Pieces of My Heart

by Robert J. Wagner

  I was in terrible pain, and I was scared. An ophthalmologist washed out my eyes, but I had to keep my eyes covered for an endless three weeks, opening them only to put in eyedrops. For those three weeks, Josh and Peter led me around. Back in Hollywood, some thought was given to writing me out of the script so that no production time would be lost, but David, Peter, and Blake refused to continue unless they could shoot around me while my eyes got better. After three weeks, my eyes were fine again. Because of my friends, I kept my job, which at that point in my life was of critical importance. The fact that the picture was an international hit was also a great help.

  Most people in show business have some level of talent. Peter Sellers had a level of genius. It was Peter who helped break me of a bad habit I had fallen into. As The Pink Panther wore on, I began to develop a nasty case of stage fright. It didn’t have anything to do with the injury to my eyes; it was that my confidence was still a quart low, and I was working opposite Peter Sellers and David Niven, for God’s sake! They were so good, so seamless in their work, and I began to wonder if I was in their league. At first, I got a slight case of the shakes, and then it manifested itself as not being able to look the other actors in the eye.

  This was an entirely new experience for me. When I had been starting out, I was nervous, of course, but stage fright goes far beyond nervousness. Stage fright limits your concentration because you’re not thinking about the scene—you’re not thinking about anything other than how terrified you are. It’s emotionally disfiguring.

  Very little in life can be done tentatively. Certainly, acting can’t. It’s like telling a woman you’re in love with her when you’re not. The lie shows, and even if the audience can’t tell, you can, and you feel like a total fraud, which only increases your inner terror—“They’re going to find me out!”

  One day Peter said to me, “What the hell are you doing with your eyes?” I was hooding them slightly, because I was afraid of the camera. Peter was the only one who noticed, and he forced me to confront it. I went to David with what was happening, and he said it was something that had to be worked through. David ran scenes with me numerous times so that I would be as comfortable as possible.

  All this happened toward the end of the shoot, which, other than the incident with the detergent, had been an entirely wonderful event. It’s possible that I was upset about saying good-bye to a group of people who had become a sort of surrogate family for me. In any case, I knew the stage fright was something I was going to have to address.

  Peter was always a little crazy, but I must say that I never found him that nuts. I did have to talk to him at one point: he liked amyl nitrate when he was getting oral sex, and I told him that unless he was careful he was going to blast his heart right out of his chest. Amyl nitrate extends the orgasm for a very long time, and it can be dangerous. And that’s what eventually happened: he had a massive coronary while making Billy Wilder’s Kiss Me, Stupid. After that, he got really crazy, but for some reason it never bothered me.

  A few years after The Pink Panther I was doing It Takes a Thief, and Peter guest-starred for me, playing a man with a nautical shop. As always, he was great fun. He gave me a gold cigarette lighter, which I have kept by my bed for more than forty years.

  This run of pictures put me right where I wanted to be—in a different world than I had been in back in Hollywood. And if I was a member of an ensemble rather than carrying the picture, that was fine with me, so long as the picture had some chance at quality.

  Next up was The Biggest Bundle of Them All, with Raquel Welch and Edward G. Robinson, which also gave me a welcome reunion with Vittorio De Sica.

  Eddie Robinson, of course, was just a wonderful actor, and he was also the most cultured and elegant of men. He had amassed one of the finest art collections in Hollywood when a toxic divorce forced him to sell most of it off. He sold Van Gogh’s Sunflowers to Stavros Niarchos, with the proviso that once Eddie got back on his financial feet he would be able to buy it back for the same amount of money Niarchos had paid him.

  A few years later, Eddie had the money, but he could never get Niarchos on the telephone. It doesn’t matter how much money a chiseler may have—he’s still a chiseler. Eddie went on to rebuild his collection. He converted his garage into an art gallery, and he was the proud owner of a three-panel Water Lilies by Monet.

  Raquel was a very difficult woman; her career was at white heat, she was only twenty-five or twenty-six years old, and as a result she was terrified. Her fear manifested itself in her constant lateness. She would be in makeup for hours while she kept everybody waiting. It was the same behavior that gradually alienated people from Marilyn Monroe, who was probably driven by many of the same fears.

  Yet, as difficult as it was working with Raquel, I liked her and felt sorry for her. She didn’t seem to have the tools she needed to handle her life. She asked me once about a painting she was interested in buying, and I told her a story that Eddie Robinson had told me, about how purchasing a painting can change your life.

  Eddie had been a struggling young actor in New York when he scraped the money together to buy a small Cézanne. He took it home and hung it over his mantel, then realized it didn’t look quite right. He changed the mantel, and the painting did indeed look better. Then he realized that the room wasn’t quite right, so he got new furniture that was more in keeping with the painting and the mantel. This went on until he moved to an entirely different apartment, just so he could properly showcase the Cézanne.

  “You can’t worry about the value of the painting appreciating,” I told Raquel. “You just have to make sure that the painting feeds you in some way; you have to buy something you genuinely like, that you want to see every day. And if you can find a painting like that, then you have to have the right place to display it, and that’s how a painting can change your life.”

