Preminger as always looked ahead, and while in rehearsal for the ill-fated This Is Goggle he bought the screen rights to two novels, Mardios Beach by Oakley Hall, about the romantic escapades of a married man, and The Wounds of Hunger by Luis Spota, about bullfighting (an unlikely Preminger subject). He announced that the former title would go into production in the spring; and the latter was to be shot in the late summer in Mexico in both English and Spanish versions. Otto, however, dropped both projects when, with a great deal of cunning, he nabbed the screen rights to three red-hot properties. First up was Les voies du salut (The Ways of Salvation), a new novel by Pierre Boulle, author of The Bridge on the River Kwai. In mid-April, before the novel had been published in France and before it even had an American title, Preminger flew to Paris to work out the terms of the sale. He guaranteed a payment of $150,000 for the novel (the American title was to be the not-so-enticing The Other Side of the Coin). Otto was drawn to the novel’s exotic setting, a rubber plantation in Malaysia, and its political framework—the nineteen-year-old heroine is a devout Communist. But his primary motive was to grab the book before Sam Spiegel, who had made a fortune with his film of The Bridge on the River Kwai, was able to. Acting on “an important tip,” the equivalent of insider trading in the literary marketplace, Preminger made the trip to Paris “in strictest secrecy,” as Willi Frischauer reported. Spiegel “did not relish being pipped at the post, and his friendship with Preminger came to an end. Spiegel would not talk to his old friend, who took the rebuff badly”17
While he was in Paris Otto also scrambled to obtain the screen rights to a current best seller, Anatomy of a Murder, a courtroom drama based on a true story by a Michigan Supreme Court justice, John Voelker, writing under the pen name of Robert Traver. The property already had a tangled history. In August 1957, six months before the book was to be published, and as Otto was on the Riviera filming Bonjour Tristesse, his New York story editor Tom Ryan had read the galleys and recognized at once that the material was a perfect fit for his boss. He sent an enthusiastic report to Preminger in Cannes, urging him to buy the book. But Preminger was preoccupied trying to scream a performance out of Jean Seberg, and both the stage and screen rights were snapped up by others. As expected, the novel had a sensational sale. While he was in Paris in April 1958 outfoxing Spiegel, however, Otto read in a trade paper that the movie rights to Anatomy of a Murder might still be on the market; this time he acted with the speed of lightning. But after he announced his purchase of the property, three other producers, claiming title to the stage rights, threatened lawsuits. Undaunted, Otto began to plan his film as soon as he returned from Paris. In late spring he visited John Voelker in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the rugged landscape where the novel was set, and decided to shoot the entire film on location.
At the same time he also laid plans for filming the Boulle novel. On May 10, with his production manager Martin Schute and his screenwriter, A. E. Hotchner, he departed for Kuala Lumpur to visit a plantation similar to the one that was the setting of the novel. “Leo Jaffe, head of Columbia [the film’s distributor], who had warned me about Otto, and who used to sit in fear of him, said, ‘Go with our blessing,’ ” Schute recalled. “But Otto was a wonderful traveling companion, even when he realized that Kuala Lumpur, which had none of the high style he seemed to require, was not exactly to his liking.”18 When one of the planters Preminger spoke to began talking about snakes, Preminger’s face, as Frischauer reported, “grew paler and paler. Finally he confessed: ‘I’ve had one phobia since childhood— snakes!’ ”19 Returned from the scouting expedition, Preminger was less interested in The Other Side of the Coin. He was disappointed at the direction Hotchner’s script was taking and concerned about weather conditions at the time when he was planning to begin shooting, in February 1959. Otto canceled the project “for technical difficulties,” which may have been true enough. But the underlying reason may have been because, in addition to Anatomy, he acquired another property that potentially was even more of a blockbuster than The Other Side of the Coin.
