EIGHT
“Chicago”
Finished by the end of August 1955 with his obligations on The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell, Preminger turned with relief to filming The Man with the Golden Arm, Nelson Algren’s novel about a drug addict in a Chicago slum that won the first National Book Award in 1950. Otto already had a long involvement with the novel, which Ingo had recommended to him in 1951. “He wasn’t interested at first,” as Ingo recalled.
But I kept pushing because Otto, even before he decided to film The Moon Is Blue, was looking for a way to violate the Production Code and here was a story that would do that because there was a clause in the Code prohibiting verbal references to, or the depiction of, drug-taking. I was Otto’s agent at the time, and he listened to me, but only after we had many violent arguments. It was almost against Otto’s will that I put a group together that made a deal where Otto would have the first option to do the picture.1
Ingo’s group of investors bought the rights from the estate of John Garfield, who had died in 1952. When he had learned of the Code’s prohibitions, however, Garfield in 1951 had abandoned his plans to turn the novel into a star vehicle for himself. Otto, after finishing Carmen Jones and all the while prodded by his brother, began to get enthused about the project for the very reason that Garfield had dropped it. He realized that in tackling a prohibited subject for his third outing as an independent filmmaker he would again be offering moviegoers the kind of material that the major studios were afraid of and that could not be seen at home on television.
Before Otto had become involved, Ingo had hired one of his clients, Lewis Meltzer (Otto had directed Meltzer’s play Yankee Fable in 1940), to write a screenplay. “He was not very talented,” Ingo said, “and his adaptation wasn’t good, but Meltzer felt, and I felt too, that something could be done with it. Once Otto came on board, he threw Meltzer out.”2 In the late summer of 1954, as he was supervising postproduction on Carmen Jones, Otto had brought Nelson Algren to Hollywood from Chicago to talk about the film and possibly to collaborate on the script. Between the director and the novelist a complete lack of rapport was immediately apparent. Preminger arranged for Algren to stay in a cottage at the Beverly Hills Hotel, but when he called to schedule a meeting he discovered that the novelist had checked out. Later in the day Algren telephoned to inform Preminger that the hotel had been too “fancy” and that he had relocated to a dump in Skid Row, “a disreputable, broken-down, flea-ridden hotel full of pimps, addicts, and drunks,” according to Preminger. After a few days of working with Algren, Otto discovered that the novelist “couldn’t write dialogue or visualize scenes.”3
Algren, however, had a quite different recollection of their meeting. “I never gave him a script,” he contended.
When I went out to Hollywood working for Otto was the farthest thing from my mind. My two days with Otto were a farce. He picked me up in his Caddy and drove me to his office. A Japanese electrician was stringing lights… . Otto sat at his desk and a makeup man began working on him [in preparation for a television appearance], stopping only while Otto was using the telephone. A man who looked like a PR man came in puffing a pipe and made Otto furious: “Take pipe out!” he commanded. … I began helping the electrician string the lights while the makeup man kept working between telephone calls. I was pleased to be in a place where so many people were keeping busy while accomplishing absolutely nothing. Suddenly I smelled smoke; it was coming from the PR man who had stuffed the pipe in his lapel pocket. “Fool!” Otto shouted, “you’re on fire!” Later that morning, after the PR man’s fire had been put out, the makeup man and the electrician had left, and the telephone had stopped ringing, Otto approached me, stopped beyond hand-shaking distance and said, clicking his heels: “I am happy to have met such an interesting man.”4
To Nelson Algren, who lived in a lower-depths area in Chicago, Preminger’s world of Hollywood protocol seemed to consist of fatuous, self-aggrandizing gestures: sound and fury signifying “absolutely nothing.” “Otto has always enjoyed special privilege,” Algren scoffed. “When his family was trapped by the invasion of Austria, a Viennese chief of police obtained a plane for them to escape. The family arrived in New York with only temporary visas. Tallulah Bankhead spoke to her father, then Speaker of the House. A special bill was passed making the Premingers American citizens. So much for the Holocaust,” he reported, inaccurate on almost all counts. “[My] book dealt with life at the bottom,” Algren observed. “Otto has never, not for so much as a single day, had any experience except that of life at the top.”5
Algren made a hasty departure, convinced that a director who only knew “life at the top” had no chance of making an authentic film about human wreckage in an urban underbelly. A few weeks later, on September 14, 1954, Preminger signed an agreement with television writer Robert Alan Aurthur, paying him $2,500. On December 23 Aurthur signed a formal contract at a higher salary—and then he was gone, replaced by Walter Newman, who on February 11, 1955, signed a contract for $70,000. To help Newman, Preminger, curiously enough, rehired Lewis Meltzer, Ingo’s “untalented” client who had written the original adaptation. Newman and Meltzer are credited as the film’s coauthors. As Preminger and his battalion of writers discovered, it was hard work cobbling a workable screenplay out of Algren’s novel.
