When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead: Useful Stories from a Persuasive Man

by Jerry Weintraub; Rich Cohen; George Clooney

  Then, late one night, while we were sitting in the house, moping, wondering what to do next, the phone rang. It was the lawyer. Something had changed. We had the baby. Incredible. She was three days old and would arrive by plane in the morning. I called the manager of Saks Fifth Avenue. He opened the store for us in the middle of the night. (I must have promised him something.) I remember wandering the empty rooms, filling a basket with tiny clothes, Beverly Hills bathed in moonlight out the windows.

  We went to LAX at 7.00 A.M. My doctor insisted on coming with us. He wanted to examine the baby before we took possession, "Just to make sure she's healthy, Jerry."

  "There really is no point," I told him. "I'm taking this baby no matter what. This is my baby."

  "Just hang back," he said. "I don't want you near that baby till I've had a look."

  A nurse came off the plane with the bundle. I took the baby from her before the doctor could get close. As I reached for the baby--this was Julie, my oldest daughter, who is wonderful, beautiful, and now thirty-five--my back went out, which is one of the reasons I remember the day so vividly. (My life can be divided into segments: days when I am standing straight, and days when my back has gone out.) The doctor hurried over. "Come on," he said. "Let me just have a look before you go home with that baby."

  "This is my baby," I told him.

  "Fine," he said, "let me look at your baby."

  Luckily, the baby had ten fingers and ten toes and was perfect in every other respect, as I was keeping her no matter what the doctor had to say.

  Then we went home. Jane was happy, and I was happy. It was a good time.

  A few years later, Jane decided she wanted another baby.

  I was against this at first. Not because I did not want another baby, but because I did not want to go through that again, the lawyers and papers and chance of losing the kid at the end, reliving the tumult and heartbreak.

  "I'm sorry," I told Jane. "I just can't do it."

  Around this time, I hosted a fund-raiser in Las Vegas for the Catholic Charities of Nevada. This was in honor of Frank Sinatra's mother, who, not long before, had been killed in a plane crash while traveling to see Frank perform. A dozen top artists sang at this benefit, including Sinatra himself. There must have been a thousand people in the room. I was seated with an innocuous little guy named Tom Miller, the director of the charities. We started talking.

  He said, "I understand you have an adopted child."

  "That's true," I told him.

  "How old is your child?" he asked.

  "She's going to be two," I said.

  "Wouldn't you like to adopt another child?" he asked.

  "Yes, I would," I said, "but it's impossible to adopt children."

  "It's not impossible," he said. "And to prove it's not impossible, I am going to get you a child."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "I'm talking about the fact that I am going to get you a child," he said.

  "How are you going to do that?" I asked.

  "Well," he said, "we have the Nevada Catholic Welfare Act and we have a home for unwed mothers. We have a wonderful sister there. I am going to talk to her, and she is going to get the baby that God means for you to have."

  "But I'm not a Catholic," I told him.

  "I didn't ask about your religion," he said. "I asked if you wanted to have another child."

  "Well, yes," I said. "I do."

  A week later, the sister visited me and Jane in Beverly Hills. I can still see the two of them walking through the house, from the living room to the baby's room, with the sun going down. We sat in the kitchen. "I have your child," the sister told me. "She is already in the home, she is three months old, and she looks exactly like you."

  This was Jamie, who is now thirty-two. She came in a bundle, like something in a storybook. And she did look like me. This experience--the death of Frank's mother, the charity event, the innocuous little man, the nun walking through our house, the baby that looked like me--touched me deeply.

  I went to Vegas to see the house where the unwed mothers lived while they were pregnant and the babies stayed until homes could be found. I became involved after the visit and gave a lot of money to help the sisters build a new, better home.

  Then my third daughter came. This was not something we planned on. It just happened. One day, the sister called. She said, "Jerry, your new baby has been born."

  "My baby, Sister? Come on!"

