn’t been feeling well for a while—nothing very specific, just a kind of weakness and exhaustion. When I asked Gloria about this on the phone, she said, “Oh, Jimmy’s always got something wrong with him,” with the clear implication that he was also a bit of a hypochondriac. I then remembered asking Stewart once, maybe ten years before, how he was feeling and he said, “Aw, Payter, I’ll tell ya, after seventy, it’s all patch, patch, patch.” Of course, as always, the Jimmy Stewart delivery made this memorably funny, but it also speaks to a general attitude about his aging.

  James Stewart as Junior Senator Jefferson Smith at a low point toward the end of his Senate filibuster during the famous conclusion to Frank Capra’s masterful and hugely successful political drama, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), which at the time the real members of the Senate hated. Everyone thought Jimmy shouldve won the Oscar, so he did the following year for The Philadelphia Story.

  Now, a certain stoic fragility was very much a part of his mystique and of the ambiguous heroes he sometimes played. Especially in his five Anthony Mann Westerns where it’s most apparent that no other male film star was ever better at showing the real pain and fear caused by violence. Or, indeed, the crushing anguish of lost love. You can see it crystallized in the few (brilliantly shot and edited) moments of the frantic tussle at the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, when villain Raymond Burr throws him out of his own rear window: searing pain and terror in a few seconds. And there is simply no better lost-love–anguished performance in picture history than his in Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

  In no way did this honest commonality compromise his stature as a leading man; it showed a vulnerability that average people in those circumstances would identify with. His ability to overcome the fear and pain made him therefore even more of an everyman hero, as he was for his currently most often-remembered role, in Frank Capra’s small-town-America fantasy It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Average American guy, in fact, is how he was cast in his first Western (the most American of genres), Destry Rides Again, released in 1939, the same year as his breakout performance of the naive Midwestern senator in Capra’s then-controversial Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. In Destry he was cast opposite Europe’s world-weary Marlene Dietrich, as a way of accentuating the extreme polarities of their personas. The picture (adroitly directed by George Marshall, an amiable studio journeyman) is a perfect example of what made the old star system in its heyday work so well—both stars’ parts being expertly styled for what these two actors could do best. Because their innate personalities have such appeal and scope, the characters instantly achieve a mythic size impossible to attain only with good actors.

  The sizeable success of Destry Rides Again (in a year that also saw the release of four other Stewart pictures, including Mr. Smith) led to nearly twenty (all postwar) Westerns. He was rivaled solely by John Wayne for hit cowboy pictures throughout the fifties and early sixties (Wayne’s first successful A-Western, John Ford’s Stagecoach, also was released in 1939). Destry set a particular image of Stewart that he and others exploited for the rest of his career (as did Mr. Smith, in a much more learned mode). Stewart’s Destry was the book-reading, nonviolent Eastern dude in the West who must learn to use a gun when necessary. Ford cast Stewart in precisely that same role twenty-three years later for what would turn out to be both the actor’s and the director’s last great Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Dietrich told me that she and Jimmy had a blazing affair during the shooting of Destry, and the electricity is noticeable. During one love scene, Marlene said, Stewart’s “interest” in her became so “apparent” that director Marshall called an early lunch, at the same time wagging his index finger reproachfully at the actor, “Jimmy …” Orson Welles once told me he had taken Dietrich “to have an abortion after Jimmy knocked her up.”

  James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich in Stewart’s first Western (of some eighteen), Destry Rides Again (1939), directed by old pro George Marshall. Stewart and Dietrich (whose first Western it was, too) had a torrid affair during shooting.

  The shy, retiring character Stewart generally played around women evidently was like catnip to them (my mother always said she wanted “to mother him”) and Jimmy was a well-known ladies’ man prior to his marriage to Gloria Hatrick McLean in 1949 at the age of forty-one. The popular image of Stewart from that point on was as “an exemplary husband” and family man. Since they soon had twin girls and Gloria had two sons from her first marriage, he was suddenly a responsible father of four. What was known only among a few people in the business was that Jimmy did continue occasional dalliances with his co-stars in the fifties. He once joked very obliquely about this around the time of Rear Window (1954), when asked how he felt about being married while kissing Grace Kelly. “Waall,” he said, “I’m married, but I’m not dead!” The common wisdom is that Ms. Kelly had already been through Gary Cooper (High Noon, 1952) and Clark Gable (Mogambo, 1953), and that Stewart had no escape. Hitchcock hinted to me that Stewart also could not resist Kim Novak on Vertigo (1958), and the director’s longtime assistant and dear friend, Peggy Robertson, confirmed this romance; a good friend of mine heard about it directly from a still fond Kim Novak. Evidently the affair continued, because immediately after Vertigo the two of them co-starred in a pretty weak Bell, Book and Candle (1958). Of course, this occasional occupational hazard could have caused some private grief to Gloria, which Jimmy would no doubt have profoundly regretted after her passing.

  Ironically, it was Stewart’s involvement with his first postwar Western, Winchester ’73 (1950), that eventually changed Hollywood beyond recognition, certainly far beyond where either Jimmy or I could see at the time we first met in January 1964. Winchester ’73 also marked the beginning of his extremely fruitful relationship with its director, Anthony Mann, and was among the first and best of the genre’s darkening trend, a kind of noir Western with complex and ambiguous reverberations. Since its subject, in essence, is the uniquely American obsession with firearms—in this case a highly prized rifle—the picture tragically retains a contemporary significance and an ominous quality perhaps not nearly as resonant, nor as grimly intended, on its initial release. Since one of the key uses of art is to illuminate, Winchester ’73 continues to serve that purpose.

  Although Cary Grant had flourished since the end of the thirties as an independent star, not signed to any studio’s long-term contract, and although by the end of the forties such stars as Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney had their own production companies, it wasn’t until Jimmy Stewart’s percentage deal on Winchester ’73—negotiated for him wit
h Universal by his agent Lew Wasserman (whose own company, MCA, within a decade would buy this same studio)—that the notion of a star’s receiving a hefty piece of the action in lieu of salary began to gain wide acceptance. As a direct result, by the time the sixties had barely started, the old studio star system had crumbled, and soon all stars were getting a piece and large salaries. What was initiated as a name-actor’s honest sharing of the gamble with a film’s financiers deteriorated into a no-lose situation for the talent, and a deep crisis for the business and the art of pictures. And roles for Stewart and his contemporaries dried up after the mid-sixties because there were no studios to look after the talent and design roles as they aged.

  Mann and Stewart would eventually work together on eight other movies, most memorably four more of the finest fifties Westerns—the last full decade of the genre’s classic period—with strikingly photographed exteriors and generally hard-edged stories of greed, ambition and vengeance: Bend of the River, The Naked Spur, The Far Country and The Man from Laramie—the last featuring an especially violent and frightening sequence in which Stewart is tortured and maimed. His edgy, chip-on-the-shoulder performance in Winchester ’73 set the standard and remained one of his most intriguing. Stewart used these tough, somewhat neurotic frontiersmen he played for Mann to help radically alter his original image as all-American dreamer and whimsical man of integrity (though he still mined that area occasionally with pictures like The Glenn Miller Story, also directed by Mann, and Harvey). As a result of these, and his three extraordinary Hitchcock movies during the same years (Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much and Vertigo), it’s not surprising that the fifties were by far Stewart’s most popular decade, concluding in brilliant high form with Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959), the best film ever made about the American judicial system.