Pieces of My Heart

by Robert J. Wagner

  I remember when we opened at the Wilbur Theater in Boston, the director gave us a note: “Don’t play it. Just read the letters and let it happen.” And that’s exactly what we did, bringing our own emotional coloring as actors and through that discovering the layers of the characters, and the layers of ourselves. I never looked at Jill onstage, and she only looked at me once, at the very end. We had some extraordinary nights. We found new values in that play every night. Every night!

  We took the images of different people out onstage with us. In Jill’s case, it was the young Barbara Hutton. Barbara had been Jill’s mother-in-law when she was married to Lance Reventlow. Barbara was one of those people who didn’t like to be alone—a woman whose life just didn’t work out. Jill never particularly liked her, but she admired her wit and intelligence and felt sorry for her. Occasionally, Barbara told Jill stories about her terrible childhood, and in Jill’s mental image of her character, she was similar to the “poor little rich girl” that Barbara Hutton had been.

  We covered America two or three times over, played Europe, played Atlantic City twice, Vegas three times. We played casinos, we played basketball stadiums, we even played synagogues. We played everything but a men’s room. When we played in Texas, words like “fuck” and “snatch” lifted some people in the audience right out of their chairs, out of the theater, and into their cars. Alabama had the same response. When we played the synagogues, Jill took those words out of the script. “I’m not saying ‘snatch’ in a synagogue,” she told me. Other than that, we never changed a word of Gurney’s script.

  Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and I had some discussions about doing Love Letters with a revolving cast. One night it would be Paul and Jill, another night it would be me and Joanne, and just to keep things really interesting, every third night Paul and I would do it. Just kidding. The revolving cast never happened, but I still think it was a good idea.

  After Stefanie Powers and I had done six Hart to Hart TV movies, I was offered $10 million to produce three more. It seemed like a good idea to me, and Lionel Stander and the rest of the team were up for it, but Stefanie opted out in favor of doing a road company of the musical Applause. I was furious at her decision, regarding it as a betrayal—not just of me but of all the cast and crew who had worked with us for years and certainly could have used the work. But Stefanie had come to believe that Hart to Hart had typecast her and the show was somehow holding her back. There was some halfhearted conversation about recasting her part, or even writing her out of the shows, but I pointed out that if we did that, it wouldn’t be Hart to Hart anymore. I felt I had to be loyal to the audience’s expectations. I walked away.

  Applause closed quickly, and I suppose we could have reconstituted the Hart to Hart TV movies, but I had lost interest in working with Stefanie. Last year, her agent called to ask if I would be interested in doing a reunion Hart to Hart project. “Who the hell wants to see people our age cuddling in bed?” I asked him. I love Angela Lansbury, but I’m not about to give her a run for her money as the oldest detective in television history.

  Mostly, I’ve continued to work as much as I want. A movie or two a year, a couple of TV shows a year. Lately, the biggest hits I’ve been associated with have been Mike Myers’s Austin Powers movies. I met Mike when I hosted Saturday Night Live in December 1989. At that point, Mike and his wife, Robin, were living in a tiny apartment in New York, and she cooked for them on a hot plate. I had a great time on the show, and I did a couple of skits that Mike wrote, in particular a hilarious bit playing a gay nurse—Nurse Stivers.

  Years went by, and in 1997 Mike sent me a script he’d written about a secret agent from the Swinging Sixties who was cryogenically frozen and became the ultimate fish out of water in the modern era. I was to be the jealous second-in-command to Dr. Evil, Mike’s take on James Bond’s nemesis Blofeld.

  Austin Powers looked good on paper, and it looked better on film. Everything you saw in the film was in the script—my eye patch, everything. Mike is extremely shy but fantastic to work with—he knows exactly what he wants. Those pictures are definitely Mike Myers productions—Jay Roach is the credited director, but Mike calls the shots and does the editing. The success of the film, and the notice people took of me, confirmed Gadge Kazan’s suggestion that my instincts for comedy were excellent and I should do more in that line.

