by Norman Lear
The DAS story was based on what I’d lived through with Charlotte. Jason Robards, divorced from Jean Simmons, was trying desperately to marry her off to Dick Van Dyke, newly divorced from Debbie Reynolds. What Robards didn’t know was that Van Dyke’s situation was interchangeable with his. Both men were living on less money with their new families than their ex-wives were getting in their divorce settlements. The movie critic Roger Ebert said of the film, “Who would have thought that a movie starring Dick Van Dyke and Debbie Reynolds would turn out to be a member of that rare species, the Hollywood comedy with teeth in it?”
Those teeth would have been incisors worthy of a wolf had we made the film with the kind of voices and characters I heard in my head as I was writing. They were Stanley Kowalski, Marlon Brando’s character in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, in the role played by Dick Van Dyke; and Gittel Mosca, the character Anne Bancroft played opposite Henry Fonda in William Gibson’s Two for the Seesaw, in the Debbie Reynolds role. Anne, her husband, Mel Brooks, and I were longtime friends, so I sent it over to her as soon as Columbia Pictures and National General said they wished to make the film. Midevening of the day I had it delivered she phoned me and said, “Norman, I’m reading your script and it’s good, but I have to ask you not to make me finish it. It’s just too painful.” As much time as Anne and I spent together in the thirty-some years that followed, “too painful” were the last words between us on the subject of Divorce American Style.
Because the voices that motivated me in the writing were those of dramatic actors, it didn’t occur to me until sometime later that Dick Van Dyke, a comedian, could handle it, and be a big surprise in the role as well. Especially if he were to perform opposite a gifted dramatic actress. I loved Joan Hackett, a brilliant talent and very beautiful. She was well known but had yet to make a big score. In the right role, on the big screen, lit as they took pains to light leading ladies then, I thought she could make it into the category of a true cinema queen, and I pitched her hard to the studio. But Debbie Reynolds was married to the shoe magnate Harry Karl, a close friend of Irving Levin’s, who ran National General, the company cofinancing DAS with the distributor, Columbia Pictures. I had no problem with Debbie Reynolds personally, or with the idea of her in the film. It was the phrase “Together at last,” the three words that leaped to mind every time I heard or thought “Dick and Debbie.” I saw the biting satire I hoped for reduced to fluff.
I had to have Joan Hackett opposite Dick Van Dyke and that became my mission. Thank God Bud agreed and we were united, but that made little difference to Irv Levin or to Mike Frankovich, VP of production for Columbia Studios, under whose reign Columbia made Lawrence of Arabia, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, In Cold Blood, A Man for All Seasons, and Cat Ballou, among others. On top of his success running the studio and selecting films, Frankovich had been a Hall of Fame football player at UCLA and was a popular figure, exceedingly well liked. There we were, Bud and I, with our mere TV reputations, tilting against this giant studio head at the peak of his career over our wish to cast a midlevel actress in our film as opposed to his desire to cast the same role with a major star.
We argued Hackett versus Reynolds, a summer romp of a film versus a biting satire, for months. While this went on Columbia made a deal with Van Dyke and had Reynolds, Robards, Simmons, and Van Johnson standing by. The pressure from the studio mounted. It mounted on Tandem’s end, too, because Bud and I were basically broke. We had taken an option on The Night They Raided Minsky’s and I had the screenplay to work on, but that provided no income. Leo Jaffe, president and CEO of Columbia in New York, hoping to mediate the situation, suggested we do a screen test with Hackett and Van Dyke that he hadn’t heard Frankovich was resisting. We did it, Joan was wonderful, she made our point, but not one mind was changed on the other side. Finally, Leo Jaffe flew out from New York, and a knock-down, drag-out meeting was called together. Out of that meeting came a line I could not forget if I lived to be a thousand.
Mike Frankovich, Leo Jaffe, Irving Levin, and Gordon Stuhlberg, Columbia’s general counsel, met with Bud and me in Frankovich’s office. We went through our spiel, pouring our hearts out as to the film we envisioned: the star it would make of Joan Hackett, what Hackett playing opposite Dick Van Dyke would mean to his performance, and what all of that could mean to the success of the film and to the studio.
