Scotty was the only one in that operation who didn’t drink or smoke dope. Bob partied hard, as did his operation. She was always the one who the next day could say, “Okay, guys, here are all the crazy ideas you had last night. This one sounds good, this one is crap.” And so on. There was a kind of edginess between Bob Eggenweiler and Tommy Thompson and Scotty. They were his buddies. All of a sudden there was this sometimes abrasive female at a critical part of the operation. She was one of the toughest people that you could imagine in many, many ways. In other ways she was very soft and very vulnerable. “Feminine” is not a word I would use, but “vulnerable” is.
From wardrobe she evolved into casting director, and she eventually became an associate producer and executive producer. In the process she in effect became his line producer. Scotty became extremely powerful in Bob’s operation primarily because she didn’t care about the credit. The analogy is Dick Cheney in George Bush’s White House. He didn’t want to be president, so therefore he isn’t a threat. He doesn’t care whether he gets any public credit or not. She didn’t want Bob’s job, she didn’t care if she was the producer, and she was prepared to travel anyplace in the world with him. She didn’t have any complications of family.
The net result was that both Eggenweiler and Thompson were gone after Popeye. That’s where Scotty got her infamous reputation as being the black widow spider of Bob’s operation. It’s probably true.
ALLAN NICHOLLS: She basically gave her life to Bob and became his sole producer. Now, this was over a period of time. She was coproducer when Tommy Thompson was around and Bob Eggenweiler was around. But you could see what was coming. She basically had no other life than Bob. So she became the person he relied on to do numerous things in terms of casting. She was there all the time for Bob, and she was there when others weren’t around. She knew Bob’s thoughts, Bob’s opinions, and so she became the bearer of that news.
JERRY WALSH: Bob frequently referred to her as his artistic partner—far from being an assistant. She didn’t have any life other than working for Bob. She was divorced from Bill Bushnell when I met her, and as far as I know she never had any kind of romantic relationship here. She was on top of everything going on in the office. She drove almost everyone crazy, drove many people away from Bob, Tommy Thompson being the first and foremost.
ALLAN NICHOLLS: Tommy was incredible. He was the personality. Big, fun-loving, knew how to run a set. I think probably if Scotty thought of herself as knowing Bob’s art, she would probably think of Tommy as not being artistic. But Tommy’s creativity was in his personality and his knowing how to engage people, and his charm. So that’s where he would totally be a polar opposite of her.
MICHAEL MURPHY: Almost every guy I’ve known who was a big player like Bob had a woman like Scotty who kind of devoted her life to him, whose whole personality gets taken over by the job and the position and the power of it all. She was very much an integral part of that office, and Bob relied on her a great deal. I got along with her fine. I don’t mean this out of school, but she was a lot of the things that Bob wasn’t. She was kind of judgmental and you’d see her looking into the lens and she just wasn’t the same kind of person around this kind of creativity that Bob was. She was very good at marshaling the army and getting it all together. But she didn’t help him in terms of making people feel good on the set or relaxed.
So her style worked at odds with Bob and the way he operated. And, I mean, many times people would say, “Bob, why do you deal with her?” He’d say, “Oh, you know, she’s kind of crazy. But I need her for this stuff and that.”
ROBERT HARDERS (theater director): She was one of those secretive types who are consolidating their power all the time. When you were jibing with her plans she could be very nice, and when you weren’t you might as well be a speck on the floor or worse. Scotty was ballsy. Scotty was true to her convictions. She didn’t offer much to people, but I don’t think she expected much from people.
BILL BUSHNELL: Scotty wasn’t nice. Bob’s power reflected on her and there was a period of time there in Hollywood and in the film world when she had that reflected power. In some ways, she was one of the more feared individuals in a town full of people who are afraid. And she was never afraid. She was tough. She was Bob’s “no” person. She allowed Bob to appear as the good guy. He never said no to anybody. Scotty said no to everybody.
