Goldwyn, relieved to be rid of Mamoulian, treated his new director with deference. But once Preminger began to voice some of the same concerns Mamoulian had, the producer’s attitude changed. Like Mamoulian, Otto, as he had with Carmen Jones, wanted to transform a stage-bound opera into a realistic story with music to be shot entirely on location. “I think this sort of film calls for the smell of reality,” he stated.35 While Goldwyn was decreeing a reverential approach to Gershwin, with the score to be presented as preserved-in-amber musical treasures, Preminger was asking for orchestrations favoring jazz over symphonic arrangements and intending to embed the songs within the action rather than framing them as separable show-stopping numbers.
Once he realized that Goldwyn was determined to have the entire film shot in his own studio, Otto began to raise objections to the theatrical-looking sets by Oliver Smith and the too-fancy costumes by Irene Sharaff “Look,” he scolded the producer, “you’ve got a two-dollar whore in a two-thousand-dollar dress.”36 Producer and director, equally stubborn, had daily run-ins, and Otto’s bellicose voice reverberated throughout the lot.
Although he seemed to be losing the war to a formidable adversary who also happened to be footing the bill, Preminger, in a series of underground moves, tried to puncture the producer’s “make it beautiful” demands. Behind Goldwyn’s back, Otto ordered some of the crew, after hours, to repaint the sets and to mangle the costumes. Preminger was adamant on one point, however, making it a condition of his employment: he insisted on the right to shoot a picnic scene on location (on Venice Island near Stockton, California). No doubt eager to get the project under way at last, Goldwyn assented.
Locked in daily skirmishes with his boss, most nights Otto met with Wendell Mayes to work on the screenplay of Anatomy of a Murder. Goldwyn, too, was busy on other fronts. At seventy-seven, the elder statesman among Hollywood producers could not understand the fury that his beloved Porgy and Bess was causing in the black community. The way he saw it, Gershwin’s glorious music ennobled the characters and the setting. He was puzzled and hurt when an anonymous article in a local black newspaper attacked him after he held a press conference in which he attempted to address the concerns of the Negro community. “Mr. Goldwyn smiled in gentle reproof that we should feel we knew more about being colored than he does, or that we would feel that a colored writer, like John O. Killens or Langston Hughes, could come anywhere near preparing a workable script for a Samuel Goldwyn picture. Directly after earlier blasts at Goldwyn for his plans to make this piece of ante-bellum gingerbread,” the article continued, “the producer gave a thousand dollars to the local NAACP drive. Rather like blood-money wouldn’t you think?” “The only thing left to go wrong on this picture,” Goldwyn said, “is for me to go to jail.”37
When he heard that Preminger was replacing Mamoulian, Brock Peters was “thunderstruck.” The actor recalled:
I was insecure about playing Crown, a hunk who has Bess in his sexual grip, because I didn’t think I was physically right for it. But Mamoulian had helped me and I was gaining in confidence. With Otto directing, I was sure I would be fired—I thought he would remember me as the young buck who had tried to jump at him on Carmen. And when I saw Woody Strode on the lot—Woody was stunning-looking, strapping, an ideal choice to play Crown—I knew I was finished. I dreaded going to the first day of rehearsal with Otto. “Now I get it,” I thought. But instead, in a completely friendly tone, Otto said, “Hello, Brock, how are you?” Boy, was I relieved!38
At the prospect of working with her erstwhile lover, Dorothy Dandridge was plainly horrified. She still had powerful feelings—attraction coiled with repulsion—for Otto. On the one hand she remained intensely grateful for all that he had done for her and taught her; on the other, she was bitter about how the affair had ended. Her manager, Earl Mills, claimed that Dorothy had become pregnant and Otto had urged her to have an abortion. “In my biography of Dorothy I left it ambiguous about the abortion and Otto’s paternity, but because Mills was so specific with me I am convinced it was true,” Donald Bogle said. “Regardless, however, considering their affair was over, and that Dorothy had liked working with Mamoulian, Otto’s coming on the film was bad news for her. Very bad news.”39
“No one could be more fully forewarned than I was about [Otto] and by him,” Dorothy recalled.
