Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God

by Nat Segaloff

  Bogart’s cynicism notwithstanding, it did little over the years to dampen Silliphant’s attitude toward youthful competitors. “I like younger people,” he would come to say, even at a time when the young Turks who had taken over Hollywood had forgotten who he was. “Because I worry about them. I hope they can have what I have had and continue to have. But the chances are they won’t. And so I want to help them. And they are invigorating to have around because they have more eyes than I have. With them around, I can see as the bee or the fly sees — through multiple and peripheral mirrors.”

  More philosophically, he added, “The most dangerous thing anybody can do is to live, and, since living is a daily peril which we all share, whether we are seventy or seven, I have never been threatened by anyone younger than I for the simple reason that I am superior to them, in the sense that I have achieved something they may never achieve: a lifetime of more years than they have had. And they may die, be killed, diseased, stricken tomorrow at five thirty for all anybody knows. So why should I envy them? Actually, I pity them.”

  In 1953, Fox had a major upheaval. The Robe, the first film released in the wide-screen CinemaScope process, was crucifying the box office competition. More importantly, it was knocking out television. The studio announced that, henceforth, all of its films would be in ‘Scope. [26] Silliphant cringed. “I was detesting my job despite the fact that, even in those days, I was being paid $500 a week, had a department of forty people, assorted assistants, and two secretaries. I decided it was time either to write or be unhappy for the rest of my life.”

  But first he had to tell his boss. Not surprisingly, Skouras roiled, “You’ll be back. You’ll come back crawling, but you’ll be back some day.” And, indeed, Silliphant did come back to Fox one day, but it wasn’t crawling, it was to make The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, the box office successes of which saved the studio. But by then Skouras was long gone.

  “I heard from somebody in publicity at MGM in New York that their studio was looking for a script for Joan Crawford,” Silliphant said. “I got a copy of some of our Fox scripts to see what the physical layout of such work looked like. Then I wrote a romantic story, the Joan Crawford role built around a Pulitzer Prize-winning poetess seeking love in Cuba and in the oil city of Maracaibo, Venezuela. I wrote the script in two weeks, working all night every night, doing my Fox publicity job in the daytime. Then I rushed the finished script over to MGM to a sort of godfather of mine, Oscar Doob, who was Metro’s VP in charge of advertising-publicity, and ‘submitted’ it to him to send along, if he thought it was worthy, to his studio. He told me he’d be happy to read it, but he knew nothing of the studio looking for a Joan Crawford script. Where had I heard that rumor? ‘From friends in your publicity department,’ I replied. Right then and there he called the studio in Culver City. Result: nobody, but nobody, was either looking for or wanted a script for Joan Crawford. At least at MGM.

  “So there I was, script in hand, no market. A week later, while at lunch with Roger Straus (Farrar, Straus publishing house) I told him the story and joked about my gullibility. ‘Let me read the script,’ he suggested. I sent it to him and the following day he called to tell me he thought it would translate into a pretty fair novel. Did I know how to write a novel? ‘Well,’ I said, ‘three weeks ago I didn’t know how to write a screenplay, so I might as well see if I can’t also find out how to write a novel.’”

  But first, he embarked on a producing gambit. He secured the life story rights from heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis and landed financing from Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. (son of the founder of the Chrysler Corporation and a well-known art collector and benefactor) and William Zeckendorf (the real estate developer who would make the deal with Spyros Skouras to build Century City). They hired Robert Sylvester — a columnist friend from The New York Daily News and a fight buff — to write the screenplay. He engaged workmanlike director Robert Gordon and secured promise of release from United Artists, and then found himself doing the one thing he hated to do most: wait.

  “It never occurred to me to write the film, only to produce it,” he said. “Only when Bob failed to give me some of the scenes I felt were essential did I step in and write them myself. Later, when I watched the completed movie, I saw that the several scenes I had written were far and away the best ones in the flick — at least to my considerably prejudiced opinion. But, even more, I had discovered the pain of having to sit there and wait — as a producer — for the writer to deliver. What the hell, it struck me, why not be the guy everybody’s waiting for rather than the guy who’s going crazy waiting?