  The odd thing about the Austin Powers pictures is that they sometimes look like we’re improvising, but we’re not. Everything’s written. I did feel that on Austin Powers in Goldmember, the last of the trilogy, the script was better than the film. There were some terrific scenes that ended up getting cut, including one of all of us in drag singing, “What’s it all about, Alfieeeeeee…,” and there was another sequence with me and a herd of llamas that was quite funny.

  Mike’s brand of comedy certainly pays dividends for a modern audience, although my favorite kind of comedy comes out of reality. The people I grew up laughing at, like Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy, usually started with a very realistic premise. That tradition was carried on by Blake Edwards, who I think was the best comedy director of his generation.

  With all the quantum changes in show business—the transition to multinational conglomerate owners and the growth in foreign audiences, which affects the way a lot of movies are made—one thing hasn’t really changed since I drove onto the Fox lot in 1949: it’s a brutal business.

  Just like sports, show business is for front-runners: they either boo you or applaud you, and it changes day to day. It’s particularly hard for actors. Logistically, a writer needs nothing more than a legal pad in order to write, but an actor needs a stage or a camera. Basically, someone has to hire him, and that changes the dynamic because it becomes money-intensive; it’s less of a talent issue and more of a sales issue. Add to that the fact that very few films are made because people have a passion to make that film. Mostly, films exist because corporations think they will be profitable, which results in a very different kind of movie.

  In any case, I’ve been an actor for nearly sixty years, and nobody with that kind of career has any cause to complain. I’ve been very fortunate, and I think it’s largely because I was determined to be a working actor, emphasis on working. I just kept going to the plate and swinging. It didn’t matter whether the reviews were great or terrible, whether the films and shows were successful or unsuccessful. I kept showing up. Some actors go into a depressive shell when something doesn’t work, as if a critical or commercial failure is somehow a reflection on them and their ability. I’ve never believed that.

  When I was a kid and just starting out, I read my reviews, but I came to realize that if you believe the good reviews, you have to believe the bad ones. Rather than focusing on what other people thought of me, I chose to concentrate on the work, the job, and my commitment to that work. I was at the studio, I was on time, and I knew my lines. As Spencer Tracy told me more than a half-century ago, don’t worry about anything but the scene. I extrapolated that to the big picture. From focusing on the scene, I focused on the job, then I focused on the next job.

  Beyond anything else, I loved the business, and I loved working. And I don’t think people understand how important behavioral choices—not being an asshole, showing up on time, knowing your lines—are to sustaining a career. It’s easy to go from job to job when you’re hot, but it’s when things cool down that you can spot the jerks, because nobody will hire them.

  I’m amazed that I’ve sustained a career for this length of time, because my contemporaries are either dead or haven’t worked in twenty years. The young actors with me at Fox were Cameron Mitchell and Jeffrey Hunter. Chuck Heston was at Paramount. Farley Granger was at Goldwyn, and John Erickson, who got the part in Teresa and got hammered for his trouble, was at MGM.

  But the ironic reality is that no matter how devoted you are to your craft, it won’t necessarily have anything to do with whether or not lightning strikes. That’s actually a matter of the right part. Bill H
olden, for instance, was not fully respectful of acting, but he got two films with Billy Wilder, and they changed his career and his life. Bill was a bit like Errol Flynn: he was ambivalent about his career choice but followed the path of least resistance and had a lot of doubts about himself as a result.

  All my life, when I think about acting, I think about Spencer Tracy. Spence knew his work. He would say, “You’ve got to know the lines. If you know the lines, you can do anything you want to do.” Actors are really the least rehearsed of performers. The performers who really rehearse are musicians; they have those notes down, and that’s why they can go anywhere they want.

  I remember sitting with the cellist Lynn Harrell. He was fretting about a problem he was having with a section of a piece. “I’m just not playing it the right way,” he said. The conductor offered some suggestions, and then Lynn said, “I know! I’ll think of Picasso.” These guys have played the music so many times that the problem of getting a fresh sound is in the forefront of their minds. The same thing happens with actors, except very few actors know their lines the way musicians know their notes.

