With Such Good Friends stalled, Otto on November 29, 1970, acquired the screen rights to Genesis 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War, by Don Kurzman, which in both setting and scope promised to be an Exodus II. “We’ll show both the conflict on the battlefield and in the political arenas in Washington, Moscow, the United Nations, and the Mid-East,” Preminger said in a press conference, and then in vintage mode expressed the hope that the film “will offend neither Arabs nor Jews.”53 In January 1971, with Such Good Friends still on hold, he made a location-scouting visit to Israel, where he told the local press that he expected to return in October for further reconnaissance and to begin shooting in the spring of 1972. He announced that a completed film would be ready in time for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the birth of Israel in 1973. “There are few countries I like better than Israel, and there is no country which believes more optimistically in the future,” he said.54
Genesis 1948 was a promising project for the filmmaker and a chance to redeem himself after the failure of his two pictures about young people, but it was never made. In February 1971, almost a year after he had first offered her the assignment of adapting Lois Gould’s novel, Preminger returned to Elaine May, who this time accepted. “They worked well together,” said Erik, who attended all the writing sessions.55 Erik became friendly with May, who would hire him for a future project. After an intensive ten-week sprint Preminger at last felt he had a script he could work with and he began to prepare for filming on location in New York over the summer. (For reasons of her own Elaine May asked for a pseudonymous credit as “Esther Dale.”)
As he was working on the script, Otto solidified his relationship with Erik. At a press conference on February 17 at the Dorchester Hotel in London he announced that Erik was his son, and for the first time spoke publicly about his relationship with Gypsy. One month later, on March nin the office of Surrogate Judge S. Samuel DiFalco in lower Manhattan, Otto formally adopted Erik, who changed his last name from Kirkland to Preminger. In addition to Erik and Otto, also present for the occasion were Erik’s wife Barbara; Hope and the twins, Mark and Vicky, now ten; and Eve Preminger, acting as Otto’s attorney. Erik and Barbara’s three-year-old son, Chris, was at home, at 75 Central Park West. Afterward, father and son embraced as they talked with reporters. “I consider finding Erik one of the best things that has happened to me in my life,” Otto said.56
For at least one member of the family group, however, the smiles were forced. Less than a month after the adoption, Barbara left Erik, taking Chris with her; and on June 8, 1971, she sued Erik for divorce on grounds of “cruel and inhumane treatment.” “It had been a terrible marriage, and it was a bitter divorce,” Barbara said.
At first Erik had stayed in touch with the wonderful person I fell in love with, but then he changed. Once he became a young prince— well, he couldn’t have a child and wife and still be a prince. I think working for Otto twelve to fourteen hours a day seven days a week was a real hardship. Erik wanted so much to measure up to his father’s expectations, but he was unable to pull it off very well. He became so nervous his leg shook, and he bit the cuticles off his fingers. I thought he should just quit, and I’m afraid I wasn’t sympathetic or supportive.
Erik was very good with actors, and when he was offered a job as a theatrical agent, away from Otto, I said he should take it. But when he said he would stay with Otto, I felt crushed. We couldn’t have had a good marriage under those conditions. If we’d been older and stronger, maybe, but we were both very young and neither of us had the skills at that time to get through it. Although we were poised on the surface, we were both misfits—I had also come from a broken home—and that’s part of what had attracted us to each other.57
Throughout the marriage Barbara had been very conscious of the negative impact both his parents had on her husband. “Erik pretended not to care about his mother being a stripper, but I felt it did bother him. (Gypsy was really quite puritanical; it was all right for her to do things, but nobody else.) Erik kept a lot of his past with her under wraps, but he was always angry with her because she was cheap, the opposite of Otto. Both Otto and Gypsy loved Erik, there was never a moment’s doubt of that, but Erik also always got the short end of the stick with his mother, and in the end, with Otto too.” Although she tried hard not to be, Barbara herself also felt stifled by Erik’s world-famous parents.
