Pieces of My Heart

by Robert J. Wagner

  After Natalie and I got back from our honeymoon, I began The Hunters, with Robert Mitchum, directed by Dick Powell. I adored both of them. Powell was one of the great guys of all time, and Mitchum and I became fast friends. He insisted that I call him “Mother Mitchum.” One day we cooked up a juvenile practical joke—we hired a girl to sit on a bench at lunch-time without any underpants on. We were in Arizona, at an Air Force base, and from the reaction you’d have thought the men of the United States Air Force had never seen a woman’s private parts before. As word spread, we gradually brought the entire base to a halt. The fact that it was juvenile didn’t make it any less funny; actually, it made it funnier.

  Mitchum and Dick Powell had worked together on a picture the year before, the very good The Enemy Below, so they already had a rapport. Mitchum wasn’t drinking at the time, although he did smoke a little grass. His marijuana bust in the 1940s hadn’t fazed him in the least; grass had remained his preferred method of relaxation.

  Let me say something right here: Robert Mitchum was one fine actor. He belonged to that small tribe of actors who are more interesting in concealing emotion than expressing it. Most actors lunge to show you every card in their hand. That wasn’t Mitchum’s way. But that smooth, implacable surface hid things only up to a point. On those occasions when he let loose, in movies like The Night of the Hunter or The Friends of Eddie Coyle, the effect was powerful and startling.

  The Hunters was based on a fine novel by James Salter, but the script was far more conventional than the book, and in any case, beautiful prose can’t be directly translated into a movie. What’s left is the underlying story structure, which is often very ordinary.

  Mother Mitchum wasn’t the only legend I got to know about this time. Fox had a project called Lord Vanity, a novel by Samuel Shellabarger, a first-rate historical novelist whose books—Captain from Castile and Prince of Foxes—had served as excellent vehicles for Ty Power. The proposed cast for Lord Vanity included Errol Flynn, me, Clifton Webb, and Joan Collins. Of course, I was terribly excited by the opportunity to work with Errol Flynn, one of a handful of truly legendary Hollywood characters. Flynn was making a much-heralded comeback at the time as a somewhat debauched character actor; his performance in The Sun Also Rises was being talked about for an Oscar.

  I went over to Warner Bros., where Flynn was making Too Much, Too Soon. I was looking forward to telling him about the time he picked me up hitchhiking on Sunset Boulevard years before. I asked about the location of his dressing room. “Around the corner,” they told me. I went around the corner, and there was a wooden building that looked like a little schoolhouse and could be wheeled around the lot.

  The door was slightly ajar, and I said, “Mr. Flynn?” as I opened it. There he sat, facing the door, with his legs spread. Between his legs was a blond girl giving him what looked to be a very expert blow job. Flynn looked up, and his eyes locked with mine, which I’m sure were very wide. He slowly shook his head emphatically from side to side. I didn’t say a word, not even “Excuse me.” I just closed the door. Very tightly.

  Unfortunately, Lord Vanity was never made. It might have made for an interesting picture; it would definitely have made for an interesting experience.

  The marriage of Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner sent the fan magazines into overdrive. There weren’t as many as there had been when I was a boy, but there were still about a dozen that catered to a predominantly female audience: Photoplay, Modern Screen, Motion Picture, and so on. The keynote of the fan magazines at any period was a throbbing, melodramatic view of show business. Every date was a possible marriage, every marriage was a coupling of titans, and every movie was Gone With the Wind. The fan magazines are all gone now, but the attitude still survives on TV shows like Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood.

  Natalie and I were the latest model off the assembly line. Preceding us were Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, and Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher. I realize now that the fan magazine sensibility could subtly affect your attitude about yourself. What’s DeMille’s line in Sunset Boulevard? “A dozen press agents can do terrible things to the human spirit.” Among other things, all that publicity can make you feel bulletproof when in fact you’re not.

