by Roger Ebert
After the BVD experience, I saw Russ every time I went to L.A. and joined in tributes to his work at Yale, the National Film Center in London, the Museum of Modern Art, and UCLA. He came to my housewarming, he flew all the way to Urbana for my mother’s funeral, we went fishing on Lake Michigan, and I sat with him the night his own mother died and saw him completely depleted, blank eyed, barely able to talk. He was a Rabelaisian workaholic, demanding total dedication and loyalty. He was the general and the movie was the war. He would travel anywhere to promote his films or appear at events and talk shows, and interviewers liked him because he was good copy and fun to be around. He could have taken advantage of the Hollywood casting couch ritual, but didn’t. Of all his actresses, the only ones I know for sure he slept with were his wife and producing partner Eve, Edy Williams, and his frequent star and later companion Kitten Natividad. He was close with Haji, a Canadian actress and stripper who appeared in six of his films and did makeup and crew work on most of them, but I never heard them refer to sex. He and Uschi Digard, a Swedish stripper/model who appeared in four of his films, were good friends; she later married a European diamond merchant and became a gemologist. Kitten, a Mexican-American, was introduced to Russ by Uschi. She was warm and funny, and they liked each other. I went along with them for dinner one night at her grandmother’s apartment, jammed with antique furniture. They were a couple on and off for fifteen years.
One night Russ convened a gathering of the Signal Corps buddies at a prime-rib house he’d found in the Valley. By this time I’d met them all several times. Midway through dinner Russ related a story, paused, and repeated it again, almost word for word. Our eyes all met around the table. In the 1980s he began to exhibit gathering dementia. He completed Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens in 1979, and it was his last film, although he announced others. He began to work on his autobiography, originally titled Russ Meyer: The Rural Fellini. I suggested A Clean Breast, and he liked that more. This project grew and grew like a book in a fantasy.
Writing on legal pads, he drew from fifty years of leather-bound scrapbooks on shelves dividing his living room. RM Films was being run by Janice Cowart, whom he met as the manager of his favorite video store, and she feared it would never end. He consulted printers about paper that would not deteriorate after five hundred years. It would be leather bound. It would contain countless illustrations, repeat many interviews, copy many documents. It would have photographs of every important woman in his life. When he couldn’t find a photograph, he would shoot a body double with a paper bag over her head. Yes. Janice typed, and his long-suffering graphic and advertising man, George Carl, assembled the manuscript. Russ was proud that all of the lines were the same width but asked why there was a little more space between the words in some lines than others. George explained justification. Russ holed up with a thesaurus in his second home in Palm Springs and substituted longer or shorter words as needed. He found a printer in Hong Kong.
“Three volumes,” he told me. “Eighteen pounds. One-hundred-pound stock. A hundred and ninety-nine dollars.” He was publishing it himself.
“When will it be in stores?” I asked.
“No stores. I’m selling it personally. If they want it, they can call here.”
“But your number is unlisted.”
“It’s out there. I was in a bookstore once and I saw Olivia de Havilland’s autobiography marked down to half price. I worked with her once. A great lady. That will never happen to my life.”
As his illness progressed, Janice took away his car keys, and Kitten, who was fighting cancer, did his driving. The time came when he required around-the-clock caregivers. He died in 2004. He was eighty-two. Chaz and I attended the funeral at Forest Lawn. The night before, there had been a gathering of the friends. All the surviving army buddies. All the crew members, collaborators, lawyers, distributors. Janice, Jim Ryan, and Chuck Napier, of course. And Erica Gavin, Kitten, Tura Satana, Haji, Marcia McBroom, Cynthia Myers, Sue Bernard. Kitten told me Uschi would have been there but was having eye treatments. This was the family. Russ had a son, he told me, whose mother had never told him who his father was. “I’ve seen him from a distance.” The stories went long into the night. The women cried. In the cruel world of X-rated films, Russ had treated them with respect, paid them moderately well, photographed them lovingly, required them to act and not simply be naked, never did hard-core sex, worked their asses off climbing mountains and fighting in mud, and stayed in constant touch forever after.