Gypsy wanted us to stay in her house, but I couldn’t breathe there. She had a loud, very old-time theatrical voice, and she spoke with exaggerated vowels. She was very smart, and Otto must have found her challenging. But she was also brusque and outgoing, just the opposite of Hope, who was reserved and could be a little cool. Gypsy could be very funny but I was afraid of her, and I always tried to avoid her. I was tongue-tied around her, always, and around Otto, too, nice as he was. I never felt that way with Hope.
When I became pregnant, Gypsy was the only one who had been happy. Otto said it was the worst thing. “You’re starting a career; a baby will tie you down,” he told Erik. I was very upset when Otto accused me of interfering with Erik’s career; I didn’t think I was. Otto and Hope, whom we saw all the time, made an effort to accept us and they were both very nice to our son. I felt Otto liked me, and he stood up for me against Erik a few times. Otto yelled at me only once, for five minutes, when I wouldn’t agree to going with him and Erik to the Toronto Film Festival because my best friend was coming to New York. “You are standing in his way to success,” Otto stormed in an almost childlike voice. Erik wasn’t there, but when I told him later, he turned white and got furious. Otto called later to apologize. No human being should get away with how Otto behaved in a tantrum. He had been spoiled as a boy, when he should have had his hide tanned.
One day, about six or seven months after his mother had died, Erik said he wanted a divorce, and he was totally right. We were living on delusion. We went to couples therapy for four months but it didn’t work. From Erik’s point of view I must have been unbearable. He was emotionally needy but pretended not to be, and I wasn’t mature or strong or wise enough. We were both too selfish. Also, Erik may have found someone else, he may have been dabbling. After the divorce and during procedures I didn’t see Otto or Hope for six or seven months. Then Hope called and suggested we meet for lunch. I complained that Erik wasn’t sending money, and Hope told Otto. But I didn’t hear anything. Ingo’s wife Kate was the warmest and most human of the Premingers, and she wanted Chris to be part of the family. Chris and I were the paupers—a lot of the time we had no money. Chris, who started working when he was ten, as a result now has a great work ethic. But the family, which is so close and protective, cut us off. I’ve had no contact with Hope, or with any Preminger except Erik—we talk once in a while about Chris, and why he hasn’t sent money58
Throughout the summer of 1971, as he was going through divorce proceedings, Erik was by his father’s side during the making of Such Good Friends, a story about a failed marriage. Otto scheduled three weeks of rehearsals beginning in mid-June and ten weeks of shooting to start on July 7. Planning to make the entire film in the city where he lived, Otto thought the production would be a snap. But once he cast Dyan Cannon in the leading role of Julie Messinger, the prospect of a hassle-free shoot was blown sky high. “Dyan Cannon and Faye Dunaway—these two were in a class by themselves,” Hope recalled.
But in the final analysis first prize must go to Dyan, the most temperamental actor Otto ever worked with. She was rude to the other actors and high and mighty to the crew. She would yell “Cut!” She was late. Because she always knew best, you couldn’t tell her anything. At night Otto and I would long for Deborah Kerr, a real star who was lovely to everyone; but as Otto said, “There is only one Deborah Kerr.” I know very well that over the years Otto had offended a number of actors, but except for Faye and Dyan (Tom Tryon, I think, is in a separate category), I always felt they eventually forgave him. But with Dyan, even more than with Faye, I felt that she truly despised Otto, and I am sure t
hat over thirty years later she reviles his memory. I am certain she feels exactly the same way about me. She and I simply did not get along. She bad-mouthed Otto everywhere: in the makeup room, in front of the other actors, on the set, when we were shooting in the middle of the Guggenheim Museum. She told everyone Otto couldn’t direct his way out of a paper bag, couldn’t direct his niece to the bathroom. I finally blew my stack, which I should not have done, and told her not to talk about Otto like that while I was around. Dyan has a good comic flair, but the career never quite happened because the word about her got out: we weren’t the only ones who felt this way59
The animosity between the director and his leading lady transformed the sweltering summertime shoot into a prolonged war of nerves. Costars and staff lined up, for or against Otto or Dyan Cannon, who, quite unlike Faye Dunaway had staunch defenders. Firmly in Otto’s corner, in addition to Hope, was the blunt, no-nonsense assistant director, Charlie Okun, who had survived a far more harrowing production, Michael Cimino’s misfire, Heavens Gate. “Dyan was a pain in the ass,” Okun said.
