Among the stand-alone projects, I was particularly pleased with There Must Be a Pony, which had been a very good novel by James Kirkwood Jr. It was a roman à clef about his mother, silent film star Lila Lee, and her affair with the director James Cruze—one of those negatively symbiotic relationships in which each party increased the speed at which they were heading for the bottom. Jimmy Kirkwood was a delightful man—flamboyant, funny, and self-deprecating. He cowrote A Chorus Line, the best musical I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen them all.
I asked Mart Crowley to write the script, and it was his excellent work that helped me sign Elizabeth Taylor as my costar. I was already with Jill when we made There Must Be a Pony, and I was concerned that Elizabeth might be interested in rekindling our relationship, but nothing happened.
I hired Joseph Sargent to direct the picture, and before we got started we talked over everything thoroughly and rehearsed the staging and the attitudes. As soon as we started shooting, Joe changed everything. He became an impulsive egomaniac, and I wondered why we bothered rehearsing for two weeks if he was throwing everything we had agreed on out the window.
If it had been a feature, I would have fired him, but on a television film that’s very hard to do because the schedule is so short. My main worry was that Joe wasn’t leaving Elizabeth alone; he had completely altered what he wanted from her, and I thought the way we had planned her performance in the first place was wonderful.
I knew that if he lied to her, she would kill him and, by extension, the entire film. She would kill him with time—take an hour and a half to make up one eye, that sort of thing. The problem was that I had personally guaranteed the production—the insurance company didn’t want any part of Elizabeth because of her long history of health problems. Any overshooting was on my tab, and if Elizabeth decided Joe had to be shown who the real diva was, I was in danger of a financial bloodbath.
Well, Elizabeth showed up every single day and was totally professional, even though her director wasn’t. She was perfect in her lines, perfect in her attitude, perfect in her performance. We went over schedule by one day, because of a problem at Hollywood Park that was unavoidable, but it was a smooth production and a fine film—in spite of Joe Sargent, not because of him.
The experience of working with her confirmed my feeling that Elizabeth Taylor is one of the best screen actresses ever, a fact that has been overlooked because of her beauty and because her private life has clouded the public’s perceptions of her ability as an actress.
It was at this time that I had another insight into the simmering rage of the red scare period. I was proud of There Must Be a Pony and had a screening at Warner Bros., after which we had a party at my house. I had unthinkingly invited two people who meant a lot to me: my old director Eddie Dmytryk and Lionel Stander. Eddie had been one of the original Hollywood Ten and had gone to jail for his beliefs, after which he recanted and named names. Lionel, of course, had stood firm. They both came to the house, and each refused to acknowledge the other’s existence. For the whole of the evening, they stayed far, far apart, all because of shameful events of forty years before, when good people were asked questions they never should have been asked and saw their lives torn apart.
I had asked Howard Jeffrey to produce There Must Be a Pony. Howard was always there for Natalie, and he was always there for me after she died. I trusted Howard absolutely; I made him executor of my will and gave him the responsibility of raising my girls if anything happened to me. But the day came when Howard came to me and told me he was terribly ill with AIDS. It was typical of Howard that he was less worried about himself than he was about us. “What can I tell the children?” he asked me.
In the lives of the people who loved Howard, there will never be anybody to replace him.
My next project was a TV film with Audrey Hepburn—her only movie for television. I had met Audrey shortly after she came to Hollywood and was always mad about her. The project we worked on, Love Among Thieves, was a lighthearted charmer about an elegant lady—Audrey—and a raffish, cigar-chomping guy—me.
The network had offered the man’s part to Tom Selleck but he couldn’t do it, and when Audrey told them she wanted me, I jumped at it. Audrey was sensational to work with: professional, relaxed, engaging, endearing—the most helpful, loving person you could imagine. She had finally jettisoned her second husband, a psychiatrist who wasn’t any better for her than Mel Ferrer, her first husband, had been. Somewhere in there she had had a major affair with Ben Gazzara, and I understand that when she left, it brought him to his knees, which I could certainly understand. When we made Love Among Thieves, she was with Rob Wolders, with whom she stayed for the rest of her life. Rob gave Audrey something she had always needed and had never gotten—security. He wasn’t with her for the glory and perks that came to the consort of Audrey Hepburn. He was there because he loved her, and he was at all times attentive, loving, and caring. Simply, he made her very happy, which is what she had always deserved.