  In this period, we were mostly living on my salary, because Natalie had refused all the scripts Jack Warner sent her after Marjorie Morningstar. The only picture she regretted turning down was A Summer Place, not because it was particularly good, but because it was particularly successful. Warner was infuriated and put her on suspension.

  It wasn’t just Jack’s tacky taste in projects that made her angry. She was also grossly underpaid. Finally, in early 1959, Warner gave Natalie a new contract that started at $1,000 a week and ran up to $7,500 a week. The most important thing, as far as Natalie was concerned, was the provision that for every picture she made at Warner’s, she could make another picture for somebody else. She didn’t trust Jack Warner and believed she’d have to do her quality work for someone else.

  She was right, more or less. The first picture she made back at Warner’s was Cash McCall, a programmer with Jim Garner that was strictly designed to exploit his new fame stemming from the Maverick TV show.

  I first met Frank Sinatra when I was about twenty-four, shortly after he had broken up with Ava Gardner. Like most guys of my generation, I had tremendous admiration for him as a man and as a musician. He was such a tremendous influence, as much as Brando was in another sphere—the dialogue, the Jack Daniel’s, the manner, everything. And in his work he was like Brando in another way: the combination of an overtly tough masculinity on the surface and, just beneath that, total emotional openness. My friendship with Frank easily broadened to include Natalie, and we both became part of his circle.

  One day we were all in New York when Natalie casually mentioned that she had never seen the East Coast, so nothing would do but that Frank had to charter a Beechcraft, and the three of us took a flight up the East Coast so that Natalie could see that part of America from the air.

  Frank was an enormously exciting man to be around, but I don’t believe that he was ever content. He was very restless, both physically and in every other way. He wanted to get out there and get it done, and he didn’t have a lot of patience—or rather, he was somewhat patient with recording, but not patient at all with movies. If you were making a movie with Frank, you had to be on your toes, because he’d only do a shot once or twice, and he would get really pissed off if it didn’t go well. As I gained more experience, I would begin to see what he was talking about, because there is an awful lot of wasted motion in motion pictures.

  Looking back, I don’t think Frank was comfortable with movies in the same way he was with music. With his music, he was in control. He knew what sound and what emotion he wanted before he walked into the recording studio. But there are so many more people standing between an actor and the audience than there are between a singer and the audience. He knew that a movie was going to be taken and edited in a way that he couldn’t control, and I don’t think he ever quite learned how to assert himself in movies the way he did in music.

  That said, people think that because he would shoot only one or two takes he didn’t take it seriously, but that wasn’t the case at all. Spencer Tracy didn’t like a lot of takes either, and nobody thought he was casual about the work. Frank was very conscious of his lack of training; he was never sure that he would be able to reproduce an effect more than once or twice because he had to rely on emotion more than craft. He was very serious about his work; he went over his wardrobe, the look of the film, the dramatic arc. He didn’t just pick up a script, look at it, and shoot it. He prepared; I saw him in thrall to the words of The Manchurian Candidate.

  As for his temperament, Frank would reliably be set off by someone not fulfilling their obligations in the manner he thought proper. Any kind of dishonesty or bullshit would infuriate him. And people were afraid of him because his explosions were not pretty.

  He never spok
e about Ava, not ever. It wasn’t a subject you could bring up, and he certainly never brought it up himself. Even casual references—“Ava and I were here one night,” that sort of thing—were conspicuous by their absence.

  He adored Dolly, his mother. I was with him when he gave her a house, and it was touching; he so wanted her to be pleased. Dolly was one tough little broad—she would have been the first to tell you so—and probably the only woman Frank was ever submissive toward. He went to a great deal of trouble for her, and he wanted everything to be just right—he had personally bought and supervised the installation of the chandeliers and everything else.

  Frank catered to Dolly, and it was so touching to see him that way. He was such a dutiful son that it’s appropriate that they’re now buried together in Palm Springs, although it’s impossible to believe that the ceaseless energy that constituted Frank could be contained in a small cemetery plot. When you listen to his music or watch his movies, there it is again—as vibrant as ever.