The sermon was a dreary affair by a Forest Lawn rent-a-preacher, who uncanned the usual boilerplate about Russ being in a better place now, in the bosom of Jesus. “He’d rather be in the bosom of Mary Magdalene,” Napier whispered. Chaz told me, “If you don’t go up there and say something Russ will come out of his coffin and strangle you.” I walked up to the altar. The hired man droned on about heavenly rewards, looked at me uncertainly, and asked if I wanted to speak. “Thank you,” I said. “The family has asked me to say a few words.” I spoke of Russ’s friendship, loyalty, and lifelong efforts to stay in touch and keep us all in touch.
It was so sad seeing him in the final decade, this vital man. Chaz and I would visit him at his home on Arrowhead in the hills. On our last visit he didn’t know who we were, or who he was. “Sometimes he has a flash of memory,” Janice said. A nurse came in to give him pills and a glass of milk. He looked after her as she walked away. “No tits,” he said.
29 THE INTERVIEWER
MY SECRET AS an interviewer was that I was actually impressed by the people I interviewed: not only by Bill Clinton, John Wayne, or Sophia Loren, but by Sandra Dee, Stella Stevens, and George Peppard. I am beneath everything else a fan. I was fixed in this mode as a young boy and am awed by people who take the risks of performance. I become their advocate and find myself in sympathy. I can employ scorched-earth tactics in writing about a bad movie, but I rarely write sharp criticism of actors themselves. If they’re good in a movie, they must have done something right. If they’re bad, it may have been the fault of filming conditions or editing choices. Perhaps they may simply have been bad. I feel reluctant to write in a hurtful way; not always, but usually. I feel repugnance for the critic John Simon, who made it a specialty to attack the way actors look. They can’t help how they look, any more than John Simon can help looking like a rat.
My job involved doing a great many interviews. I was always a little excited by the presence of the subject. As a teenager covering the Champaign County Fair, I stood behind the bandstand in the racetrack infield and interviewed the teenage country singer Brenda Lee, and was terrified. That established my pattern of low-key interviews. I tend not to confront or challenge, and my best technique has been to listen. This turns out to have been a useful strategy, because when you allow people to keep on talking they are likely to say anything.
The best interview I ever wrote was one about Lee Marvin, in Esquire in 1970. I sat in his beach house in Malibu for a long afternoon of drinking, and he said exactly what came into his mind. There was no press agent present and no mental censor at work. He didn’t give a damn. I was a kid he’d never heard of, but that afternoon he gave me the opportunity to write accurately about exactly what it was like to join Lee Marvin for an afternoon of desultory drinking. I took notes. Later, typing them up, they came to resemble dialogue. They weren’t interrupted by questions, because I realized quickly that questions and answers were not going to be happening. Lee was passing time in public.
I took this dialogue, added a spare minimum of exposition, and submitted it to Harold Hayes, who printed it in Esquire. The piece contains no background on Marvin. No autobiography. It isn’t hooked to his latest movie. There is no apparent occasion for it. It is his voice. Some years later, I was rather surprised to be invited to his house outside Tucson for another interview. He was by then married to the high school sweetheart he’d left behind forty years earlier to join the Marines. I wondered why he wanted to see me again. It may have been
because he had been giving a performance in Malibu that day of the Esquire interview and my article recognized that and got out of his way. I mentioned the earlier article, saying I was relieved he didn’t “mind” it. His wife said, “Well, I wasn’t there, but it was all true.”
In those days movie stars didn’t move within a cocoon of publicists and “security.” Today’s stars are as well protected as the president. Then it was possible for stars like Charlton Heston, Cliff Robertson, and Clint Eastwood to walk into a place like O’Rourke’s Pub and have a drink and not give a damn. The master of that was Robert Mitchum, who had never given a damn about anything. The “bad publicity” he got for posing at Cannes with a topless actress or being busted for pot only enhanced his aura, because he’d spent no effort in trying to be someone he wasn’t.