It was a good picture and a good group of people—Jerry Orbach and Samantha Eggar were also in the cast. But I don’t believe that any of Audrey’s pictures were as important or as meaningful as Audrey. Audrey’s essence as a human being shone through her acting and lifted her movies up by yards, not inches or feet. I have never known any woman other than Jill whose personality was so reflected in everything she did.
Audrey’s spirit was embodied in her garden, her furniture, her paintings, her jewelry, her dogs, her linens. She absorbed everything she experienced and saw in her life, took it into her subconscious, her soul, and then somehow contrived to radiate it outward onto everything she touched. If I were to show you four or five pictures of different houses and gardens, you could easily pick out the one that was Audrey’s place in Switzerland—it reflected security, serenity, and, through the beautiful flowers on which Audrey lavished so much attention, astonishing beauty.
There Must Be a Pony and Love Among Thieves were both rewarding experiences, but a couple of the TV projects weren’t as good as they could have been. Indiscreet had been a good picture with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, and I wanted to do a remake with Candice Bergen. But the network said they wouldn’t make the picture with her. “She doesn’t have any humor, and she’s an ice queen,” they told me. So a year later, Murphy Brown went on the air and proved that she was never an ice queen and had a spectacular sense of humor. Unfortunately, I had to do Indiscreet with Lesley-Anne Down, who I found opinionated and irritating.
The capstone to this phase of my life came when Jill and I were married under the two-hundred-year-old sycamore trees in the back garden of the Brentwood house on May 26, 1990. Roddy McDowall brought his video camera and shot what seemed to be endless hours of the ceremony and the toasts of the guests, intercutting them with shots of the house and the ranch. To the best of my knowledge, the only people who sat through the tapes in their entirety were my mother, Jill’s mother, and Willie Mae. They watched the tapes incessantly, saying over and over, “Oh, look at that! Isn’t he/she adorable?” My son Peter Donen, as well as my daughters Katie and Natasha, would also be married under those trees.
The years since have been the most serene of my life.
I always had a sneaking affection for Aaron Spelling. He was a bug-eyed, asthmatic Jewish kid who grew up in Texas and got the shit beaten out of him by the other kids damn near every day. Not only was he a Jew in Texas, he was a little Jew in Texas. He grew up, went to Hollywood, was mentored by Dick Powell, and became a billionaire. A great story.
But Aaron and his partner Leonard Goldberg and I had epic battles over the years. A lot of them were over the profits due me and Natalie over Charlie’s Angels, and a lot of them ended up in court. I’m proud to say I won nearly all of them.
This went on for decades! In the spring of 1980, Los Angeles County District Attorney John Van De Kamp, who had successfully prosecuted David Begelman for forging checks in 1978, began an investigation into the business practice
s of Spelling/Goldberg. Van De Kamp believed that $660,000 due Natalie and me from Charlie’s Angels had been “reallocated” to the accounts of Starsky and Hutch, a show that Spelling/Goldberg owned a much larger piece of. Charlie’s Angels was then in its fourth year, and we hadn’t received any money from it at all at that point, which is not unusual—most TV shows run a deficit until they go into syndication, which is where the real money is.
I couldn’t say anything about the investigation publicly, for the very good reason that Aaron and Leonard were also our partners in Hart to Hart. As it worked out, Van De Kamp never brought criminal charges against Spelling/Goldberg, but he did advise all the profit participants on their shows to hire independent auditors to make sure they got what was coming to them.