On May 25, 1958, soon after he had returned from the Far East, he announced that he had purchased the screen rights to Exodus, a novel by Leon Uris about the birth of Israel to be published by Doubleday on September 18. Visiting Ingo in Los Angeles in April, Otto had noticed a manuscript of monumental length on his brother’s desk. He was interested immediately when Ingo told him the subject, and that night, although Ingo warned him that MGM held the rights, Otto began to read Uris’s book. “I read until five o’clock the next morning,” he remembered. “I could not put the book down. Before I was halfway through I knew I had to make the movie.”20 As soon as he returned to New York, Preminger launched a campaign to win the rights from MGM, and he was in a good position to do so. Several years earlier, in an unusual arrangement, Ingo, who had been Uris’s agent at the time, had persuaded Dore Schary then head of production at MGM, to take an option on his client’s proposal, at that point no more than a rough outline. Further, Ingo had convinced Schary to underwrite some of the author’s research expenses. “Since Uris was a dedicated Jew I suggested he go to Israel for research,” Ingo recalled. “I went to MGM for financing, and in exchange we gave them an option to acquire the rights for $75,000. Uris went to Israel and wrote the book, which I brought in manuscript to MGM.”21 But by the end of the more than three years it had taken Uris for research and writing, Schary was no longer at the studio, and, as Otto was pleased to find out, Schary’s successors were not enthusiastic about Uris’s partisan and politically controversial novel. “If you make it the Arab countries will close all MGM theaters and ban all MGM films,” Preminger warned the company president, Joseph Vogel. “You can’t afford an Arab boycott but I can. Since I am an independent producer, they can’t hurt me too much.”22 Vogel hesitated, but Otto’s argument must have sounded a warning note, since within a week he and Ingo were asked to make an offer. Otto maintained that he and his brother paid MGM the amount MGM had paid Uris: $75,000, a terrific deal, because the author’s price would certainly have risen steeply after September 1958 when the book zoomed to the top of best-seller lists.
Preminger was elated. Leon Uris most definitely was not. “Ingo was working for me as my agent at the time, and I woke up one morning to find out that Otto now had the rights,” Uris recalled over forty years later.23 “Ingo stole the property from Metro and gave it to Otto, and I got a royal fucking from the Preminger brothers, who were a couple of Viennese thieves. I have never spoken about it, and I have a fifty-year reputation to consider, so I’m ambivalent about saying anything at all. But it was a monstrous experience. Otto was a terrorist—he’s Arafat, a Nazi, Saddam Hussein—who never knew the difference between lying and not lying.”
Ingo offered a differing account of the transactions. “MGM turned the book down because of the Arab issue and because they felt it was too unfriendly to England. Then, after discussing it with Uris, who said fine, I went to Otto. We all made money. Without me, the picture wouldn’t have been made.”24
Armed with the rights, Preminger went to his former colleague Arthur Krim at United Artists. Krim, who was keen on the project because his wife Matilda was a research scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, offered Preminger about $3.5 million in backing. The sum was low, but Preminger knew he could stay within the budget.
His battles to secure the rights to Exodus and Anatomy of a Murder over, Otto in July 1958 chose the relatively unknown Wendell Mayes to adapt the Traver novel and in his usual way began working with the writer on a daily basis. At this point, in what was already the busiest time of his career, Otto received an offer from Samuel Goldwyn to direct a film of George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward’s 1935 black folk opera, Porgy and Bess. Although Otto was eager to get Anatomy before the cameras as quickly as possible— the book was still selling and he was certain his film would end his recent string of failures—he felt he could not decline Goldwyn s offer. For years he had himself
wanted to make a film of Porgy and Bess. But along with many other Hollywood troubadours, including Hal Wallis, Arthur Freed, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Anatol Litvak, Dore Schary Louis B. Mayer, and Harry Cohn (who had had the mad notion of casting Al Jolson, Rita Hayworth, and Fred Astaire in blackface), Preminger had haggled unsuccessfully for the rights. George Gershwin’s brother Ira, who had worked with DuBose Heyward on the lyrics, had firmly rejected all overtures for twenty-five years because he “feared [the work would be] debased in Hollywood hands.”25 But when Goldwyn agreed to his stiff terms—$650,000 as a down payment against 10 percent of the film’s gross earnings—Ira was finally persuaded. However, he and his wife Leonore (known as Lee) would never have sold their prized property for any amount of money unless they had had faith in the buyer. And for good reason they trusted Samuel Goldwyn. On May 8, 1957, Goldwyn, who had been lobbying Ira for years, had proudly announced that at long last he had finally succeeded where many others had failed: he had acquired the screen rights to Porgy and Bess, his favorite show. In the same press release he had also stated that the film would be his farewell, the climax to a long career as a producer that had included, among many other movies, Wuthering Heights (1939), The Little Foxes (1941), and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).
