And so it is. Despite the charges that can be leveled at Hurry Sundown— that it is a simplistic view of the Deep South by a team of outsiders; that it is contrived, meandering, overplotted—it is another example of Preminger tackling previously off-limits subject matter. This time, though, he didn’t get any credit for taboo smashing. And other, more modern-seeming films on race relations such as In the Heat of the Night and To Sir with Love (which were released after Hurry Sundown) earned praise while Preminger’s epic was branded with an ill fame it doesn’t merit.
As a white liberal’s utopian view of racial integration, Hurry Sundown is ideologically, if not artistically, immaculate. The film treats the Negro characters with notable respect. Neither saints nor holy victims, on the one hand, nor militants bristling with rage and rhetoric, on the other, the characters, in a way that was rare at the time, transcend stereotype. And Preminger places them carefully within the period of the story, 1946, rather than imposing a 1966 perspective on them. Neither Reeve (Robert Hooks) nor his girlfriend (played by Diahann Carroll), who has been educated in the North, is played as a contemporary 1960s firebrand. Rather, it is Reeve’s mother Rose (Beah Richards, magnificent) who, in her deathbed epiphany, expresses the kind of anger that will lead to the civil rights movement. “I was wrong,” she announces to her son. “I was a white folks’ nigger [who] help[ed] them to do it [to me]. I grieve for this sorry thing that has been my life.”
In his usual fashion Preminger attempts to be fair to “the other side” as well. Some of the white characters, like the racist Judge Purcell and his shrewish, social-climbing wife Eula (Burgess Meredith and Madeleine Sherwood) are beyond reclamation. But the central characters representing white privilege (played by Jane Fonda and Michael Caine) are not. Fonda reveals her character’s growing awareness of the tainted legacy she will ultimately reject. And Caine discovers in his grasping capitalist a vein of regret.
There are many familiar Preminger touches: beautifully orchestrated
There are empty seats in the room but blacks have to stand in the back, a social point made unobtrusively by Preminger in this long shot in Hurry Sundown. (The witnesses: Jane Fonda, Michael Caine, and Robert Hooks.)
tracking shots that follow the characters walking through scenic locations; objective, frontally staged group shots that reveal connections among the characters; meaningful deep-focus compositions, as in a scene in a courtroom in which blacks are made to stand against the rear wall despite there being many empty seats. A heroic, high-angle helicopter shot at the beginning introduces the land that the white and black sharecroppers will fight for with a determination recalling the pioneers in Exodus. But there are some shortcomings here. Preminger undermines the sweep of some of his tracking shots with nervous cutting. More crucially, the South that the film depicts resembles a studio-era confection, a constructed world from which the warp and woof of reality have been more or less excluded. Despite the fact that all the exteriors were shot on location, the settings are curiously antiseptic. Poverty and architectural decrepitude have been carefully excised, and notwithstanding the enervating heat the characters always look suspiciously fresh. Interiors, many shot at MGM, are also too manicured, adding to the film’s “made-in-Hollywood” aura.
It’s tempting to speculate that as a story of race relations in America, with a vivid cast of local racists, visiting movie stars both nice and monstrous, and a good-hearted, temper-prone director, a film about the making of Hurry Sundown might have been more pertinent. Business was respectable—rentals were just over $4 million as against a budget of just under $3.8 million—but hardly encouraging. In spite of its fresh subject for the time, Hurry Sundown is stodgy, its earnest tone and multistranded narrative throwbacks to a kind of moviemaking that seemed almost fatally out of step with the new Hollywood struggling to reflect the counterculture emerging in the late 1960s.
As he was well aware, Preminger was no longer an industry trendsetter. Concerned about making a place for himself at a time of great change both within and outside the film business, on his next project he attempted to banish “Otto Preminger.”