  "Yes, your baby," she said. "She is the most beautiful little girl, with a full head of hair--she is supposed to go to you. Don't you want another child?"

  "Of course, I want another child."

  Paul Anka was singing in Vegas at the time. He was a client and is still a friend. He had his plane there. He flew her back to Los Angeles. This is Jody, who is just about to turn thirty.

  I stayed involved with the charities. I gave money, but, more important, I helped babies find homes and couples find babies. (I am the man to go to when you want what money can't buy.) Friends who wanted to adopt came to me. I consulted and advised, then put them together with the sister, who wandered the mansions of Malibu and Beverly Hills, searching for the heavenly connection, just the right baby for just the right parents. I was part of at least fifty adoptions. I still get calls and letters from my many dozens of godchildren, the scions of powerful Hollywood families. After about twenty years, though, I quit my role as facilitator. I cared too much, and felt burdened by the responsibility--a marriage that ended in divorce, parents who seemed cavalier or abusive. I had taken on more than I could handle. I remain involved with the charities, however, give and do what I can. My family was built in a way unlike the way my mother and father built our family in the Bronx, but it sits on the same bedrock: love and loyalty and concern tempered with a large dose of comedy.

  Which brings me to a question I ask myself every day: What kind of a father have I been? Have I been good? Have I helped more than I have hurt? Have I given as much as I have taken? In truth, my children have, at times, had trouble. With depression, with drugs, with all those exotic things that befall kids nowadays. Though I do not like all the things they have done, I am here for them when they are in jeopardy and I do whatever I can when they need help. I sometimes wonder if the root of the problem is in our very circumstances, if the life we have given our children--the money and the cars and the vacations and the private planes--has spoiled the everyday world for them.

  Can the child of a rich man have the same ambition as a kid from the Bronx?

  One evening, one of my daughters, having just flown on a commercial plane for the first time in her life, called me in a panic. "My God," she said, "the way they jam you in, and make you sit there, in one seat, it's like a prison!"

  In the end, though, I think your outlook has less to do with money than with the values your parents exhibit and your own nature. In this, I've been neither perfect nor blameless. I love my children and I think I have been a good father, but there were times when I chose my career over the life of the house. Was I there for every recital, or play, or concert? No, I was working. It's nearly impossible to succeed in the world and also succeed in the house, which means, at some level, even if you do not realize it, you make a choice. This is a regret. I wish I had been there more, had done better, had given my children as much as my parents gave me. I did not. I was always divided, being pulled away, on the phone, and so forth. But maybe you do best by being true to your nature. Whatever my children have lost to my work habits, they have made back in the privileges afforded them by my success. I could not give them what my parents gave me, so I gave them the world instead.

  The Producer

  Just what does a movie producer do?

  It's a question I hear all the time.

  Well, simply put, the producer is a driving force behind the project. It's often the producer who finds the story, the article that reads like a movie, the novel that cries out to be filmed, the event you just know will light up the screen
. He tracks down the author or owner or real-life players, secures the rights--at favorable terms--hires a writer to turn the story into a script, which is key. I don't care what kind of cast you have, how beautifully the thing is shot--if you don't have the right script, you're going to fail. But with the right script, you can set yourself up with a studio, get a bucket of cash, hire a great director and actors, scout locations, and so forth. As the project proceeds, your job--one of them, anyway--is to police and guide everything, to be the adult, the voice of authority, the wallet when it's pay time, the hammer when it's hammer time. For this, you take some of the credit when it works, and most of the blame when it fails.

  What qualifies a person to be a movie producer?

  Another question I'm often asked.

  Well, it's mostly a matter of temperament. You have to enjoy being in the world, mixing it up, reveling in hits and misses. A movie set is like Brigadoon, a city that appears on the sands and exists for just a time, with all the rivalries and passions of a metropolis. The producer is mayor of that city, shaking hands and walking streets, calling people to compromise, rise above, and, crucially, to work with people they do not like. You have to praise and you have to scold. It must have been easier in the old days, of course, when the actors were on contract and thus were simply told: Go there, play that. But every player is now a free agent, meaning everyone is a star and expects to get paid like a star, or at least a little bit more than anyone else is getting paid.