  I try to maintain a positive outlook about all the changes in the business and in the world, but I don’t like entitlement: kids who are pissed off if they don’t get into Harvard, Yale, or Princeton; actors who think they have to get where they’re going by the time they’re twenty-five because they’re afraid it won’t be there by the time they’re thirty-five. Recently I was talking to a young actor, and he mentioned a director he said was great because “he didn’t get in my way.”

  This is insane. Acting is a give-and-take between the director and the actors. You have to have someone say the lines to you in order to prompt your lines. If that other actor is good, he will make you better, and if the director is good, you will be better still. But there are actors today who don’t care about that reciprocal arrangement. Their attitude is, “Fuck ’em, bring in somebody else.” These kinds of people are more concerned about their status than they are about the quality of the job they’re doing.

  I’ve worked with guys who do push-ups or run around the block before a scene to work themselves into the proper state, but I tend to think that acting is analogous to music. When you hear a musician blowing a great sound, you don’t think about everything he’s gone through to be able to create those notes. You’re just interested in the result. The audience isn’t interested in what the actor goes through; they’re only interested in being transported, in being moved, and that’s what I find most thrilling—moving somebody.

  After nearly sixty years, at this point it’s supposed to be Miller Time: hit the marks, say the words, go home. But I’m still nervous, and I still want to be as good as I can possibly be. The problem is not unlike Lynn Harrell’s: you want it to be there, but you want it to have a different value without pushing it.

  I think my ability to sustain a long career has been at least partially a result of my ability to sustain long relationships, sometimes through succeeding generations. I’ve mentioned how much I valued Paul Ziffren, my lawyer. He was so innovative, so brilliant. It was Paul who set up the deal for Charlie’s Angels, and Paul who set up my profit participation in Hart to Hart. When Paul died, I simply moved my representation over to his younger brother Leo, who has fought my battles with all of the consideration, purposefulness, and accomplishment that his brother brought to my career. When Jill and I got married, it was Leo who gave her away. And Paul’s son John, who began his career in show business as a production assistant on Hart to Hart, is now a successful producer.

  Fifteen years ago, after I’d fallen out with my agent, my daughter Natasha suggested I consider a man named Chuck Binder. Fifteen years later, on nothing more than a handshake, I’m still with Chuck, who has always had an overall view of my career and what I can do. I think Chuck is a large part of the reason I’m still working when most actors my age are sitting around twiddling their thumbs.

  And then there are the friendships that have lasted longer than most people have been alive. Friendships are particularly difficult to sustain in a competitive, migratory business like show business. I’m thinking of people like the late Guy McElwaine, and Steven Goldberg, the man who gave me Larry, my German shepherd—actually imported from Germany by Steven. My friendship with Steven began as a straight business deal when he hired me to represent his company, but we began playing golf together, and more than fifteen years later we’re still doing it. We’re bound together by our love of dogs and golf and by similar senses of humor—the trifecta! I’m lucky to have him in my life. More than that—I’m grateful to have him in my life.

  TWENTY-THREE

  “THE WORLD MOVES ON.”

  The extraordinary women to whom I dedicated this book: my wife, Jill, and, from the left, my daughters, Katie, Courtney, and Natasha. (© SAM JONES/CORBIS)

  Any long life is pummeled as you lose the people you love, and because I’ve always been comfortable with an older generation, I’ve lost more than most. The last time I saw Noel Coward was in London at a party Swifty Lazar gave for him. Noel was very shaky, and Roger Moore and I helped move him around. At one point Roger and I were sitting at Noel’s feet, and he leaned down and told me, “I think this is my last party, dear boy. Don’t think there will be any more.” A little while after that, he went back to Jamaica to die.

  I was living in the desert in the mid-1970s when Darryl Zanuck came back from Europe. His health was breaking down, and mentally he wasn’t what he had been. Virginia, his wife, had been waiting for this moment for twenty years, since Darryl left for Europe. She had always been Mrs. Darryl Zanuck, and she would always be Mrs. Darryl Zanuck. She took him back, and no man could have been more tenderly cared for in his last years. When I would go to see him, he knew who I was, but not a lot more.