  “As I recall, Bob wrote the mother-son violin scene. The scenes I wrote were the later John Marley scenes and virtually all of the Joe vs. Maria marital scenes, along with the ‘finding himself ’ wind-up. The gutsy, fight and ringside stuff is all Bob’s. My scenes are the more personal, intimate moments, which, for some reason, evaded Bob in his writing of the draft.”

  Joe Louis, the “Brown Bomber,” is credited with bringing new excitement to boxing following the retirement of Jack Dempsey. But Dempsey was white and Louis was black: something that made no difference to Silliphant, but did to some of his advisors who were not bashful about showing their racism.

  “The flack from ‘friends’ of mine, southern exhibitors, was an eye-opener,” Silliphant sighed. “They called long-distance to tell me I was out of my mind to make my feature debut with a ‘race’ movie. And what was that scene where Manny [played by John Marley], Joe’s trainer, is sitting there with Joe’s black daughter on his lap? That’s gotta go — or it’ll never play in our theatres.” The pressure increased when Chrysler’s and Zeckendorf ’s funding proved insufficient. “From the beginning I never was fully funded,” Silliphant confessed, “but I went ahead and shot anyway — even while I was still out drumming up money. We got a life-saving infusion half-way into the shoot from one of the few black businessmen who came through for Joe. This gentleman was Harlem’s leading abortionist and obviously business was good uptown.” The Joe Louis Story was released on September 18, 1953. When its copyright was not renewed, it slipped into the public domain and has enjoyed a wider distribution on home video than it ever had in theatres.

  Two years after Joe Louis saw 5 Against the House (1955), a taut heist tale from a Good Housekeeping magazine story by Jack Finney, author of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, among other classics. Silliphant put up his own money — his fee from Maracaibo — and established Dayle Productions (named after his daughter) with writer-director John Barnwell. This time he wrote the script, which was later polished by William Bowers and Barnwell, and had Phil Karlson — a fine action hand — direct the no-nonsense story of four college buddies planning on robbing a Reno casino just to show it can be done, and one of them double-crossing the others by planning on making off with the loot. Guy Madison, Kim Novak, and Brian Keith starred. Although Silliphant produced, this was his first screenplay credit, and it brought him in contact with one of Hollywood’s true moguls: Columbia Pictures’s monstrous boss, Harry Cohn.

  “I only met Harry Cohn once,” Silliphant recalled, “in his office. He was courteous and businesslike, but that could be because I was the only goy in the shop and young and wide-eyed, and he knew instinctively he could have me for breakfast on the worst day of his life, so he spared me. And, yes, he [ordered] us to cast Kim Novak in 5 Against the House. But who cared? She couldn’t act, but the role didn’t require a Shakespearean capability. All she had to do was to slink and roll those eyes. And, yes, Mr. Cohn was definitely running things when I was there. But I preferred that hands-on, rough-andtumble control to today’s push-button executions from offices in distant skyscrapers. Today you never quite know who ordered your death. With Harry around, you never had any doubt.”

  As he would do so often, Silliphant purposely over-extended himself. He kept a private journal marked “Income From Writing” listing everything he worked on in 1956. He set personal goals of $40,000 from
screenwriting (demanding of himself $1,000/week for forty weeks), $20,000 from sales of originals, and $5,000 from books. By year’s end he had amassed a pre-tax total of $73,354.53 derived from a staggering number of projects. Not all were produced (*), but all were paid: [27]

  SCREEN

  Nightfall — *4,000

  Squaw Fever — 5,000 (for Raoul Walsh)

  Last Man at Wagon Hound — 3,000 (for Clark Gable)

  Damn Citizen * — 9,500

  Pakistan — 19,666 (for John Wayne)

  Rachel Cade * — 14,000 (Sins of Rachel Cade)

  Angel’s Twenty — 2,000

  Wherever You Are — 4,000 (for Donna Reed)

  TV

  “The Thread” * — 1,250 (Jane Wyman Theatre)

  “Never Again” * — 500 (Hitchcock Presents)

  “The Warriors” * — 875 (Chevron Show of Stars)

  “The Hunted” * — 1,250 (G.E. Theatre)

