Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God

by Nat Segaloff

  But Goldman managed. He eventually called Robertson, said he had finished, and wanted to give him the script of what was to be called Charly.

  Robertson came to Goldman’s Manhattan apartment and picked up the story in his Archive of American Television interview: “He said, ‘You can go in the other room and read it.’ I said ‘No, I wouldn’t do that to you, I’ll take it home.’ I lied. I took it down to the corner delicatessen. and I’m looking through it, and although he’s a brilliant writer, he somehow had missed it. I wasn’t about to say that to him. But I went home and I swallowed my pride — well, best-laid plans — I have to get somebody else. I called Bill and said, ‘Bill, I just don’t think it’s gonna work.’ He said, ‘But you paid me.’ I said, ‘I know.’ [126]

  Says Goldman, “The next event of consequence was when I found out that I was off the project and Stirling Silliphant was doing the screenplay. (And wonderfully, too, without a scintilla of mine in the finished work.) I couldn’t believe it. Getting canned is always two things, shocking and painful. I was rocked. I’d never been fired before. No one ever told me specifically what was wrong with my work. But if I were forced to guess, I would say, odds on, my screenplay stunk.” [127]

  “So that’s how Stirling Silliphant got involved in Charly the movie,” Robertson continues, “and I worked with Stirling very closely through the whole picture. I might add that Bill was misquoted later on in an article about Hollywood where he said I fired him. I never fired Bill. I never fired anybody in my life. But he was quoted as saying that I fired him, you know, from Charly, but I didn’t fire him, and he’ll admit that. I simply paid him the money and it wasn’t gonna work out.” [128]

  Silliphant’s first problem was a major one, the one that, if it didn’t play, would sink the whole film: the surgery that increases Charly Gordon’s intelligence. “Okay,” he explained, “what surgery? If it exists, why aren’t surgeons sawing away night and day at the unfortunate mentally deficient? I didn’t want to write a science fiction piece. I wanted — and Ralph Nelson, our director, wanted — and Cliff Robertson, our Charly, wanted — all of us wanted to make this a film dominated by the sense of real life, of reality. So I had to understand for myself — even if I never used any of the research — how the brain works. Imagine my astonishment, after digging into towering stacks of medical works and after meeting with numerous neurosurgeons and other experts, to discover that nobody really knew too much about the human brain. That is, knew for sure. And the more research I did, the more I found that each successive writer had somehow slightly poached on the work of a previous writer, and that, ultimately, if you traced this pyramid to its foundations, everybody was borrowing from a few seminal sources.

  “For this reason, I arrived at the wondrously devious answer to my problems: when in trouble, punt. I dismissed everything I had learned and summed it all up in a simple scene between Claire Bloom (Kinnian) and Cliff in which she asks the poor chap, still in his moronic stage:

  Kinnian: Would you like an operation like that?

  Charly: Yeh.

  Kinnian: Why?

  Charly: Well, so I can be smarter and understand Gimpy and the other guys at the bakery cuz they use a lot of words I don’t understand. So I could get a little closer to them.

  “Go fight City Hall! You can’t tear into that one because there’s nothing to tear into. By staying away from everything I’d learned about neurosurgery — which was that there still remained more questions than answers — I solved my problem.”

  Silliphant’s other major change is invisible: he moved the story from Charly’s first person point of view, which worked in print, to the point of view of an objective third party, which works on screen, including scenes that Charly is not present to observe. He made Kinnian a widow, removed the subplot of Charly’s tryst with the neighbor, and cut the book’s backstory about how Charly’s father landed him a job at a box factory to keep him from being institutionalized. “By staying strictly within the human story and following Charly around,” Silliphant explained, “sharing with him both the joy and the anguish of super-intelligence, I followed his arc to its peak, then to its nadir.”