As we continued it was clear that Mr. Frankovich, sitting behind his giant desk, was getting more and more riled. He exploded finally: “Hackett, Hackett! For months, fucking months, all I’ve heard is Hackett. All right, we got Leo here, we got Irving, I’m listening, we’re all in the room—once and for all you tell us why Joan Hackett in this part!!” I couldn’t believe the man.
“For all these months,” I started, “that’s all I’ve been doing: telling you and Leo and Irving, you more than anyone, why Joan Hackett!” My voice was raised now to meet his as I went on. “You know what I’m beginning to think? This is personal. You don’t think Debbie Reynolds would be better than Joan Hackett in this film. You have something against Joan Hackett!”
There followed a few “I do not’s” and some “You do, too’s,” during which Frankovich raised himself behind his desk and leaned toward me. We were shouting at each other now, and when I repeated near the top of my voice that he had something against Joan Hackett, he hit me with these deathless lines:
“I have nothing against her, you hear me? Nothing! But if you ever take an ocean voyage with your wife and she is on the ship, you be sure you don’t leave your wife alone with Joan Hackett!”
Debbie Reynolds did herself proud in the film, as did Van Dyke. Bud did a great job directing it and I came away loving it, especially one scene. It takes place on a Sunday morning when eight couples in eight cars, caught up in the permutations of their marriages, descend on a suburban house, dropping off and picking up children in the exercise of their visitation rights. We see Debbie picking up a child as we hear a running commentary, i.e., “That’s Susie, Fred’s second daughter by his first wife, Ethel, picking up her kids—and there’s Susie’s stepfather, Ed, here to pick up Rosie and Tom, being dropped off by his ex, Monica, whose two kids from her first marriage, Eddie and Sophie, are over there waiting for their dad, Phil, now married to . . .”
In the end, when all the drop-offs and pickups are completed, after all the honking and chasing and door slams, with the last car having driven off, the camera pulls back and up to a high shot of the house, driveway, and front yard, and we see a lone three-year-old coming out from behind a tree, rubbing her blankie to her cheek, totally overlooked in the DAS madness.
Film critic Richard Schickel called the scene “a tragic comic gem in a tragic comic gem of a film” that had “something truthful to say about the way we live now and says it with a savagery of tone that runs completely counter to the babbling, socially meaningless flow of our comic mainstream.” New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther saw the enterprise differently. He found it “depressing, saddening and annoying, largely because it labors to turn a solemn subject into a great big American joke.” There could be no better comment on the two reviews than my grandmother’s “Go know.”
8
EARLY IN 1967 BLAKE EDWARDS, who created the hugely successful Pink Panther, had a falling-out with his star, Peter Sellers, and both men bailed out of the third film in the series. United Artists changed the title to Inspector Clouseau, cast Alan Arkin in the title role, and asked Bud to direct it in London. Tandem’s finances were such, and Arkin in the Sellers role so enticing, that Bud grabbed it. The timing was good because I was working on a second draft, from a first draft by Arnold Shulman, of The Night They Raided Minsky’s, which I finished in June. Bud and I decided to give our friend Billy Friedkin, a wunderkind of a young director, his first studio film. Previously he’d done a few music videos and Sonny and Cher’s first foray into independent film, Good Times. A nightmare productio
n about one of the dreamiest corners of the entertainment world had begun.
From day one I wanted Britt Ekland, loveliest of the lovely, a relatively unknown British actress, to play the innocent Amish girl Rachel Schpitendavel, who comes to New York to perform “Bible dances” and, by accident in an onstage performance, invents what becomes the striptease. And I wanted one of our most precious clowns, Bert Lahr, who played the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, to play Professor Spats, an older, retired burlesque comic. It was a smaller role, but key to interpreting the time, the place, and the art.
