Pieces of My Heart

by Robert J. Wagner

  It wasn’t really professional jealousy I was feeling. I’ve always known that the movie business is completely cyclical—roll a seven and the waves part; roll snake-eyes and the waves close over your head. I was never one to sit there and whine, “How come I’m not working for Kazan?” It was the fact that Natalie was less and less of a presence in our life, and I didn’t handle it well. Had I had more maturity, or taken some steps back, the divorce might not have happened.

  The irony is that I was threatened by the idea of analysis. I told her, “Try to do it on your own,” but she couldn’t. Nobody could. We were both paralyzed by our individual insecurities. We still loved each other—I don’t think we ever stopped loving each other—but we could no longer communicate with each other. Our emotional vocabulary had deteriorated.

  Warren Beatty really came into the picture after she left the house. That summer, when I read about the two of them as the hot young couple around town, I wanted to kill that son of a bitch. The one thing I did not want to have happen was have him move into my life and break up my marriage. That was the absolute bottom. I felt as if the ground I had been standing on was being systematically cut from beneath me. I was also totally humiliated, in a way I’d never felt before and, thank God, have never felt since. Life magazine was calling Beatty “the most exciting American male in movies,” and my last four or five pictures had been flops. How would you feel?

  At one point, after their affair made the papers, just after Dorothy Kilgallen wrote, “The way Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty are carrying on…it’s a wonder they have time to eat,” I was hanging around outside his house with a gun, hoping he would walk out. I not only wanted to kill him, I was prepared to kill him. I was living out of a suitcase, staying with Mart Crowley some nights, John Foreman and his wife other nights. At the same time, I was opening up our house on Beverly Drive and walking around at night, sleeping in our bed, smelling Natalie on the sheets. I was, in short, a mess—on the verge of a complete emotional meltdown.

  Maintaining a troubled marriage with two people is difficult but possible; maintaining a troubled marriage with three people can’t be done. I was desperate, ripped wide open, and going slowly downhill. I drank a lot in this period, although I didn’t tip over into alcoholism. I don’t have the compulsive personality that alcoholics have; if they’re not drinking, they’re gambling or snorting or eating, and I’ve always been able to control my appetites. I poured my sorrows into bottles, not cases.

  One night I went by the house to get some things. The house was empty, and a mood of desolation washed over me that was just overwhelming. I thought everything was coming to an end—my marriage, my career, the life I had painstakingly built up for the last dozen years, all of it leaking away. I remember thinking that if I couldn’t kill Beatty, maybe I should kill myself.

  There was a knock at the front door. I didn’t answer it. Then there was a knock at the side door. Persistent. Finally, I opened the door. It was our old friend John Foreman. He came in and said, “What’s going on?”

  “I just don’t think I can make it,” I said. And John held me and stayed there with me and helped me. It was John who got me into analysis, which slowly enabled me to put the pieces of my life back together.

  After John talked me into going to see somebody, I thought of trying the LSD therapy that Cary Grant swore by, and I went to see the same doctor. He scared the living hell out of me. While I was talking to him in his office, I could hear moans coming from a back room, and I noticed there were suspicious stains on his rugs. While we were talking, he was spinning a record around on a turntable and trying to play it with his fingernail. Finally, he said, “I don’t know if you’re capable of this therapy,” which was precisely the decision I had come to on my own. On the other hand, he helped a lot of people besides Cary. Eventually, my second wife, Marion, went through that LSD therapy, and it did her some good.

  Throughout this perilous, ragged time, John and Linda Foreman held me together. I was at their house every afternoon, drinking and crying. Sometimes I crashed at Mart Crowley’s place, some nights I spent on Guy McElwaine’s couch. Other times, I would just sit in a near-catatonic trance. Bob Conrad was very helpful at this point, but it was really a man named Gerald Aronson who made the difference. He was my therapist, he made himself available to me at any time, and he helped get me through some of the longest nights of my life.