  My next picture was In Love and War, written and directed by Philip Dunne, who was a top-quality human being and screenwriter but only a medium-quality director. Darryl’s absence from the lot was definitely having a negative effect on my career. My costars were Jeff Hunter, Hope Lange, Brad Dillman, and Dana Wynter. Dana later married the lawyer Greg Bautzer, who was one of the great cocksmen of the movie industry and a behind-the-scenes player who had a great deal of clout within the business.

  Greg was my lawyer, and a good one, but he was a very volatile man—a couple of drinks and he was off to the races. Booze made Greg pugnacious, and he’d take a swing at anybody. Between the women and the liquor, Greg was not your typical lawyer.

  Somewhere in here was a guest bit in a silly picture called Mardi Gras, which was only notable as the last movie directed by Edmund Goulding, who was, shall we say, an interesting man: a married, gay, former boxing champion.

  The year 1959 brought Say One for Me with Bing Crosby and Debbie Reynolds, directed by Frank Tashlin. There was a period when it was not fashionable to say nice things about Bing Crosby as a human being, but I had a great deal of affection for him. As for Frank Tashlin, he was another issue entirely. For one thing, he didn’t want Natalie visiting the set, which I thought was rude and unprofessional.

  Much more important than that was Tashlin’s attempted intercession for a friend of his who had written some songs that Tashlin wanted featured in the film. Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, two great talents on whom both Bing and Frank Sinatra relied, had written the songs for the film, and here was Tashlin trying to use me as a guinea pig for someone nobody had ever heard of. “Jesus Christ,” I told him, “I’d rather have Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen write my material than your friend.”

  He didn’t appreciate my response, and I didn’t appreciate his suggestion, so things were a bit chilly between Mr. Tashlin and myself—not that I cared. The movie was about a caddish nightclub owner on the prowl for a nice dancer played by Debbie Reynolds, and I did a little singing and dancing. I wasn’t Astaire, but I wasn’t terrible. Bing played a priest. Again. It was basically a riff on Pal Joey, but a riff that was too little, too late.

  Bing and I spent a lot of time talking about golf, and he gave me some pipes he had brought back from England. He also gave me a beautiful Labrador I named Conroy, after Bing’s character in the film. Conroy loved to walk out onto the edge of a diving board and leap into the pool. Then Conroy would do something dogs rarely do, which is swim underwater. If you were underwater with him, you could see his mouth drawn back in a huge grin. He was never happier than when he was swimming underwater. Hysterical.

  Debbie Reynolds was going through a very bad time; the Eddie Fisher–Liz Taylor affair had just broken wide open. Debbie wasn’t exactly falling apart, but she had her ragged moments. The sad part was that her career was on fire, and the circumstances were such that she couldn’t really relax and enjoy it. Debbie was fragile and kept to herself, so I spent most of my time with Bing and the wonderful character actor Frank McHugh, who was part of that old Hollywood Irish mafia at Warner Bros.

  When we weren’t working, Natalie and I enjoyed the Hollywood social scene. The great restaurants and clubs that had been opened in the 1930s were still thriving. In this period, our favorite restaurants were Romanoff’s—Spencer Tracy was always at Romanoff’s—and Chasen’s, Patsy d’Amore’s for Italian food, and Don the Beachcomber’s for Polynesian. Dave and Maude Chasen were great, warmhearted people who served great food. I particularly liked their chili, the great seafood platter with iced shellfish, and the hobo steak. Chasen’s also had Pepi, the best bartender in town, who made the best martini, which featured both orange and lemon peels. For the pièce de résistance, Pepi would light the martini!

  To give you some idea of why Chasen’s was so loved, years later Jimmy, the captain at Chasen’s, was the second man to hold our daughter Courtney because, after she was born, Dave Chasen sent down a big hamper of food to Natalie’s hospital room, and Jimmy delivered it.