They were both on board when the concentration on our two lead characters, the comic and the straight man, grew hot. For the straight man my friend Tony Curtis fell into place, excited to be making his first out-and-out comedy since Some Like It Hot. Midafternoon the next day, after a studio lunch with Elliott Gould, to whom I offered the role of Billy Minsky, a Tony Curtis near tears phoned me. He’d just been invited by 20th Century Fox to play the title role in The Boston Strangler. “I hate to do this to you, Norman,” he said. “It isn’t like I haven’t made a comedy before, but when will I ever get a chance like this again—Tony Curtis as the Boston Strangler?” The nightmare had begun.
Next came the Walter Matthau chapter. The celebrated British comedian Norman Wisdom was available and eager to play opposite Matthau, who lived in New York with his wife, Carol, known on the East Coast as Carol Saroyan because of a prior marriage to the renowned playwright. She was quite a character in her own right and an author as well. I sent Walter the script overnight and made a date to get his reaction in person two days later. I was due to fly to New York the next day for an emergency meeting with Mayor John Lindsay, whose urban renewal team was scheduled to begin tearing down some vacant tenements on two city blocks that we were already at work transforming to look like the Lower East Side circa 1925. There could be no The Night They Raided Minsky’s without them.
The morning of the meeting with Mayor Lindsay, Walter Matthau’s agent called to say Walter loved the script and wanted to play the straight man, Raymond Paine. Minsky’s finally had its cast—if the city of New York changed its mind about pulling the rug, in this case the streets, out from under it.
In a diary he kept, Mayor Lindsay wrote that the previous year, 1966, might have been the worst year of his life. On his first day in office, New Year’s Day, a strike by the Transport Workers Union shut down all buses and subways for twelve days, and the rest of that year saw him forced to raise taxes and water rates to deal with the city’s severe economic problems. He was a quite harried Mr. Mayor on the morning that my production manager, Charlie Maguire, and I walked in to see him.
A great-looking man by anyone’s standards, Lindsay had been bitten by the showbiz bug before he entered politics and, as it turned out historically, was more of a showman than a politician. A Republican when he ran for mayor, Lindsay was nonetheless endorsed by the Liberal Party, and when he flirted with the idea of running for the presidency he planned to run as a Democrat, which in 1972 he did. As a politician his mistresses were the camera, media attention, and, by extension, showbiz, so of course he and Charlie and I hit it off quickly.
My liberal leanings were of interest to him, and he could deal with the problem we brought to him far more expeditiously than he could a transportation workers’ strike. And so he, as mayor of New York City, ordered a halt to the wrecking ball for the time we needed to shoot exteriors. And we gifted him with the feeling, so rare for him at the time, that he could get something done.
The meeting that afternoon with David Picker and Walter Matthau was a lovefest. In the first ten minutes Walter and I learned that we might have flown missions together in World War II. Our 15th Air Force B-17 Flying Fortresses out of Foggia often met up with 8th Air Force B-24 Liberators out of London to bomb the same target. Walter was a B-24 bombardier, and we were quick to bond over the possibility that we had hit targets and caught flak together.
The very next day Walter Matthau, like Tony Curtis, another star who’d become my good friend and who had been so excited about appearing in Minsky’s, called and told me to find myself another Raymond Paine, “this is good-bye,” he was out of the film. It seems that Walter’s mother, well known from earlier Matthau mother stories, had gotten angry with Carol on the phone the night before, and told her she was going to kill her. The following morning she called to confirm the threat.
“‘I have a gun and give me two days, I’m going to shoot you dead. Dead as a doorknob,’” Walter quoted his mother as saying. We might have laughed, until Walter reported that Carol, no lightweight hysteric herself, was boarding the Super Chief to Los Angeles that afternoon, and under the circumstances he couldn’t leave her alone and was flying out a few days later to join her. Many years later I asked Walter why, since he “couldn’t leave her alone under the circumstances,” he wasn’t on the Super Chief with Carol when she skipped town. “Four days cooped up in a train compartment with me wouldn’t be good for her,” he said with a hint of martyr mischief in his eyes. Another master of mischief and a great actor, Jason Robards, ultimately played the part.