In light of the fact that Porgy and Bess surely had no greater chance than Saint Joan for commercial success, Samuel Goldwyn’s persistence and that of many other prominent Hollywood entrepreneurs is astonishing. The original Broadway production, performed with all of Gershwin’s passages of recitative, closed after a disappointing 124 performances. A 1942 revival, stripped of recitative, fared better, as did an international tour. But in financial terms the piece had a far from robust track record. Based on a 1925 novel and a 1927 play, both written by DuBose Heyward, Porgy and Bess is set in a teeming black ghetto, Catfish Row, in the white author’s hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. The title characters are, respectively, a crippled beggar and a drug-taking prostitute. The supporting characters are superstitious, hard-drinking, drug-addled, lusty, and violent ghetto dwellers. Porgy and Bess, in short, presents a view of black life open to the charge of racist stereotyping. And as if that were not discouragement enough, Gershwin’s groundbreaking work has engendered a still extant debate about whether its primary musical allegiance is to the opera house or to the commercial musical theater. But overriding all concerns, as it had for Goldwyn and the other Hollywood figures who wanted to turn it into a film, was the fact that George Gershwin’s score, which closes the distance between elitist and popular musical idioms as it mixes elements of jazz, blues, spirituals, gospel, American folk music, European opera, Tin Pan Alley, and musical comedy, is arguably the greatest ever composed for the American lyric stage.
Once he had secured the rights to the prized property, Goldwyn, as always, proceeded to approach the best possible collaborators. But he received many rejections. To write the screenplay, his first choice (a sign that he intended to be sensitive to racial issues) had been Langston Hughes, the black poet who was one of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes spurned the offer, as did a succession of playwrights including Sidney Kingsley Clifford Odets, and Paul Osborn. Finally, N. Richard Nash, most noted as the author of The Rainmaker, had accepted, and by the end of 1957 had turned in an overlong screenplay. To direct, Goldwyn had asked, and was turned down by, Elia Kazan, Frank Capra, and King Vidor. Although Goldwyn had had reservations, he had signed Rouben Mamoulian, the director of the original play Porgy, as well as the 1935 Broadway opera.
Adhering to his long-established belief in star casting, Goldwyn had pursued the best-known black actors of the time, regardless of whether they could sing the roles. (As in Carmen Jones, the stars’ singing voices were dubbed.) Again, he encountered resistance. Harry Belafonte, his first choice for Porgy, rejected the offer because he felt the material was racially demeaning. Reluctantly, and only because Goldwyn cornered him into it, Sidney Poitier agreed to play the role. (Goldwyn, still capable of formidable wheeling and dealing, pulled strings so that in order to play a part the actor wanted in The Defiant Ones as an escaped prisoner chained to a white man, Poitier was obliged first to appear as Porgy.) Committed at the time to playing only affirmative characters, Poitier disdained the role of a crippled beggar as well as the depiction of Negro life in Catfish Row.
Between shots of Porgy and Bess: Dorothy Dandridge, Sidney Poitier, and Brock Peters.
