Just One Catch

by Tracy Daugherty

  Another watershed for Joe was the destruction of Dustin Hoffman’s apartment on West Eleventh Street on March 6, 1970. Joe had met the actor through Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, who lived on West Eleventh at the time (Bancroft had starred with Hoffman in Mike Nichols’s movie The Graduate). “[Hoffman and I became] good friends [because] we have never been close,” Joe wrote. “We have never worked together … leaving each of us with an unmarred respect for the judgment and consideration of the other that is probably unwarranted by both.” The foundation of their friendship, he said, lay in the “ground rules”: “he [didn’t] have to read my novels, and I [didn’t] have to see his movies.”

  Just past noon on that chilly March day in 1970, a woman named Marie-Thérèse Thiesselin, whom Hoffman and his wife had hired as a baby-sitter for their daughter, Karina, was standing in Hoffman’s living room at number 16. Suddenly, the fireplace lurched at her, a violent blossoming of bricks. Shock made her strangely calm. She picked up Hoffman’s pet terrier, O.J., walked into the kitchen, and phoned Hoffman (Karina was not at home). Then she walked out on the street, where she saw a gaping hole in the building next door, debris strewn across the pavement, flames licking the windows of number 18. Soon, the country would learn that members of the Weathermen had been manufacturing bombs in the basement of that building. By accident, one had gone off.

  From the air, from his perch in a B-25 during World War II, Joe rarely knew if he had hit a little bridge. On the ground in Greenwich Village, the mayhem was impossible to miss and even harder to absorb. As Hoffman and his neighbors salvaged whatever they could from their apartments, they wondered if other blasts were imminent and might eliminate the street entirely.

  In the aftermath, city officials discovered, buried in the waste, sixty sticks of live dynamite.

  Some time later, speaking of the bombers on The Dick Cavett Show, Hoffman said he didn’t feel anger, but fear—for all of us, our families, our nation. His words seemed a valediction for the decade. The dissidents at number 18 had benefited from the “rising income, rising productivity, [and] rising consumption” Fortune magazine, in 1961, had predicted would lead to contentment and glorious achievement. What could have steered them toward that basement? Disillusionment after years of racial strife, a questionable war, and a rash of political assassinations? Still, to most observers, the Weathermen’s actions were unfathomable. The culture seemed to have come unhinged.

  The old thrill rides at Coney Island were nothing compared to this.

  In what seemed another eulogy for the sixties, a resident of West Eleventh Street expressed the mood of the neighbors in the days following the blast: “At first there was camaraderie, but then there was a general sense of helplessness, a kind of loneliness, [and finally] a sense of distance.”

  14. Where Is World War II?

  IF IT HAD BEEN ACAPULCO, Joe would have beaten the film crew there. But the location scouts had staked out a patch of desert twenty miles northwest of Guaymas, in the Mexican state of Sonora. According to Catch-22’s screenwriter Buck Henry, the area offered a “breathtaking panorama of poverty, dust, [and] unidentified plant life”—not the ideal setting in which to ring out the old decade and, along with the roar of over half a dozen B-25s, ring in the new.

  Originally, the film crew had hoped to shoot where Joe had fought the war. John Calley, the movie’s producer, and Richard Sylbert, the production designer, flew to Corsica. Up and down the coast, they asked (“in our failing Italian,” Sylbert said), “Where is World War II?” Joe could have told them. Nowhere. Oil refineries and highways had replaced the old American air base.

  Besides a desire for accuracy, Mike Nichols, the film’s director, wanted a setting that conveyed Yossarian’s “how-do-I get-outta-here feeling.” He found such a place near the Tetakawi mountain, known as “Goat’s Teats,” north of Guaymas. There, the crew built a $180,000 five-mile highway to haul necessary equipment to the location, and a $250,000 six-thousand-foot runway for the B-25s. The mayor of Guaymas welcomed these improvements to the infrastructure, particularly because he owned a local construction company.

  In the years preceding production, Columbia, which had first optioned the book, sold the film property to Paramount/Filmways. At one point, Jack Lemmon wanted to make the movie (and play Yossarian). Later, Richard Brooks said he would do it, but he wound up making a version of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim instead, exhausting his capacity for orchestrating war movies.