SEVENTEEN
Father and Son
At sixty-one in 1966, Preminger, becoming bored with newspaper and magazine articles that branded him with such labels as “Peck’s Bad Boy, the aging crown prince of Hollywood,” and “the last of the bad-tempered, old-style Hollywood patriarchs,” was eager to revamp his image. To do that, he was on the lookout for material that had a more contemporary kick than either In Harm’s Way or Hurry Sundown, his two epics set in the 1940s. When he read Too Far to Walk, a novel by John Hersey about rebellious college students experimenting with drugs, he thought he had found it. He grabbed the screen rights prepublication, began to work on a script with unknown young writers, and experimented with LSD. “Timothy Leary gave it to me after a small dinner party in my home,” he recalled. “While Hope was out of the room, Leary and two of his friends brought out some LSD pills and swallowed them.”1 In his altered state, aware that “everything that happened was imaginary,” he saw Hope shrink to “the size of a small doll” and he noticed “every bone” in the spine of the back of a nude woman in the Degas painting that hung in his bedroom. He also sensed that he lost track of time. Hope disapproved, reminding her husband that he hadn’t taken heroin to prepare for The Man with the Golden Arm.2
Working with inexperienced young people, Otto couldn’t seem to get a decent script, but indirectly the project yielded a huge dividend. One day early in January 1967 a young man named Chuck Wein, whom Preminger called his “technical adviser” on Hersey’s hard-to-crack novel, casually informed him that Erik had known for over a year that Otto was his father. At that point, as Otto remembered, he called Gypsy to point out that “there was no reason anymore for Erik and me not to meet.” When Otto, preparing for the American and European launch of Hurry Sundown, found out that Erik was in the Army, stationed in Augsburg, Germany, he wrote to ask if they could meet in Paris in February, when he would be hosting the European premiere of his film. “Erik replied promptly that he would be happy to meet me,” as Preminger recalled.3
Erik with his mother, Gypsy Rose Lee, on the set of Screaming Mimi in 1958.
“I had found out about Otto in a strange way,” Erik recalled. “It happened when I had asked Bill [Alexander] Kirkland (to whom my mother was married at the time and the person she had always told me was my father) for money for a car, and he refused. He told my psychiatrist to tell me that he wasn’t my father and he didn’t want to give me any financial help.” When Erik confronted his mother, she insisted at first that Kirkland was his father, but after Erik kept questioning her she finally admitted the truth. However, she made Erik promise that he would not get in touch with Otto. “She had made this decision to have me and to raise me on her own, even though Otto had always made it clear to her that he was interested in being my father,” Erik said. “Gypsy was interested in having a child, but not a relationship. Neither Gypsy nor Otto, as I was to discover, left a lot of room for discussion: their basic philosophy was ‘I’m going to do it my way’ ”4
For both father and son, the timing seemed right. As the doting father of six-year-old twins, Preminger was a confirmed family man who welcomed having another son, while at twenty-two Erik belonged to the generation that the aging filmmaker was hoping to connect with in his work. For Erik, who had been through a few difficult years before joining the Army— he’d dropped out of college, experimented with drugs, held a smattering of unchallenging jobs—Otto represented professional salvation. As Erik recalled, “From my point of view at the time, Gypsy’s decision seemed a good one: I had the advantage of meeting Otto when he could offer me work.”
Nonetheless, the meeting, scheduled for February 15, 1967, at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris, was anxiety-provoking for both Otto and Erik, as well as for Hope. “When Otto and I had first started dating, he never admitted to having had affairs—he was a gentleman, and never talked,�
�� Hope said.