Goldwyn’s first and only choice to play Bess was Otto’s Carmen, Dorothy Dandridge, who said yes but was unenthusiastic. Although Otto and Dorothy had not been seeing each other romantically for over a year, they were still in touch, and when Otto heard Dorothy had been offered the role he urged her to take it. “Do it. It’ll make you as big a star as you were when you did Carmen,” he told her.26 For other roles, Goldwyn raided the cast of Carmen Jones, all of whom in 1950s Hollywood had found few other opportunities. Brock Peters, Diahann Carroll, and Pearl Bailey signed, but each had a list of objections. Bailey resented the script’s use of heavy dialect and threatened she wouldn’t appear if the women had to wear bandannas. Only one actor, Sammy Davis Jr., a card-carrying member of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack and a smug, brash, hard-drinking nightclub crooner with an oppressively energetic performing style, was eager to appear in the film. Davis was desperate to play Sportin’ Life, a drug-dealing low-life—Satan in Catfish Row—who has two show-stopping Broadway-style numbers, and he arranged to audition for Goldwyn at a party at Judy Garland’s house. Lee Gershwin saw him perform at the party and was horrified by Davis’s vulgarity. Famous for speaking her mind, Lee cornered Goldwyn. “Swear on your life you’ll never use him,” she pleaded with the producer. “Him? That monkey?” Goldwyn sneered.27 Davis was aware that Goldwyn wanted Cab Calloway and he got Sinatra and his Mafia entourage to put pressure on Goldwyn. After Calloway turned him down, Goldwyn relented. “Mr. Davis, you are Sportin’ Life,” he informed the actor. “The part is yours. Now will you get all these guys off my back?”28
For the sets Goldwyn hired Oliver Smith, an acclaimed theatrical designer. For costumes he turned to Irene Sharaff, whose background was also primarily theatrical. André Previn, with extensive experience scoring films for MGM, was given the crucial job of musical director. During the lengthy preproduction period Goldwyn and Rouben Mamoulian, opposites in almost every way, had many collisions. Mamoulian was articulate; the malaprop-prone Goldwyn was tongue-tied. As N. Richard Nash observed, Mamoulian “got into the habit of scoffing at everything Sam had to say.”29 To their temperamental difference was added an artistic disagreement. Goldwyn wanted the film to look and sound as much as possible like the original Broadway production, whereas the director had no interest in recreating his original staging. It was his intention to transform a stage work into a fluid, realistic film that he wanted to shoot on location in and around Charleston.
After months of elaborate planning Goldwyn announced that full-cast rehearsals would begin on July 3 at 9 a.m. on the cavernous Stage 8 of his studio. At six that morning, a phone call to his house informed the producer that a fire had destroyed the Catfish Row set and all the costumes. That afternoon, a remarkably composed Goldwyn gathered together the entire cast and crew to assure them that the set would be rebuilt and the production would resume. Unsubstantiated rumors circulated that the NAACP, presumably in protest against the film’s treatment of black characters, had started the fire. Although the fact that the fire had occurred in the early morning when the studio was empty seemed to point to arson rather than accident, the cause of the fire has never been determined.
During the hiatus (Goldwyn anticipated it would be about six weeks), Mamoulian continued to press for an opened-up, plein-air version of Porgy and Bess. Goldwyn’s huffy response was to order Nash to reduce the number of settings in his screenplay. At the end of July, paying him his entire salary of $75,000, Goldwyn fired his director. Adding insult to injury, the next day at twice the sum he hired Otto Preminger. “I was Otto’s
agent for Porgy and Bess and carried out the mechanics of the deal,” said Ingo.30 Although he worked out a highly lucrative salary for his brother, Ingo in his talks with Goldwyn couldn’t reach a figure on Otto’s profit participation. Ingo pushed for 50 percent, Preminger’s standard terms; Goldwyn offered 10 percent. When negotiations were at an impasse, with Goldwyn refusing to raise his offer, Otto backed off, telling Ingo to allow Goldwyn to decide on the participation after the film was completed. “Goldwyn was surprised and promised to be fair,” Otto said.31
In mid-August Otto relocated to Los Angeles for preproduction and rehearsals. From the moment he arrived he was under fire. Mamoulian, no doubt recalling that Preminger had replaced him on Laura, took his case to the Directors’ Guild, charging Goldwyn with firing him for “frivolous, spiteful or dictatorial reasons not pertinent to the director’s skill or obligation.” The Guild determined that until the matter was settled Preminger “may not enter into a contract with Samuel Goldwyn.”32 At first, there was a great deal of sympathy for Mamoulian and very little for Otto. But Mamoulian made a fatal error. He produced a bit actor, Leigh Whipper, who announced he was withdrawing because of his opposition to Preminger, “a man who has no respect for my people.”33 As performers who had worked with Otto on Carmen Jones testified, the charge of racism against Preminger was absurd and completely unsustainable. After Mamoulian’s agent, Irving Lazar, admitted that his client “had grossly misrepresented the facts in the case,”34 the aggrieved director had no choice but to end his campaign.
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