by Lee Hill
Although the credit dispute would irritate Kubrick for years (during the writing of The Shining, he told coscenarist Diane Johnson that Southern’s entire contribution to Strangelove consisted of throwing pages out of the window of a cab once a week), the two men kept up a cordial and often warm friendship throughout the sixties. In addition to dedicating Blue Movie to Kubrick, Southern visited the set of 2001 several times and, most significantly, encouraged the director to adapt A Clockwork Orange when Kubrick’s Napoleon project collapsed in 1970. Kubrick’s hesitancy to share credit was later repeated in 1987 when he initially refused to offer Gustav Hasford a cowriting credit on Full Metal Jacket, the screen adaptation of the latter’s Short-Timers.
Christiane Kubrick believes the tension between Kubrick and Southern has been blown out of proportion because they made good copy.
“Terry and Stanley were good friends,” she says. “Terry was immensely supportive when we came to New York and had this disastrous opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey, when everybody thought it was going to go wrong. We had this blue-rinse audience of executives who didn’t understand it and walked out. There was a terrible meeting in our hotel room and Terry was saying, ‘This is going to be great and just you wait and see and this is not a proper audience.’ Everybody else was saying the film was impossible. The next morning it turned out people were lining up around the block. But the previous night at the hotel, we were in despair because the screening crowd had slighted it and not understood it at all, but Terry was very strong and not influenced by the mood around him. I always liked him very much for that.”
Dr. Strangelove, like Citizen Kane, remains a landmark film around which myth, rumor, speculation, and innuendo have gathered to blur the facts of its production history. That the various principals involved—Kubrick, Southern, Peter Sellers, and Peter George—had different recollections doesn’t necessarily help matters either. If there was some dispute about who made the film the success it is, there is no doubt that everyone (except George) gained immeasurably from the film’s success. Sellers continued to be one of the highest-paid comic actors of the sixties and seventies. Editor Anthony Harvey went on to direct The Lion in Winter with Katharine Hepburn and Peter O’ Toole. Production designer Ken Adam worked on other key sixties films including several in the James Bond series. Southern’s fee jumped from the reported $2,000 for his work on Dr. Strangelove to as much as $100,000 a script thereafter. Kubrick consolidated his position as an A-list director whose need for total control would be imitated by Mike Nichols, Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, and others in years to come.
Without a doubt, Dr. Strangelove put Southern in the enviable position of being able to pick and choose screenwriting assignments. With a British Screen Guild Award, Oscar nomination, and a racy bestseller reinforcing his reputation as a hot writer, Southern was able to turn fame into cash and considerable social entrée.
Harris recalls the credit dispute philosophically: “[Stanley] had the highest regard for Terry and he felt that the third credit was the proper credit because, I suppose, of the various stages and how that thing was eventually developed. On the other hand, when I spent time with Terry he seemed to think that his contribution was…should have been regarded as a higher credit listing and I said, ‘Well, there was so much work done on the film. The story was Peter George’s, and the screenplay, and so forth.’ But Terry said, ‘I added the one thing that it never had and that was humor.’ Needless to say, if you are doing a satire or comedy, that probably is the single most important additive, but I do think—being in on the development of the script from the very beginning—that the credits were just. You know, it’s a hard call.”
By the end of 1964, Candy had sold about 140,000 copies, which made it number two on the fiction list after John Le Carré’s Spy Who Came in from the Cold. It was a good year for Quality Lit. Saul Bellow’s Herzog came in at number three. John Lennon’s In His Own Write and Hemingway’s Moveable Feast managed to give the glut of Kennedy books a run for their money on the nonfiction side.
