A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking
Page 45
Back home, there were few credible offers coming my way, except for Charles Warren's Iron Horse TV series. I decided to go back to writing fiction again. First, I did a novelization of The Naked Kiss, which turned my tight one-hundred-page script into two hundred pages of free-ranging prose with plenty of back stories about my central characters, Kelly, Griff, and Grant. I also put the finishing touches on Crown of India, a globetrotting adventure story about some jewels stolen en route from India to New York's '64 World's Fair. It was published in 1966.
My first wife, Martha, was still friendly with me. Because of our divorce, she'd done well for herself financially, buying two houses, one next to Elizabeth Taylor's on Schuyler Drive and one for investment purposes on Cherokee Lane. She offered to let me stay in the place on Cherokee, probably because she felt guilty about having all that money and me just scraping by. That's the way I'd set it up after I walked away from our marriage, so I had no hard feelings.
Once I'd moved into her place on Cherokee, Martha started coming round a little too often. She even joked that our divorce had been a mistake and that we should get back together. I wasn't laughing. Not only was Martha now remarried to the dependable Colonel Ray Harvey, but I was in love with Christa. I suspected Martha secretly wanted both Ray's steady companionship and my energetic creativity. No way. I may have loved Francois Truffaut's films, but I wasn't made for triangular affairs straight out of his Jules and Jim (1961).
When the opportunity presented itself, I told Martha that I was with Christa and that she was coming to join me as soon as possible. Martha was stunned. Then I dropped the other shoe. My new love was thirty-two years younger than me. Martha was really burned up that I'd taken up with a "European gold digger." I laughed, because there was no gold to dig. I was living from hand to mouth. Martha had an ax to grind, but the grinding landed on deaf ears.
I counted the days, weeks, and eleven long months until Christa's arrival, writing her a love letter or a postcard every day. On the big dayNovember i9, 1966-I drove my gleaming "Jack Warner" Cadillac to the Los Angeles airport to pick her up. It was terrific to be together again, this time for good. Like children, we relished every aspect of life, loving each other from moment to moment.
All my friends wanted to meet Christa. Stanley Cortez, my cameraman on Shock Corridor, Ray Kellogg, the special effects man, Harry Sukman, the composer, and his wife, Gretchen, Peter Bogdanovich and his wife, Polly Platt, all dropped by the house on Cherokee to wish us well. Peter and Polly, who were closer to Christa's age, became our constant companions. The four of us would go for Sunday brunch at Nate 'n' Al's Delicatessen and have a lot of laughs.
One of my old friends, John Ford, startled Christa when he called that summer. It was June 6. Ford telephoned me every D day. Since I wasn't in, Christa introduced herself and asked if she could take a message: "Jack Ford here. Tell Sammy to fuck the Big Red One." Then he hung up. I explained to her it was a running gag between Ford, a navy man, and me that had been going on for years. At first, Ford's particular sense of humor baffled Christa, but they later became buddies.
With Christa at my side, I'd been given a new lease on life, a fresh reason to rededicate myself to moviemaking. Although we didn't make it official until the following summer-July 25, 1967, to be exact-we lived like man and wife from the day Christa came to the States. Our wedding ceremony in Santa Monica was presided over by Judge Eddy Brand, who'd also officiate at the marriage of Henry Miller and his wife, Hoki, a few years later. We told no one we were getting hitched, preferring to keep it intimate. It was so intimate that I had to grab a couple of cops in the hallway of the courthouse to be our witnesses. Afterward, Christa and I had some Chinese chow and a romantic walk on Malibu beach.
Looking back at my three decades with Christa, I confess I was a tough guy to be married to. Somehow, we made it work, realizing right away that it takes two to tango. I made her laugh a lot with my yarns and optimism. I worked hard to support her dreams of a family and a higher education. Christa has been my loyal, shrewd, realistic Sancho Panza, without whose understanding and loving support my mad quest to make hard-hitting movies would have long ago come crashing down in a selfinflicted heap of frustration, vodka, empty bank accounts, and unproduced stories.
