Nat dressed like Otto, very conservatively and tastefully, usually in a blue serge suit, a navy blue silk tie, and a spread collar. He wore the same cologne as Otto—they both smelled very nice, like freshly talcumed babies’ bottoms. They both had black raincoats, though, a sinister touch. Nat was obsequious—Uriah Heep. He was yelled at more than anyone else but he always translated Otto’s tantrums into something positive. Barnes, a closeted but fairly obvious homosexual, wore Brooks Brothers tweeds and button-down shirts. He was an intelligent, pleasant, somewhat anxious young Southerner who acted as if nothing short of genius ever passed Otto’s lips, and when the whip was cracked he’d go into gear. It was Barnes’s job to take agents to lunch, to follow Publishers Weekly, and really to keep the boss current with the industry.
It was a laissez-faire atmosphere, and I was never told what or how to read. It was my job to read all the unsolicited manuscripts, whereas Bill read the choice properties. I did the dirty work, wrote long synopses with recommendations, all of which Otto turned down. When I recommended Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Otto replied that “great novels don’t make great movies.” I also recommended Fail Safe, but Otto laughed when the agent wanted $750,000. But he turned down Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a mistake. And my mistake was to bypass To Sir with Love— it was a good idea for a film, and a good setup for Otto.2
As Macdonald recalled, Preminger “was after Nat Rudich for every lightbulb, but neither Nat nor Bill ever once raised their voices. Not once, no matter the provocation. Barnes would roll his eyes theatrically, and that’s all that had to be ‘said.’ The feeling was to let Otto blow off steam.” What Macdonald remembered with pleasure forty years later were the twice-weekly invitations for drinks with the boss. (No food was ever served.) Held from 4:30 to 6, these gatherings were a mixture of business and relaxation during which Otto “did almost all the talking, and he was a great talker. But it must be said that he listened too. When I raved about Antonioni’s L’Avventura, he said it was a box-office flop. When I responded that ‘there are more important things,’ he was amused. At these meetings he never talked politics, although he was very interested in the subject and certainly well informed.” Mostly the boss recounted stories from Old Vienna; discussed current plays and movies; took calls on the speakerphone; and made calls to Hope at home. “Otto was a very solicitous husband and father, and there were hourly bulletins on the twins’ health.” Sometimes, for the enjoyment of his staff, Otto put on a show during speakerphone calls.
One afternoon, Spyros Skouras calling from Los Angeles went on at understandable length about Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and the rising, unprecedented Cleopatra bills in Rome which would soon end his reign at Fox. Suddenly, Skouras paused. “Otto, you don’t have that speaker thing on, do you?” he inquired plaintively. As we suppressed giggles, Preminger wrinkled his formidable pink forehead in dismay. “Spyros, please,” he purred, as his ice-blue eyes swept merrily over Bill, Nat, and me. “Vat do you take me for, eh?”3
When he was in town, Ingo, who had “good Viennese manners, an ebullient quality, and was kind of handsome in his own way,” as Macdonald observed, would appear during the cocktail hour. “Swinging his arms, Ingo took up the room; Otto wasn’t as physically imposing. They didn’t look like brothers.” Sometimes some of Preminger’s cronies from Vienna, including Gottfried Reinhardt, the son of Max, and Max Slater, on Otto’s payroll, would show up. “There were never any actors,” Macdonald noted. “When I dropped by for a visit in 1964, however, I was surprised to see Jane Fonda with her husband, Roger Vadim. Otherwise, the only movie star I ever saw in the office was Preminger himself.” The front office receptionist, Pam Elliot, was never invited to the cocktail hour. “No women ever were,” Macdonald said. “This did not mean that women were demeaned: quite the opposite. I never heard a coarse word from Preminger, who was at all times extremely proper. But this was a man’s world, especially in those days. Otto was a true gentleman of that old school.”