Norman Mailer, who had become an even bigger literary celebrity by this time, would see Southern occasionally at Plimpton’s. It was apparent that a star was being born. Candy and Strangelove especially, says Mailer, instantly became a part of the sixties zeitgeist:
“I think, by now, [Strangelove] is iconographic. Dr. Strangelove had a huge impact. I remember seeing it and not loving it the way other people were, and I remember thinking about it and whether it was just sheer competitiveness or there was something I didn’t quite like about it. In any event, it epitomized the impact it had because those years had a heady optimism. There was a feeling we were really going to take the country away from all the mediocrities that were running it—the deadhead mediocrities—so this picture sort of proved that in a way. It just gave a real spur to people: ‘My God. The seventies are going to be our decade if they’re making pictures like this,’ and then, of course, the opposite happened in the seventies. Whatever revolutionary spirit there was in the sixties, somehow got leached out before long. Terry was very much, what could I say, his importance was directly related to that spirit of revolt in the sixties and when that spirit ended, the love that a lot of people felt for Terry began to diminish. Which was about all he needed, with all his other problems.”
Those problems, or the possibility that there would be any problems, were barely perceived by Terry as he rode the wave of fame, money, acclaim, and other grand groovy things rolling in in the wake of Dr. Strangelove and Candy. Nineteen sixty-four was starting to be a very good year indeed.
Making It Hot for Them
Everything went young in ‘64.
—Andy Warhol, Popism
Dr. Strangelove and Candy elevated Southern into an Olympian realm of glamour, money, constant motion, and excitement. There was little time to stop and think during the ride into the unknown.
In spring of 1964, Carol, Nile, and Terry went to Los Angeles for the first big Hollywood gig, to work on The Loved One for John Calley and Martin Ransohoff’s Filmways and MGM. When the commencement of principal photography was pushed back to July, the Southerns returned to Connecticut. He was still kept busy with a rewrite on William Wyler’s adaptation of John Fowles’s The Collector.
Fowles’s 1963 debut novel, a captivating mix of dense character study and psychological thriller, dealt with Frederick Clegg, a deeply shy and repressed young clerk who wins a fortune on the racing pools. The windfall allows Clegg to quit his job, buy a house in the country, and devote all his time to butterfly collecting. He becomes infatuated with Miranda, a London art student whom he stalks on his lonely forays into the city. After some planning, Clegg kidnaps Miranda and keeps her captive in an elaborate cell/studio in the cellar of his estate. Miranda quickly realizes that the usual pleas for mercy will have no effect on her obsessive captor. She slowly manipulates his almost preadolescent crush on her to lay the groundwork for an escape.
Since the novel was told alternately through Clegg’s point of view and Miranda’s diary entries, there were more than a few challenges in adapting it to the screen. Wyler was not crazy about the original script by Stanley Mann and John Kohn. Still they would receive official credit when the film was released in June 1965.
“I quit before the shooting began,” Southern recalled. “These two American producers [Jud Kinberg and John Kohn] insisted on finding a way to save the girl. At the end of John Fowles’s novel, the heroine dies of pneumonia after trying to escape in a rainstorm. Changing that didn’t even seem like a possibility. It just sounded like one of those stupid ideas. I was not comfortable doing that because of my admiration for Fowles’s novel…. Then [the producers] said, we’ve been thinking about it, maybe the real message is that art can triumph over an asshole like the Collector. After showing him for his complete nerd-jerk-nowhere-man creepiness, I contrived to have her escape by outwitting the Collector through her art and prevail. So I wrote a couple of scenes where [Samantha Eggar
] was working with this papier-mâché sculpture in her cell. I set up a pattern of where (Terence Stamp) would open the door of this room and look in very cautiously to make sure she wasn’t trying to escape, because a couple of times she tried to dart out when he opened the door. He would say, ‘I want you to stand where I can see you from the other side of the room.’ She created this papier-mâché likeness in such detail that it deceived him. He would open the door and look across the room and see ‘her,’ when she was, in fact, just behind the door. But because the sculpture was so artfully done, he fell for it. The scene was like Hitchcock. Then she locked the door behind her and him in her former cell. Years later, she would be seen having a picnic on a lovely day. ‘It’s so lovely here in this pastoral sylvan setting, I can understand why you like to come here,’ her companion would comment. The camera would then pull away to reveal they are having a picnic just a few feet away from the cellar door. By this stage they had gone too far back to the original premise for them to use the new ending that I proposed,” said Southern.