  Columbia had financed Dr. Strangelove and purchased Fail-Safe, so the studio released two antiwar movies in the same year. “[T]he Pentagon didn’t like it,” Joe said. “Each of the studios has a man in Washington who talks to the generals and the admirals, and keeps them happy, and [the Columbia heads] didn’t want to embark on another movie that they thought the Pentagon might not like. Then a stockholder’s fight got in the way. All this time my reputation was suffering because the rumor was spreading that Catch-22 was hard to adapt to the screen. And I was getting stigmatized. People in Hollywood and New York were saying, ‘That’s Heller over there—his books don’t make good screenplays.’ I stopped being invited to parties.”

  Joe was kidding when he made these remarks during a talk at the Ninety-second Street Y, but he wasn’t exaggerating much.

  Enter Mike Nichols. With two phenomenal successes, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate, he had earned the right—in a shifting Hollywood climate—to make whatever he wanted. He had become the first American director since Orson Welles to gain creative control of his movie, including the right of final cut and the option of keeping studio executives from seeing daily rushes. Welles had wielded such power with Citizen Kane in 1941. Now, Catch-22 was to be an important “auteur” film.

  Throughout the early 1960s—in fact, since the end of World War II—the American film industry had floundered, losing its grip on an audience tired of the kinds of formulaic projects Joe had worked on (with certain exceptions, like Casino Royale). In 1968, Jack Valenti, a former insider in the LBJ administration, and now president of the Motion Picture Association of America, oversaw the creation of the movie rating system. It was established to assuage the fears of parents and politicians fussed about inappropriate material for children (much the way the comic-book industry had regulated itself in the 1950s). But the system was also designed to lure bigger audiences to “mature” movies, for which moviegoers were showing a predilection.

  In his comprehensive American Film: A History, Jon Lewis says movies like The Graduate, explicit about sex and other “adult” behaviors, “moved the industry one step closer to a simple truth: the old guard running the studios were desperately out of touch, and a new breed of American filmmakers—young and audacious, with an understanding of and an interest in a more international film style and form—had a much better idea of what American audiences wanted than they did. The success of … The Graduate [which earned forty million dollars in its first run] made the auteur renaissance—the brief golden age … in Hollywood when directors finally seemed to be the ones to call the shots—not only necessary but inevitable.”

  In the 1950s François Truffaut was the first to use the term auteur theory, which refers to the notion that every movie had an author: the director. “A peculiarly American brand of auteurism was embraced by the studios only so long as the auteurs were able to satisfy the audience’s tastes and make money,” Lewis writes.

  Nichols, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany who spoke only two sentences in English when he first arrived in the United States—“I do not speak English” and “Please do not kiss me”—was thirty-seven years old when he was granted so much freedom with Catch-22. With Elaine May, in the 1950s, he had honed not just his English but his wit and comic timing. The couple took their comedy act from Chicago’s Second City to Broadway. Nichols went on to produce and direct plays, then movies. Catch-22 was his third feature-length film.

  “Every time you get too much for what you’ve put in, you know it’s going to come out
of you later,” he told Nora Ephron, who flew to Mexico to cover the filming for the New York Times. He said he kept thinking about the Beatles—in their early days, they wondered when “the Fall” would come: that inevitable moment when success dimmed, soured, or backfired. Nichols said he would almost welcome that moment. Perhaps it would dispel his feeling that he had been given more than he deserved. In the meantime, he would restage World War II.

  One day in the Apthorp, Erica picked up the phone. “It’s another one of your friends,” she said to her father.

  “Which friend?” Joe asked.

  “I don’t know, but he’s giving me false names.”

  “I don’t have friends like that, you do,” Joe said.

  “Well, he says he’s Mike Nichols.”