DAVID LEVY (producer): On a pie chart of friends and enemies, the friends slice is very narrow. In my view, she didn’t play fair and didn’t play by the rules. For instance, if she didn’t like the direction a piece of casting was going she might lie to Bob about an actor’s availability. Pretty outrageous, you know? Things of that nature. If you’re controlling the flow of information in any endeavor you can really stack the deck, can’t you? To her credit, was she passionate about the work? Yes. Was she devoted? Yes. Was she in her mind all about Bob? You bet. But I don’t think she had the gift of analyzing what was in his or a project’s best interest, and there were a lot of unhappy people left in the wake of her involvement.
JOAN TEWKESBURY (screenwriter and director): She did all the stuff Bob didn’t want to do. She was the one who tied up all the loose ends. And he trusted her—which is no mean feat—because he knew that he owned her. She was the “It” person. But it was a dark “It.”
Between Bob and me there was a period of time when it was not great. I would try to see him or talk, and he was simply not interested. It was a lot to do with Scott. She had gotten Tommy Thompson out. Bob Eggenweiler left. I mean, these men were his soul, they were his guys, you know, and they were hilariously funny, stupidly funny. A longtime secretary was gone. They were part of the old crowd, with Louie Lombardo. Now they’re all dead. All of them.
MATTHEW SEIG (producer): I don’t really like getting called at midnight or at two a.m. and yelled at. I would rather keep those things confined to, hell, a twelve-or fourteen-hour day, you know? You know, there’s a reason to take it from Bob and there wasn’t much of a reason to take it from Scotty.
Those two people, they had no business being together. It was just a disaster. I mean, she was a very smart woman who helped him a great deal, I have no doubt about that. She did many things that he gets credit for. You know, she was behind the scenes and stayed that way. But she was a difficult person and their relationship was bad news, just really poisonous. It was like the worst marriage. It’s like a nightmare. I mean people screaming at each other. It doesn’t make any sense. Why do people do that to each other?
JERRY WALSH: Initially I got on well with Scotty, but there came a time when she called me to complain about some advice that I had given Bob. She said, “Bob thinks he knows much more than he actually knows, and it is up to me to protect him from mistakes. When you come along and give him bad advice, it just makes my job so much harder. So please, in the future always convey your advice through me so we can avoid problems.” Of course, I could not agree to her suggestion, and after that there was a coolness in our relationship.
She was mean and nasty to everybody. Well, that isn’t entirely true. She was very nice to actors. Everything and anything they wanted, she would fight to get them and make sure that their lives were comfortable.
PETER GALLAGHER: Scotty was great. I don’t think I would have been in Caine Mutiny, The Player, or Short Cuts without Scotty. So I kind of owe her everything. I think that’s what kept me being invited back. I mean, I know Bob liked having me around. She was very, very caring, wacky, and smoked too much, which I guess eventually killed her. I thought she was terrific. There’s usually somebody, it seems with people like Bob, there’s usually somebody in their ear. And if that person is in their ear, it’s good if they like you. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that’s a big reason why I had such a nice run with Bob while I did.
HENRY GIBSON: She was very good at what she did. And it’s the same in art as it is in politics. If you are a staff member of a senator or a president, or a corporate official in busine
ss, and a boss responds, you want to do more to please the boss, because the proximity to power gives you power by attribution. And I think that was part of the Scotty story. There’s no question she was damned good.
LILY TOMLIN: When we did Nashville, the scene in the café when Keith is singing, you did not know where the camera was. … When I finally saw how they shot it and they were moving past the other women and pushing in on me, and my eyes were in shadow, I thought, “I’ve failed this. I’ve failed this really great moment.” I left the screening, which I never did before. I went home and I was in tears.
Scotty called me and said, “Why did you leave the screening? The footage was just great.”
I started saying, “No, no, you can’t see my eyes.” Just crying. It was a terribly important moment in my career at that time, but Scotty tried to talk me out of it and have me see what was good about it.
