It was the first time I had worked with Natalie, and it was as great as I had hoped. We always tried to make it realistic. It would seem that being together 24/7 with someone could get a bit claustrophobic, but it didn’t feel that way. It was great to work on a scene at home, go to the studio together, and talk some more about the work. It was an immersion experience with the woman I was head over heels in love with, so of course I loved it.
I got to know some of MGM’s old guard while making the movie, guys who had stalked through the jungle with Louis B. Mayer. Eddie Mannix had been Mayer’s number-two guy, and Benny Thau had been the head of talent and even ran the studio for a time in the 1950s. Both of them were superficially nice guys, but you definitely wanted them for you, not against you.
In recent years, there have been a lot of questions about whether or not Eddie had George Reeves, his wife’s lover, murdered. I knew Eddie, I knew his wife, and I knew George Reeves. Is the murder scenario possible? Yes, it’s possible. Eddie certainly had the connections needed to have someone taken out, and I think he also had the emotional capability. He was a tough little guy, as was Billy Grady, the head of talent at MGM—all tenacious bastards.
As for Benny Thau, after the MGM years he had an office at William Morris, but Benny was controlled by false ego; he couldn’t stand to come to work at a company that wasn’t his. Years later, Benny ended up in the Motion Picture Home. I ran into him and asked how he was doing.
“I’m doing fine, RJ. Listen, I want you here tomorrow, for lunch.”
“Well, Benny, I’m working tomorrow, I can’t make it for lunch.”
“Well, when can you make it? I want you here.” Benny was used to giving orders, and there was no one left to give orders to. It was another negative lesson about the perils of the movie business.
TEN
“THAT FUCKING CUNT WILL NEVER WORK IN MY STUDIO AGAIN!”
Natalie. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)
All the Fine Young Cannibals didn’t break my streak of losers, but as far as the public was concerned, Natalie and I were living the movie star life and loving it. In October 1959, Frank Sinatra threw a major bash at Romanoff’s to celebrate Natalie’s twenty-first birthday as well as her fifteenth anniversary in the movies. There was an orchestra, Frank and I both toasted her, and Spencer Tracy hugged her. Then Frank, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and I formed a quartet and sang “Happy Birthday” to her. I admit I was the weak link in that particular vocal chain.
At Fox, I could feel the temperature falling. Buddy Adler had died, and the studio was now being run by Spyros Skouras, whose background was as an exhibitor. It was a field that had served Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner well in that it gave them an education in exactly what put people’s asses in seats. But Skouras was a walking, talking disaster, and he had just begun production on Cleopatra, the biggest runaway production of all time. Cleopatra would bring the studio right to the edge of the precipice, so he certainly had more important things to worry about than me.
When I would go in to complain, the studio minions would say something on the order of, “What the hell are you beefing about? You’re making thousands a week, and there are hundreds of kids out there earning nothing. We’ve done all right by you so far. We know what we’re doing.”
Actually, Darryl Zanuck had known what he was doing, but nobody else at the studio had his touch. The studio was making a mistake by keeping me a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed juvenile and not letting me play an adult, and I suppose I had been at least somewhat complicit in this as well.
That was one reason Dick Powell and I began developing a picture called Solo, about a jazz musician, somewhat in the mold of Young Man with a Horn. But it was increasingly clear to me that the studio was much more interested in catering to a new group of leading men: Brad Dillman, Richard Beymer, Tony Franciosa. They may have been comparatively untried, but they hadn’t been touched by failure either.
If my career was sputtering, my marriage was still solid. We were having a great deal of fun, and we continued to learn together. When Jack Warner bought Gypsy for Natalie, we went to New York to see the show. It was clear that it was a perfect vehicle for her and that she’d be sensational in it. Warner and Natalie gave a press conference announcing their plans for the picture, and afterward we were sitting in Jack’s office, at 550 Fifth Avenue. Natalie went down the hall to pose for some stills, leaving me sitting there with Jack Warner.
