Robert Altman

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  JOAN ALTMAN SARAFIAN: That’s not true. Dick would love to have been Bob’s friend. He would have loved it more than having me. He would much rather have had Bob.

  JOHN WILLIAMS: Bob was uneven when he drank. He could always be very sweet, but more typically he would be cutting and sarcastic and apply that soul-destroying gaze of his. His eyes were fantastic instruments of reprimand and reproach.

  When he drank, he seemed to find an excuse to go penetrating and in-depth at people’s foibles. He could go right for the jugular with people in a way that could be devastating. He was so perceptive in his analysis of people at various levels that he was very well equipped to do it. A lot of that came out when he was lubricated, or liberated, by alcohol. I don’t remember him aiming it at me. But my kids—he was hard on my kids.

  I don’t think it’s very unusual. But Bob was also so attractive and elicited so much loyalty from his friends that I don’t think there were too many relationships in his inner circle that were broken by this cruel behavior.

  KONNI CORRIERE: He gave parties every weekend, loud and late and drunk, and he always got drunk and always got cruel and evil and terrifying. He was so perceptive; he’d go for a person’s weakness and then crucify them. It was loud. It was frightening. It was the main attraction and no one ever stood up to him.

  Once at the house in Mandeville Canyon, he was so drunk and so angry, he took the television and threw it through the plate-glass window into the swimming pool.

  KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: He was a big drinker and a party boy. His good traits outshone his bad ones, but he had some pretty bad results with all the drinking. Telling people off at the wrong time. Really the problem was not that person. I would have to tell them, “You are not the target, don’t take it personally.” I won most everybody back. There were times when I would just walk on eggs and sit in fear before the evening was over that there was going to be an explosion. When he was good he was very, very good, but when he was bad, oh man.

  REZA BADIYI: He wasn’t scared to just say his mind. But sometimes he was just saying it for effect at that moment. But it has a resonance, an echo that bothered him dearly in life, to a point that he was truly not working and he needed some money.

  KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: Some people are motivated by security. And then there’s the gambler. He takes chances, risks. That’s Bob Altman, the rebel and the renegade and all those names they called him. It was a given. His dad was a big hustler, player, gambler, so Bob grew up in it, knew all the tricks.

  It was our fifth anniversary and he was at the track. I heard about this later. He had this last three hundred dollars or something, and he was saying, “If this horse doesn’t win I can’t go back home because Kathryn is waiting and I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m just going to put it all on one horse.” And Martha Raye was there, and she said, “Put it all on this one.”

  Robert Altman, from an essay called “Risk” in Esquire, October 1993: Martha Raye came by and said, “Here’s a tip. I don’t know if it’s any good but there’s a horse called Pal Fast.” I looked up and saw that Pal Fast was going off at thirty to one. “Thanks a lot,” I said…. I’m thinking, “What the fuck am I going to do? I can’t cover a check for Las Vegas and I can’t lose face.” Finally I said, “Oh what the hell.”

  KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: He bet it all and he won. He came up with a few grand and we had the greatest weekend—we laughed the whole time. It could have been a horrendous story, and I might not be sitting here very easily had it gone down the other way. That was our last ten cents. Make that our last nickel.

  Robert Altman, from an essay called “Risk” in Esquire, October 1993:I’ve gambled all my life, but I’ve managed to gamble within my loss range. I’ve been lucky, because I haven’t always been careful. My attitude is, “Why not?” Professional gamblers are the most uninteresting gamblers of all because they’re like the banks. They play the odds and cut it right out of the middle. They don’t even think about the long shot. Absolutely boring. I put them alongside the studios…. We don’t rely enough on instinct in this culture. Sometimes you just feel the heat and you know the fucking number is going to come out and finally it does. Waiting for it is part of the joy.

  * * *

  GEORGE LITTO: So the Variety piece comes out, where he says the thing about the cheese, and when I read about it in the paper I said, “Jesus, what a stupid son of a bitch [laughs]. Didn’t he have enough trouble? Can’t he keep his mouth shut?” And he gets dropped by his agency, Ashley-Steiner. And before I knew it, Ray Wagner, who was an executive at MCA/Universal, called me on the phone. I had many clients working under his auspices. And he said, “George, I’m calling you because I’m planning to leave Universal.”

