—
I’VE BEEN a movie fan all my life. When I was ten, there were three theaters in West Palm Beach: the Palace, which was nice; the Florida, which was nicer; and the Arcade, which was a bit run-down. I didn’t care, because in those days it usually had a double feature and a serial.
I got there for the first show on Saturday morning and stayed all day. I had my allowance for the week—thirty-five cents—and after I paid the nine-cent admission there was enough left for popcorn, a candy bar, and a Coke. I loved every minute of it: the features, serials, cartoons, newsreels, and coming attractions. At the end of the day I caught the city bus back to Riviera Beach and got home after dark.
My earliest movie memories are of Westerns with Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Wild Bill Elliott as Red Ryder, and the Durango Kid, played by Charles Starrett, whom I loved because his outfit was all black. He had a kind of Humphrey Bogart quality. I also liked Bob Steele. He was a terrific horseman and his fight scenes were always good.
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EARLY IN MY FILM CAREER I started playing what I call the Movie Game. You name an actor and the other player has to name a picture he or she is in. So if I say Errol Flynn, you might say Captain Blood. Then I have to name someone else in Captain Blood beside Flynn. If I say Basil Rathbone, you have to name a Basil Rathbone movie, and it goes on like that until one of us can’t come up with an answer, and gets a strike. Three strikes and you’re out.
I used to play the Movie Game with fellow actors while sitting around waiting for the one line I had in the picture. A lot of times, when the assistant director would come over and say, “Okay, Reynolds, you’re up,” I’d be annoyed because we were right in the middle of a game.
Not all actors are movie fans. It shocks me how little some of them know about their profession, especially the actors who came before them. I could never understand it when an actor couldn’t name three Bette Davis movies. And I don’t understand directors who have no interest in the old black-and-white films from the 1930s and ’40s. When I’m channel-surfing late at night I always stop when I come upon a black-and-white movie on Turner Classic Movies. Some of them are better than color films, the way some things are better on radio than on television. Certain stories seem more real in black and white. You can give them as much color as you like . . . in your mind.
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MARILYN MONROE and I were walking down Broadway on our way to the Actors Studio. She was wearing slacks, an old football jersey, and no makeup. As we passed Childs Restaurant, I said, “I don’t understand it: We’ve walked three blocks and nobody’s bothered you.”
“Want to see her?” Marilyn said. All she did was change her posture, and within twenty feet we were mobbed.
It took five cops to get us out of there.
That’s a movie star. You can’t fake it. You either have it or you don’t.
Spencer Tracy, Bette Davis, James Cagney, Robert Mitchum, Gary Cooper, James Stewart, Mae West, Cary Grant, John Wayne—they all had it. They don’t become the character, the character becomes them.
A journeyman actor looks at a script and says, “How can I serve this material?” A movie star says, “How can I make this material work for me?” And that’s the way it should be. If you go to a movie with Duke Wayne in it, by golly, that’s who you want to see.
Duke was a force of nature. When he walked into a room, it got quiet. And he could persuade you to do anything. In addition to that walk of his, he had the most distinctive gestures of anybody: that way of shooting his arm out to point at something, of wrinkling his forehead, and of losing his breath when he talked. “We’re . . . gonna . . . go over . . . there.”
Even though Duke won a Best Actor Oscar for True Grit (1969), I don’t think he got the respect he deserved. He made a lot of Westerns and war movies, and some of them were stinkers, but he was so powerful in The Searchers (1956) and so touching in his last film, The Shootist (1976). I went to a meeting of the Screen Actors Guild where someone said, “I think we should do something to celebrate Duke Wayne’s career,” and people laughed. They didn’t understand! It made me angry and it soured me on the Screen Actors Guild for a long time.
—
ROBERT MITCHUM’S younger brother John played the cook on Riverboat, and we got to be friends. John was talented in his own right. In addition to his acting—he’s probably remembered best as Inspector Frank DiGiorgio in the Dirty Harry films—he was a singer, guitarist, and something of a poet.
John and Mitch (everybody called Robert Mitchum “Mitch”) grew up in Connecticut. Instead of finishing high school they jumped a freight, came to Hollywood, and got themselves into the movies.
John was tough. Whenever Mitch got in a fight the bartenders couldn’t stop, they’d call John, who’d come in, slug him, and carry him out.
I never worked with Mitch, but I drank with him. There was a joint called the Keys across the street from Universal and he was always there, on his same old park bench at the bar. I’d go over whenever I could to sit with him.
He did something one night that I wanted to put in a picture. A guy came over and started badgering him. “You think you’re tough, don’tcha?” he said, while poking Mitch in the chest. He kept it up until Mitch, who had the biggest hands I’ve ever seen, put one of them behind the guy’s head and slammed his face down on the bar. As he slithered to the floor, Mitch said to the bartender, “This man has fainted.”
Mitchum told anybody who’d listen, “I’m not an actor. I have two emotions: on a horse and off a horse.” I’m sorry I never got to work with him, because in spite of what he said, he was a terrific actor. He knew that the best acting is not acting, it’s behaving. The only time he’d even come close to making a false move was when he tried to do comedy. He wasn’t good at anything that made him look clumsy, even if it got a laugh. He knew that and stayed away from it. That’s what movies stars do.