For the first few months of Macdonald’s tenure most of Preminger’s time was spent preparing for the opening of Advise and Consent. Otto supervised the advertising campaign, as he always did, and personally selected all the first-run theaters. He also hosted numerous press screenings and arranged extensive public appearances for himself and some of his actors. A new father at fifty-five, he devoted considerable time to his private life. In February 1962 he began preparations for moving his office from Fifty-fifth Street to a suite in the Columbia Pictures building at 711 Fifth Avenue. For many weeks prior to the move, scheduled for mid-April, he shuttled back and forth between the old and new offices, conferring with (or more often, screaming at) architects and designers. “After the official move, the setup became more formal,” Macdonald remembered. “ ‘Drinks’ became a drink, and invitations were no longer twice weekly. In the new office the feeling just wasn’t the same. Our old sociable nest was gone, and I found it dispiriting.”
Preminger’s suite at 711 covered half the top floor of the Columbia building. In minuscule metal letters designed by Saul Bass, “Otto Preminger” appeared on an intimidating black door, which opened into a suite consisting of a massive reception area; an office for the story department; Nat Rudich’s office; and, behind a second forbidding black door, Otto’s office, more than twice the size of his office on Fifty-fifth Street. “It was a daunting layout that reminded me of another lifeless interior, the tasteful, dull offices of the Museum of Modern Art [designed by Preminger’s East Sixty-fourth Street neighbor, Edward Durrel Stone], where I’d recently been a summer student intern,” Macdonald recalled. With black leather Charles Eames swivel chairs, paintings by Picasso, Kandinsky Sam Francis, and Diego Rivera on the severe white walls, and marble tables, the 711 suite also, of course, resembled Preminger’s town house. “Seven-eleven was a bit of a cliché,” according to Macdonald, “but it was the natural setting for the last of the old-time, fierce-tempered moviemakers.” The suite, emanating the authority of the bald man with twinkling blue eyes who presided over a marble desk the size of a Ping-Pong table, seemed to issue a warning: “Timid souls, beware.”
When Advise and Consent opened in June, Otto was “so hands-on,” according to Macdonald, that he had Bill Barnes constantly on the phone, tracking the grosses at the Sutton Theater on East Fifty-seventh Street. “The grosses were disappointing, but Otto was optimistic nonetheless.”
In late July Preminger received an extraordinary job offer. After firing Spyros Skouras, unable to stem runaway costs on Cleopatra in Rome, the board of directors of Twentieth Century-Fox asked Otto to take over as the president of the company. Preminger enjoyed the vindication of being asked to lead a studio from which, twenty-five years earlier, Darryl Zanuck had expelled him, but not for a moment was he tempted to take the job. His answer was a swift and final no. Otto would have been a first-rate CEO, his eye fixed firmly on the bottom line, but he relished his independence, and besides, he wanted to make his own films rather than supervise the films of others. After Otto’s brushoff, Zanuck, semiretired, stepped in, attempting to salvage the ailing studio he had cofounded nearly three decades earlier. “Otto may have had the last laugh,” Mike Macdonald speculated.
He felt he didn’t need the sausage factory anymore, and as he told me, “Let Zanuck sort out the Fox basket of crabs.” Otto was at a point where he felt he could wait and wait and wait for the right property to come along. I couldn’t—and quit two weeks after he said no to Fox. In his modest way, Otto Preminger was after art, while I wasn’t after money but experience. So I took a big pay cut from the $250 a week that Otto paid me—about $1,250 in today’s terms—to $65 a week to work as David Susskind’s assistant on All the Way Home.4
In late July, Preminger finally decided that “the right property” would indeed be The Cardinal, based on Henry Morton Robinson’s best-selling 1950 novel which, since its publication, had had worldwide sales of over 25 million. Columbia Pictures, the original rights holders, had a
bandoned the property because of the opposition of New York’s notorious Cardinal Spell-man. Spellman was convinced the title character, a priest who becomes an important cardinal of the Roman Catholic church, was modeled after him, and, as Otto noted, he “attacked the book with all his ferocious energy.” “He was particularly incensed because the fictional Cardinal had a sister who became pregnant, although she was not married. He maintained that this was an insult to his own sister, despite the fact that she was happily married and nothing of the kind had happened in her life.”5 While Spellman’s denunciations had succeeded in deterring Leo Jaffe, the president, and Abe Schneder, the chairman, of Columbia, to Otto the prospect of public battles with Spellman was music (or money) to his ears. Preminger was hoping that clashes with the intemperate, reactionary prelate would stir up interest in the project.