  In some senses, it was a sad and disconcerting end, but God, look at the bigger picture. Darryl created a great movie studio out of his own blood, sweat, and tears, and he made dozens of great movies that audiences are still analyzing, still being moved by. Darryl’s life mattered.

  In addition, Darryl’s son Richard became one of the finest producers of his generation, which nobody could have foreseen when he was just the kid I used to play with at Darryl’s house in Malibu. People outside the business don’t know how difficult it is to follow an act like Darryl’s, but Dick Zanuck is the only mogul’s son to have a career comparable to his father. He’s a great producer (Jaws, Driving Miss Daisy, Sweeney Todd, and dozens of others), a standup guy, and, when Darryl was alive, he was also a wonderful son.

  Gene Kelly and I were never lucky enough to work together, but we played a great deal of tennis over the years, and we enjoyed many skiing vacations with our kids in Sun Valley. Gene was a wonderful man with great joie de vivre, terribly active and athletic, and one of the most competitive personalities I’ve ever encountered. But Gene had some bad luck in the later stages of his life. He had a very nurturing marriage to Jeanne Coyne, a dancer, a glorious lady who had had the misfortune to be married to Stanley Donen at one time. Gene and Jeanne had two children, to whom they were completely devoted.

  But Jeanne died in 1973. Gene’s career was winding down, the kids grew up and moved away into their own lives, and he was lonely. He married a much younger woman who was universally disliked by all of his friends and family. Then Gene’s health broke, and he lost his eyesight and the use of his legs. To see a man like Gene Kelly confined to a wheelchair before his death in 1996 was one of the most prominent examples of nature’s cruelty.

  The deaths of these great friends might have been expected; they had run their race. But the death of my son Peter Donen in 2003 was stunning. Peter was still a young man, only fifty years old. He had become overweight and hadn’t had a checkup for a couple of years, and his loner personality worked against him.

  Peter had become one of the finest creators of special effects who ever lived. You can see his work in movies like The Bourne Identity. Peter’s work was so s
eamless that critics commented on how nice it was to see a movie without computer images, even though The Bourne Identity was full of Peter’s computer images. Peter was almost a genius, and his great gift was that his special-effects shots couldn’t be identified as special effects. I loved Peter, as I do his brother Josh. Peter wanted me to adopt him, but I told him it was impossible because his father would never allow it.

  In retrospect, I should have done it anyway.

  My ex-wife, Marion, and I remain good friends, bound by our mutual love for our daughter.

  There aren’t that many people left from the period when I broke into the business. Tony Curtis and I were friends for a long time, but we had a serious breach over the way he treated Janet Leigh. Janet was a considerable person, and Tony treated her badly, and said all sorts of nasty things about her. At that point, I got angry and told a Los Angeles Times columnist named Joyce Haber that none of that was true, that Tony was an asshole and she could quote me. Which, with a few emendations, she did. Tony blew up and challenged me to a fight, and I said, “Anytime you want to go outside I will kick your fucking ass.” I was very hot under the collar, and I was also in good condition.

  But that was a long time ago, and we’ve patched things up; we even worked together on an episode of Hope and Faith. Tony is perennially buoyant, always full of piss and vinegar, and I love that about him. I’ll call Tony up and ask, “Is this Ali Baba?” and he’ll automatically respond, “Prince Valiant?”

  Once upon a time, we were young together. Whenever we get together, we still are.

  People ask me why I haven’t retired, and sometimes it feels like I have. The truth is, I don’t want to drop dead on a sound stage; I want to drop dead in a river, with a fishing rod in my hand, or in my house in Aspen. There was a period of about ten years when I worked practically every day. My career is important to me, but I’ve learned from therapists like Arthur Malin, Gerald Aronson, and Cheryl O’Neal—as well as my friend and personal physician, Paul Rudnick—that you can only take out of yourself what you put in. It’s ever so important to have life experiences.