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MAE WEST’S PICTURES were vehicles for the Diamond Lil persona that she brought to every role. Her character managed to be a sex symbol and a parody of a sex symbol at the same time.
In the 1930s, films like She Done Him Wrong, I’m No Angel, and Belle of the Nineties made her one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. She wrote or rewrote most of her own dialogue, and lines like “Is that a pistol in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” and “Beulah, peel me a grape” became part of the language.
When I was still new in town I went to a party and she was across the room with a bunch of people around her. Somebody came up and said, “Miss West would like to meet you.”
I went over, and she looked me up and down like I was a piece of meat. “You lift weights, don’t you?” she said.
“Not really,” I said.
“Oh come on, I know you do. I like men who work out. Do you like apartments?”
“Uh, sure . . . I guess.”
“I have an apartment. You’ll like it.”
She’d lived in the same building for twenty years, a great art deco thing in Hancock Park called the Ravenswood. When I got off the elevator an ape-shaped guy was standing guard. (Obviously a weight lifter.)
“Follow me,” he said.
“Anything you say,” I said.
He escorted me to the apartment and rang the bell. Another ape-shape opened the door.
“Come with me,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I said. I followed him to a large bedroom in the back of the apartment, and there she was, sitting up in a round bed.
She looked up at me, and without changing the blank expression on her face, she said, “Pull up a bed.”
I sat down beside her and we started talking like old friends. She was funny and fascinating. I couldn’t get over her hands. They looked so young and so smooth, it didn’t seem possible, and I almost looked to see if there was someone under the bed doing her hands for her.
I
must have visited her ten times after that. Always a lot of laughs, and I loved hearing about the old days. I asked her the story of how she “discovered” Cary Grant and she said, “Yeah, it’s true. I was in the head of Paramount’s office and I saw him walking across the yard and I said, ‘If that guy can talk, I want him.’”
That was the start of his career. She was talking to Cary when she said, “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me?” in She Done Him Wrong (1933).
I asked if it was true that she didn’t get along with W. C. Fields and she told me that they did all those pictures together without ever speaking off-camera.
“I thought he was kind of an asshole,” she said.
Mae broke all kinds of barriers in terms of what you could get away with on the screen. She slipped in what was then considered risqué material. She made the movies grow up a little, but I don’t think she got enough credit for that.
She knew how the movie business operated and how to pull the levers. She was in her late seventies when she stood in a receiving line at the premiere of Myra Breckinridge (1970). A parade of Hollywood heavyweights went by and they all came away saying, “Boy, she’s still sharp and she really knows what’s going on.” Later somebody asked how she managed to make such an impression and she said, “It’s simple, I said the same thing to everyone: ‘Loved your movie.’”
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CARY GRANT always said that Archie Leach created a character called Cary Grant and became that character. It was the man he wanted to be. If you look at the early movies, especially the ones with Mae West, he’s still Archie Leach, with a thick Cockney accent. It took him a while to “discover” Cary Grant. When he did, everybody loved him.
Cary told me he’d patterned himself after men he thought were elegant and sophisticated, like Noël Coward and a character actor named Jack Buchanan. He also admired and copied Douglas Fairbanks and Cole Porter. But Cary wasn’t just debonair, he was a good actor. People recognize his brilliance at comedy, but he was also wonderful in dramatic roles. He didn’t get to play them because everybody loved him so much as Cary Grant, but he had the talent to play anything. And I never caught him acting, I only caught him being Cary Grant, which is what he wanted. I see so many actors trying so desperately, but Cary made everything look easy while seeming to enjoy it all.
He had the reputation of being a little tight with a dollar. When I was at Universal doing Riverboat, his dressing room, the biggest on the lot, was across the street from mine. Every day when the mail arrived, he’d come out and hold the envelopes up to the sun. If they contained money (from fans sending a few bucks in cash to cover postage for an autographed picture), he’d take it out, put it in his pocket, and throw the rest away.
Cary invited me to join him at the races one day. There were a bunch of people in his party and he collected two dollars from each of us for a pool. I thought, Two dollars is ridiculous, and without telling anyone I gave the runner an extra hundred bucks to bet. Wouldn’t you know it, our horse won. When the runner came back with ten times what we should have collected, Cary happily divided the winnings without asking questions.
After the sixth race I told Cary, “I’ve got to pee, but I hate to walk through the crowd.”
“Do you want me to take you?” he said.
“Great,” I said, “nobody would ever recognize you.”
“Trust me,” he said.
He was right. People were so in awe of him they froze as we walked by.
Cary was a gracious man and very encouraging to a young actor. He seemed to believe in me, and he gave me a piece of advice. “Burty,” he said, “everybody loves you, so be yourself and have a good time. But when it stops being fun, walk away.”
Directors
I’d been acting ten years before I started to think about how I might have blocked a scene or read a line differently. That’s when I began to imagine I could direct. When you get enough power in the movie business, you can get damn near anything you want. (Which is one of the things wrong with the movie business.) So when I finally said, “I want to direct!” I got my chance.