“Would you like a drink?” Jack asked, and I said yes. He poured us both a Jack Daniel’s. So there I was, sitting on Fifth Avenue having a drink with Jack Warner. I distinctly remember thinking, Life is good.
“Great, great property for Natalie,” he says. “It will be a wonderful picture.”
“She’ll be wonderful in it, Jack.”
“Who do you think should play the mother?”
“Well, Jack, in my estimation there’s only one person in the world who can play the part.”
“Who’s that?”
“Judy Garland.”
And suddenly all the good feelings vanished as Jack Warner began screaming. “That fucking cunt will never work in my studio again! Fuck her! She’s a pain in the ass, a no-talent cunt.” And that was just for starters. It was a stunning transition, because Jack Warner was a man who always effected the air of a jovial comedian. Jack Warner wanted to be liked, but he was acting like he was going to pick me up and throw me out the window, Jack Daniel’s still clutched in my hand.
As he continued ranting, it became clear why he was so angry. Right after the premiere of A Star Is Born, he had gone to a party at Judy’s house on Mapleton Drive. When he walked in, he had a vague feeling of déjà vu. Instead of dissipating, it got stronger, and then he realized what it was. Judy and Sid Luft had taken the furniture that had been used for the sets of A Star Is Born and moved it into their house. Judy Garland had stolen furniture from Jack Warner! He’d been brooding about it for years, and his anger had been building, and all it took was the mention of her name to set him off. His attitude was, “She fucked me and I’m going to fuck her!”
Warner’s outburst was a window into the ferocity of that generation of movie moguls. This had happened six years before, but as far as Jack was concerned, it was the day before yesterday. There was no sense of letting bygones be bygones, and there wasn’t even a sense of respect for Judy’s talent and the fact that she would have been far superior as Mama Rose than Rosalind Russell, who got the part. These men were so competitive! Most obviously with each other, but it went deeper than that. They didn’t want anybody getting ahead of them, on any level. Not another producer, and certainly not an actor, no matter how talented, no matter how much they needed that talent.
I have learned that in a long life we all eventually play the part of the betrayed, and we all eventually play the part of the betrayer, and neither is pleasant because both roles involve pain—inflicting it or absorbing it.
By the spring of 1960, I began to feel pressure building on our marriage. With the exception of Gypsy, Natalie felt that she had been put on the back burner by Jack Warner, and she was right: Fred Zinnemann hired Audrey Hepburn for The Nun’s Story, and Josh Logan hired Leslie Caron for Fanny. Finally, Natalie caught a break when Elia Kazan asked her to be the leading lady of Splendor in the Grass.
It didn’t start out that way. Kazan’s first choice was Diane Varsi, but she quit the business. Then he thought about Jane Fonda, but it was William Inge, who wrote the original script for Splendor, who suggested he look at Natalie. Jack Warner wasn’t happy about it and actually tried to talk Kazan out of using her; Natalie had defied him when she went on suspension after Marjorie Morningstar, and God knows, Jack could hold a grudge.
For Natalie, this was her ship coming in. Kazan was unquestionably the best actor’s director alive, and he’d made A Streetcar Named Desire, which contained Natalie’s favorite female performance. A lot of people thought Kazan was nuts to hire her; one reporter told him that she’d been good in onl
y two movies. “Then I say she’s got it,” Gadge said. “Two pictures is a hell of a lot of pictures.” While the script was by William Inge, not Tennessee Williams, it had both authority and emotional authenticity.
Natalie was so hungry for the part that she even agreed to test for it. She told Kazan that she wanted a new career, and Gadge recognized her power as an actress and her willpower as a person; she got the part. What was unsaid but clearly indicated by the fact of that screen test was that she was willing to put herself completely in his hands—one of those things that every director wants to hear.