He told me why he was tough on a set, and tough with others, and tough in all his dealings. “Don’t show kindness,” he said. “People will construe that as weakness, and they’ll take advantage of you.” “Don’t show kindness”: what a key to Hollywood success. It never occurred to me that one day he would be as tough about me. … In a way I felt a certain compassion for him. Out of his own hurt, whatever it was, he had fashioned his own drives. Otto was ugly. Truly ugly. Many of those little men who run Hollywood are ugly. … I think now that Otto never loved and never was loved… . He could have been afraid of it. Love would weaken his essential conviction about toughness as the way, the truth, and the life.40
Otto’s feelings for Dorothy were much less complicated than hers for him. He had ended the relationship not because he had ceased caring for her but because he knew he would not be able to marry her, as Dorothy repeatedly requested. Dorothy’s being black was not an issue for a man with Otto’s willful temperament—to prove a point, he might almost have married her because she was black. The obstacle was Dorothy’s tormented psyche. Professionally Otto clearly was drawn to working with wounded beauties, but for his wives he chose women who were far more secure and self-possessed and who, unlike Dorothy, or Jean Seberg or Maggie McNamara, were not remotely suicidal. Even if Otto had been in turmoil about Dorothy, however, he had a far greater capacity than she did for separating his private life from his professional obligations.
For the first week of the three full weeks of rehearsals that he requested,
Otto, tactful with everyone, seemed to treat Dorothy with special consideration. He could see she was having trouble with the role—she was blurry and hesitant—but he had confidence in her. When after two weeks Dorothy didn’t seem to be making any progress, his “famous temper was directed as fully upon me as I had been spared it in Carmen Jones,” as Dandridge reported. “Now I was the idiot. … I was doing this wrong, that wrong… . He lit into me. ‘You were rotten in [The Decks Ran Red, a minor film released while Porgy and Bess was in rehearsals],’ he stormed for all to hear. The old romance was now as cold as iced cucumbers.”41
Dorothy, lacking the self-assurance or the stamina to fight back, crumbled. And as on Carmen Jones, she often spent her time away from the camera isolated in her dressing room. Then, her coplayers had viewed her retreats as aloofness; now they saw her disappearances as the behavior of a victim wounded in battle and retiring to gather strength enough to withstand the next attack. “Dorothy was the most vulnerable member of the cast,” Sidney Poitier observed. “Preminger smelled this, and she became sacrifice number one. Her defense mechanism was that of the prey and the predator had selected her, staked her out, marked her for the kill, then struck without warning.”42 Finally, at a point when Dorothy had two days off, a group of actors led by Nichelle Nichols, a member of the ensemble, confronted Preminger. “The actors ate him alive,” Nichols recalled. “He knew he had a mutiny on his hands… . We told him to treat [Dorothy] differently… . She was our queen, and it demeaned us to see this man attempt to destroy her every day. Everyone knew they had had a relationship. After the meeting, he was more respectful of us. He was a little more respectful of Dorothy. At least, she was able to get through [the filming] in a more respectful way”43 Brock Peters maintained, however, that Preminger “never found a really kind way to talk to Dorothy”44
In addition to her fear of the director, Dandridge had difficulty performing intimate scenes with her dark-skinned costars. When Preminger asked her to stroke Poitier’s head, she hesitated. Some of the cast felt that Dorothy, whose attraction to white men was well known, was reluctant to touch a black man. Ot
hers believed she was simply being sensitive to her costar’s dignity. However, a few days before shooting the scene in which Crown rapes Bess, Dorothy called Preminger to ask him to replace Brock Peters. “I can’t stand that man. When he puts his hands on me I can’t bear it. And—and—and he’s so black!” Preminger interpreted her statement as “the tragedy of Dorothy Dandridge. She was divorced from a black man who had fathered her retarded child. From then on she avoided black men.”45
As he was lining up the shots for the rape scene, Preminger took Peters aside to tell him that Dorothy was having trouble with him. “Otto told me that Dorothy didn’t think I was ‘right’ and he implied that my skin color was the problem,” Peters recalled.