First, however, he had to derive a workable script out of Robinson’s sprawling chronicle. It took a record six months for Otto to develop a narrative through-line for Robinson’s protagonist Stephen Fermoyle, who in order to embrace a life of devotion must overcome pride, doubt, and temptation. In August Otto began working with Robert Dozier on a first draft, but after three months he was not satisfied. On a scouting expedition to Rome in late October he hired Gore Vidal “to polish the script and to add his own brand of acid wit to what Dozier had written,” as Hope recalled.6 Otto also hired Ring Lardner Jr., who was working on the script of a comedy called The Genius that Otto was expecting to film. “I don’t know whether Otto realized that both Gore and I were atheists,” Lardner said. “Another thing we had in common, and which we jointly communicated to Otto, was our verdict that he had fallen into the habit of buying the movie rights to some of the worst-written best sellers on the market.”7
Robert Dozier receives sole screen credit, but Preminger maintained that “almost all of it was rewritten by Gore Vidal. The Screen Writers Guild handed down a strange and arbitrary ruling, insisting that Dozier and Vidal share in the billing equally and alphabetically, although their contributions were far from equal. Vidal preferred to withdraw his name rather than be a party to such an unfair arrangement.”8 It is likely, however, that the script contains far more Preminger than Vidal or Dozier or Lardner. “Now, I don’t want to take anything away from the writer, but if you really ask whose thoughts are mainly represented, or whose personality is represented in the picture, I must claim this, for better or for worse. I feel that I am not an illustrator of books. I feel I have the right to re-create them, with the help of a writer.”9 With an episode set in Vienna, the city of Otto’s youth, at the time of the Anschluss in 1938 that has no counterpart in the novel, and the manner in which it examines and ratifies the intricate ways in which the Catholic church governs itself, the script does indeed reveal the imprint of the director.
Throughout the fall, Otto took brief sabbaticals from working on the screenplay to scout locations in the four places where the story is set: Boston, Rome, Vienna, and the American South. At each site, many months before he was to begin filming in February 1963, he hired a cadre of production assistants.
As Preminger got closer to the start of shooting, Cardinal Spellman began to renew his attacks on the novel and now on the filmmaker. “He sent letters to every bishop in the United States asking them not to cooperate with me,” Preminger recalled.10 Spellman, the ranking American cardinal, tried to obstruct Preminger in every way that he could, but Otto managed to circumvent him. When Otto, thanks to Spellman, could not find any priest willing to serve as a technical adviser, he hired a man named Donald Hayne, who had left the priesthood to become an adviser to Cecil B. DeMille on The Ten Commandments. “Donald Hayne, a lovely man, was the unsung hero of the film who knew everybody in Rome and got us immediate access to the Vatican,” Hope recalled.11 When, again because of Spell-man, Preminger was unable to find a church in Boston willing to host a film crew, Nat Rudich located a church in Stamford, Connecticut, his hometown. (Boston’s Cardinal Cushing was friendly to the project and to Preminger personally, but because of Spellman’s animosity he felt he could not offer a church anywhere within his jurisdiction.) When the bishop who had jurisdiction over the church in Stamford insisted it was he and not Cardinal Spellman who had the authority to make the final decision in the matter, Otto was delighted. The claim confirmed one of the themes he hoped to express in the film, “that there [is] considerable freedom of action within the Church.”12
Outside America, beyond the reach of Spellman’s influence, Preminger received the same kind of extraordinary cooperation he had enjoyed in Israel and Washington. The pope permitted filming in his summer residence and in a Baroque church in Rome. In Vienna, Cardinal Franz König granted permission to shoot in St. Stephen’s and in the cardinal’s palace.