  Throughout this time, I remained crazy in love with Natalie. I did not want a divorce, but she was very involved with Warren and felt that she had to give things some space—in other words, spend more time with Warren. Friends did what friends always do in this situation—you get variations of the “there’s lots of fish in the sea” speech, and they introduce you to lovely single women.

  I couldn’t have cared less. I was only interested in a reconciliation with Natalie, and I had no interest in starting something else that could possibly derail a reconciliation down the road.

  Solo, the movie Dick Powell and I had developed, was supposed to be a serious picture about a jazz musician. Dick had gotten André Previn to compose the jazz score, and the picture was shaping up as something special. But Fox had reshaped it into a project that could have been made by Sam Katzman; now there were supposed to be a lot of currently hot rock-and-roll stars doing numbers, and they wanted me to work opposite Jayne Mansfield. In other words, it was supposed to be a follow-up to The Girl Can’t Help It, which neither Dick Powell nor I wanted to get anywhere near. I went on suspension.

  The last thing Fox offered me was a western with Elvis Presley called Flaming Star. If I’d done that, it would have taken the “jaws of life” to free up my career, because nobody ever paid attention to any other man in an Elvis Presley picture—Colonel Tom Parker made sure of that.

  Between my career and my marriage, it was game, set, match. It was at this point that I decided to leave it, all of it, and go to Europe and start over. I had loved living and working there when Spencer Tracy and I made The Mountain, and going back gradually became a goal in my mind. The most charitable view of my situation would be that I was standing still; a more realistic view was that I was losing ground, and fast. I had to move, had to do something to alter the chemistry of my life and career. It was either flip out or flip the page. I chose the latter.

  What was happening all around me made it that much easier. Hollywood was falling apart, and Fox wasn’t doing well either. The mood on the lot was different because the people who had been there in 1949 weren’t around much anymore. There had always been a family feeling at Fox—the same wardrobe people, the same technical crews. If a grip worked at Fox, he had fifty-two weeks of work a year, or close to it. Likewise, it seemed like my dear old friend Joe MacDonald was always the cameraman. It wasn’t so unionized that a carpenter couldn’t put an electric plug in a wall or a lighting man couldn’t lift a piece of lumber. There was a certain esprit de corps; everybody worked together to make the film. We worked a full day on Saturday, and if a picture was supposed to be shot in thirty-five days, you better believe that it was finished on that thirty-fifth day, no more, no less. Overtime? Forget about it.

  But by the late 1950s, business was down, the crews were being let go, and people were hired by the picture. All the crews and costumers, who were devoted to their jobs and to the studio and to the picture, had to start freelancing, and I think the quality of the movies was subtly affected. It was the beginning of a crucial transition in the business—from several generations of people whose concern was what was happening on the studio floor to several generations of people who were more interested in the programming and the marketing.

  Darryl was still in Europe and had no intention of coming back anytime soon. I had been making movies for twelve years and was no longer the fair-haired boy, to say the least. I believed that if I went to Europe, where the most interesting movies were being made, I could get the kind of work I wanted to do and perhaps start my life over again. As for Natalie, I was still holdi
ng out some hope that we might be able to reconcile somewhere down the road.

  Abe Lastfogel was my agent, and I told him I wanted out of Fox. Abe agreed that it sounded like a plan, so we went to see Spyros Skouras. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with the company,” Skouras began. He seemed to be honestly distressed about the way things were going, even though he was one of the primary reasons behind the deteriorating situation. But at this point, that wasn’t my problem. I told him I wanted to leave the studio; I had had it.

  Skouras said that he wanted to keep me at Fox and wanted to renegotiate and keep me on—maybe at the same salary. Abe started talking about a raise. While they were talking, I flashed back to a conversation I’d had with Spencer Tracy. “Get out,” he said. “The quicker the better. Leaving MGM was the smartest, not to mention the most lucrative, decision I ever made.”