Sharks
43,
Five long years had gone by without a movie offer coming to fruition. Sure, there was plenty of high-paying TV work around, but in those days, you had to choose as a director between making feature films and television. Hungry to direct a picture, I agreed to take on a project in Mexico based on an obscure novel called Twist of the Knife by Victor Canning. Before the book ever showed up came a check, a contract, plane tickets to Mexico, and a treatment about an out-of-work gun runner in Sudan who hooks up with a mysterious couple searching for sunken treasure in the Red Sea. The book never arrived. It was the debut of one of the strangest goddamned pictures I'd ever be involved with.
I let myself be convinced by a couple of American wheeler-dealers, Skip Steloff and Mark Cooper, along with their Mexican playboy partner, Jose Luis "Pepe" Calderon, to get involved in that project. See, they assured me that they wanted a "Fuller" picture based on this sunken treasure tale. I should have had my head examined before getting mixed up with those guys or their production company. But the fact that good movie offers were no longer coming my way was making me stir-crazy, so I bit the bullet and threw myself into this caper. I convinced myself that, at the very least, Christa would get to see Mexico. Just like every descent into hell, it started off gloriously. They put us up in a luxury hotel called Las Brisas, in Acapulco. I went to work on the script, turning their thread of a plot into an action movie, weaving in a slew of double and triple crosses with some cagey characters called Doc and Mallare, some underwater scenes, and some shark attacks. Don't forget this was five years before Spielberg's jaws (1975). I called the movie Caine, after my lead character. Only Caine and the female lead, Anna, are alive at the end, when they exchange caustic good-byes, thinking the other's screwed.
We moved to Calderon's private mansion outside Acapulco, with servants running all over the place, and I finished Caine there on schedule. A stomach virus turned tropical paradise into living death, making us so miserable we thought we were going to die. An American doctor was called in, but his medicine made us even sicker. A Mexican doctor finally cured our malaise. Once recovered, I owed it to Christa to take her out to some Acapulco nightspots. At one of them, we became friendly with the talented Cuban singer Celia Cruz. Celia gave us some of her records. Back home, Christa would play Cruz's sensual, rhythmic numbers for me when I was working on my next script, about the Spanish-American War, The Charge at San Juan Hill.
Considering the banality of the original treatment, my Caine script turned out pretty good. How I was ever going to get it made into a motion picture was still a mystery. Sloppy and disorganized, the Mexican production company didn't have a clue about making movies. I figured I'd be innovative. Hadn't Orson Welles shot Touch of Evil under very tough conditions too? With Caine, I'd stay on my toes, inventing tricks as I went along. I actually believed I could turn out a jewel of a movie. Of course, I was bullshitting myself.
We moved to Mexico City for preproduction. The producers had hired Burt Reynolds as the male lead. Reynolds was a television actor still a couple of years away from his breakthrough film, Deliverance (1972). For Doc, we cast Arthur Kennedy, who came down from New York, straight from his Tony-winning performance in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. And for Mallare, I persuaded my old friend from Forty Guns, Barry Sullivan, to join us on this Mexican escapade.
For Anna, our female lead, we sought out the lusty Mexican star Silvia Pinal. She'd been outstanding in Luis Bunuel's Viridiana (i96i). A dinner was arranged with Silvia and Mexican rock star Enrique Guzman, the third of her four husbands. Pinal was so good-humored and gorgeous, I hired her on the spot. She turned out to be one of the lovely surprises of that shoot, a real pro. Christa and I became ve
ry close with her, even spending a couple of weekends at her place in Cuernavaca.
In Mexico City, Luis Bunuel heard I was in town and invited Christa and me to dinner at his place. There, we met his French wife, Jeanne. We had a fabulous evening with Luis, a kindred spirit, every bit as much of a maverick as I. I'd first met Bunuel in Hollywood before the war when he was making ends meet by dubbing films for Warner Brothers. The Naked Kiss and Bufluel's Belle de jour (1967) both dealt with the double life of prostitutes, exposing perversity without being perverse. Both poked fun at the small-minded mores of the righteous middle class. Luis told me how much he'd loved The Naked Kiss, but that he hadn't seen it before he made Belle de jour. So much for critics who thought my film inspired his. The fact remains that we were both interested in probing beneath society's saccharine superficialities.