  This dynamic--everyone measuring himself or herself against everyone else--has just about killed the ensemble picture. The Wild Bunch, The Dirty Dozen, The Magnificent Seven--you hardly ever see movies like that anymore. It's become nearly impossible to produce a film with more than three major stars. It's less about money than about politics. People talk on the set, and when they talk, they compare, and when they compare, they bitch. Some demand raises or back-end points, others simply storm off. Which is why I consider the Ocean's movies such a triumph. Merely being able to assemble such a cast--Clooney, Pitt, Damon, Gould, Garcia, Cheadle, and so on--and keep it together through three pictures was a feat. My role in this was both as hands-on tactician and as guiding spirit. I was the old man upstairs, saying, "Isn't this fantastic! Can you believe all of the fun we're having?"

  But the main job of the producer is this: Solve problems. The list of my movies is, in fact, little more than a list of problems solved. The pit boss won't let us shoot in the casino? Fine! Build a casino in Burbank. Each movie tells the story of its producer, where the idea came from, and how the crises were averted.

  Take, for example, Oh, God!, which I produced after Nashville. It was a breakthrough for me. With it, I finally reached the great American middle that Colonel Tom Parker talked about so often. The idea came from David Geffen, who acquired the rights to the novel and wanted to cast John Denver as the lead, a befuddled, latter-day Abraham, who, while managing a supermarket in California, hears the voice of God. It was a perfect part for John and a great way for him to branch out into something new, the average lifespan of a pop star being not much longer than the average career of an NFL running back. Geffen asked me to produce. Larry Gelbart and Carl Reiner were already assigned to write and direct. You could do no better. Gelbart was the author of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Carl Reiner was the creator of The Dick Van Dyke Show. The men worked together on Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows. Alan Arkin had been signed to play God, which made sense. Not only is Arkin a great actor, he was friends with Reiner and Gelbart. He was young, though, a little slight for the part of Yahweh. I mean, when you think of God, what do you picture? For me, it's a gray-haired, humorous old Jew, with slumped shoulders and big hands and a cigar in his mouth.

  After discussions of a theological nature--What kind of voice do you think the big guy would have? Do you think the divine would take his own name in vain?--Reiner and Gelbart and I realized we were all picturing the same face.

  All three of us decided the only person for this part was George Burns.

  Burns was in his late seventies, a legend with a career that went clear back to the golden age of radio and, before that, to the Yiddish theater. He was a vision of the almighty in modest, human form. He was available, but the situation was tricky. It meant firing Arkin, who was friends with everyone. But when we explained it to him, he understood. The part of God was not one you could use the Method to play--you could not draw on your own experience to get into the mind of the Infinite. You simply had to be an old man who had been around forever, had done everything, had known everyone.

  It all came back around years later, when I was casting Ocean's Eleven. I signed Arkin to play the part of Saul, who was just the kind of wise, humorous old man Burns would have played a generation before. Two days before shooting, I got a call. Arkin was going in for surgery and would miss the shoot. I was in a panic. I went over to Carl Reiner's house in the middle of the night, banged on the door, handed him the script, and said, "Please, Carl, you have to play the part of Saul in Ocean's Eleven."

  He said, "Jerry, Jerry, why so late?"

  "Well," I told him, "Arkin was supposed to do it, but he's in the hospital."

  "Oh, I see," said Carl, "Alan is still not ready to play God."