  “The Idea Man” * — 1,250 (Ford Theatre)

  “Fan Dancer’s Horse” * — 1,250 (Ford Theatre)

  “Not for the Rope” * — 1,000 (Zane Grey Theatre)

  “Mr. Cinderella” * — 1,100 (Heinz Playhouse)

  “Jonathan” (polish) * — 500 (Hitchcock Presents)

  “The Manacled” * — 1,250 (Hitchcock Presents)

  “We Fly Anything” — 1,350 (unproduced pilot)

  “A Bottle of Wine” * — 1,250 (Hitchcock Presents)

  “Juvenile Delinquent” — 800 (West Point)

  During this period, he sold, for $7,500, a screenplay called Huk!, about Communist guerillas fighting land owners to free the Philippines from imperialism. The film was directed by John Barnwell and saw brief United Artists release in 1956. Not wanting to leave any revenue source untapped, he also novelized the script, as he had Maracaibo, into a paperback, this time for Popular Library. [28]

  All of this enabled him to move to pre-Castro Cuba. “I rented a house on the beach, a place well outside of Havana — Playa Tarara, I believe it was — and there, working nights only (the days were spent scuba diving) I [finally] turned the aborted film script [Maracaibo] into a novel, which Farrar, Straus published in 1954, and which my then-agent Ned Brown of MCA sold to Universal for what to me (in those days) was a small fortune — either $37,500 or $47,500. I have the feeling it was probably the lesser figure, but since I could live in Cuba on that much money for three or four years I had suddenly become rich. So this is a long answer to How did I learn [to write scripts]: I just jumped into the water and swam.” Maracaibo [29] was eventually filmed by Cornel Wilde, who also starred; the screenplay is credited to Ted Sherdeman. The “Joan Crawford” role was played by Jean Wallace, who was married to Wilde at the time.

  When Silliphant returned from Cuba, he got a call from an old friend in the Disney publicity department. Walt was about to start a TV show aimed at kids, something called The Mickey Mouse Club, and was desperate for material.

  2: The Mouse

  Even though Walt Disney would have his finger firmly up the pulse of the public until his death in 1966, in 1938 his investors had so little faith in his company’s future that they tied the construction of his new studio to a bizarre condition. The bank leaned on Roy Disney, Walt’s financially savvy brother, to design the building with halls and doorways wide enough to admit hospital beds so that, if the studio failed, it could be sold to St. Joseph’s Medical Center across Buena Vista Street as an infirmary. Completed in 1940, the studio’s old art deco animation building — which now houses administrative offices — stands as testament to the Disneys’ vision and the bankers’ myopia.

  The Mickey Mouse Club was a different animal. Debuting on ABC-TV on October 3, 1955, it was created in the wake of the successful Disneyland TV series, which had begun on the alphabet network in 1954. Financed by an arrangement with ABC that also had the network invest in the Disneyland theme park being built in Anaheim, California — the show was an instant hit. [30] The hour-long Club aired weekday afternoons just as kids were getting home from school. It was heavily formatted: Monday was “Fun with Music Day,” Tuesday was “Guest Star Day,” Wednesday was “Anything Can Happen Day,” Thursday was “Circus Day,” and Friday was “Talent Round-up.” Each program featured songs and dances by the teenage Mouseketeers, Disney cartoons that had never before aired (Walt refused to sell to TV), newsreels of kid-oriented activities, educational shorts hosted by Jiminy Cricket, and serialized adventures with youthful casts (“Spin & Marty,” “Corky and White Shadow,” “The Hardy Boys,” etc.).

  Told by a former colleague that Walt was looking for additional segments, Silliphant pitched Disney an idea that had children taking a crack at what they wanted to be when they grew up. Trans-World Airlines, which was an exhibitor at Disneyland, agreed to let kids into their Kansas-City-based training center to learn what it took to become a pilot (Duncan Richardson) or flight attendant (Pat Morrow). The series, for which Silliphant was writer and production supervisor, was called “What I Want to Be” and ran for ten weeks beginning October 3, 1955, in the third quarter-hour of The Mickey Mouse Club.