The routine in those days was usually for a star to fly into town and meet with the local press. Movies opened differently then. The premiere might be in New York or Los Angeles, and then a film would gradually “go wide,” market by market, with the star traveling a week ahead of it. Then in the 1970s studios started advertising on national television, and it made sense for many movies to open nationally on the same day. The junket was born: The journalists would be flown in to meet the stars.
Early junkets were bacchanals of largesse, and none was ever larger than one in 1970 when Warner Bros. flew planeloads of interviewers to the Bahamas for a week to attend premieres of five of their films. We stayed in luxury, ate and drank like pigs, and were platooned at Sam Peckinpah, Katharine Hepburn, and Kim Novak. Francis and Eleanor Coppola were there with his The Rain People, an art film that was greeted with some bafflement. I sat at an ice cream counter with Coppola and he wondered if he had a future in the business. One great film was shown, Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. I thought it was an important act of filmmaking. The general reaction to the film was disbelief and disgust. “I have only one question,” said the lady from Reader’s Digest. “Why was this film ever made?”
Later the studio junket developed into a way of life for “junket whores,” who appeared more or less weekly at luxury hotels. They all knew one another and exchanged family photos. When one had a birthday, there was likely to be a cake or a little celebration arranged by their “friends” the studio publicists. Minor eccentricities were indulged. During one junket a bathroom door flew open in a hospitality suite and revealed two junketeers having sex on the floor.
Junket guests were given swag bags containing the press release, a baseball cap, and a bottle of cheap wine. Soon a Swag Industry came into being, and the swag bag itself might be by Louis Vuitton. Companies lobbied to have their products given to famous people, or even lowly journalists; a new electronic device like the Flip, for example, might be well placed in the hands of a junket whore. High-priced swag was reserved for “talent” (not interviewers). I qualified as “talent” once, at a Friars Club roast of Whoopi Goldberg, and was invited into a backstage swag room and offered resort holidays, designer chocolate, TV sets, cases of wine, computers. A tailor with a measuring tape was eager to size me for a new suit.
The rules for junket whores were informal but well understood. You flew into Vegas, or New York, or London. You saw the movie at a premiere or private screening. If you were “print,” you sat at a round table while publicists rotated stars and filmmakers. Each new occupant of an empty chair was greeted by cries of affection and familiarity. Difficult questions were rare. Everyone was asked, “What did it feel like working with (name of another star in the same movie)?”
Television interviewers found themselves cycled through interview rooms strung along a hotel corridor and connected by umbilicals of cables. Companies sprang up that specialized in doing the AV for junkets. The interviewers, camera operators, and “room directors” would greet one another happily. The stars would come and go; the crews remained. The stars would be perfectly lighted and made up and seated in front of a poster for their movie. Talent would take a chair, also after TV makeup. Questions were limited to three minutes, five in the case of “major markets.” A star could cover six markets in an hour.
Appearing at such junkets was a species of hell for them but was often mandated by their contracts. We all had more fun in the days when TV was disregarded and stars came into town and actually spent time with the newspaper people. Off the top of my head I can tell you of eight times when a movie star and I got more or less drunk together. One night as Peter Cook left with my date, I called after him, “I knew she was a star fucker, but I thought I was the star!”
I flew on the junkets. It was understood to be a part of the newspaper job, “bringing back a star” for the Sunday paper, not unlike the old TV show Bring ’Em Back Alive. In Dallas for the premiere of 9 to 5, I had an uncanny experience, and on the plane home to Chicago I confessed it to Siskel: I had been granted a private half hour with Dolly Parton, and as we spoke I was filled with a strange ethereal grace. This was not spiritual, nor was it sexual. It was healing or comforting. Gene listened, and said, “Roger, I felt the exact same thing during my interview with her.” We looked at each other. What did this mean? Neither one of us ever felt that feeling again. From time to time we would refer to it in wonder.