  I told her all this, and she looked at me and said, “I don’t have any of that. How can I get that?”

  Well, it helps if you have someone you trust to lead you through things. I had been lucky—Barbara Stanwyck, Clifton Webb, Natalie, and a lot of other special people had lent me their good taste until I could develop my own. Raquel wasn’t that lucky.

  I found her oddly vulnerable, but Vittorio De Sica and Eddie Robinson weren’t buying it. Waiting for her drove them both crazy, because professionalism and courtesy was the absolute bedrock for that generation of actors, irrespective of nationality. One day Eddie Robinson finally exploded and read her the riot act. He excoriated her for being unprofessional, for being rude, for being inconsiderate, for being less than all the other people she was working with, for thoughtlessly subjecting other people to her indifferent ethics. He just kept going. It took him six or seven minutes, and he was amazingly eloquent; he never repeated himself.

  Raquel’s response was to cry a little bit and continue to keep everybody waiting. One day we had been sitting there waiting…waiting…waiting. She finally came out of her trailer and walked past us. Vittorio muttered, “She’s so strong, it would take six oxen to pull a hair from her cunt.”

  In the spring of 1963, Marion, the boys, and I came back to America. Marion and I were married on July 22, 1963, in the Bronx Courthouse. My best man was Bill Storke, the dear friend who flowed through my life for more than fifty years. We trusted each other absolutely, and Bill made me godfather to his son Adam, who became—horrors!—an actor. Staying close to and loving Adam as I do has enabled me to stay close to Bill, even after he died in 1996.

  In October, Marion and I moved into a small ranch I bought in Tarzana that had originally been built by Robert Young. It was a beautiful place, not far away from the old Edgar Rice Burroughs house where he had entertained us with the jungle sounds he piped into the trees. The Tarzana ranch had eight acres of land and gardens—now all that beautiful land is covered with houses.

  I remembered how much dogs and horses had meant to me when I was a boy, so I made sure that Peter and Josh had access to bot
h. Those first couple of Christmases with Marion, Josh, and Peter, in Rome as well as America, were wonderful. Seeing Christmas through the eyes of a child makes it a more important experience than it can ever be with adults. Christmas is better with children than it is without them, and I don’t think it matters all that much where you are.

  I devoutly believe that it’s not the house, it’s who’s in it. It’s not what’s under the tree, it’s who you’re with. I was with my new family, and that’s why it was so good for me.

  THIRTEEN

  “MY HEART STOPPED WHEN I SAW HER.”

  My second wife, the beautiful Marion. (PHOTOGRAPH BY DOMINICK DUNNE)

  The problems that Marion and I had initially were caused by Stanley Donen, her ex-husband. Marion had custody of Josh and Peter, and Stanley, who was living in England at the time, had visitation rights. And then Stanley began a custody battle over the children.

  Stanley’s case was built on the fact that Marion had a gay decorator friend named Peter Shore, who had lived with her in her beautiful Rome apartment. Stanley said that Marion was an unfit mother because she exposed her children to homosexuals. The fact that Mart Crowley had come to visit us and babysat for the boys while Marion and I would go out to dinner was also thrown into the mix.

  At one point when I was in the docket, Stanley’s lawyer tried to imply that I was gay and part of the pervasive homosexual influence. I think Stanley was just trying to screw Marion over in the only way he had left.

  In the end, we had to have a man come and live with us at the ranch in Tarzana to see if we were good parents. He stayed with us for a month, then went back to London and gave a positive evaluation to the court.

  The trial transcripts were eventually five feet high, and defending the case cost me a great deal of money. Between the court case and the purchase of the Tarzana property, I was financially strapped and very much on the edge.

  The low point came when I had to post a $40,000 bond into an interest-bearing account for the court. I had about $30,000 in AT&T stock, but I didn’t want to sell it, and I didn’t have $40,000 in cash. It was the last thing on earth I wanted to do, but I went to my father, explained the situation, and asked him to give me a loan.

  To make a long story short, he wouldn’t lend me the $40,000. He liked Marion but hadn’t wanted me to marry her because she had two kids who were half-Jewish because of Stanley. Refusing the loan was his way of registering his disapproval. I wouldn’t say that my father was an anti-Semite, but like many people from his time and place, he felt that Jews were definitely déclassé.

  I went to Watson Webb and explained the situation. Wat listened, nodded, sat down, and wrote me a check for $40,000—the equivalent of several hundred thousand dollars today. Wat came through for me because he understood what it was like to have a father who didn’t believe in you.

  Ultimately, Marion retained custody. Stanley didn’t even bother to appear at the final hearing. All this crushed Marion and brought her to the edge of a breakdown, which was, of course, the point.

  I’ve mentioned Marion’s marvelous sense of style, which rubbed off on me, but her greatest gift to me was undoubtedly our daughter Kate, who was born in May 1964 and was named after Kate Hepburn. Having a child is a common experience, but that doesn’t make it any less astonishing. As I looked down at Katie for the first time, I felt a surge of responsibility and an entirely different level of love than anything I had ever felt before.