“At once a philosopher of despair and a comedian of the lower depths, [Algren] lets us in on the condition of the lost,” writes literary historian David Castronovo in Beyond the Gray Flannel Man: Books from the 1950s That Made American Culture. “He’s our poet of hopelessness, which is to say the most unusual of American poets.”6 For its poetry as well as its despair, Algren’s novel is doubly damned as a prospect for successful Hollywood transplantation. The man with the golden arm is Frankie Majcinek (Machine), a vet who got hooked on heroin during his stint in the Army. He’s an ace card dealer (his golden arm) trapped in a loveless marriage to Zosch, a woman whose legs became paralyzed in a car accident caused by his drunkenness. Glimpsing possible redemption in a romance with Molly, a neighbor, and a career as a jazz drummer, Frankie thinks he can kick his habit. But in Algren’s fetid underworld, a one-way ticket to oblivion is the only destination for Frankie. After he kills his drug dealer in a rage, Frankie becomes a fugitive who haunts alleys and rooming houses. With the arm that has dealt cards and received needles filled with heroin, Frankie hangs himself; his crippled wife descends into madness; and Molly slides into a life of prostitution.
Algren’s authorial voice, alternately luminous and bleak, a self-infatuated blend of hard-boiled lyricism, charnel-house imagery, and compassion, guides the reader through an underworld of deadbeats, misfits, petty criminals, and drunks. As his characters hurtle toward death or damnation Algren periodically pauses to offer philosophical asides or to explore the inner monologues of minor characters. Atmosphere, not narrative momentum, is Algren’s concern, and the heart of the novel—the author’s wise presence, the sprung-rhythm music of his voice—is not translatable to film. “There was no delivery from the dead end of lost chance,” the novel’s narrator muses, with almost biblical cadence, as he observes Frankie looking out of a jailhouse window.
No escape from the blue steel bars of guilt. Somewhere far above a steel moon shone, with equal grandeur, upon boulevard, alley, and park; flophouse and penthouse, apartment-hotel and tenement. Shone with that sort of wintry light that makes every city chimney, standing out against it in the cold, seem a sort of altar against a driving sky. Beyond the bars light and shadow played ceaselessly, as it played beneath so many long-set moons, for so many that had lain here before Frankie: the carefree and the careful ones, the crippled and the maimed, the foolhardy phonies and the bitter rebels; each to go his separate way, under his own private moon. Against a driving sky7
Preminger’s intention was to wrestle a standard sensation melodrama out of Algren’s literary web. He and his writers give Frankie’s drug addiction far more prominence than it has in the novel, where in fac
t it was an afterthought, an addition encouraged by the novelist’s agent. And they twist the story in order to conjure a spurious Hollywood ending in which Molly helps Frankie to kick his habit. Only Zosch is unredeemed. Unlike the character in the novel, she only pretends to be a cripple, as a way of binding her husband to her, and it is she rather than Frankie who kills the drug dealer. As Frankie and Molly face the future, Zosch jumps to her death.