  I said, “Why, Ray? I know they like you there.”

  He said, “Well, I’m going to go into production. I want to produce pictures and I’m going to go into a partnership with Bob Altman to produce pictures and some television, too.”

  I said, “Are you out of your fucking mind?” My thought was, Bob Altman couldn’t get a commitment to be a dogcatcher at this point in time.

  He said, “George, you don’t know Bob. You got to meet him and you got to come to breakfast with him.”

  RAYMOND WAGNER (producer): I liked Bob because he was a rebel. Bob was always Bob. He was not a man that enjoyed the big commercial process so much or the corporate structures, but liked doing whatever it was he liked doing.

  GEORGE LITTO: So we had a breakfast meeting at the Beverly Hills Hotel. My first impression? He was angry. He was a little surly. I’m a first-generation Sicilian Italian, okay? I’m not intimidated by anybody. So he said to me, “If you’re interested in working with us, I’m not going to do any more television.”

  I said, “You don’t have to worry about that. I don’t think anybody will let you.”

  It was true. It was a long time before he did television.

  CHAPTER 10

  No Milk

  *

  JOAN ALTMAN SARAFIAN: I don’t think TV was right for him. TV is too regimented. Making a film is different. He can control it. He was not a soldier. It’s not that he was a general, either. Just a free, free soul.

  KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: He laid off for a year waiting for a feature film. We were out of money. We were cut off by the milkman. Oscar the milkman. That’s pretty bad. And we had a Japanese gardener, Kenny, and he came to me, “I’m sorry, madam, I will have to halt the service” [laughs].

  It was very brave of him to do that. We managed. We never fought over money. It wasn’t one of those marriages where there’s pinchpenny behavior. We were generous with each other. “You’ve got some money, okay, then, we’ll pay that bill. Next month we’ll have more and pay the other one.”

  MICHAEL MURPHY: He couldn’t have found a better woman. I mean, she truly devoted herself to him, but he really met his match in her. She was fast and she made him laugh and they both had that same “I’ve been around the block a few times” outlook on life. His pet name for her was Trixie, and that just kind of fit who she is.

  When times were rough, she was the kind of woman who could plow through it with him. She could live on the edge and do it with great style. But it must have been hard.

  ROBERT REED ALTMAN: I went to Carlthorp from grade one to three; it was a private school, because they did want me to have a good education. But at times, when they couldn’t pay the bill there, I would be put in the waiting room and they would come and get me. And that kind of confused me. “Why am I being picked up by my parents? Did I do something wrong?” So psychologically I think that did something to me, not knowing. My dad was always juggling money to try to make things work.

  Robert Altman in party mode

  REZA BADIYI: It reached a point where he was truly not working and needed money. He was going to do some commercial for an automobile company. I was working at the time, but I went. Louie Lombardo came. Brian McKay, who was a writer, and Robert Eggenweiler, who did a little of ev
erything. All of us, we gathered and shot it for him. And we did it all for free. We had to.

  ROBERT BLEES (producer): I loaned him money personally. Bob was desperate. He was broke, broke, broke. Real broke. I wouldn’t say promptly, but he paid me back.

  Bob was a huge gambler, which is one reason he was broke most of the time. We almost bought a horse together named Earl the Pearl, a three-thousand-dollar claimer. Bob said the horse was going to run at a claiming race at Delmar. Bob said, “We’ve always wanted to buy a horse, let’s look at the race.” I said, “Bob, you owe me fifteen hundred dollars right now. I’d rather have the fifteen hundred than half a horse.” So we didn’t buy the horse. He ended up winning his next five races.

  GEORGE LITTO: He didn’t want to do television anymore, but he had kids, he had a wife, ex-wives, you know. I used to lend him money. That’s a whole ’nother story. He had to put food on the table. He owed me at least a year’s salary [laughs]. A year’s income. What he would be happy to make in a year, let’s say. He was always on the brink.