He assured me, though, that I was doing well in the role and that I was to disregard any outburst from Dorothy. We completed the scene without incident, and both at the time and even now so many years later, I questioned Otto’s intention. Was that Otto’s way of getting what he needed from me in the scene? Did he really think Dorothy would explode at me? I don’t know. I’ve never figured it out. I guess it could have been a color issue. Dorothy never mentioned being black, and on Ed Sullivan she said she was Cherokee. Although I didn’t know the reason, when we were on Carmen Jones Dorothy had been distinctly unfriendly to me, but on Porgy and Bess her attitude seemed to soften. And after we filmed the rape scene, on location in Stockton, we shared a plane ride to Los Angeles during which we talked personally and I felt I began to know her for the first time. I saw how lonely and insecure she was. A lot of the things in her life, certainly including her color, affected her negatively, and I have to say that her suicide was not a mystery to me.46
Unlike Dandridge, Sidney Poitier had no trace of the victim in his bearing. Early on, when Preminger exploded at him, the actor walked off the set and would not return until Preminger apologized. Otto said he was sorry, and realizing he could not raise his voice to Poitier, never again did. “Otto could control himself,” as Brock Peters observed. Poitier achieved another victory when, without discussing it with the director, he refused to speak in the exaggerated, ungrammatical dialect that N. Richard Nash had written, following the style of the original novel and libretto. “We all used Sidney’s intelligent performance as our model,” Brock Peters said. “He set the example for how we spoke—no ‘dems,’ ‘dese,’ ‘dose.’ We were determined not to demean ourselves and language was one way to keep it straight up, to avoid caricature. Otto never tried to correct us, or to force us to go back to the dialect; I suspect he wasn’t attuned to hearing dialects anyway”47
While his relations with his two stars remained prickly, Otto enjoyed working with the other principals. He had noisy run-ins with Sammy Davis Jr., fully able to defend himself. “I felt Sammy and Otto had fun yelling at each other,” Peters noted. “I think it was a way for both to let off steam. Sammy seemed to be having fun with the part, and with life.”48 “Otto loved Pearl Bailey to pieces, and so did I,” as Hope Bryce recalled. “We thought she was Mother Earth.”49 But as she had been on Carmen Jones, Bailey was decidedly unpopular with the cast. As Brock Peters affirmed, “Pearl was two-faced and we all saw that she was competitive with Dorothy. For good reason Dorothy disliked Pearl, and distrusted her.”50
Embroiled with his actors during the day and working most nights with Wendell Mayes on the script of Anatomy of a Murder, Preminger was also busy blocking interference from Samuel Goldwyn. “He didn’t contribute one useful thought or word of advice throughout the entire production,” Otto maintained. “He only knew always to buy the best. He bought William Wyler, he bought the best writers and actors … for the cheapest money… . He had an awful way of testing people, a cold-blooded, very egotistical man, always afraid of people.”51 Otto surmised that “much of Goldwyn’s curious behavior was due to the fact that he didn’t understand the technical side of filmmaking.” For instance, Porgy and Bess was being shot in 70 mm film and Goldwyn became perturbed when Preminger told him it was not going to be shot in 35 mm as well. “I tried to explain: pictures shot in 70 mm are printed down in the lab to 35 mm. You don’t have to shoot two versions. He couldn’t grasp it.”52
Goldwyn may have been ignorant about how films were made, but watching the dailies he noticed that most of Otto’s shots were boom and master shots; that there were no close-ups; and that entire scenes played out with no editing at all. Deliberately, Otto was including no extra footage or coverage for Goldwyn to tamper with. “In his sly way,” as the Goldwyn biographer Arthur Marx noted, Preminger was “cutting the picture as he shot it—right in the camera.”53 When Goldwyn challenged him, Preminger erupted, declaring that he was the director and would shoot the film as he saw fit. He issued a warning: if Goldwyn did not stop interfering, he would walk off the film. Goldwyn tolerated Preminger’s high-handed treatment, as Otto expected he would, because the producer could not take the chance of dismissing a second director. “His reputation as a fair employer really would be in ruins if Preminger walked off,” as Arthur Marx wrote. “And so Sam swallowed his pride and remained holed up in his office, barely speaking to Preminger when he bumped into him on the lot.”54
When principal photography was completed on December 16, 1958, Goldwyn, Preminger, and the cast were immensely relieved. At the wrap party Goldwyn was a serene host, smiling benevolently and praising Preminger as a brilliant director. Sly fox Sam, however, may have claimed the last laugh. Before the film was to be released, Ingo inquired about the profit participation for Otto that had remained unsettled at the time the contract had been signed. When Ingo reminded Goldwyn that they had left the amount up to him, Goldwyn snapped, “You left the participation up to me? So there is no participation.”55
The response to the film after the screening for executives at Columbia (the releasing studio) was far from enthusiastic. “One of the top people at Columbia came up to Otto after the screening to express concern about the downbeat ending,” Hope Bryce recalled. “ ‘Can’t you have Porgy get up and walk at the end?’ he asked. Otto thought that was so typical of the Hollywood mentality”56 But Goldwyn, undeterred, and every bit the showman that Preminger was, went ahead with his original plan of presenting his farewell production in hard-ticket, two-a-day screenings at a handful of opulent movie palaces. Offering his beloved Porgy and Bess in a dignified atmosphere, Goldwyn wanted audiences to behave as if they were going to the legitimate theater or the opera house, with gentlemen in coat and tie, and for the ladies dresses rather than slacks.