During his first phase of Loved One work, Filmways set up the family in a rented house in Mandelville Canyon. Then the owners had to move back in when their child became ill. For a brief period, the Southerns stayed in Martin Ransohoff’s home while he was away on business, and then they moved into yet another rented house on Mulholland Drive. This hectic period lasted through August. Carol was introduced to some of Terry’s new Hollywood friends, including Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward, Ben Gazzara and Janice Rule. The original intention during this period was for Terry, Carol, and Nile to return to Connecticut once The Loved One was finished. Things did not go according to plan.”
“It was very disruptive and the whole period seems very disjointed. During that time, Terry took up with Gail [Gerber],” Carol Southern said. “I don’t think he intended to break up the marriage. But he was having a good time and he wanted to stay in L.A. The plan was he would come back to Connecticut in October. We were planning to fix the house and do a lot of renovation and also Nile was going to nursery school. So I came back [to East Canaan]. Terry just never came back. I think John Calley, whether consciously or unconsciously, played a part in that. He wanted to keep Terry around and he was offering Terry two-to-three-week jobs that turned into four-week jobs. Finally—I don’t know who it was—he was offered a Ferrari. Terry said, ‘I can’t turn this down.’ So finally I said, ‘I am coming out there.’ It’s was December, when Nile and I went out to L.A. He told me he had to stay. He had met Gail.”
Gail Gerber was a young Canadian dancer and actress Terry had met on the MGM backlot. She had a nonspeaking part in The Loved One and was also in an Elvis Presley picture being shot on the adjacent soundstage.
Gail was twenty-six years old, petite, slim, and blond. She looked like Tuesday Weld, whom Terry was already enamored with. Her blondness struck a deep chord in Terry. Henry James’s Daisy Miller had been blond. As was Daisy in The Great Gatsby. And of course, Candy was the überblond. This physical attraction by Southern gave way to a deeper appreciation of her artistic talents as they began to date.
Born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1937, Gerber had studied music and dance as a child. She went to the National Ballet School in Montreal and studied theater as part of her core studies. She joined Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, which, along with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, was in the vanguard of Canada’s cultural scene in the fifties and sixties. She left the company after a couple of years to work on the stage and in CBC Television in Toronto. For a time she was part of a revue called Spring Thaw starring Don Harron, the father of American Psycho director Mary Harron. Like many Canadians of her generation, she moved to Los Angeles to expand her horizons. She rented a house in Benedict Canyon and began taking acting workshops with Stella Adler. When she met Southern, Gerber was a dancer on the Elvis film. There were also other very small roles in other MGM films as an extra or background player. Like many women who met Terry, Gerber found the writer charming, but his reputation and aggressiveness made her wary.
“First he invited me to lunch,” recalls Gerber. “He told me very clearly that he was married and that he had a small child and all of it. I didn’t know the state of the relationship. I could tell that he was making it with Margo, the makeup girl.
“There was something about the relationship [with Carol] that wasn’t working and that he was living a bachelor life. He was going to work his way, sort of like Baryshnikov with the New York City Ballet, like a wolf in a sheepfold, through the entire female cast of The Loved One one by one.”
After a few dates, Gail tried to terminate the relationship. She had been invited to a party at Jennifer Jones’s, but decided not to accompany Terry in the hope she could distance herself from him. Instead Jones, in the role of matchmaker, called Gail to encourage her to attend. “She said, ‘Well, Gail, you better rethink this, you know, you better come to the party and we’ll talk about it.’ She was playing that role. ‘We’ll discuss this and rethink this whole thing.’ As a matter of fact, I had pretty well made a good split and she sort of wrecked it for better or worse.”
Over the months of July and August, the relationship with Gail intensified. Terry clumsily tried to navigate between his loyalty to Carol and passion for Gail.
“I could always reach him during that period,” recalls Carol. “He was really trying to keep both fires going. He just got caught.”
Work on The Loved One exposed Southern to the full gamut of Hollywood’s temptations. In Carol’s view, The Loved One period allowed Terry to indulge his dark side.