  For all his genius as an innovator and story editor, Disney the man was a ganglia of contradictions. As a result of having been cheated out of the first cartoon character he created, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, he was paranoid to a fault about everything else his studio turned out. He would roam the office after his workers had left, leaving notes for them in blue ink and rifling through their trash cans in case they had discarded an idea that his genius would know how to save. But he also wanted to discover if any of them was working for anybody else on his time. When Silliphant realized this was going on, he started leaving cryptic and misleading material in his trash can to see what Walt would do. Perhaps as a result, when Silliphant pitched Disney on future episodes, discord developed between the men and both the series and Silliphant’s employ were canceled. [31] “What I Want to Be” was replaced by “Adventure in Dairyland,” in which Mouseketeers Annette Funicello and Kevin “Moochie” Corcoran appeared. As for Silliphant, he never worked for Disney again.

  Meanwhile, Maracaibo was published to reviews that were good enough to warrant a call from Collier’s magazine “about my interest in submitting a short story for consideration,” Silliphant said. “Having no short story conveniently in stock, I sat down that very night and wrote 3,500 words and called it ‘Under Capricorn.’ The title comes from one of the lines in the human palm, which, in the case of murderers, is to be found under the mound of Capricorn. [32] The Collier’s editor, upon receiving and reading the short story, rejected it with a vehemence, which I found quite disturbing [calling it] ‘the most horrible story she’d ever received.’” Undaunted, he took off the rejection slip and mentioned the story to agent Ned Brown. “He promptly sold it for $750 (more than I would have received from the niggardly Collier’s crowd) to a new TV show called Screen Director’s Playhouse. “I said, ‘How long has this been going on?’ and I was in television.” [33]

  The story was never produced, but that hardly mattered; Silliphant had cracked TV. The first four titles in his imposing Writers Guild of America credit roster are for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which filmed at Revue — the TV arm of MCA — in 1956. Peggy Robertson and Norman Lloyd handled the day-to-day chores as associate producers. Silliphant’s first script for them was “Never Again” (airdate: April 22, 1956), which had a twisted history: it was based on a story by movie columnist Adela Rogers St. John, with earlier attempts by Gwen Bagni and Irwin Gielgud. Silliphant applied the final polish.

  Apparently it shone like a beacon because he was hired ten more times over the course of three years but seldom got to work with the Master of Suspense himself.

  “Except for one meeting with Hitch to discuss my scripting a one-hour Suspicion,” Silliphant said, “I never, over the two or three seasons I wrote for the show, met the man. [34] My meetings were always with Joan Harrison — with nobody else — not even with Norman Lloyd, although I did see him a few ti
mes around the office at Revue. Joan would simply call me up and tell me she was sending me a story to read and if I liked it to come in and we’d talk about it. I don’t recall ever having written an original for the show — only adaptations — and all based on stories given to me by Joan. This lady had a prodigious talent and… one of the keenest story minds of any producer with whom I ever worked — I have always preferred to work with women producers — they are more complex, more insightful, I have found, than ninety-nine percent of the male producers I’ve known. I can tell you, without any question, had it not been for Joan, Hitch’s show wouldn’t have stayed on the air ten minutes, for he had less to do with it than any of the several writers Joan used as her backstop for the scripts which she then produced. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Hitch probably didn’t even screen ninety percent of the episodes. Or that he never read a single script. Believe me, it was Joan and Lloyd who made that show. Hitch was their book-end. Nada mas. [35]

  “I must tell you an amusing (though to me it wasn’t at the time) story about Joan and me. After I’d written several episodes for the extravagant sum of $500 for each half-hour Alfred Hitchcock Presents script, I heard that she’d paid one other writer, one of her New York stable — I forget his name, but I believe he wrote more episodes than I did for the show — $750. That did it. I demanded $750 hereafter, or else.

  “‘Or else what?’ Joan asked with that sweet bitchiness which I so loved about her.

  “‘Or else I don’t write any more episodes for you.’

  “‘I’ll miss you,’ she smiled, and I was out the door. Seven — maybe more — months went by while I was busy elsewhere. Then she called. ‘I have a simply marvelous story for you,’ she told me. ‘It’s called “The Glass Eye” and you’re going to love doing it.’