  Like the students in the Yale Drama School, Nichols couldn’t believe this guy had written that book. One of his associates said maybe Heller had found the manuscript of Catch-22 on the body of a dead soldier. One night in Chinatown, Joe joined Nichols and Buck Henry over noodles and a movie script. The meal was awkward. Nichols wanted to know what Joe thought, but Joe did not want to criticize Henry’s script in front of the man. The writing had been herculean: The first draft of the screenplay topped out at 385 pages (a typical script rarely exceeded 120). “[This] indicated to me that they had made an effort to include in the motion picture everything in the book that they themselves liked, and that was pretty much the whole book,” Joe said. Touched but doubtful the film could succeed, he decided to stay out of the process. Buck Henry was working in good faith. Besides, Joe realized that when it came to movie scripts, he was probably too bound by conventional patterns. He understood that were he to have undertaken the adaptation of his novel, he would have made a mess of things by going for easy laughs and avoiding some of the book’s darker moments. Whatever flaws stippled Henry’s script, he was taking a mighty shot at doing the book justice.

  Nichols said he’d “get back” to Joe. Over the course of many months, he would say this several times. Joe never saw him.

  Nichols tapped Alan Arkin—a Brooklyn native and another Second City vet—to play Yossarian. “[It’s] the only part I’ve ever worked on that didn’t demand a conception,” Arkin said. “[T]here isn’t much difference between me and Yossarian.”

  The mayor of Guaymas dispatched seventy-five peones armed with machetes to clear a one-mile-square site of rattlesnakes, brush, and cactus, leaving only mesquite, which could pass for the small olive trees native to Corsica. Nichols issued a call for thirty-six bombers. Eventually, Frank Tallman, a stunt pilot, rounded up eighteen old B-25s, most of which had been destined for the scrap heap, repaired them, and readied them to fly, at a cost of ten thousand dollars each. One of the planes came from heiress Barbara Hutton, who had given it as a wedding present to a playboy pal of hers. It had been fitted with a bed, reclining seats, and a leather-lined toilet.

  Tallman signed former fighter pilots to steer the planes. An additional plane, beyond repair, was shipped to the desert, burned to film a crash scene, and buried beside the runway, where it remains to this day.

  The sight of Tallman’s artificial leg unnerved all the actors scheduled to fly in the bombers.

  A reporter from Time magazine, watching the filming, wrote, “Under Nichols’ direction, the camera makes the air as palpable as blood.… [T]he sluggish bodies of the B-25s rise impossibly close to one another, great vulnerable chunks of aluminum shaking as they fight for altitude. Could the war truly have been fought in those preposterous crates? It could; it was.”

  The cockpits and the bombardiers’ perches were so small, the crew had difficulty fitting actors, cameras, and cameramen in the planes. Nichols spent hours one day setting up a scene, arranging the camera the way he wanted it. The equipment filled the cockpit. “Uh—Mike—who’s going to fly the plane?” Tallman asked.

  John Jordan, a second-unit director, refused to wear a harness. While in the air one morning, in the tail gunner’s spot, filming one plane from another, he sent a hand signal to a crew member in the other plane, lost his grip, and fell four thousand feet to his death, a late casualty of the war.

  Painstakingly, Nichols staged the scene where Milo Minderbinder calls an air strike against the base; Yossarian watches in horror as building after building is destroyed. The crew set off tons of explosives. Afterward, Nichols told Arkin, “That was good terror, Alan.” Arkin replied, “That was real terror, Mike.”

  The actor playing Snowden wore a flight suit packed with animal offal to simulate the spilling of his guts.

  “I don’t think of this as a film about World War II,” Nichols told Nora Ephron. “I think of it as a picture about dying and a picture about where you get off and at what point you take control over your own life and say, ‘No, I won’t. I decide. I draw the line.’”

  The Time reporter observed, “Nichols … was aware that laughter in Catch-22 was, in the Freudian sense, a cry for help. It is the book’s cold rage that he has nurtured.”

  “He caught its essence,” Joe said of Nichols’s approach to the book. “He understood.”

  The actors and crew revered the novel. On the wall of a portable men’s room on the set, someone scrawled, “Help Save Joe Heller”—a reminder to everyone to preserve the book’s integrity.