Preminger’s careerlong disclaimer about adaptation was never more pertinent than here: “When a producer buys the rights to a book or a play he owns it,” Preminger declared. “The property rights are transferred, as in any sale. The writer gives up his control, as the word ‘sell’ implies. When I prepare a story for filming it is being filtered through my brain, my emotions, my talent such as I have. … I have no obligation, nor do I try, to be ‘faithful’ to the book.”8 Understandably, Algren, the poet of the lower depths, felt Preminger, the man who lived “only” at the top, had “done violence” to his book. As Preminger admitted, when he read the final draft the novelist was “furious.”9
As Newman and Meltzer were finishing the script over the spring and summer of 1955, Otto began to line up his cast. For Frankie Machine, he wanted either Frank Sinatra (who, in fact, is cited twice in Algren’s novel) or Marlon Brando. Sinatra accepted the role before Brando’s agent even had time to respond. (Although there would have been explosions between the Method-trained Brando and the anti-Method Preminger, America’s greatest film actor would surely have given an electrifying performance.) On June 14, for $100,000, Sinatra signed a contract with Carlyle Productions. For Molly, Preminger wanted Kim Novak, a newcomer under contract to Harry Cohn, the profane czar of Columbia Pictures, where Preminger now had his Hollywood office. “Harry and I had a love-hate relationship,” Otto recalled. “In order to disarm him I always recited his favorite four-letter words the minute I saw him.”10 Cohn was reluctant to release Novak, who with her recent starring role in Picnic was about to replace Rita Hayworth as the first lady of the lot. Playing hard to get, Cohn asked for, and Preminger agreed to, $100,000 for Novak’s services. As Frankie’s forlorn wife, Preminger cast Eleanor Parker, who, on loan-out from MGM, received the highest salary, $125,000.
For good reason Preminger was apprehensive about working with Sinatra, an obscene man with proven Mafia connections and a well-documented history of violent outbursts. Spoiled rotten by his ever present entourage, Sinatra was accustomed to having the world around him move to his own measure—or else. Alternately sullen and convivial, the actor hated to rehearse and when shooting began never wanted to do more than one take. “I was warned about Sinatra, and I had my misgivings,” Preminger said.
I was told he was difficult. I could see that he was; that he was a highly temperamental man, very touchy and very, very moody. He has a chip on his shoulder all the time. Also, unlike most stars, he doesn’t really get along with little people. He can be small in little things. Perhaps this comes from his youth, a feeling he shouldn’t be soft by being nice to small people. He’s full of contradictions. He treats women rather badly. If he thinks a person is untalented he can be unbearable. And you always have a feeling he may be about to blow up.11
With Frank Sinatra, on the set of The Man with the Golden Arm. The two notoriously temperamental men got along.
When Sinatra early on exploded at an electrician and then urged Preminger to replace the man, Otto made it clear that he alone did the hiring and firing on his films. “I explained that he was engaged only as an actor. I ‘handled’ him,” Preminger said, and claimed that for the remainder of filming Sinatra became “as congenial as Gary Cooper. He proved to be tractable and full of humility; he always got to work on time and always knew his lines.”12
Sinatra, himself on guard about Preminger—“I had heard about him”—also developed “handling” strategies. “I would tease him tremendously and he really loved it because nobody wanted to get involved with him because they were afraid he would chew you up. I had a lot of fun with Otto about his wonderful Vienna or Berlin accent, whichever one it was. I would ape him and he would say, ‘Vy, vy you talk, I don’t talk that vay vy are you speaking that vay with me?’ And I said because that’s the way you talk. He said, ‘I don’t talk that vay’ ”13 Costar Darren McGavin (playing the drug dealer) noticed how “when things got extra bad, Sinatra would use a German dialect on Preminger. It broke the tension every time. It was Sinatra’s way of fighting for us.”14 The relationship between the director and his star grew so cozy that they had nicknames for each other. Sinatra called Preminger by his middle name, Ludwig, and unaccountably Preminger called Sinatra “Anatol.” “I don’t know where he got the name but that was what he called me. ‘Anatol!’ he would say. ‘Ve are ready for you on the set!’ ”15
It would have been out of character for Preminger to pick on a big male star like Sinatra—“little people” and fragile women were his usual targets. But under the circumstances there was no reason for the director to go after Sinatra, who respected Otto for his intellect (“Otto was so smart in every possible way”) and was working hard to prove himself in a demanding part. “When I read the script, I thought this is a great piece of work and it’s going to be tough to do,” Sinatra recalled.