  It was at that point that Skouras revisited the Elvis picture, and I said that wasn’t what I wanted to do at all. I held firm; Abe and I told Skouras that I wanted out. Skouras said he didn’t understand any of this; hadn’t the studio taken me from nothing, from a $75 a week contract actor to someone whose face was known around the world?

  “Spyros,” said Abe, “I think we need to move on.”

  “The bottom line,” said Skouras, “is that we want him here.”

  “That’s not our bottom line,” Abe said.

  And then Skouras uttered the magic phrase: “If he doesn’t stay here, I will see that he doesn’t work anywhere.” Well, Abe didn’t scream, but he got extremely angry, as angry as I ever saw him. “How can you speak about him like that?” From pretending to be fatherly, Skouras had slipped right into pretending to be a gangster, and he didn’t have the personality for either part. We left that office with my release from Fox.

  I’ve always retained a sense of surprise about that meeting. Perhaps I was naive, but I had thought the meeting would be consummated with more grace. I would have been perfectly happy to let them have an option for a picture or two in exchange for my release—there is always room for negotiation in a negotiation—but Skouras poured gasoline on what was actually a modest flame.

  It was always about power with those guys. Skouras wanted his way, not because there was a good reason for it, but simply because it was his way. Fox wasn’t going to do anything for me that it hadn’t already done, and we both knew it. The difference was that he couldn’t admit it.

  I began to sell everything I had that could be sold. What I couldn’t sell or put into storage I gave away; I even gave away Conroy, the wonderful Lab that Bing Crosby gave me. Natalie and I divided everything down the middle. The house we had bought for $90,000 and dropped nearly $100,000 into sold for around $185,000—we managed to avoid a bloodbath, the only bloodbath I had been able to avoid for a long time.

  On my last day in Los Angeles, Abe and Frances Lastfogel drove me to the airport. Abe was very paternal and supportive during the ride, which, God knows, I needed. As for my father, he was consistent—he stayed in La Jolla that day. He wasn’t crazy about me relocating to Europe, but then he hadn’t been crazy about me becoming an actor either.

  It was a quiet departure. I just got on the plane and left. About all I took with me were my clothes and a few belongings. I had no intention of coming back anytime soon, but then I had no real sense of what was actually happening: the great movie studios were in their death throes. Nobody really believed that the studio system, the way Hollywood had run and defined itself ever since Cecil B. DeMille opened up a little studio on the corner of Vine and Selma in 1913, was self-destructing. Sure, TV was tough competition, but hadn’t it produced more jobs for more actors?

  I had no sense of the old order dying; rather, I was focused on the wonderful pictures that were being made in England, France, and Italy. I meant to get into some of them. No, that isn’t correct. I had to get into some of them. This wasn’t about want, this was about need; it was a question of survival.

  On the trip to the airport, on the plane to London, I tried hard to cling to my residual optimism, as I have all my life. I believed that the future had to be better than the recent past. All I had to do was be there. All I had to do was strike a match.

  A heartbroken actor in Rome, on the terrace of his new apartment, 1962. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ARALDO DI CROLLALANZA)

  PART TWO

  As if all this wasn’t enough, Natalie brought Penny into my life. Penny was an Australian sheepdog; Cricket, Natalie’s other dog, was a mixed breed. Along the way, there was also Fifi, the basset hound, who was particularly adored by the children.

  But it was Penny who became a special love for me, as she was for Natalie. She had gotten Penny while we were apart, and she appeared in a couple of Natalie’s movies. She was the most darling animal, and I just adored her. Unfortunately, she got old and developed problems. Finally, we took her to the vet for an examination and left her there. Later that day, we got a phone call telling us she had gone beyond the point of no return and he had put her down. We were both devastated—I don’t believe in letting animals die by themselves, let alone one I loved as much as Penny. We had both wanted to be there with her when her time came.

  The first time we were married, we had spent time at a lot of the established restaurants around town—Chasen’s, Romanoff’s, Patsy d’Amore’s, Don the Beachcomber’s. But the second time around La Scala became our place.