  The novel’s repetitive, retrospective structure did not translate easily to the screen. Nichols tried to give the film narrative coherence by folding the events into Yossarian’s fever dream following a knife attack. A spirit of the absurd carried over from the novel in the actors’ broad mugging (Borscht Belt–style) and in touches like the changing portrait on Major Major’s wall—first it’s FDR, then Winston Churchill, and finally Joseph Stalin.

  “For the actors … making an Air Force film has turned out to be very much like being in the Air Force,” Ephron reported.

  “I’ll tell you what we do around here in our free time,” said Arkin. “We sit in the barracks out at the set with our muddy boots on and talk about women. That’s what you do in the Army, isn’t it? Sit around in your muddy boots and talk about women? I don’t know why we do it.”

  Orson Welles had a small part in the movie. His arrival on the set discombobulated the crew: He went about criticizing performances, scene preparations, and camera setups, yet when it came time for him to deliver his lines, he nearly always flubbed them. Nichols sympathized with him. “I was very moved by Welles,” he said. “I knew [he was] used to being in control—and I was sorry when people didn’t see what that felt like.… I know that if I were acting in a movie, it would be very hard for me not to say, ‘I wonder if you would be kind enough to consider putting the camera a little more there so that when I do this…’ How do you kill that knowledge?”

  On another occasion, John Wayne dropped by the set on his way to film a Western in Durango (and to look at some nearby land he wanted to purchase). He expected a welcoming party, but none of the younger actors knew who he was. Nichols and Henry were not informed of his arrival. Angry, convinced he had been snubbed for political reasons, he went to the Hotel Playa de Cortes in Guaymas, drank and smashed glassware in the bar, and wound up breaking two ribs in a nasty fall. “We’re trying to make up [for not greeting him] by getting a print of The Green Berets and showing it to the crew,” Buck Henry said. “In the meantime, we’ve just been sitting around here, watching the days go by, and waiting for him to come back and bomb us.”

  The Welles and Wayne incidents threatened crew morale. Nichols’s energy kept everyone on task. Of being directed by Nichols, Dustin Hoffman once said, “He makes you feel kind of like a kite. He lets you go ahead, and do your thing [as an actor]. And then when you’ve finished he pulls you in by the string. But at least you’ve had the enjoyment of the wind.”

  During the shooting of a love scene between Arkin and Paula Prentiss, Nichols wanted a more passionate vocal reaction from the actress. He set the cameras rolling. While Arkin and Prentiss embraced, he sneaked up behind her and squeeze
d one of her breasts. “I let out this great hoot,” Prentiss said. Nichols was pleased. “Then I was so overcome with emotion I had to go in a corner and be alone,” Prentiss said. “Whenever someone touches me I’m in love with him for about eight hours.”

  The film crew spent nearly four months in the desert, having little contact with the outside world. The budget ballooned from eleven million to over thirteen million dollars. “I wonder if I could see something in a less expensive model?” the producer complained to Nichols.

  Hollywood studio heads feared nothing more than an auteur film swelling out of control. One disaster—critically, financially—could spell the end of directorial independence and a return to tight studio control. (The nightmares finally occurred in 1979 and 1980, first with Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and then with Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate; in essence, the age of auterism ended, and Hollywood turned to churning out predictable special-effects blockbusters.)

  Nichols’s Catch-22 came dangerously close to being an auteur disaster. The fall he feared appeared imminent. Though the film ended up eighth on the top earners’ list in 1970 (after Airport, M*A*S*H, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, and Woodstock, among others), it struck critics and studio executives alike as a disappointment, given advance expectations. Jacob Brackman, writing in Esquire, said “it seemed … [like] two movies … intercut by some moon-struck studio editor. The one a dark, hysterical masterpiece, a Moby Dick of movies. The other a dumb, undergraduatey jackoff.” The near-brilliant scenes, he said, played “as if Lewis Carroll had redone The Inferno—to make you laugh and steal the sound of your laughter.” These scenes were undermined by the “fairly contemptible burlesque” of other scenes. Vestiges of Yiddish theater were not welcome on the silver screen; it was an irony (and an indicator of the novel’s deepest tones) that comedy—Nichols’s calling card—was the film’s weakest aspect.