I got permission to watch a kid who was in the dryout position in a padded cell. I advise anybody never to go look at that. I left with tears streaming down my face. The little guy must have weighed about ninety pounds, they were drying him out and he was trying to knock the walls down. I watched through a peephole, even though it was against the law. That’s how I got some of my moves during the withdrawal scenes. I saw how he felt and what he did. The poor kid was out of his head. I couldn’t handle it, I walked away, I couldn’t control myself. To see the actual thing was scary, but it helped me when we started shooting. I knew what I wanted to do.16
Preminger’s stepson, invited to the set during the drug withdrawal scenes, observed that “Frank was doing some work. Otto didn’t have much to say, and I could see that Frank was quite grateful to be let alone. When Otto was admiring, as he was of the work Sinatra was doing, he was very solicitous; and he let Frank do what he wanted to. Frank, like Cooper in The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell, was really playing himself; with people who had no personalities or were not known, Otto’s approach would be different.”17
Overseeing his studio-created Chicago slum in The Man with the Golden Arm.
Remarkably, both Sinatra and Preminger were patient with Kim Novak, so unsure of her abilities that she needed as many as thirty or forty takes before she was able to deliver her lines with even minimal competence. “She was a warm girl with a great, great wish to please people and make a success,” Preminger observed. “What I didn’t know at the time was that her earlier movies had been dubbed afterwards because she could never get the lines right. I didn’t want to dub. Because she was so nervous Sinatra went through all the takes she needed, just like a pro. She just had no self-confidence, none at all. She’d been treated like a nincompoop, but she’s really quite shrewd. And I knew she was right for the part. She has a sadness inside, just the quality I wanted, and I knew it could come through if we made her feel comfortable.”18
The director, however, was not patient with Darren McGavin, playing the demonic drug dealer—Mephistopheles on Division Street. “I felt he was fighting himself, getting in his own way, and I treated him pretty rough,” Preminger admitted. “Don’t you shout at me!” McGavin called out in a voice even more bellowing than his director’s when Preminger began to scream at him in front of the cast and crew. Knowing he had a captive audience, and savoring the dead silence that had overtaken the set, Preminger paused before saying in a small voice, “Very well, Mr. McGavin, you’re a bad actor on stage, a bad actor in front of the camera. Can you hear me, Mr. McGavin? Shall we proceed?” “I almost chased him up the boom,” McGavin said. “He’s of the German school, which thinks ‘I have to destroy you before I can create you.’ He can be crue
l and sadistic; he was to me. But in spite of all this nonsense I have a tremendous liking for him. Besides, look at the results.”19
Preminger’s original intention had been to shoot the entire film on location in Chicago, but to keep costs down he decided instead to build “Chicago” on a sound stage. Artistically the wrong choice (the studio sets give the film a cramped, artificial look), it was financially prudent, allowing the producer to remain well within his trim $1,135,000 budget. Preminger began shooting on September 15 and, despite the numerous retakes required for Novak’s scenes, finished a few days ahead of his projected November 1 wrap date.
The weekend after the end of shooting, Sinatra treated Otto, Mary, and Sandy to a weekend in Las Vegas at the Sands Hotel. “Sinatra picked up the tab for everything, and it was first-class all the way,” Sandy recalled.
Otto was used to being in that role, paying for everything for everybody in a very generous way. But that weekend he was a guest who knew how to accept Frank’s hospitality. That ability to receive graciously is not always a quality that someone like Otto, so used to giving and to the power that comes with being in the giving position, would necessarily have. But Otto had it. He was grateful to Sinatra for the hard work he had done, and Sinatra was grateful to Otto for giving him the chance to play a great part and for seeing him through it.20
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