She had an attitude a mile wide, and she was a nutcase who’d only eat grapes. She hated Otto, truly hated him, and because my job as a.d. was to bring her to the set she hated me too. For a scene to be shot at Elizabeth Arden, there was a terrific argument over wardrobe, with Dyan crying and Otto screaming, “I am not dressing you, I am dressing the character!” Dyan left the set and refused to return. I had to go back to her four times. “I know he’s an s.o.b., but I’m only doing my job, don’t take it out on me,” I said. When I finally got her to come onto the set her face was puffy and red from crying. This happened many, many times.
As a.d., my job is to protect the director 150 percent, and I wanted to protect Otto because I had great respect for him. (That’s why I would never call him “Otto.”) I don’t interfere creatively—I never wanted to be a director, and I wouldn’t dream of talking to actors. I break down the script, for logistics, but I don’t make any artistic judgments. That was Otto’s department, and he was always emphatic. Arrogance was a part of his persona—there were no conferences, ever—and that style didn’t work for Dyan, to say the least.60
“Dyan was not easy to work with,” recalled Nina Foch, cast as Julie’s fashionable mother.
I tried to make friends with her but it didn’t work. We had nothing in common. She was all over the place, and Otto didn’t know what to do with that kind of “let’s be free,” marijuana-smoking world. She deserved to be talked to, because she really was acting up, but she should not have been yelled at. Otto, who was the most charming man when he wasn’t yelling, used yelling where he never should have. It was wrong—it was appalling. He didn’t understand that if you yell at people, then they cannot work. My father was a Danish conductor, so I knew what these “important” European gentlemen could be like: they thought they could break you down and then build you up again. What you want from the people you hire is what they can uniquely bring, and it takes courage to allow them to use their own stuff. I don’t know if Otto understood that. Now Otto didn’t yell the whole time, not even at Dyan; they had their peaceful moments and even a few laughs. But he was wrong to have yelled at her at all.61
Erik had an equivocal response to the stand-off between his father and Dyan Cannon, a sign perhaps of a growing alienation between him and his stepmother. “Hope selected the wardrobe, which Dyan didn’t like,” he recalled. “When Hope went to complain to Otto that Dyan was being difficult, from that moment on Dyan was dead meat. Otto’s loyalties to Hope were beyond question, and after that the relations between Otto and Dyan were not redeemable. The war raged with such ferocity because Dyan gave as good as she got. She was much stronger than a lot of people when confronting Otto; she would not be bullied.” 62
Costars Rita Gam and Ken Howard were firmly on Dyan’s side. “Why should he have hated her so much?” wondered Gam, cast as one of the dying husband’s many ex-lovers.
There was no reason. Dyan is a fine actress, and we could all see that she was giving a lovely performance. Yet Otto tortured her. He just had a case against poor Dyan, who was desperately unhappy, always crying and just miserable. He drove her to Valium. He beat a performance into her, and the result is there on film for everyone to see: she is magnificent. But surely this isn’t the way to do it. As a director Otto was like a throwback to the silent era; I felt he should be carrying a whip and wearing puttees. In one shot in a hospital scene where nine of us are waiting for news of Richard’s death, he screamed at each of us individually. Once, when I wasn’t on my mark—and I was just a fraction off—he screamed with such intensity you would have thought I had committed murder. 63
During rehearsals for a scene in which Julie rages at Richard (Laurence Luckinbill), near death in his hospital bed, Dyan Cannon, with tears streaming down her face, suddenly laughed. It was a brilliant choice, appropriate for the character and the moment. But because it wasn’t in the script, Preminger, as Ken Howard observed, “just lost it. He just devastated her because of that laugh, which is wonderful and sort of crazy, sexy and funny and part of Dyan’s own temperament.” 64
“Otto did not destroy Dyan in the end,” Erik pointed out. “He couldn’t destroy Dyan, she was too strong. But he did destroy Jennifer O’Neill,” playing Richard’s current mistress and Julie’s supposed best friend. 65 “He was cruel,” Jennifer O’Neill remembered. “He was terrible to me and of course to Dyan Cannon. He loved to intimidate and once he got started you couldn’t stop him. It was like he was on drugs or drink: he wasn’t, but that’s how it felt or seemed. He would go for the jugular. He had made good films before, but not this one, which was very bad. He could be nice, however, and I liked and appreciated that side. When he heard my daughter was sick, he insisted I go home and take care of her.”66
Away from the set and working with his editor, Harry Howard, Preminger was becalmed.