Samuel Goldwyn opened the film on June 25, 1959, at the Warner Theatre on Broadway, the house where The Jazz Singer had premiered in 1927 and where Cinerama was first presented in 1952. On July 5, Porgy and Bess opened in Los Angeles at the resplendent Carthay Circle Theater, the site of many Golden Age premieres, including the one in 1939 for Gone with the Wind. (Around the World in 80 Days had only recently concluded a run at the theater of two and a half years, the longest exclusive engagement in the history of American film exhibition. The Carthay Circle was so refined that its doors remained closed when there wasn’t a film deemed important enough to be shown on its expansive, curved screen.)
“A stunning, exciting, and moving film,” wrote Bosley Crowther, not usually a Preminger enthusiast, in the New York Times. “It bids fair to be as much a classic on the screen as it is on the stage.” No other reviewer concurred, and on virtually every aspect of the film reaction was mixed. Some reviewers hailed Preminger’s direction as immaculate; others accused it of being stage-bound. Sidney Poitier was both admired and criticized for his dignified Porgy; Dorothy Dandridge both applauded and derided for her ladylike Bess. Oliver Smith’s sets, the removal of dialect, the stylized color and lighting, the Todd-AO wide screen, the six-track stereo sound—each was either saluted or roundly condemned. It seemed as if no two reviewers had seen the same film. Almost every critic liked something about the film, but none approved of everything. Even George Gershwin was not immune. According to an anonymous scribe in the July 20 Lon
don Observer, “the work fails—this is heresy—because George Gershwin’s music is not inventive enough or robust enough to support a full-length opera.” When it opened in Atlanta, Porgy and Bess angered some black viewers, and a still mystified Goldwyn decided to pull his film, incurring the accusation that he was censoring his own picture. “For a film that is neither controversial nor inflammatory the studio’s action [of canceling the Atlanta run] looks like excessive timidity or excellent press agentry” the Atlanta Journal huffed on August 11.
Following reserved-seat long runs in major cities, Porgy and Bess was shown only briefly in general release. In the end the film earned back only half its sizable $7 million cost. After a few television screenings in the 1970s, it became unavailable, and at this writing, as it has been for nearly four decades, the Goldwyn-Preminger Porgy and Bess is “forbidden,” in effect a censored property. Only a few prints survive (most in private collections) and none is in prime condition. Porgy and Bess as it was exhibited in its original road-show version in lush color, six-track magnetic stereo, and Todd-AO, apparently exists no longer. It is indeed an indefensible fate that the troubled film has suffered, and an ironic one, too, in view of the fact that a work by Otto Preminger, a filmmaker who fought landmark battles against censorship, has in this instance been the object of the ultimate censorship of invisibility. Opposition of the Gershwin estate, rumored to have been displeased with the dubbing and with the treatment of the score; fear of militant black reprisals; a mysterious clause in Samuel Goldwyn’s will—each has been circulated as an explanation for the film’s disappearance.
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