  My bachelor apartment had been too crowded for two people, so Natalie told her parents they had to move out of the house Natalie had paid for so we could move in. We wanted a big house in Beverly Hills, but between the two of us, we weren’t really making enough money to afford a big house. Natalie knew how her parents would react. “You won’t believe what you’re going to hear,” she told me.

  Sure enough, Mud and Nick acted like they were characters in a Victorian novel, dispossessed and thrown onto the street by ungrateful children. Actually, Natalie just found them another place to live. A little later, in the summer of 1959, we finally took the plunge and bought a house. It was at 714 North Beverly Drive, a very nice neocolonial house that cost $90,000—I wonder what it would bring these days?

  Natalie was a show business kid, and for most of her life she hadn’t been terribly interested in anything beyond whether or not she got a part. But after we were married, she became very interested in interior decorating and decided to do the house over completely. Remember the Cary Grant movie Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House? For the next three years, that was my life. Walls were taken down, walls were put up; floors were covered in marble. Plumbing contractors put their grandchildren through college on what we spent.

  Natalie had an enormous marble bathtub installed on the second floor, but it was too heavy, and the floor started to give way. We had to repair and reinforce the floor, but even when that was done, hot water took so long to get to the tub that it wasn’t really hot. We added an outdoor lanai and swimming pool, which was filled with saltwater.

  As if the reality wasn’t bad enough, the fan magazines, which were heavily invested in portraying us as intensely glamorous “America’s sweethearts,” exaggerated everything. They said we had Old Master paintings (Natalie’s good taste in art didn’t come until much later); they said Natalie had a collection of stuffed tigers (she had a couple of poodles); they said we had two saltwater pools (we had one). All this publicity just made the reality worse. We would end up spending more than $75,000 redecorating that house, and it never really was finished.

  I hadn’t been too fond of the movies I’d been doing, and Natalie felt the same way about her career. We decided to join forces and do a film together, which seemed like a good idea for both creative and commercial reasons.

  All the Fine Young Cannibals was done on loan-out to MGM. The studio had originally planned it as a vehicle for Elizabeth Taylor and Elvis Presley, but at some point they dropped out and we dropped in. We made more money together for the movie than we could have made making two separate movies, but it was the wrong movie for the wrong studio.

  All the Fine Young Cannibals was a big, juicy soap opera, the sort of film that Douglas Sirk had been making at Universal for Ross Hunter, but MGM didn’t have the facility at making and selling that kind of picture that Universal did. MGM hired Michael Anderson to direct our movie. He had recently had a big hit with Around the World in 80 Days and proved
a good man and a good director.

  Toward the end of the picture, Michael had to leave for another assignment, so Vincente Minnelli came on and directed the last two weeks of the shoot. Minnelli had a nervous habit of constantly puckering his lips as if he were going to kiss someone, and he was very fidgety about things like drapes and props. He was quite particular in every way imaginable, even though it wasn’t his picture and he was working without credit. I was surprised by how effete he was, obviously bisexual at the very least.

  I enjoyed making the picture, and I especially enjoyed the music of the picture. Uan Rasey blew the horn for me, and it was such a kick to spend time with him. Uan is still alive and still playing, even though he’s lost his eyesight. When he’s not playing, he’s giving trumpet lessons.

  I noticed that, compared to Warner’s or Fox, things were pretty sparse at MGM at this point. We were one of the few films in production, and the studio didn’t seem to know its audience anymore. For instance, one of the film’s major components was black people; it was Redd Foxx’s first picture, and there was an interracial affair between Pearl Bailey and me. But MGM cut the love scenes between us because they were worried about bookings in the South.

  Compare this to the way Universal emphasized the racial aspect of its remake of Imitation of Life just the year before, and considering the fact that the year we did our movie the hot pictures were Psycho and The Apartment, and you realize how badly MGM was falling behind the times. The studio was just hanging on, and it ended up semi-sabotaging its own movie, which is by no means an unusual event. Instead of being a really good movie, All the Fine Young Cannibals was just an ordinary movie with a couple of good scenes.