  There was a sense of healing in that emotion. I had lost Natalie, much of my career momentum, and, a couple of weeks before Katie was born, my father—a relationship that was never completely resolved.

  At the end of his life, my parents were living in La Jolla. One day my father ordered something to be delivered from a drugstore. He hung up the phone and said to my mother, “Can we afford this?” At the time he had several million dollars.

  Soon afterward, he had a cerebral hemorrhage. He had always been an incessantly busy man, but for the most part he had settled down. “I want to die in that chair,” he had told me, pointing at his favorite easy chair, and he nearly did.

  After the stroke, a neighbor who was a doctor gave my father some shots to stabilize him, and he was taken to Scripps, where everybody waited for me. It was a serious stroke, similar to the one that hit Joe Kennedy. Had he lived, my dad would have been in a wheelchair and unable to speak. I knew he wouldn’t want to live like that, so I told the doctors to take no unusual measures—a decision with which my mother agreed. My father died and was buried at Forest Lawn.

  I believe he had a premonition that something was going to happen, because he had made a special effort to talk to me and my sister just before he died, which was unusual for him. My father being my father, everything was in perfect order, so there were no problems with his estate, which went entirely to my mother.

  And then we opened up his safety deposit box and discovered a marriage certificate that predated his marriage to my mother. I was stunned; neither my sister nor I had any idea he had been married before. I think my mother knew, because she never batted an eye. Now, you would think that a son who was having terrible marital problems and who was, moreover, in terrible pain might be taken aside by his father and told, “Look, this happened to me too, and you can survive it.”

  But that conversation never happened. Robert J. Wagner Sr. was a Catholic, a thirty-second-degree Mason, a man of severe temperament. When I would express my feelings about him to my mother, she would simply say, “He loved you, but he loved you in his way.” In many ways, he still haunts me.

  Because he and I were, at bottom, very different kinds of people, we never shared the emotional intimacy that I desired, but I remain proud of his strength, his will, and the values of hard work that he gave me. He defined his own life; judged on the terms he chose, his life has to be considered a great American success story.

  So the birth of Katie so soon after the death of my father was a special blessing and a promise of renewal, as every child is. But she was also something more: a chance for me to be a more loving father than my father had been. The moment I looked down at Katie in the hospital for the first time was the moment I realized that a parent’s love for his child is one of the few things that is permanent in life. I had finally found something I could count on.

  A few nights after Katie was born, I was celebrating at La Scala when Natalie and Mart Crowley walked in. Natalie came over and congratulated me. She seemed very happy, but Mart Crowley told me later that she was actually terribly sad. Partly this was because I had been able to move on and establish a viable marriage with someone else; Natalie herself had bounced around after she and Warren broke up. Most recently, she’d just split up with Arthur Loew. Beyond that, Natalie was telling friends that she had decided she was ready to have a child, but there was no suitable father in sight.

  I didn’t know about all that; what I knew was that my heart stopped when I saw her. At the same time, I felt a terrible, conflicting disloyalty to Marion, who deserved a husband totally focused on her.

  Professionally, I was open to anything during this period. Although I hadn’t been on a stage since high school, when I was offered a production of Mister Roberts at the Pheasant Run Playhouse in St. Charles, Illinois, just outside of Chicago, I leaped at it. We opened in January 1965, and I think it was something of a career starter for me, especially emotionally.

  For one thing, I loved that play, even though any actor who plays the part is inevitably compared to Henry Fonda, just as anybody who plays Stanley Kowalski has to fight the ghost of Marlon Brando. For another, I found that I loved being onstage. Understand, I was scared beyond all imagining, because the rhythm of a stage performance is so different. Films are made thirty seconds at a time, and the arc of a performance is shaped with the director and, especially, the editor. Onstage, once the curtain goes up, the actor is completely on his own. There are no retakes, and the performance has to be sustained and shaped, and the dialogue remembered, fo
r two and a half hours every night, not to mention twice on matinee days.

  The critical moment was my entrance on opening night. It was the first time for the audience, but it was also the first time for me, so the illusion of spontaneity was not going to be a problem. But I was stunned when the audience applauded before I opened my mouth. Jesus Christ! What did they expect from me? What did they want? What if I disappointed them? I hadn’t expected the applause, and it threw me. But I loved doing the play, and it was a pretty big success. Years later I would scratch the theater itch again, for years at a time, when I did Love Letters across the country and in London.

  My first film back in America was Harper with Paul Newman, which was a joy. Jack Warner didn’t want me in the movie because he now had a grudge against me. Years before, I had taken a position he hadn’t liked about Natalie’s participation in a publicity tour for the studio. I hadn’t wanted her to go, and he threatened her with suspension. So now I was in the position Judy Garland had been in—except that I hadn’t stolen any furniture, so the hole wasn’t as deep. John Foreman and Paul both insisted, however, that I make the picture, and I did Harper as the heavy, which is always great fun for an actor.

  Harper was the first of many films John Foreman would make with Paul Newman. Foreman had been an agent, one of the founders of CMA. From his partnership with Paul, he also developed a partnership with John Huston. Anjelica Huston has always said that John Foreman was responsible for her career, because he was willing to cast her in Prizzi’s Honor.