He never talked to me about his relationship with Dorothy Dan-dridge, for instance: not a word, at any time. I figured this was all in the past and had nothing to do with me, and I didn’t ask. Before we married, however, he did tell me about Gypsy, that it had been a one-night stand, and that he was the father of Gypsy’s son. I have to admit I was surprised, because I wouldn’t have thought Gypsy would have been Otto’s type. He told me that he had offered to support the boy, but Gypsy had refused and made him take an oath not to reveal who he was to Erik, or to tell anyone. Otto said he told me in case the matter ever came up. But after that one time, he didn’t mention Erik again. As we were waiting at the hotel for Erik to arrive, Otto was very nervous, and I suggested that perhaps the two of them should go out for a walk and to dinner on their own, without me.5
When Erik arrived at the Plaza Athénée, he expected to go to the room his father had reserved for him. But the concierge informed him that Mr. Preminger had been calling the desk every few minutes to find out if his son had shown up yet and left instructions that the minute he did he was to go directly to his father’s suite. His nerves jangling, Erik knocked on the door of the Premingers’ suite. “For a brief moment, time seemed frozen, and the tableau remains vivid in my memory today and probably forever,” Erik recalled. In the middle of the baroque magnificence of the suite, with elaborate floral arrangements on every table and a room-service cart stocked to overflowing, “Otto was standing … wearing a dark blue suit. He appeared to have been pacing and caught midstride. I had recently seen a small photograph of him in Time magazine, so I was prepared for a heavy-set, bald man. No photograph, however, could capture the strength of his presence. He emanated power.”6
“The minute Erik came into our hotel room he was very sweet and I could see that Otto liked him instantly,” Hope said. Following his wife’s suggestion, Otto asked Erik to go for a walk. When Erik, embarrassed by his “disreputable” raincoat, said that despite the chilly weather he would prefer not to wear it, Otto said, “If my son doesn’t wear a coat, then neither do I.” Quite accurately, Erik regarded the statement as “a declaration of love and acceptance, and I felt the warmth of it even through my self-conscious reserve.”7 Indeed, as Erik would come to recognize, “With family Otto was like a marshmallow, and was capable of great love in a primal way. This love superseded everything.”8
During their walk, which lasted for several hours, Otto was “gallant” about Gypsy and also candid, as Erik recollected. “He told me he had asked Gypsy to put his paternity in her will, so I could turn to him if she died before him; I never saw her will, so I don’t know if she did as he asked.” When Otto asked Erik if he wanted to work with him on making films, Erik was elated.
Joining Erik at the hotel later in the evening was his fiancée Barbara Ann Van Natten, a stewardess with American Airlines whom he had met through mutual friends at the American Exchange in Munich. “Erik was exceedingly polite, well mannered, and well traveled—and in those days, when Europeans didn’t bathe, he smelled good,” Barbara said.
He had bangs (he had to keep his hair short because he was in the Army) and he looked collegiate. He had lived in New York and I thought he was a real New Yorker, youthful but sophisticated. He cared about books, he was bright and well educated. Before I had met him I was told he was Gypsy’s son, but I’m not starstruck and I didn’t care about that. It was his duffel bag and his bangs I couldn’t resist. When he told me he was also Otto Preminger’s son—actually, he made it seem a little iffy—I believed him. I had seen Stalag 17 and the resemblance was unmistakable. But from the first I could see that he wanted people to like him, not his parents. After all, he wasn’t Otto or Gypsy. He didn’t even know his father at that time and he and his mother were at odds.9
After Erik had invited her to join him in Paris, “Otto himself called me,” as Barbara remembered.
He made all our reservations. We had a lovely room, with crushed violets everywhere and a vase filled with spectacular long-stemmed roses that Otto had sent. The first night, when Erik and his father had walked around on their own, Erik was overwhelmed when he returned to our room, but he seemed to like his father a great deal. The next morning we went to the Premingers’ suite for breakfast. Then Otto took us to Maxim’s for lunch. Otto was exceedingly charming and slightly formal: a courtly European man of good breeding. Erik was a little withdrawn, and I was a little intimidated too: by the restaurant rather than Otto and Hope. With Otto, of course, we were ushered to the best seats. There were immense amounts of silverware, at least fifteen utensils. I decided I would order just what Hope did; and that meant no sauces, no oil, no garlic, no dessert. Erik and I were both so nervous we couldn’t eat anyway.10