TIM ROBBINS: She was a facilitator for him. As a good producer will do, she would fight the battles that he didn’t have the time for. So I’m sure she was the bad cop a lot of the time. And I don’t know that that endeared her to people, but that’s kind of the sucky thing about that job. I always liked her and had some laughs with her. I always felt she was part of the machine. She was a part of the artistic process—the adult who would allow the kids to play.
BILL BUSHNELL: Her turf was that office, and I’m sure she didn’t make Kathryn feel very welcome. It was the thought that Kathryn held Bob back in a certain way. That his creative choices and the pictures that they were doing were more conservative than Scotty thought he should be doing.
ALLAN NICHOLLS: I saw the disconnect between her and Kathryn. Here were two women in Bob’s life, one the best wife, spouse, companion a person could want, and one probably the best producer one could want. They don’t like each other, and not many people like the producer.
JERRY WALSH: Bob spoke to me on a number of occasions about the problem of Scotty and Kathryn. Kathryn detested her. How Scotty felt about Kathryn I don’t know because I never heard her mention Kathryn’s name.
But Bob I remember very well saying to me at one point where there was a particularly big blowup, he said, “I’ve just told both of them they have to work it out.” He said, “I have to have Kathryn to live and I have to have Scotty to do my work, and I’m not going to give up either one. So they have to decide how it’s going to work.”
MICHAEL MURPHY: I think Scotty was way out of bounds in a lot of ways because she treated Kathryn with a sort of disdain. You’d think she would be trying to make Kathryn real happy. And it’s not hard to make Kathryn happy. She’s a lovely woman. But there was some kind of possessive thing that went on there. That may be part of even my own dropping away for a while.
ALLAN NICHOLLS: Over the years, her unpleasantness kind of became her. She was wearing all these layered clothes and she started to hunch. She was an incessant smoker. It was like in Brewster, you know how René’s character transforms? She became the character of the bad producer.
There was one time during Quintet where I was getting on an elevator with Scotty, and Kathryn reached out. I think she even said, “Come on, let’s just bury the hatchet on this one.” I remember Scotty closing the elevator door in her face. So it was clearly not to be. I can remember wanting to be anywhere else at that moment, because I had to ride the next three floors with absolutely nothing to say.
KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: Bill Bushnell came to our house a couple times in Mandeville Canyon in the late sixties, and he brought her and she’d sit over in the corner. She was impossible to bring into the group. We got around the pool, barbecuing and all that, and she’d just take a book and go sit. She had no social grace whatsoever, none. She was like a hayseed. And I worked so hard at that and it just never went anywhere. And so I was starting to resent her right there and then. I mean, it was embarrassing.
She slowly wormed her way into making herself almost—he seemed to feel that she was indispensable. It’s a strain, a part of Bob’s personality that I was never able to understand. And he was never able to explain it to me or anybody else. And at the beginning when people were questioning him, “God, Bob, what’s her story?” and she was turning people off one by one, he would say, “Well, it’s good to have her around because she doesn’t ‘yes’ me.” I remember that vividly. And he was getting to the point where it was getting to be a little sycophant city around there, that rise to stardom so explosively from M*A*S*H. I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back I could see how he didn’t need someone to tell him he was right. He functioned better with somebody that would, you know, converse contrarily.
She was a conniver and she was dishonest and she was needy and she was no fun. And she used that power to manipulate all kinds of people—actors, writers. It just got completely out of control and it affected me and my entire family. He lost many friends. Many he’s gotten back. He got back Matthew Seig. He got Tommy Thompson, thank God—that was a huge loss. He got back Michael Murphy, David Levy—she dumped Dave. She was just terribly destructive, but also during that time, Bob, he was very successful. You know, he was working one picture after the other. So therein lies the puzzle.
I just went up to her one day after this thing of shunning and shunning and shunning. She was talking to Allan Nicholls—this was in 1979 or something—and she said, “Now, we’re going to have the birthday cake for Bob at lunchtime.” And I walked in and I said, “Listen, cool it, will you?” Before that, I didn’t have the courage to tell her off ever, because I didn’t want to rock the boat with Bob. So I said, “Listen, he’s my husband. I’ll plan the birthdays, you plan the picture.” She shriveled up and crawled away or some unattractive thing.