I’ve now directed five feature films: Gator (1976), The End (1978), Sharky’s Machine (1981), Stick (1985), and The Last Producer (2000)—and I loved every minute of it. I enjoyed communicating with the actors and had definite ideas about what I wanted. The producers were happy because I always finished on time.
People ask if it’s hard to both act and direct at the same time, and I say that it isn’t as hard as you might think. When you’ve done as much bad television as I have, you become your own director anyway, because most early TV directors had no idea what they were doing. You didn’t get anything from them beyond “Turn right at the chair.” As a director, you have to know the big picture. But a good actor will know that, too, so it’s not a big leap from acting to directing.
I wanted to be an actor’s director, someone who works with actors rather than trying to control them. That means respecting them and not playing games. I hate any sort of manipulation a director uses to get a performance out of an actor. Elia Kazan was famous for that.
In 1968, I was in a film called Fade-In (aka The Iron Cowboy) with Kazan’s wife, Barbara Loden. Fade-In’s only distinction is being the first release ever directed by Alan Smithee, the pseudonym used when control is taken away from a director by the studio, and the director no longer wants to be publicly associated with the film. In this case the actual director, Jud Taylor, didn’t want his name in the credits after Paramount recut the picture without him.
Barbara and I were next door to each other in a little motel in Moab, Utah. When Gadge (I still don’t know why they called him that) came to stay for a week, I met him one morning for breakfast.
I’d heard that as soon as anyone starts talking with him, they tell him their life story. I thought, I’ll be damned if I’ll tell him my life story! But two minutes after we sat down I heard myself saying, “Well, my father was chief of police in Riviera Beach, Florida . . .”
Kazan could squeeze every drop out of you because he pretended it was the most fascinating thing he ever heard. No wonder he dominated actors; he mesmerized them. And pitted them against each other. He had all these little tricks to put an actor in the mood he wanted for a character.
When Kazan was making Baby Doll (1956), Eli Wallach told me that Kazan took him aside and said, “Have you heard the things Karl Malden’s been saying about you?” That was typical, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to be a puppet, and I resented how easy it was for him to control me in casual conversation. Looking back, though I admire his films, I can’t say I’m sorry I never worked with him.
As an actor I look on the director as a collaborator. I feel I have something in me that hasn’t been tapped yet, so I want us to try to find it together. Let’s talk about the script and figure out what the writer intended for the character. Once we’ve settled on that, I promise to give everything I have. Unfortunately, some directors hate actors.
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ROBERT ALDRICH was born into power and money. His grandfather was a U.S. senator, and his cousin, Nelson Rockefeller, was the governor of New York and a presidential candidate. Bob would have inherited a piece of the Chase bank, but his family disowned him when he dropped out of college to go to Hollywood. He started as a production clerk at RKO and climbed the ladder to become one of the top directors in Hollywood, with credits like Vera Cruz (1954), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), and The Dirty Dozen (1967). I made two films with Bob, The Longest Yard (1974) and Hustle (1975).
The Longest Yard has a simple plot: The prisoners in a tough penitentiary form a football team and play the guards. We wanted to shoot at Georgia’s Reidsville State Prison, so Al Ruddy, Bob Aldrich, and I went to see Governor Jimmy Carter for permission. The governor was gracious. “That’s a pretty rough place,” he told me with a grin, “but if you get taken hostage, I’ll personally c
ome down and take your place.”
I turned to Bob and said, “This man lies so damn well, I think he’s going to be president someday.”
Governor Carter laughed, thank God.
I’d filmed in prisons before, and I knew it was essential to have the inmates on your side, so in addition to building a football field complete with bleachers, we had six basketball courts installed on the yard. I also knew from experience that every prison has its inmate leadership, so I went to the top man and made him my stand-in. His name was Ringo. He looked like a Brahma bull with glasses and he was serving ninety-nine years for manslaughter and kidnapping.
Six months later I was in Nashville shooting W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings when who should appear at my trailer door but Ringo. There were a couple of state troopers guarding me, and I was afraid of bloodshed if they knew who he was, so I sent him to James Hampton’s trailer. Ringo told Jimmy that he’d decided “to take a vacation.” The next time I saw Ringo, he was leaning against a wall watching us shoot a scene. A week or so later I heard that he was back at Reidsville, in solitary confinement. (Jimmy still hasn’t forgiven me.)
I played a former pro quarterback in Longest Yard. He’s a sleaze, a kept man who sold out his teammates. But prison changes him. A bunch of convicts teach him that there are more important things than winning. I loved making that movie, and it was very successful.
At the previews I attended, people were cheering and ripping up the seats. It was the first picture I’d done since Deliverance that takes the audience on an emotional ride, and that’s what movies are supposed to do. And I think The Longest Yard still holds up. In my un-humble opinion, it’s one of the best football movies ever made.
Unfortunately the remake wasn’t in the same league. Ninety-nine percent of remakes aren’t as good as the original. They never seem to recapture the magic. But Hollywood keeps making them because studio executives think they’re the safe way to go.
But Enough About Me: A Memoir Page 24