Was accepting a junket a conflict of interest? Was it a form of bribe, to assure a kind interview and a more positive review? Of course it was. In the early days the ethical question didn’t arise because newspapers were eager to get celebrity interviews into print and couldn’t afford to send their writers flying somewhere every weekend. I never gave a bad movie a good review just because I’d been on the junket, and I tried to choose junkets only to movies I thought I might like: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, for example.
One day Siskel told me, “Our show has gotten too big for us to go on junkets anymore.” “But the paper wants the stories,” I told him. “Let the paper pay its own way. That’s what the Tribune is doing.” Of course he was right. I took no junkets after about 1980, but when I was at the Toronto or Cannes festivals the junkets would come to me, and I did TV for the ABC station in Chicago and wrote pieces for the paper. If I accepted a junket, I split my expenses between the Sun-Times and the TV station. Sometime in the 1990s interviewers started being asked to sign agreements promising to ask no questions in certain areas (politics, marriage, religion, past flops). I refused to sign anything. Since they weren’t paying my expenses, they had no leverage. Curiously, I found I got better interviews that way. Warned that I hadn’t signed an agreement, stars sometimes seemed almost compelled to bring up their forbidden subjects. I got the impression the agreements hadn’t originated with the stars but from the protective publicists.
What the interviewer has to understand is that he is not a friend or a confidant. He has engaged in a superficial process for mutual benefit. In a few cases I have become, if not friends, at least very friendly with actors or directors. I felt bonds with Werner Herzog, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Paul Cox, Ramin Bahrani, Errol Morris, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Shirley MacLaine, Clint Eastwood, William Friedkin, Mike Leigh, Sissy Spacek, Michael Caine, Atom Egoyan, Paul Schrader, Brian De Palma, Francis Coppola, Jason Reitman. I am a good friend of Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas, whom I met at the Chicago International Film Festival in 1975 and whose El Norte (1983) was the first epic of the American indie film movement. I felt a meeting of the minds with Robert Mitchum, but that was because of who he was, not because of who we were together.
Losing the ability to speak ended my freedom to interview. There are new stars and directors coming up now whom I will never get to know that way. Tilda Swinton, Sofia Coppola, Ellen Page, David Fincher, Colin Firth, Jennifer Lawrence. I’ve never even had a proper conversation with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Marisa Tomei, Edward Norton, Darren Aronofsky, Catherine Keener, or George Clooney. I tried a few interviews using the voice in my computer while tape-recording the answers. I got some good answers, but you couldn’t call those conversations. I tried sending questions by e-mail, but that isn
’t conversation, either. I’ve felt better about one other approach: I ask prepared questions and take digital video of the responses, finding that being on camera inspires more conversational frankness. During those interviews I pause to type up follow-through questions. All the same, my last real interview was at Cannes in May 2006, when I talked with William Friedkin, Tracy Letts, and Michael Shannon, the director, writer, and star of Bug. That was a movie I was eager to discuss. Now that is all in the past.
30 LEE MARVIN
ONE DAY IN 1967 I was at Paramount to visit the set of Josh Logan’s troubled musical Paint Your Wagon, in which Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood were to sing with such undeniable results. Logan was setting up a shot and Marvin went with some friends to a bar outside the studio gate. I went along, because in those days stars were self-confident and didn’t give a damn and would take a pee on the sidewalk if it was called for. I took notes.
Returning to my room at the Hollywood Roosevelt I typed them up on my sky blue Olympia portable from high school, read them, and realized I essentially had the article right there. That’s how I discovered a method that would carry me through all my later articles for Esquire and many other interviews, until it became unusable because stars grew too timid to allow access. I was a deadpan witness, apparently simply recording what happened. No or few questions. Just the star observed. There was more contrivance involved than it seemed, as any writer would know, but that was the apparent method. It proved a godsend, particularly with actors like Marvin and Mitchum, who rejected linear Q & A’s and free-associated. I simply wrote it all down and got some of the best interviews I would ever be able to do.