(“Otto and I both adored Barbara when he brought her to our suite,” Hope said. “She was just as sweet as Erik, and beautiful and smart as well.”) A few nights later Otto took Erik and Barbara to dinner, “a royalty kind of place,” as it seemed to Barbara, where Otto’s other guests were Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim. “Otto said to the headwaiter, ‘You decide for all of us; we want the best you have.’ When we were served truffles, I didn’t know what to do. How would an American eat this? I wondered. It’s not so easy to cut a truffle. Seeing my difficulty, Vadim, who told me truffles are an aphrodisiac, helped me out. It was all like a fairy tale.” Preminger invited the young people to join him and Hope in London, where he would be opening Hurry Sundown. He put them up in a suite at the Dorchester. “I took it as my due,” Barbara explained. “I was very young, and foolish, and I thought, ‘Of course, this is going to be my life.’ We saw Hurry Sundown at the London premiere and we were under a lot of pressure to like it. Erik even convinced himself that he did like the movie. But I thought it was awful, so clunky. Neither of us knew what to say to Otto about the film. The next night Otto got us the best seats in the house at Covent Garden to see Nureyev and Fonteyn in Swan Lake.”11
On March 18, 1967, shortly after returning to Augsburg, Erik and Barbara were married. Preminger, who had to return to New York to prepare for the opening of Hurry Sundown on March 23, was not present, but as a gift he gave them ten thousand dollars, “an enormous amount in those days,” as Barbara acknowledged. The only witnesses at the wedding were the mutual friends who had introduced the bride and groom. “It was a religious ceremony in the church on the Army base, and although Otto was Jewish he had no objections,” Barbara maintained. “Otto had no religion; he told me he hadn’t been in temple for three generations. He prided himself on his modernity, on trying to be with it, which he wasn’t always able to achieve.”12
Otto told Erik that he would begin working for him, at his office at Paramount in Hollywood, in September 1967, after he had completed his military service. “Thanks to Otto, who had no patience for anything bureaucratic and who wanted me to get out of the service right away, I was released ninety days early, in July,” Erik said. “I got out on July 5. Barbara and I flew to Los Angeles and went to my mother’s house. I was to start working for Otto Monday morning at nine.”13 “Gypsy called at nine, asking to speak to Otto, who was in the shower,” Hope recollected. “ ‘Tell Otto that Erik is exhausted and will be in the office a little later,’ she said. I told her I would give Otto the message. That was the only time I ever spoke to Gypsy.”14
When Erik began working for his father, Otto was still trying to wrestle a screenplay out of Too Far to Walk. “Otto felt the development of the script was the most important part of making a movie, and he wanted me to sit in on all his sessions with the writers,” Erik recalled.
In addition to spending hours on script sessions, I had responsibilities in the office. Learning on the fly, and having to meet my father’s expectations, I was under tremendous strain. At the time I was not introduced as his son because Gypsy had a television program that catered to ladies and she felt her audience would be offended by the announcement that I was Otto’s son. She made us promise to keep it to ourselves. When we were not at work,
my father could not have been more generous and loving—his role model for parenting was to be giving, because he had been truly spoiled by his own parents. When I would travel with Otto, he liked to take long walks and if even for a moment I would stop to look at something in a store window it would arrive twenty minutes later at our hotel. He was that way to all his children. But at work he was not interested in being a father; he was interested in being a mentor and he felt a teacher’s job was not to cut any slack. I got equal treatment with everyone else.15
With his son Erik in 1971, on the set of Such Good Friends.
Erik worked beside Nat Rudich, Preminger’s longtime general factotum. “Otto had two assistants, basically, Nat and me,” Erik pointed out. “Nat was the business person, and in time I became Otto’s casting director. Nat was decent, sweet, and patient, and yes, he got yelled at; but he loved my father, loved him as a human being truly and completely. And Otto loved Nat in return, in full measure. When Nat died [in December 1975] Otto was shattered; he was destroyed. Nat, and all the rest of us who loved my father, made allowances for Otto’s tantrums. Afterward, he was oblivious to the fact that the other person was bleeding, because for him it had meant nothing.”
As Erik shuttled back and forth between his father’s two offices, at Paramount in Hollywood and in the Columbia Pictures Building at 711 Fifth Avenue in New York, he became adept in reading his father’s personality and moods. It didn’t take him long to conclude that he could not envision his father and his mother as a couple.
I can’t even see them appearing in public together. Gypsy and Otto could not have been together for more than twenty minutes without an argument erupting. My mother’s attraction to Otto was very Shavian: it was strictly about genes, and her sense that Otto was decent and honorable. They shared an independence of spirit that was quite remarkable, and they were both extremely intelligent. Otto had been formally educated; my mother was entirely self-educated. Gypsy was not a bully, though, and Otto was. My parents were two blessings—I consider myself one of the luckiest people— but, my God, they were both so difficult.
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