  Ray Wagner was always a very diplomatic, soft-spoken guy, a nice guy. He was a bright guy, and he said, “George, we’ve developed two projects. We know you like unusual material.”

  I was saying to myself, “So I like it, what then? What can I do? This guy is just the most untouchable guy around. You know, it’s one thing to get fired from a studio. But fired from your agent, too? I mean, that’s almost unheard-of. Clients fire agents, agents don’t fire clients.” So I said, “Well, I don’t know whether I can do anything to help you guys get started in the movie business.”

  He said, “We’ll do television, too.”

  I said, “Ray, I don’t know about that either.” I turned to Bob and said, “Bob, I don’t want to seem insensitive, but I think people are a little afraid of you.”

  He just said, “Grrrrrrrr.” He didn’t give a shit. He was not intimidated. I liked that about him. Ray said, “Please read the material.” And I said, “Okay.” I said to myself, “Ray’s always been a good guy, and I’ve made a lot of money with him and his company, and I owe him that courtesy.” Though I wasn’t very hopeful that I could do anything. Because Bob really got everybody uptight.

  So I read the two scripts. One Bob did with Roald Dahl, which I think was his story or one he inspired, called O Death, Where Is Thy Sting-a-ling-a-ling?, which I thought was a brilliant script. As a joke, when people said “I’ve got a great script,” I’d say, “I don’t want it.” They’d say, “What do you mean you don’t want it?” I said, “If I agree you have a great script, imagine how frustrated I’ll get if I can’t sell it?”

  PATRICIA NEAL (actress): I met Bob when I was in Hawaii doing In Harm’s Way. I’d just won the Oscar and it was just great, and Roald was there with our three children. Bob Altman came to see Roald with Jackie Cooper, who had been a child actor. They came to see Roald because they wanted him to do the screenplay for an idea that they had. And they were so drunk from the minute they arrived till the minute they left. Dead drunk, but that didn’t stop them from thinking. They had this gorgeous idea, and they thought Roald should do the script. It was very good, and Roald decided to do it. He did quite a bit of work on it and it became very attractive to people.

  GEORGE LITTO: So I thought he truly had a great script. Roald Dahl is a great writer, and included were some letters between Bob and Roald Dahl. I could read the way this thing evolved and Bob’s thought process. I said, “This is a brilliant guy.” He’s even better than I thought he was from seeing his film. Then I read the other script, which was the comedy that Barbara Turner did, based on a novel by a dentist, John Haase: Me and the Arch Kook Petulia. I read that and I said, “Absolutely charming, wonderful movie.” First time I’ve read two good scripts in a row in years. I said, “Holy Christ, what am I going to do? Do I want to get involved in this?”

  BARBARA TURNER: Bob came to me with Petulia. I wrote that on spec, by the way. But he asked me to do it. He said, “Do you think you can do it?” I said, “I have no idea.” But Bob saw me as a writer. What appealed to Bob was the character. The character is this creature, and I think Bob liked creatures. She’s feisty and unconventional and just wonderful.

  GEORGE LITTO: I pondered it a bit because I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Even though the script material was great, Bob’s going to want to direct them and there’s going to be lots of resistance. So I had a meeting with them. I said, “Look, I love the material. I know you’ve got the talent to do it, Bob. Ray, I think you’re a very good executive; you should be a good producer. But this is going to be tough to pull off and I don’t know if I can do it. I’m willing to try but I’ll not promise you anything.” And they said, “If you’re willing to try, we want you to represent us.”

  RAYMOND WAGNER: At one time we had Henry Fonda and we had a cast and Bob was going to direct it and I was going to produce Petulia. We were almost within weeks of getting started at Warner Brothers and at the last moment they just pulled away. They were worried about Bob. They were always a little worried about someone they can’t control. I think they felt concerned that Bob might be off doing something on his own and they might not be in full accord with it.

