Mark Griffin
Page 32
If Monroe had been ideal casting, her studio-sanctioned substitute, Debbie Reynolds, was not, though at the time the vivacious Reynolds was considered a theater-owner’s dream. Constantly in the headlines as the wronged wife in the Elizabeth Taylor-Eddie Fisher adultery scandal, and fresh from an Oscar-nominated tour de force in Metro’s high-spirited musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown, Reynolds was, in Variety parlance, “boffo box office.” While Reynolds virtually guaranteed brisk business at the ticket window, her cutie-pie chutzpah seemed wanting compared to Monroe’s triple-threat combination of vulnerability, sex appeal, and offbeat comedic timing.
MGM’s legendary acting coach Lillian Burns Sidney had advised Reynolds not to take the role of the gender-confused title character, as she was convinced that Goodbye, Charlie was essentially a one-joke story. But Reynolds wanted to work with Minnelli, so she signed on. “When one combines her self-possession with a tendency toward cuteness, you don’t get the exact quality I was looking for,” Minnelli would say of Reynolds.4 However, Vincente was about to be reminded that Reynolds, who had survived Gene Kelly’s rigorous direction during Singin’ in the Rain, could be one of the hardest-working troopers in the business. Even if pert, wholesome Debbie was essentially miscast, she was determined to give Goodbye, Charlie her all.
Casting concerns aside, Minnelli also hoped to avoid some of the pitfalls of the original theatrical production. For her performance in the Broadway version of Goodbye, Charlie, star Lauren Bacall had been taken to task by critic Brooks Atkinson for playing the part of the reincarnated Charlie like “a cross between a female impersonator and Tallulah Bankhead.” Minnelli decreed: “The approach, as I saw it, should have been more feminine.” As a result, the transformed Charlie would emerge as a glittering glamour girl. Reynolds would be dolled up by Minnelli’s fellow MGM expatriates—costumer Helen Rose and hair stylist Sydney Guilaroff (who appears in the film’s memorable beauty-parlor sequence). In addition to overseeing the glamorization of Charlie Sorel, Vincente would work diligently with Debbie, dictating bits of physical business and insisting on specific line-readings.5
Although Minnelli missed his opportunity to work with Monroe, he did snare her Some Like It Hot costar Tony Curtis, who would play Charlie’s devoted but disoriented friend George Tracy. “He was one of the better directors that I worked with,” says Tony Curtis:
He was so sensitive to whatever environment he was in. His sets. The props he used. The actors he used. The lighting. All of these things blending together to give him a mood. I admired him a lot. He was a brilliant man but that brilliance was vitiated, perhaps, by a lot of his personal dilemmas … his marriages, the kind of pictures he really wanted to do, the pressures he was under. I don’t think he was a particularly happy man as all of these elements had a way of beating him up. He could still do the work, though. Nothing ever got in the way of that.6
His and Hers: George Tracy (Tony Curtis) counsels the gender-confused Charlie Sorel (Debbie Reynolds) in Goodbye, Charlie. “I think the most important thing about [Minnelli’s] movies is this notion of ‘identity,’ and a person’s sexuality is, after all, the core of their identity,” says Minnelli disciple John Epperson. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
Rising star Ellen McRae (better known as the Oscar-winning Ellen Burstyn) would remember her director, whom she tagged as “a strange bird,” with far less affection: “At this point in his career, he was a bit past his prime, married to a woman named Lee Anderson,aw but his manner seemed campy, if downright androgynous… . Minnelli seemed polite to everyone on the set but me. He railed at me, humiliating me at every opportunity.” When Burstyn began saying her lines, Minnelli started reciting them along with her. When she stopped, he exploded. “Say the line!” Minnelli bellowed at the frazzled Burstyn. While Farley Granger and other actors had found ways to adjust to this directorial quirk, Burstyn found it extremely challenging. “I just couldn’t imagine he wanted me to say the line with him at the same time. But that’s what he wanted. Over and over until I had his rhythm and there was nothing left of mine. I was doing his performance of the character.”7
In only one genuinely hilarious sequence does Goodbye, Charlie hint at what might have emerged after half a dozen rewrites. Reynolds’s Charlie and her well-heeled, mother-dominated suitor Bruce Minton (a surprisingly not bad Pat Boone) are parked seaside and the trust-funder reveals to Charlie that his Maserati is “one sick little car.” The double entendres come fast and furious. “Put an overdrive unit between her differential housings,” Charlie suggests. “Have you stripped her? She’ll thank you for it.” Framed like some wind-swept, romantic interlude from A Summer Place and beautifully underplayed by Reynolds and Boone, the scene leaves the viewer wondering why the rest of the movie couldn’t be this deliciously sly and restrained. For in the film’s early scenes, Debbie Reynolds isn’t so much a man reincarnated in a woman’s body as an actress possessed by her previous role. With all of the mugging and caterwauling going on, Reynolds seems unable to shake her celebrated Molly Brown portrayal. More than once, the star seems ready to burst into a chorus or two of “Belly Up to the Bar, Boys.”