All this was classic creative bookkeeping and, sad to say, classic Hollywood. Years later we had a fight over the profits from Hart to Hart. There were other profit participants besides me—Stephanie had been hired as an actress on straight salary, but I thought she deserved more and gave her a piece of my piece of the show. Tom Mankiewicz was also a profit participant. My problem was that I was sick of having to fight for what was contractually mine, so in a moment of anger I had called Leonard a crook. We were sitting there in a lawyer’s office trying to work things out. The lawyer outlined the situation, then Leonard said, in a hurt tone, “I’m not a crook, and I don’t want anybody calling me a crook.”
We then went around the room so everybody could lay out their position. The statements told you a lot about each individual’s character.
Tom said, “I think you owe me money.”
Stefanie said, “There’s a great deal of poverty in the world, and so many want for so much. We’re all fortunate to have as much as we do, and I just hope we can all work it out.”
I chimed in with, “Leonard, you’re a fucking crook.”
We worked it out. Aaron finally said, “Let’s pay the money and get on with our lives.” But having to fight for what is rightfully yours is not fun, even though it’s all too often a necessary part of Hollywood.
Years ago, I was having a drink with William Holden and Cliff Robertson after a day of shooting The Mountain at Paramount. Out of nowhere, Cliff said, “Jesus, Bill, what does it take? What does it take to have a career like yours?”
Bill Holden thought about it for a few seconds and then said, “Well, you have to have it.”
“It?”
“It. You know, Sunset Boulevard.”
He meant that you have to have that one signature part in that one signature picture, the picture that defines your screen personality and your career. That never quite happened for me in the movies, although I certainly had signature parts in television.
I had a couple of near-misses. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was dangled in front of me for a while, but then it went away. Robert Evans wanted me and actually cast me in Rosemary’s Baby, as Mia Farrow’s husband, but Universal queered the deal by refusing to hold off production on It Takes a Thief. John Cassavetes got the part.
Paul Newman and Robert Redford were sensational in Butch Cassidy, so I can’t say I would have done any better, although I have to confess to a tight little feeling of continuing disappointment when I think about playing that part. Losing that one hurt. Without false modesty, I think I would have been considerably better in Rosemary’s Baby than Cassavetes. One look at Cassavetes and you know he’s a minion of Satan, but I could have brought something else to the plate, something more deceptive. And I would have looked more believable with Mia Farrow as well.
When I lost Rosemary’s Baby, I was upset, but I wasn’t suicidal. I tried everything to make it work, and nothing could be done to make it work. Let it go. I was disappointed, but there are moments like that in the life of every actor. Also, if you’re going to be an actor, and if you want to have a long career, you have to make a crucial mental adjustment, and that comes down to: “It’s not me. It’s them.” I can do only so much to get a part, whether it’s Butch Cassidy or Jonathan Hart. They either want you or they don’t, and once you realize that, it’s helpful because it takes some of the burden off you.
If I lost a gig, it wasn’t the end of the world. I could always stand in a river with a fishing rod or play golf. My life now is not show business; it was when I was young, but the deeper I got into it, the more time I spent with people like David Niven, Claire Trevor, and Sterling Hayden, the more I realized how important it is to have something else in your life, something that can fuel your acting.
Otherwise, this is what happens: You get a pool, and you need a pool man; you get the larger house, you need the staff to cover it. And gradually you find that you have to start taking jobs that you might not really want in order to cover your overhead. Abe Lastfogel put it best when he told me, “Once you get a pool, they got you.” I can think of hundreds of people I’ve known in the movie business who got what they thought they wanted, only to find out they didn’t want it after all, but it was too late to get off the merry-go-round. Not good.
Ultimately, I think it was David Niven who made me realize that a life has to encompass more than show business; David shaped his life, and acting was just one part of it. He liked to sail, he liked to fish, and he enjoyed people tremendously. The next part, the next movie, was not at the top of his list of priorities. And my children have been very important in providing a different horizon for my life. There are no negatives to children. There are disappointments and concerns—terrible concerns, as any parent will recognize when I say that if the phone rings after 10:00 P.M., I levitate out of the chair to a height of at least three feet. But my children are more than my loves—they’re my pride and sustenance.