  The table read of Oh, God! is still vivid in my mind. This is the first real rehearsal: The producer and director and writer sit around as the actors go through the entire script, playing their parts for the first time. It's early in the process, but usually, from how the actors work together and react, you can get a sense of how the movie will play. George Burns entered in that slow, shuffling way of his--every step made me laugh. He was seventy-nine, impossibly old. Who knew he would live another twenty years? His face was like parchment. His eyes were warm and dark. He wore an obvious toupee--it was the one off note. He was a great performer. Everyone stood when he came in. For the actors, reading with him was like taking batting practice with Babe Ruth. But he was an old man, so you could not help but wonder how he would handle his lines. When we started reading, though, it was obvious he knew not only his part, but every part in the script. If John Denver fumbled, George Burns would correct him. He was incredible. Before the read, he talked with Gelbart and Reiner and Avery Corman, who wrote the novel. He went through the script with a pen, explaining which lines would hit and which would bomb, which would get big laughs and which would get embarrassed snickers. "You will kill with this one," he said, "but with this one, you'll wonder if you picked the wrong profession."

  Making the movie was a dream. The only issue, really, was George's hair, or, to be specific, fake hair. Simply put, he would not take off his toupee. We begged, please, for this role, ditch it. He refused. It was a question for priests and rabbis. Would the Lord of Hosts wear a piece? To me, the answer was obvious. Even if God is bald, or has a bald spot, and even if this makes him self-conscious when he walks upon the earth, don't you think that, rather than getting a rug, he would just make new hair? I mean, if he could part the waters...? But Burns refused, which meant a movie in which God would wear a rug. No good. As I said, the job of the producer is to solve problems. I therefore decreed: The Lord will wear a hat! If you watch the movie, you will see that God is pictured, variously, in a baseball hat, a cowboy hat, a captain's hat. He is a man of many moods and many seasons.

  The movie was finished. I was convinced we had a smash. But when I showed it to the business people at Warner Bros., they sat through it politely, without comment.

  Well, yes, they said when it was done, it's a nice little picture.

  Nice little picture? No, I said, it's a great film. But it will be huge only if we treat it like it's huge. I said I wanted five million dollars to market it on television. They told me I was insane. Back then, no one advertised movies on TV. "Look, TV is where John Denver is a star," I told them. "It's where his fans are. You show them the movie, and let them know about it, you will have a monster hit on your hands." They told me to go away. The movie had cost less
than two million dollars to make. There was no way they were going to chase that two million with five million for commercials.

  I spoke to Terry Semel, who was the head of distribution at Warners--he wound up running the company--and Andy Fogelson, who was the head of marketing. I made them watch the movie again, then argued my case. They fell in love with it. They went in to their bosses and said, "Give Jerry the money." They put their jobs on the line. Terry said, "If this fails, I'll quit the company." It was a huge moment for me and Terry--we've been friends ever since. We went on television with the biggest ad campaign Hollywood had ever seen, found John's fans, and hit them squarely, the result being a summer of packed theaters. We made history.

  While making the movie, I became friendly with George Burns. Jane and I decided to throw a party for his eightieth birthday at our house in Beverly Hills. For that one night, the world was as I had always imagined it. Invitations went out by hand: black-and-white cards with a red rose. The party was catered by Chasen's. Dinner on the tennis court, dozens of tables under white cloths, torches and tiki lamps, a jazz band. Frank Sinatra, Kirk Douglas, Cary Grant, Gene Kelly, Johnny Carson, everyone was there. As Louis B. Mayer used to say, "More stars than in the heavens." At one point, Groucho Marx got up for an impromptu roast of George Burns. Groucho was old and failing, but he was brilliant. Goddamn, he was funny. It was Groucho's last public performance. The party went all night. When I came downstairs in the morning, I found the young stars of Hollywood passed out on the floor, some of whom had won Grammies or Golden Globes the night before. They were in their suits, hugging their statues, snoring away.

  Or take, for example, Cruising--another set of problems solved--which I made after Oh, God!. It's the story of a New York cop who goes undercover in the gay leather bars of New York to solve a series of murders. It was based on a true story, having first been reported in a series of articles in the New York Times. I bought the rights to the book that came out of the articles, put the screenplay in a drawer, and waited for the right moment.