At dinner that night, Bunuel said he'd love to see my last film, Shock Corridor. Another guest at the table was Alberto Isaac, head of the Mexican Cinematheque. Isaac knew where to get his hands on a Spanish-subtitled print of my picture, so a screening was set up that week. Christa accompanied Bunuel, telling me afterward that she was in heaven that day, sitting next to Bunuel, one of her favorite directors, savoring his reaction to her husband's film. Mumbling compliments in Spanish after key scenes, Bunuel kept squeezing Christa's arm to show her his approval. It was his way of applauding.
Caine was to be shot on location in Manzanillo. Calling the town primitive would be diplomatic. Hell, the plane carrying our crew and equipment over there was the first commercial flight to land at the new Manzanillo airport, nothing more than a goddamned pasture with grazing cows. My producers had been grazing, too. Nothing was organized. Nevertheless, I concentrated on shooting the best movie I could with the resources at hand. The next six crazy weeks were as challenging as flying an airplane while you're building it. Thank God I had veteran cameraman Raul Martinez Solares with me down there. With thirty years of experience, "Papa" Solares had not only a great eye but an endearing character. He called me hijo mio, and we worked great together.
With Luis Bunuel in Mexico City in 1970. The father of cinematic surrealism, Luis was given a strict Jesuit education, sowing the seeds of his obsession with religion and subversive behavior. His last picture was That Obscure Object of Desire, in 1977. In his autobiography, Luis said bed be happy to burn all the prints of all his films-a surreal gesture if ever there was one. He was a true original.
The production got off on the wrong foot right from the start. After we'd finished rehearsing one evening, Burt Reynolds almost walked off the picture. It was something I said to him at a restaurant on the beach while we were having a cold beer. Burt was whining about his wife, Judy Carne, leaving him for another guy. I told him that he'd get over it, making a wisecrack about the girl wanting a smarter, more talented guy. Reynolds stood up with tears in his eyes, said he was quitting, and stomped outside and walked off into the Mexican sunset. Hell, I was just kidding, trying to dedramatize Burt's blues and get him to focus on the movie. I wasn't about to traipse after Reynolds. Christa did. She apologized for my insensitivity and consoled Burt with some sweet talk. For Chrissakes, 1 was making a picture in a primitive place with incompetent guys who called themselves producers, and now I had a tantrum-throwing, ham actor to boot!
Fortunately, Burt's fragility disappeared on set. He was a hard worker. It was one of his first movie roles, and he obviously wanted out of television for good. My opening sequence was shot in one take. I put Reynolds in a truck careening wildly down an abandoned road. The truck exploded. He managed to jump to the ground, reappearing through a cloud of smoke and fire. As he sauntered straight toward the camera, the movie title, CAINE, would come up on the screen. Burt did the scene without a stunt man. He was damn good.
My story was as dry as its Middle Eastern setting. There were no fairytale romances, no happy ends. Anna and Caine don't have the slightest feelings of tenderness for each other. By reversing the predictable, I'd show the absurdity of romanticism. Thanks to the camera work of Papa Solares, all the beautiful elements in the sublime countryside of Mexico became visually hostile. I wanted things to even sound hostile. Every time Caine tosses a cigarette into the water, it makes a hissing sound, and a shark comes to the surface and gobbles it up-whoooshhh!-and then the surface of the ocean becomes as still as death again.
My finish was as troubling as that environment. Anna thinks she's pulled a fast one on Caine by grabbing the loot and making a getaway. Caine chuckles because he knows her boat is booby-trapped. The camera holds tight on one last cigarette he tosses into the water, the final shot of the movie. A shark snatches it. Whoooshhh! The audience would understand that the double-crossing Anna was doomed.
I made up the cigarette schtick, just like every other shot in Caine, as I went along from one setup to the next. I wanted the picture to say something about greed. The loot everyone lusted after didn't mean a goddamned thing. In my own way, I wanted to pay tribute to Erich von Stroheim's Greed (1925). In that film's unforgettable climax, shot in Death Valley, von Stroheim's lead is trapped in the desert. The man ends up paying a king's ransom for nothing more than a goddamned glass of water. And to think that Louis B. Mayer cut about eight hours of footage out of von Stroheim's masterpiece for the studio's two-hour version. I pray Greed is put back together someday, the way von Stroheim originally envisioned it.