Fox had postponed Solo, so I was able to accompany Natalie to New York, where all of Splendor in the Grass was shot, beginning in the spring of 1960. We rented an apartment on Sutton Place that Bill Inge found for us—he lived in the same building. The exteriors were shot on Staten Island and in upstate New York, which stood in for Kansas, and the interiors were shot at the Filmways studio.
Elia Kazan, who became a good friend of mine, said in his memoirs that Natalie and Warren Beatty began an affair on Splendor in the Grass, that I was on the set, and that my humiliation was a terrible thing to see. I was indeed on the set when they were on location, but I honestly didn’t see any evidence of an affair.
There’s another scenario: Beatty had nothing to do with our breakup, and Natalie didn’t begin to see him until after we split. I choose to believe the latter. Now, it’s within the realm of possibility that the affair began earlier, but I don’t think that’s what happened for one simple reason: she would have told me.
Here’s what all the speculation about this period of our lives fails to take into account: both of us were serious about the marriage, and we were always straight with each other.
Let me put it another way: I never knew Natalie to tell me a lie. Affairs were not part of our equation. I had been faithful to her, and she had been faithful to me. If she had been sleeping with Beatty, she would have told me. Mart Crowley, who was with Natalie throughout Splendor, also thought nothing happened until much later. As a matter of fact, she initially disliked Beatty because she thought he didn’t bathe enough—scruffiness supposedly equaled authenticity, at least according to the Actors Studio.
I do know that Splendor in the Grass constituted a critical time for Natalie. The material was emotional and sensual, she worshiped Kazan, who properly set a very high bar for her performance, and Warren Beatty was…attractive. A good actor, a great sense of humor. He even played the piano.
Perhaps the core problem was in something Kazan said years later: “So many actresses, you feel they have a private life, a husband and kids, and acting has a place. But, with Natalie, acting was her whole life.” At this point in her career, I think Kazan was right—Natalie’s success or failure as an actress was more important to her than anything else. Including me.
Whether or not Beatty made the crucial difference in our marriage breaking up, I do not know. I do know that with Natalie, I always had a fear of a third party coming between us. Anytime you are involved with a beautiful woman, you can see that other men respond to her the same way you do. You have to have a lot of self-confidence to cope with the ultimate questions: Would she like him better than me? Would he please her more than I can?
Because of Natalie’s innate radiance, she couldn’t help attracting every man around her, so there was always a certain unease on my part. And when Splendor in the Grass came around, there was an added sense of fear. When such a fear is combined with the feeling that you’re not being responded to in the way you expect, things can get very edgy, very fast.
After she finished Splendor in the Grass on August 16, she had exactly two days off before beginning rehearsals with Jerome Robbins for West Side Story. The Mirisch brothers, who were producing the picture, offered her one of two deals: a flat salary of $250,000, or $200,000 plus 5 percent of the profits. I advised her to take the percentage instead of the extra $50,000, but Abe Lastfogel pointed out that musicals had been in a downward spiral for years and there was no guarantee that West Side Story would do any better than Les Girls or any of the other musicals that had been laying eggs. The only successful musical in the recent past had been Gigi.
“Take the $50,000,” Abe said, and she did. West Side Story is still playing, still earning money. She spent the rest of her life regretting the deal, but that’s the business—even the brightest agents and managers make mistakes. In the future, whenever she was offered a percentage instead of flat salary, she took the percentage, with very good results.
It was around this time that Natalie began to put together the support system that was with her for the rest of her life. Mart Crowley was a go-fer on Splendor in the Grass, and he would go on to write The Boys in the Band as well as be a mainstay for me on Hart to Hart. She met Howard Jeffrey when he worked on West Side Story. The triumvirate was completed by the actress Norma Crane. Unlike many stars’ friends, Mart, Howard, and Norma weren’t competitive with each other at all, perhaps because they were all different kinds of people. Although they were Natalie’s friends before they were mine, I grew to love them as well.