  Another difficult task was creating scenes that showed Charly’s accelerated thinking. Workers at the bakery — Charly no longer works in a box factory — mock his low intelligence by challenging him to operate a complicated bread dough machine. When his mind improves and he effortlessly aces its sequential switches and levers, his “friends” circulate a petition that gets him fired. And he shows that he has surpassed Kinnian when he presents her with an apparently nonsense sentence that she cannot punctuate, but he can. [129] Such tangible, visual moments are what lift Charly off the page.

  One of the most affecting moments — and arguably the raison d’être for the whole piece — occurs in a bar late in the story when a mentally retarded busboy drops a tray of glasses and the customers laugh at him. Charly does not; he leaves his table to help the busboy collect the pieces, and the room grows ashamedly silent watching them. Earlier he had said, “Why is it that people who would never laugh at a blind or crippled man would laugh at a moron?” This wordless scene powerfully underscores that point.

  A deeply disturbing note of another kind is struck when Charly, whose paintings reveal his sexual thoughts, forces himself on Kinnian. It not only begs the viewer to ask why such an intelligent man is allowing his libido to trump his brain, it calls for Kinnian to angrily rebuff his advances by calling him a moron. The impact on both of them is so jarring that the film has to digress with a long montage showing Charly’s month-long quest through various lifestyles, experiences, and distractions, after which he and Kinnian are seen reconciled. It requires a leap, especially considering the screen’s disgraceful history portraying rape, and only Robertson’s and Bloom’s acting skill pulls it off.

  Finally, Silliphant dared to remove the flowers from Algernon’s story so he could focus the ending on Charly and Kinnian, right up to the moment when Charly, knowing he is about to return to the shadows of severe retardation, rejects her offer of marriage and asks her simply to leave. “If you will watch the final good-bye scene between Cliff and Claire,” Silliphant said, “you will see me in my Pinter period — dialogue so clipped — emotions so restrained — playing against the tragedy of the parting — that the film really ends as Claire goes out the door. We have a coda to close — Charly on the seesaw — and we freeze frame with his silly, moronic expression — at the top of his swing upward — and leave him, childlike, back where he began. Charly is one of my favorite films because it is simple and human and unpretentious. And Cliff ’s performance was deeply moving. As you know, he was given the Academy Award for Best Actor.” [130]

  Robertson tried repeatedly over the years to produce a sequel to Charly, sometimes funding it out of his own pocket, other times raising investment money that always seemed to drop out just before production. [131] He died in 2011 at age eighty-eight, still hoping to revive his signature role of Charly Gordon.

  Murphy’s War, which Silliphant wrote next and that came and went in 1971, is a war movie that is practically without a war. Exquisitely acted by Peter O’Toole and fearlessly directed by Peter Yates (coming off Bullitt, 1968), it’s set in the waning days of World War Two and has a British seaman (O’Toole) wreaking revenge on the German U-Boat commander (Horst Janson) who sunk his ship. His obsession infects his relationships with those around him, particularly a kindly Quaker nurse (Sian Phillips) and a colorful salvage operator (Philippe Noiret). Silliphant adapted it from the novel by Max Catto.

  “Murphy’s War, in my opinion, fell through the cracks,” Silliphant stated bluntly. “It is a far better film than either the public or most critics ever perceived. Richard Schickel, in his review in Life magazine, was one of the few critics who resonated with director Peter Yates and me on the wave-lengths of the film. His review was one of the most laudatory any of my scripts was ever given. It was a curious project; indeed, our purpose was to
make a flat-out statement about the absurdity, the meaninglessness, of war. So we went for minimal sound, minimal dialogue, a kind of intense fumbling toward death, toward the showdown between enemies who have no further reason for enmity except the blind stupidity and vengefulness of the Peter O’Toole character. And this is why, at the end, in a high angle shot, director Peter Yates closed out the film with the sub sinking, the barge sinking, and the river surging above both, covering them for all eternity. Over this he shot a ragged flight of jungle birds, wheeling off, the only survivors of this pointless encounter between men and their machines.