We returned to Mexico City for another month of editing. I was able to spend more time with Bunuel as well as get acquainted with the talented Arturo Ripstein. I also ran into my old pal Budd Boetticher, who was working on his masterpiece about bullfighting, Arruza (1971). That picture was as important to Budd as The Big Red One was to me. Arruza is as much a memorial to the great matador as it is a testament to Budd's unwavering fascination with the art of life and death in the bullring.
Burt Reynolds in Shark. He did a good job in it bad film.
Christa and I stayed in a plush hotel on Calle Hamburgo. On weekends, we went over to Cuernavaca, the locale for Malcolm Lowry's masterful Under the Volcano, one of my favorite novels. I remembered Lowry's description of dead dogs in the streets. Sure enough, there were dead dogs all over the place, struck down by dehydration. Experiencing Mexico firsthand made Lowry's surreal book seem so much more real to me.
I delivered my cut of Caine on time to the producers, a good little adventure movie with reasonable commercial potential. Christa and I packed up our things and went home. A few months later, the producers invited me to a private screening room back in Los Angeles to see the fully finished picture. I brought along Peter Bogdanovich, who was at that time a critic for Esquire. What a horrible shock I had! They'd completely recut my movie, retitling it Man-Eater, refashioning almost every scene to suit their tastes, which were lousy. My opening sequence was now cut into three parts. It no longer looked like Caine was narrowly escaping death. What the hell kind of adventure movie doesn't kick off with risk and suspense? Over and over, the producers had butchered scenes, destroying all trace of timing and subtlety. I was flabbergasted with their reediting.
When the lights came up, I hit the ceiling. I told the bastards straight out that that wasn't my picture, that they had tampered with my work without asking me and, more importantly, without a clear idea of what the hell they were doing. I've rarely felt so disrespected. If Peter hadn't restrained me, I would've strangled the sonsofbitches. Instead, I walked out and immediately requested that the Guild remove my name from the movie. I'd have nothing more to do with it. The picture was eventually retitled again, as Shark, and had some kind of theatrical release and TV syndication, making a good return for the producers. Of course, I'd never see a penny of the residuals they'd promised to pay me. I never want to think about sharks again, neither the ones swimming in the ocean nor those wearing expensive silk suits who produced that Mexican fiasco.
Lean Times
44
M y ex-wife's house on Cherokee Lane was no longer the place to be living with my new wi
fe. Martha kept showing up at odd times with the pretext of wanting to work in the garden. It was bizarre. I scraped together some dough and bought a little place with a pool up in the Hollywood Hills on Woodrow Wilson Drive. In those days, your status in Hollywood dropped the farther you moved away from Beverly Hills, so we were really in the boondocks. I didn't give a shit about status. What was important to me was that we now had our own little home. Affectionately, I've always called it "the Shack." I converted the garage into an office where I set up an old rolltop desk right out of The Front Page. Surrounded by my books and scripts, file cabinets, and war mementos, I banged out my yarns. It was a damned good place to work.
Not far down the street lived John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. David Hockney moved into the neighborhood a few years later. More and more creative people bought houses up in Laurel Canyon and fixed them up. Nowadays our neighbors are a mixed crew that includes the head of a big German movie studio and Quentin Tarantino. Modest by any standards, the Shack is packed with marvelous memories. Our daughter, Samantha, spent some of her childhood here. Over the years, so many good friends came by to spend time with us. During all our sojourns around the world, the Shack was always there, beckoning us to come home.
I paid for the place by writing scripts, not directing movies. Sam Arkoff gave me a fat check for a black exploitation yarn, then never made the picture. Bobby Cohn, the nephew of the late mogul Harry Cohn, optioned my Civil War yarn called The Toy Soldiers, but never made that movie either. Believe me, it was quite a struggle to keep up the mortgage and pay for my cigars.