Jill was also a major contributor to this realization. She knew that the importance of show business is transitory and that life involves more than whether or not photographers go crazy when you show up at a restaurant. She was less concerned about her career than I was, and she had a way of drawing me back a bit to enjoy the fruits of the life I had built over the previous thirty-five years. You can luxuriate in a garden and watch the different way the light hits the mountains as the afternoon wears on, or you can get on another airplane and make another movie.
The latter will fill your bank account, but the former will fill your soul.
Claire Trevor died in 2000. Before she passed away, she designated a group of people who had meant a great deal to her and left each of us a gift of money in her will—what she called “a hug and a kiss” that she was unable to deliver in person. Since Claire was partially responsible for my appreciation of art, I used some of the money to buy two sculptures from nature: a bear, which I have in my bedroom, and a pair of owls. With what was left over, the next time I was in Paris I went to a caviar bar that she had introduced me to, ordered some fine caviar and a bottle of champagne, and drank a toast to a great, great lady.
By 1990, I was open to other things besides television, so Stefanie Powers and I began touring with A. R. Gurney’s play Love Letters. I hadn’t been on the stage since Mister Roberts a quarter-century earlier, but the more I thought about Love Letters, the more I had to do it. For one thing, it was a part I identified with—I was raised in camps and boarding schools. I knew Andrew Makepeace Ladd III, and I knew his WASP background. And I could also relate to his constant pursuit of one woman, and his ultimate loss of her. It’s such a well-written play, and it’s so very sad.
Stefanie and I did the play in a rolling series of one-nighters for about five years, five or six consecutive shows in a week, then three weeks off. In 1990 we took the play to London and did it for six weeks at the Wyndham Theatre in the West End. The reviews were terrible, but I knew they would be because I know how critics think. Two American TV stars who sit down on a bare stage and read letters? In the land of Shakespeare? Not bloody likely. But I honestly didn’t care; I was playing the West End in front of sold-out houses, something I never thought I’d do.
After five years, Stefanie became a li
ttle worried about becoming a permanent double act. She invoked Laurel and Hardy, and I still can’t quite figure that out, perhaps because I’ve always loved Laurel and Hardy. So Stefanie stepped out, and I asked Jill to step in. She initially refused, because she didn’t want to be compared to Stefanie and because she hadn’t been on the stage since she was a child.
“How many actresses have done this part?” I asked her. “Dozens! The part’s never been identified with any single actress.” She thought about it, then said yes. Jill and I did the play together for nine years, from 1995 to 2004.
On balance, I think Jill’s performance was more real than Stefanie’s. Stefanie is more theatrical; when Stefanie is in England, she becomes English, complete with accent. She has an incredible ear and picks things up automatically, and because of that, her emotions can be in a constant state of flux.
Whether I was doing it with Stefanie or Jill, it was very hard work. Not the play—that was a constant joy—but the traveling. Because it was mostly one-nighters, I realized after a time that I wasn’t being paid to act, I was being paid to travel.
If at all possible, we’d use a hub system that Jill developed. If we were playing towns in Illinois, we’d stay at the Four Seasons in Chicago—Jill picks hotels by how good their room-service eggs Benedict are. Every afternoon we’d drive to the airport and head for someplace like Springfield or Joliet, and we’d come back that same night. That way, we could spend five or six nights in the same hotel, although there were lots of times when that wasn’t possible and we’d be at an airport twice a day.
Other than the travel, it was a totally positive experience. One of the high points was the month we played in Chicago to great reviews. We were the hot ticket. I told Jill, “This doesn’t happen often. Enjoy it.”
I loved that play. To be able to sit down and say words, without the crutches of music or scenery, just words, and have those words move thousands of people every night so that they were stunned and in tears and standing up and applauding—there can be no greater reward for an actor.
Pieces of My Heart Page 26