  “We shot it entirely on location in Venezuela up the Orinoco River, one of the toughest locations any film crew has ever had to cope with. You fall into the river and you don’t know what’ll get you first — sharks up from the Gulf, barracuda, alligators, piranha or, worst of all, a tiny, tiny catfish, almost invisible to the naked eye, which simply adores swimming up the human urethra — male or female, makes no difference. Once lodged in the kidney it eats away merrily and the invaded dies a lingering and exquisitely painful death.

  “The immense silence, the Stone Age people, the awesome expanse of forest, simply took over. It invaded our senses. It dominated us. The silence — the silence of life within death — put a dome over the production and nobody who had experienced the location would ever have countenanced any kind of scoring to accompany the images Peter Yates captured. The script was shot as written. It was, from the outset, a very lean and sparing script and Peter [Yates] elected to use a great number of long shots, once more to distance the people, to set them against an alien landscape, and to emphasize how small they were on the scale of existence.”

  It was a gamble for its mercurial star. “Peter O’Toole was going through a thing at the time where he wanted to play a character that was totally unexplained, and totally unsympathetic, and totally oblique,” Silliphant told interviewer Reed Farrell. “He didn’t want to justify or explain anything; he wanted the character to be what it was and not have any explanations. Well, I went along with that to a point, but if you so divorce yourself from your viewing audience that they really don’t care, then the whole picture goes out the window. On top of that, he insisted on using a very heavy Irish brogue. And, unless you are an Irishman, and I mean from the same country, it was very hard to understand him. Even having written the dialogue, I couldn’t understand a word he said. It could have been a fantastic film. The action was there.” [132]

  When Murphy sank with barely a ripple, Silliphant decided to initiate projects rather than wait for things to come to him. He became a hyphenate. He had used his clout to produce as well as to write Route 66, but it was really Bert Leonard and production manager Sam Manners who handled the day-to-day functioning of that series. Now he wanted to be in at the ground floor. He first tried a relationship with the flamboyant independent mogul Joseph E. Levine that produced nothing but emotional distress. Then he found A Walk in the Spring Rain (1979). Adapting Rachel Maddux’s novel about an academic and his wife whose marriage is challenged by an opportunistic love affair, Silliphant set up Pingree Productions, named after his childhood address. The film’s idyllic title belies a tale of violent emotions. Fritz Weaver starred as the professor whose sabbatical takes him and his wife, Ingrid Bergman, to the Smoky Mountain locale where he intends to write his book. Bergman soon draws the attention of a local man, Anthony Quinn, and the two of them have an affair, with horrific fallout. But it was the subplot of their daughter, Katharine Crawford, and her relationship with her mother, that captured Silliphant’s interest.

  “I was drawn to A Walk in the Spring Rain by my disappointment with my daughter,” [133] he confessed. “For reasons I have never been able to resolve with her, once I divorced her mother she kept our relationship in the past, back in her little-girl period. This is what many parents do with their children, feeling disappointment when the child becomes a teenager, intent on his or her own life, but the parent keeps trying to recapture the vanishing childhood and creates friction with the child struggling to emerge into youth. With my daughter, the roles became reversed and she kept trying to relate to me in past terms, rather than in terms of the reality of my now liberated new life. So when I read Rachel’s novella, A Walk in the Spring Rain, I jumped on it because here was a story of a selfish daughter who expected her mother to assume certain responsibilities simply because she was her mother. It has always struck me that these familial relationships should be based on love and caring and letting go, not on obligation.”

  Silliphant found his own counterpart in the character played by Weaver, the professor who has to face a blank page, both in the typewriter and in himself (although Silliphant claimed he never suffered from writer’s block). However estranged he may have felt from Dayle, by this time his first son, Stirling Garff, had succeeded in reestablishing contact. His first wife, Iris, had married Jim Rasmussen and the boy had taken his stepfather’s surname. He had also kept up with Ethel Silliphant in the years after she and Lee had divorced. [134]

  “When I was much younger,” Stirling Rasmussen recalled, “I did visit Ethel fairly regularly, staying at her and Fred’s [Wellershaus] house overnight. I remember a sleeping porch they had on the second floor and the sounds of late night trains moving through Southern California in the area of their house.” Iris had never bad-mouthed Silliphant, focusing her disdain on Hollywood, but when Stirling Garff hit twenty-four he felt it was time to seek out his father. They got together several times in the 1960s, and he reported that it was as if no time had passed between them. One visit took place during A Walk in the Spring Rain.