  Jean Leon, who owned La Scala, had originally been the maître d’ at Patsy’s. One day he hailed a cab for Frank Sinatra, and Frank tipped him $200. That was how Jean was able to pay the hospital bill for his first child. Jean bought a place on the corner of Beverly and Little Santa Monica where several restaurants had failed. That didn’t dissuade Jean; he had a vision of what it could become.

  La Scala became the most successful restaurant in town, and without any publicity—Jean wouldn’t allow it. Everybody loved Jean, especially me. When I came back to America from Europe and didn’t have any money because of the custody battle, he carried me—he never charged me for anything. When you’re on top, everyone’s your pal, but it’s when you’re on your ass that you really find out who your friends are. Jean was my friend.

  Jean eventually established his own vineyard in Spain and had his own wine: Chateau Leon. Whenever Natalie and I had a special occasion, we always went to La Scala. Jean loved to participate in the gifts I gave Natalie. Dropping a ring in some champagne was minor; Jean would put a bracelet or a necklace in a cake for me. Jean later opened another restaurant, in which Natalie and I were partners, but it didn’t do as well as La Scala, not that anything did.

  After many years, Jean sold the restaurant, bought a sailboat, and achieved his lifelong dream of sailing around the world. Tragically, Jean, who smoked heavily, developed cancer of the larynx. He didn’t want people to see him that way, so he stepped back from business. Before he died, he lost the ability to speak, but we stayed in touch by faxing back and forth.

  I decided it was time to move into producing, so I set up my own production company. My first effort was Madame Sin, a TV project with Bette Davis, whom I had idolized for years. We had originally met in the early ’50s, when we were introduced by Claire Trevor, but Bette and I didn’t become close friends for another ten years.

  The 1960s were a bad time for Bette; she wasn’t working much, but she gave an interview to the New York Times in which she cited me as a young leading man with humor and class. I called to thank her, and it turned out she was a big fan of It Takes a Thief. I asked her if she’d like to do an episode.

  We wrote a show around a character named Bessie Grindell and provided Bette with a nice dressing room; the shoot went very well. While we were in production, Jack Warner threw a dinner for her, and it was preceded by a selection of clips from her great films at the studio, which gave the press agent John Springer the idea of putting her on the road with “A Night with Bette Davis.” That show made her a good deal of money over the years and gave her something to do when she was
n’t acting.

  A couple of years went by, and I brought her the idea of Madame Sin, which was a pilot for a TV series in which Bette would play a sort of female Fu Manchu. Bette had never done a TV series, but there weren’t a lot of good parts in the movies in that period for her, and Madame Sin was a good part. For my part, producing was about asserting control—over casting, music, camera, director. I wanted a say. I also wanted to see if I had the necessary sense of balance.

  We shot the pilot in Scotland. I wasn’t planning on being in the series itself, but I took a part in the pilot. The weather on location was difficult, and I went to Barry Diller, who was the head of ABC then, and told him I thought we were going to go over budget.

  “How much?” he asked me.

  “About $300,000,” I told him.

  He picked up the phone and had a check cut for the overage. We didn’t actually go over by $300,000, and I was able to give him some of that money back. My point is that what Barry did wouldn’t happen today. The decisiveness he showed is a thing of the past because everything is now done by committee; no one person could cut a check for $300,000 in overages today, nor would anyone be disposed to.

  I found that Bette was great to work with. The only time she was troublesome in her work was if you didn’t tell her the truth. If you tried to pull something on her, or if you weren’t as attentive as she felt you should be, then she would get worked up, and Bette Davis worked up was not something any sane person wanted to provoke. She had immediate access to all emotions, but the line to her anger was particularly quick.

  Otherwise, she was a consummate pro, knew her lines backward and forward, and knew her work as well as everybody else’s. Madame Sin was a good movie and did well in the ratings, although it didn’t get picked up for a series; the network was worried about protests from pressure groups because Orientals were the heavies.