“During most of our [marriage], we had practically no money. He couldn’t afford liquor. We had occasional glasses of wine. We had maybe one drink at dinner. Our life was so based on home and frugality, especially in Europe. Then we came back to Canaan and building the house. We did the work ourselves, clearing the fields and planting the gardens. One winter, we just ate the food I had been able to put out in the garden. Plus venison. So [he had] that kind of discipline. He was very productive during that period. Starting with The Magic Christian…he did a lot of work for the Nation. He was doing his work for Esquire. He did very good work, but I think when the sudden money came…I remember one day I was ironing Terry’s chinos and he said, ‘Don’t you understand that you never have to do that again!’ It was kind of traumatic from really having practically nothing to having $3,000 a month, which was what he was paid out [in L.A.].”
After Carol and Nile returned to Connecticut, the Chateau Marmont, the legendary hotel of choice for William Faulkner and Nathanael West, was rapidly becoming Terry’s second home. The Chateau was close to the active club scene that dominated Sunset Boulevard. The clientele was a mix of West Coast bohemia: musicians, singers, young actors and actresses, models, writers, and, of course, characters who seemed to have no other vocation than just making the scene.
The Chateau possessed a seductive blend of beauty, ambition, mystery, and the enigmatic buzz that made a place inspiring and energizing. The hotel management tolerated the smell of marijuana in the hallways, the parties, the comings and goings at all hours. Similarly the regulars kept such hedonistic pursuits low-key and maintained the privacy that was essential to the Chateau’s appeal. The Loved One’s production photographer, William Claxton, already famous for his portraits of the jazz world, and his wife, Peggy Moffatt, a model who became world famous through her collaborations with the fashion designer Rudi Gernreich, were also staying at the hotel. John Calley was a frequent visitor and engaged Terry to work on other Filmways projects including The Cincinnati Kid and Don’t Make Waves, a project that would ultimately be helmed by Alexander Mackendrick, the director of Sweet Smell of Success.
Although she was very much in love with Terry, Gail had few illusions about the man with whom she was getting involved. One night she called on him at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he was holed up preparing a film adaptation of Candy for Frank Perry.
“He was writing the script and typing and laug
hing and he had a new bottle of B&G there and I’m ordering food, doing whatever, reading and fooling around…and I see the bottle and it was a third empty. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s interesting.’ The next time I look at the bottle, it was half empty. I thought, ‘It must be evaporating.’ Because he’s not drunk. Alcoholics when they’re young don’t get drunk, but they have an affinity for booze. They don’t have a rejection of it like some people. So then at three-fourths empty, I thought, ‘It’s evaporating or it isn’t evaporating, but that doesn’t sound right.’ Then I realized that it was going down, but yet he was not drunk. He was stone-cold sober. Typing and writing. [He had an] enormous metabolism for alcohol.”
Tony Richardson, who was also a hot commodity due to the success of Tom Jones, wanted The Loved One to be as innovative as Dr. Strangelove in its breaking with Hollywood conventions. MGM/Filmways had given Richardson final cut, but perversely insisted on paying the Directors Guild of America scale. Richardson, in turn, perversely cast Robert Morse, an American, in the lead role of the English poet drifting through a land of Machiavellian producers, snobbish British expatriates, and sexually baroque funeral parlor directors.
During the spring and summer of 1964, Southern, Richardson, and Christopher Isherwood transformed Waugh’s novel into an all-out attack on Hollywood, consumerism, and the hypocrisies surrounding man’s fear of death. Southern and Richardson’s then wife, Vanessa Redgrave, visited funeral parlors as a fictitious couple for the purposes of research. William Claxton kept a photographic diary of the film’s production for which Southern would write the tongue-in-cheek text. Richardson also looked to Southern for casting suggestions. Lenny Bruce was considered for a cameo as Guru Brahmin, a cynical Lonelyhearts columnist. Despite their friendship, Southern was unable to convince Bruce to join the cast. However, the gravelly-voiced Lionel Stander, a survivor of the blacklist, was a more than adequate replacement.