JOHNNIE PLANCO (agent): Bob and Scotty were coming to odds on Kansas City. They were hardly speaking to each other.
MATTHEW SEIG: She wouldn’t leave and he wouldn’t fire her. It was sick. He said for years that he was going to stop working with her and he just couldn’t do it. They only separated after she practically died.
BILL BUSHNELL: She was stricken in March 1995, a week from making Kansas City. She was on the phone to London to somebody’s agent. She suddenly said, “God, my legs are numb,” and she fell off the chair. She was lucky there was an ER squad across the street having lunch.
I spoke to the doctors because I was staying in her loft in New York. She flatlined in there for some period of time, and as she was fond of saying, “It ain’t white. It’s all black.”
MICHAEL MURPHY: I went to see her in the hospital. It was an interesting thing. Boy, she really got her priorities lined up because she was nicer than I ever remember her.
BILL BUSHNELL: That was the end. As far as I know Bob never came to the hospital to see her. I think he was so terrified of death that the idea of going and seeing someone who had been with him for twenty-something years at death’s door terrified him. Not of being dead but of the process of dying. Because he was having his own problems. Plus I think it was his way of getting rid of Scotty. I think that relationship was over and probably had been over for some time but neither one of them knew how to get out of it.
I don’t think she ever talked to Bob again. I think that was a two-way street. She never called him and he never called her.
MATTHEW SEIG: After that happened, for a couple of weeks Bob said that he was never happier on a film, that he was having a great time. Everybody was happier and he was happier and loving it. That changed after a while because we were just really running out of the money and the stresses were growing on Bob. So he was less happy as time went on. But it was a big burden off of his shoulders when that happened, as cruel as that sounds.
I believe that Bob did visit her in the hospital, but I could be wrong about that.
KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: He was ready to let her go. He was ready, [but] he didn’t know how, he never fired anybody except cameramen. And I just don’t think he had the guts or knew how to do it. I think he was so grateful that he didn’t have to do it. He went
to see her once in the hospital—I’m sure of that—and that was under great pressure. And he never mentioned her again, after working together twenty-six years.
MATTHEW ALTMAN: That was a strange thing about my dad. There were a lot of people in his life, they were in one minute and then, boom, they were gone, never to be talked about again. I never understood that about him.
HENRY GIBSON: She was an arch defender of his vision, of his ability. And she was very clear-eyed except for that one big fault, which was not giving a damn about humanity. And very vulnerable, she was very vulnerable and died alone and sad and uncared for and with very little money. Saddest of endings.
WREN ARTHUR (producer): He was so happy to be free of Scotty, but I think his freedom contained a lot of guilt. A couple of times he did acknowledge that he had put Kathryn and a lot of people who he loved through a lot—Tommy Thompson, a lot of people. He really wasn’t respectful to them by keeping Scotty around. Because she wanted them out. I mean, especially Kathryn. Therein lies the hair in the butter, as Bob would say. You don’t put your wife through that because of this producer. It’s just wrong. There was one specific time, probably the following summer—after work we were all sitting around having wine and he was just talking about Scotty very candidly. About how he wished he’d done things differently and let her go years before and ended the relationship. I’m paraphrasing here, but he said he’d needed her in an old-school way to protect him so he didn’t have to be the bad guy.
CHAPTER 22
Popeye
*
Popeye (1980)
David Ansen, review headlined “Popeye Without Spinach,” Newsweek, December 22, 1980: Strange bedfellows make strange movies. Take Popeye as a case in point. To bring E. C. Segar’s venerable comicstrip hero to the screen, proto-Hollywood producer Robert Evans, ironic New York humorist Jules Feiffer and laid-back iconoclastic director Robert Altman joined forces. They employed the services of Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall to play Popeye and Olive Oyl, enlisted Harry Nilsson to write musical numbers and constructed an elaborate rendition of Sweethaven, the cartoon shantytown, on the unlikely Mediterranean island of Malta.
Robert Altman Page 34