• • •
THE TIME IN NEW YORK was as hard on my personal life as making the film was precious. Having their lives totally uprooted was a horror for the kids, but I was handling too many grown-up problems, producing the first musical—and, at $3 million, the most costly film to be made in New York City to that date—to be aware of their problems at the time.
Frances was high on the move to New York initially. She found us a three-bedroom apartment on Fifth Avenue within a few blocks of P.S. 6, considered the best public school in Manhattan. The apartment had the distinction of having been home to the British playwright Harold Pinter, whose play The Birthday Party, coincidentally, was set to be directed by Billy Friedkin immediately following his Minsky’s shoot. Finding and decorating the apartment to satisfy her taste and reconnecting with her old friends was a gas for Frances. For a time it seemed to equate in her mind to what I was up to, and she was in a good mood. That changed in early November when she had less to do and, as photography began on the film, I had more.
Bert Lahr at seventy-two was a bit frail, and we attempted to shoot his scenes first, especially the exteriors, before the deep cold settled in. I can’t overstate how deeply I was touched by Lahr’s presence, his voice, the way he listened, and the flashes of merriment that occasionally interrupted the ever-present sadness in his eyes. The back of a letter I wrote to Bud in London on November 20, 1967, bears this line in longhand: “Dictated this in the early morning before Bert Lahr came in half dead, unable to work today.” Two weeks later, on December 4, Mr. Lahr passed on. The world lost a clown that day, the rarest of the rare.
David Picker suggested we shut down for a few weeks. I knew that Friedkin’s and my working relationship couldn’t sustain a lull. It was the pull of the next day’s shoot that held us together. I sold United Artists, which is to say David Picker, on my rewriting ahead of the camera, hired a well-known comic, Joey Faye, to stand in for Bert Lahr on rear views and long shots, and Minsky’s plowed ahead.
The resultant publicity following Bert Lahr’s death brought a fresh burst of attention to the burlesque musical that was filming in New York City, and to me, its producer. I decided to edit the film in New York so as to be able to shoot or reshoot things as the edit suggested.
• • •
A WEEK OR SO AFTER we wrapped principal photography, Billy Friedkin handed me his director’s cut of The Night They Raided Minsky’s and took off for London to start preproduction on The Birthday Party. Billy was so tired and unhappy with the project that he went on the British version of The Tonight Show and spoke of the difficult time he had with Minsky’s. But for all the problems we faced together, Billy Friedkin left us with enough well-directed, beautifully photographed footage, sufficiently evocative of the period, to keep alive my passion for fulfill
ing the promise of Minsky’s. To that add Pablo Ferro’s magical editing of the film, including the two weeks of added footage I shot, and our collaboration was showing lovely results.
Most memorable in the new footage was a two-second shot of Britt Ekland’s breasts. Well, actually, they were stand-ins for Ms. Ekland’s breasts. When Britt was reluctant to flash hers to the camera the day we were to shoot her accidental striptease, I thought we could get by without it. But as we were editing the dance, it became clear that I was wrong and we needed a body double. Britt was beautifully proportioned but small, and the word went out that Minsky’s was looking for a pair of diminutive breasts—that is, small but full, and camera-ready. I couldn’t bring myself to announce another prerequisite, little areolae, but I knew that’s what I would be looking for in the auditions. I never saw Ms. Ekland’s chest, just guessed she had small areolae.
I must have auditioned thirty to forty chests before I found the one I thought would match my leading lady’s. I was a bit nervous with the procedure, but it was nothing at all for the women involved. It surprised me no end, but when I suggested that my secretary be in the room with us at each bra removal, every woman who auditioned was more embarrassed to do it that way.
In addition to filming some added scenes, Pablo and I played with the footage we had. Minsky’s was, of course, shot in color. In what might have been a first use of this idea, we shot some new exterior footage in color, printed it in black and white, and distressed the film to look like old stock footage. We then married the new material to the stock footage, cut it into the film, and were able to run what appeared to be historic old film, circa 1925, which, as needed, could spring into living color. The effect would have been a lovely addition to the film even if it hadn’t been conceived to solve a problem in the editing.