All these people benefited from being close to Natalie, because one of her greatest gifts was kindness. Natalie paid for Mart’s first six months of analysis. When Tom Mankiewicz, who also became part of our circle, bought his first house, she used her decorator’s license to get dealers to sell him stuff cheap. Then she threw a housewarming party and invited big shots whom Tom didn’t even know, but who she knew would bring him presents that he really needed.
As she began work on West Side Story, Natalie was under so much pressure; her career was approaching white heat, and mine was no more than lukewarm. What made things even worse was that making West Side Story was miles of bad road. Jerome Robbins was incredibly demanding and difficult, so much so that he threw the shooting an entire month behind schedule. The producers waited until October to fire him because it was imperative that the musical numbers be superlatively shot, and Robbins did almost all of those. The book scenes were less important, and those were finished by codirector Robert Wise.
Natalie was furious about Robbins’s firing and threatened to quit the picture unless he was reinstated. Both Abe Lastfogel and Robbins told her that was foolish, and she went back to work. Then she got furious all over again when the producers overdubbed her singing with Marni Nixon’s. All this turmoil couldn’t help but be reflected in our married life, and things continued to deteriorate, even after the movie was finally finished.
None of the arguments were about anything that could be objectively regarded as important, but Natalie’s intensity and my fears magnified every trivial disagreement into a critical blowout. In February 1961, Mart Crowley moved into an apartment we had over the garage. He thought our marriage was hanging by a thread, and not a sturdy one. As for me, Abe Lastfogel had arranged a three-picture deal at Columbia. The first one up was a comedy called Sail a Crooked Ship, written and directed by Irving Brecher, from a novel by Nathaniel Benchley. Irv had written for the Marx Brothers and was one of Groucho’s best friends. Irv was and is a delightful man, very attuned to comedy, and he surrounded me with funny people—Ernie Kovacs, Frank Gorshin, and Frankie Avalon among them. But he was a much better writer than he was a director, and the movie itself, while not bad, simply wasn’t strong enough to lift me out of the trough I had fallen into, and I knew it.
My insecurities were mounting, as were our disagreements. We argued. We made up. We argued again. I would give Natalie gifts to apologize for the argument, and then we would argue again. And the pressure mounted. It had gotten to the point where we were almost never alone. There was always an agent on the phone, or the studio, or a publicist. Everybody was fluttering around trying to keep her together; she was very nervous, and all of this was taking place away from me.
I can see now that I was not that sympathetic or understanding about Natalie’s needs. She told me that she wanted to go into analysis; she was overpowered by the pressure of her w
ork, going from one movie to another, and the movies were getting bigger and bigger. She felt that therapy would help her. After all those years of Jack Warner giving her films from the back of the cupboard, she was suddenly getting major movies; it became a case of “Be careful what you wish for.”
And I was standing there saying, “What about us? They’re just parts in a movie.” What I really meant, of course, was “What about me?”
I was excluded from almost everything that was happening to her, and I was jealous. I wanted us to spend more time together, and she wanted to stay on the merry-go-round, even if it was going faster and faster. And I felt that her going into analysis implied a failure on my part.
In June 1961, we got into a terrible, terrible argument. There was a lot of yelling that ascended to screaming. The argument culminated in Natalie running to her parents, which was a measure of her desperation, because her parents had spent her life running to her.
That same week we announced that we were going through a trial separation but had no plans for a divorce. We had been married for three and a half years. From the coverage in the papers, you’d have thought we’d killed the Lindbergh baby.
In our own minds, we had always been an ideal couple, and the media had picked up on that and spread it around the world. We were about to endure the sort of coverage that was being thrown at Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and Eddie Fisher, which was no help at all.
Looking back, I can see that some of the attitudes of Robert Wagner Sr. were coming out in his son—it was “pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-a-man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do.” Utterly stupid, not to mention counterproductive, but that’s the way I felt.
Pieces of My Heart Page 12