He never told me about any fights on the set, and I didn’t want to get into it anyway: the actors were not my friends. But as we were editing, he gave Dyan credit. He said she was doing a very good job, and he said that at the end, too. I don’t know that all his yelling was anger; it could have been passion. You had to understand that. I would make rough edits of the previous day’s shooting, and then each night I’d go with Otto to his town house and we’d look at the dailies. He had a good sense of how to play the dramatics on-screen. In a rough cut of a scene I had between Dyan Cannon and Ken Howard, I was cutting between them; he said I missed the point of the scene. “The drama is on her, stop cutting to him.” That was informative to me. 67
Bad feelings continued to fester after the shoot was over in early September. “Dyan refused to attend Otto’s wrap party and threw her own party,” the unit publicist Bud Rosenthal remembered. “I was the only one from the production side she invited.” 68 When the star asked to have a private screening of the finished film, Preminger refused. “She can come to the preview just like the others,” he told columnist Earl Wilson. Ungallantly he “confided” to Wilson that Dyan “wouldn’t work in the nude—maybe she doesn’t like her body. But I respect that wish.” 69
“I have absolutely no words for Preminger,” Cannon fumed, after canceling a coast-to-coast promotional tour. “I will come up with a word for him one day. It hasn’t been invented yet.” As the film opened across the country early in 1972, the actress did not let up. “How can a director who has no feeling make a movie about a feeling woman?” she asked. “The discord and mayhem on his set sent me reeling. I would never make another film rather than work with Preminger again.”70 “Imagine how good her performance will be in her next film if her performance in this one was so brilliant with a bad director,” Preminger countered. “Anyway, I didn’t hire her to praise me; I hired her to give a good performance. And she did.”71
Alight with crack timing and a buzzing subtext, Dyan Cannons performance is far more than good. It’s exquisite, ironically enough (along with Dorothy Dandridge’s in Carm
en Jones) the finest work by an actress in any Otto Preminger film. Cannon received the best reviews of her career— nothing but raves. Her character’s first line, “Oh, why did they abolish slavery?” spoken in exasperation when her black maid doesn’t answer the doorbell lickety-split, is enough to send the character to p.c. detention camp; and a later complaint, “Those people in ghettos think they have problems?” compounds her guilt. Yet, as she learns of her husband’s multiple infidelities (“Oh, Richard, you screwed us all”), Cannon earns sympathy
Dyan Cannon wearing the costume that launched a major battle with Preminger on the set of Such Good Friends.
for her character, an anxious, neglected wife who uses sarcasm as a way of covering her wounds. In the crucial scene in which a friend tells her over lunch that her husband has been having an affair for over a year, Cannon takes a pause that rumbles with Julie’s anguish. Finding her voice, she says, “Oh, my goodness, the eggs will get cold,” and manages to infuse the seemingly off-hand remark with a sense of the nearly mortal wound Julie has just received. It is an inspired moment brimming with an intuition and spontaneity that her battles with Preminger did not subdue.
Many of the eruptions between the star and her director were about wardrobe, in many instances the epitome of early-1970s bad taste. Julie wears some eyesores, including a too-short, too-bright yellow skirt and a baby-doll powder-blue dress. The biggest blowup occurred when Cannon refused to wear a fishnet, see-through blouse. “Julie wouldn’t be caught dead in that hideous blouse,” Cannon protested. Preminger won the battle, but it’s likely that the actress knew better than her director what a pampered Manhattan matron of means would and would not wear.
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