  GEORGE LITTO: I went to work, and it was quite an adventure. I couldn’t get the movies going initially. But we got a deal from folks at CBS who saw the same show I saw in Chicago. They wanted to do a police show in Chicago and they wanted Bob to do a pilot—Bob and Ray, in Chicago, for a series. I said, “Guys, what can I tell you? You don’t have a movie, and this is a great opportunity if you want to do television.” CBS was the best company to work for in those days, and they decided to do it. They did a terrific show, but it did them in. First Bob was upset because Ray tried to edit some of the footage when Bob wasn’t there. And Ray got upset because Bob told him never to do that again.

  RAYMOND WAGNER: We had different ways to approach certain problems. It’s like a marriage. You face each day and many things go along wonderfully and smoothly and other things you’re just not in step with. Bob loved the socializing, the after hours of sitting around having a drink with whomever, but I wasn’t into that. It wasn’t my style. I preferred to make myself an omelet and read. We had a mutual respect. We just approached important stuff differently. He had his own attitudes about certain things and I had mine and they weren’t meshing, and it really impacted on both of us.

  One place we parted ways was Bob was less interested in story than working with character. Bob loved character, and he was extraordinary with character. He could bring these people off on the film. Story was less interesting to him. Not consciously, at the time. It just wasn’t as important to him. You have to have a combination, in my mind, and we often had bouts about that.

  GEORGE LITTO: I could see this partnership beginning to crack. I don’t remember exactly the timing, but it did crack, and they came to me to be the arbitrator because they were going to split up.

  They wanted me to help them arbitrate this, and the way it was settled basically was that CBS wouldn’t do the television show without Bob being the producer and the director. So Ray got a lesser percentage. I think he got twenty-five percent and Bob got seventy-five percent of the ownership if the show sold, something like that. Ray got Petulia and Bob got O Death.

  LORING MANDEL (screenwriter): Bob was very bitter about that and about Ray Wagner. The way he explained it to me was he had gone down to the Caribbean to shoot a commercial—he was doing that to make money—and Wagner had taken Petulia from him while he was gone and ruptured the partnership. That’s what he told me.

  GEORGE LITTO: Then Ray sent the Petulia script to Dick Lester’s agent and manager in London. Lester had just directed all the Beatles pictures so successfully, and he was interested to do Petulia. Meanwhile, Cary Grant got interested in the O Death script, and then United Artists and the Mirish Company got interested in O Death. But the Mirish Company or UA wouldn’t accept Bob as the director. He had never done a feature, and in those days to
make the transition from television to movies was very difficult. Only a few directors did it. And even fewer did it successfully. George Roy Hill was one. John Franken-heimer. Arthur Penn. Not too many more.

  The irony of this whole situation for me was that Bob had to commit to the Chicago television series—they called it Chicago, Chicago—because they wouldn’t do it with Ray without Bob, but they’d do it with Bob without Ray. For which he gave up Petulia, thinking we might make a deal with O Death because Cary Grant was interested. And if not Cary Grant maybe it would be somebody else. It was an ensemble piece, which obviously became Bob’s signature later. Out of all these failures came the causes for his later success.

  At the last minute, CBS decided not to do it. So Bob’s interest in Chicago is worth zero. Then nothing happens with O Death, Where Is Thy Sting-a-ling-a-ling. Cary Grant drops out, and other opportunities didn’t materialize. We had no deal, and Bob needed money desperately. I was helping him as much as I could because I really believed in him at that point. And Irving Lazar, Swifty, called me up one day and said Roald Dahl wants to sell the script to the Mirish Company. Bob reluctantly agreed to sell it, and at that time we got a very big price of a hundred fifty thousand dollars, of which he got half. He felt like he was selling his soul to the devil. It was brinkmanship, financially. He was on the edge. He sold it and was very unhappy about it.

  PATRICIA NEAL: Roald had this agent, Swifty Lazar. And Swifty said, “Get rid of him.” Meaning Altman. Because he hadn’t done anything. “We’re going to go out and get a great director” and that sort of thing. Bob was nobody, absolutely nobody at this point. He was angry with Roald, which I think he should have been.