At the end of January and early February, as Otto and his production designer Lyle Wheeler were finalizing the Boston area locations, Eva Monley was in Vienna hiring a local crew and arranging housing, meals, and transportation. She also had to supervise the building of sets for a scene in which Nazis on the loose loot the cardinal’s palace. “I had to do all the legal permissions,” Monley remembered. “Otto would not shoot anywhere unless he had clearance. I would line up a number of possible locations for each setting that we needed, and then Otto made the final selections. Everything had to be done now, it had to work, and it had to be for real—Otto hated studios.”13
Filming began at the church in Stamford on February 14, 1963. By the end of the first day’s shooting Preminger had dismissed and then rehired his leading man, Tom Tryon. The actor recalled his baptism under fire:
It was 40 miles away from my hometown of Hartford, and all of my family were there. Friends had come from miles around and we were out in the middle of the street when, at eleven that morning, Otto fired me. He fired me because poor dear Cecil Kellaway with whom I had a long tracking shot, kept going up on his lines. Well, he didn’t hit Cecil, he hit me. After I said, “Otto, I know my lines,” he told me I was through. I went down to the basement of the church where we were shooting and changed my clothes. The assistant director came down, and asked why I wasn’t on the set. I said I’d been fired and I was leaving. I wish to hell I had. Then Preminger came down in a rage. “What do you think you’re doing?” “Well, you fired me, Otto, and I’m going.” “Don’t be silly,” he said, as if it had all been a joke. Well, it wasn’t a joke. I had to go back up to start filming again. The first day wasn’t over yet, I had started to shake, and for the entire filming I never stopped.14
Throughout the long shoot, which was to last until June as the production moved from Boston to Vienna to Rome to Hollywood, Preminger and Tryon were trapped in a torturous duet from which there seemed no way out. “For me in the morning to go on that set was like getting into the tumbrel and going to the scaffold,” Tryon said. “At noon, after the lunch break, it was like going to my own funeral. Day after day after day”15
Before production started, however, the director and the actor had gotten off to a promising start. “In Tom’s screen test—and Tom tested better than the other candidates, including Robert Redford and Warren Beatty— Otto had seen a quality that he felt was right for the part,” Hope said.16 Tryon, too, had been pleased with the test, during which he had found the director to be “quietly helpful. He pulled things out of me; he made suggestions; he never raised his voice.” When a number of people had warned Tryon that he would regret taking the role, his response had been, “No, you don’t understand. I have a rapport with Otto and we’re going to get on just fine.”
His range was limited—he projected a stalwart, tight-lipped masculinity—but Tryon, commandingly handsome and six foot six, with intense dark eyes and a deep voice, had the kind of natural, understated quality that Preminger was always drawn to. In hiring the self-effacing, relatively untried actor, Otto was once again casting himself in the role of a would-be starmaker.
But once production started, he became frustrated when Tryon was not giving him the perform
ance that he had already mapped out in his mind as carefully as he had all the camera movements and shot compositions. He began to heckle and humiliate the actor in public displays of bad temper. For the entire cast and crew, these episodes became the inevitable focus of the shoot. However, the witnesses, who in a sense became on-the-spot psychologists, drew their own, differing conclusions about the contretemps.
“Otto gave Tom a bad time on every shot,” recalled Bill Hayes, who was playing Stephen Fermoyle’s brother and who kept a diary during his three weeks on the production. “He never took him aside, but always insulted him in public. ‘No, Tom, you don’t understand,’ he’d tell him, in a loud voice. I believe Otto thought Tom was so placid he had to be needled: I disagree. I saw Tom as a bright and highly skilled actor who might have been brought to just as great histrionic heights by positive means rather than negative.”17
“In a funny way, I felt Tom invited the treatment he got,” said Carol Lynley cast in a double role as Stephen’s sister Mona and as Mona’s daughter Regina.
When Otto would shout, Tom just rolled over and became like a small boy being whipped. He would get the shakes. In one scene, a cup and saucer had to be taped to his hands. He couldn’t control the shakes and he had tics, so Otto couldn’t shoot him from certain angles. I asked Tom why he didn’t tell Otto to knock it off—Otto could not have fired him. I sometimes wondered if Tom somehow thought of Otto as a demented father. Tom was a lovely man, and gorgeous, but he was not a natural actor. He had enormous charm offstage, but on camera he became wooden. I began to feel that Otto realized he had made a mistake—he should have gone with Robert Redford—and began to try to force a performance out of him that Tom wasn’t capable of giving.18
“I felt terrible for Tom, who was such a nice man; we all did,” recalled Jill Haworth, Preminger’s young discovery from Exodus, appearing in The Cardinal as a saintly nurse. “Tom was plain scared; and after a while Tom’s fear began to terrify me. Tom ended up blaming Preminger for everything. If I’d been a star I would have gone to Otto to say, ‘Listen, leave him alone and let him perform.’ But I was in no position to do that.”19
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