  “I went on location in Tennessee,” Rasmussen said, “with Anthony Quinn and Ingrid Bergman. [Silliphant] had imported a bartender from Trader Vic’s and, after shooting, each day, the director and my dad and Anthony Quinn and Ingrid Bergman would do drinks. I remember I walked in — I was pretty decent looking at the time — and I put my arms up and said, ‘discover me.’ They looked at me and started laughing.

  “Another experience was an evening party that Anthony Quinn was giving. A younger (as in my age) actor who was in the film, Tom Fielding, wanted the two of us to head into Gatlinburg for some action. He hadn’t been invited to the party, so I thought it was a good plan. My dad made it quite clear to me that my evening would be spent in the company of Quinn and Ingrid Bergman.” [135]

  When the film was soft at the box office, Silliphant took it personally. “It is disappointing when you know you’ve succeeded in your work,” he reported in hindsight. “There were some scripts I had done that had gone to camera where I knew that I hadn’t finished my work, where I hadn’t licked the script. One of those was a sweet, tender little film, which was totally ignored at the box office called A Walk in the Spring Rain. I liked it, but it was never quite what we intended. It just didn’t have energy, it didn’t take off: the two people weren’t quite believable. I felt it was time for a love story between two people who were over forty. Because, when you’re past forty, you do still continue to have interest in such matters, although, to see films, you’d never believe it — everybody is nineteen or twenty. I thought I was going to fix that for the world. I was going show how that worked. And I didn’t. I just demonstrated again that there are no love stories unless you’re nineteen.” [136]

  Despite this, Silliphant maintained a cordial correspondence with Ingrid Bergman for years following their work together and, of course, his first son was back in his life again. His writer’s relationship with himself as producer was more tentative: “I always functioned as producer,” he insisted, “thereby cutting down any outside input to its least damaging components — the collaboration between writer-producer and director — a streamlined working partnership, which I enjoyed in almost all of my TV work.” But he also expressed his doubts in a Newsweek interview once the film’s disappointing returns were apparent: “The great frustration of my professional life is that anything I originate never [succeeds]. I understand
better than anyone else the failure to achieve power.” [137] He would remain of two minds on producing: he recognized the choices it gave him as a writer, but lamented the way it siphoned his time from doing the work he preferred.

  The same year that saw A Walk in the Spring Rain saw the release of a personal project of another kind, The Liberation of L.B. Jones. [138] Not only did it become the final work of the venerable director William Wyler, it began a lifelong friendship with Jesse Hill Ford, the author of the novel on which the film was based. The film was disappointing, the experience was not. [139] Silliphant was paid $200,000 for his adapting duties and co-produced with Ronald Lubin. [140] “Once I had completed my script and Mr. Wyler wanted a writer in residence — something I was unable to do for him because of other commitments — I suggested that Jesse Hill Ford be brought in to cross the Ts and dot the Is for Mr. Wyler. Nor did I have any presence on the location, though Jesse quite faithfully did. Jesse and Willy took to each other instantly, and Jesse hung in throughout the shoot, making the changes Willy requested. As a result, I submitted a request for joint film credit to the Writers Guild, not only because I felt Jesse deserved it but because, with me at his elbow, he did a lot of work during the shoot and added those delicious bits of southern largesse, which I found so fulsome and overly dramatic.” Both men are credited.

  Unfortunately, Wyler (sixty-seven, but with flagging energy) was not up to the standards he had set in earlier years with Wuthering Heights (1939), The Little Foxes (1941), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and Ben-Hur (1959). LBJ was sluggish and unfocused.