A couple of decades after Minnelli’s foray into transgendered territory, Tootsie, Victor/Victoria, and Yentl would mine the gender-bending premise for all it was worth, but Goodbye, Charlie isn’t really about gender politics, it’s about schtick, as in the anatomically revised Charlie’s self-appraisal: “I don’t have to see Brigitte Bardot movies anymore, all I have to do is come home and pull down the shades.”
Of course, sexual ambiguity was anything but an alien concept to Vincente, who had been described by his colleagues as everything from “epicene” to “androgynous.” Although Goodbye, Charlie is an especially broad comedy, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that Minnelli empathized with his gender-jumbled protagonist. And perhaps there was a moment of genuine recognition for the director when he helmed those scenes in which Charlie realizes that there’s still a man buried beneath her couture and cosmetics.
How did Minnelli feel as he set up the sequence in which George tenderly caresses a distraught Charlie until he remembers that his friend may physically be a she but in every other way is still very much a he. Did the content of that scene—in which George experiences a moment of homosexual panic (“We were practically necking!”)—strike a personal chord with the man directing it? “You know, I felt that when I was doing it,” recalls Tony Curtis. “It seemed that there was some dilemma between Vincente and the part and then a dilemma between myself and him, which made it possible for both of us to be in tune with each other… . It was interesting and it worked.”8
For many Minnelliphiles, Goodbye, Charlie offers an intriguing variation on the director’s favorite theme. “I think the most important thing about his movies is this notion of ‘identity,’ and a person’s sexuality is, after all, the core of their identity,” says Minnelli disciple John Epperson:
It’s a theme that pops up all the way through the movies, not just Tea and Sympathy or the Jack Cole character in Designing Woman… . The Pirate is about people pretending to be what they’re not. On a Clear Day is about a woman who has many different personalities and facets. It’s also what Bells Are Ringing is about—she pretends to be all these different people on the telephone. Then we get to Debbie Reynolds in Goodbye, Charlie—a man inside of a woman’s body and the confusion of the gender identity there… .
I don’t know if Minnelli consciously knew that he was doing movies about “identity.” … I mean, when someone like Alfred Hitchcock pitched an idea to the studio bosses, he didn’t say, “I’m going to make a movie about the two facets of my personality… .” Instead he’d say, “I want to make a movie about a frigid kleptomaniac who is forced to marry a man because he finds her out… . It’s a sex mystery.” So, Minnelli probably never said out loud to anyone, “I make movies about identity,” because he might lose his job if he ever said anything that cerebral.9
Although Goodbye, Char
lie wasn’t anywhere near Minnelli’s best work, Films and Filming still liked what they saw: “A director’s quality can best be gauged when his material is taxing… . Therefore, in any thoroughgoing assessment of Minnelli from here on in it will be impossible to overlook Goodbye, Charlie, a victory of décor over dialogue, of pace over pawkiness, and of directorial control over a script that is wild as all get out.”
Others were far less forgiving. As Judith Crist noted for the New York Herald Tribune, “Goodbye, Charlie hasn’t lost a bit of its bad taste in transition to the screen. In fact, all the smarmy creepiness and sleazy smuttiness inherent in a comedy about a lecherous man being reincarnated as a sexy female, with his masculine mind making the transmigration intact, has been expanded about as far as it could be—and then a half hour beyond that, as is the wont of today’s fun-loving filmmakers.”
Upon its release in November 1964, the title Goodbye, Charlie proved prophetic, as the comedy quickly disappeared from movie screens. Minnelli’s latest was certainly not the Some Like It Hot-sized smash that Fox executives had hoped for. Tony Curtis believes that the movie had something to say before audiences were ready to hear it: “It was way ahead of it’s time. I really felt that. But if I may be so bold, I’ve always felt that about the movies I’ve made. I’ve always hoped that they would be just a little sharper than the average movie.”10
34
The Shadow of Your Smile
“ONE OF THE MOST TEDIOUS, inane and ludicrous films ever made” is how writer Eleanor Perry would sum up The Sandpiper. The movie, which Perry christened a “$5.3 million sleeping pill,” was supposed to be about a Big Sur bohemian—the conspicuously unwed mother of an illegitimate son—who falls in love with a married minister.1 Of course, what the movie was really about was Liz and Dick. Like Cleopatra and The VIPs before it, the entire film seems like an excuse to cinematically eavesdrop on Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and cash in on their monstrous celebrity. How else to explain all those ravenous, can’t-get-enough close-ups of the couple? To say nothing of the cinematic ogling of that other, equally famous couple—the heaving, omnipresent Taylor bosom, which throughout the ’60s seemed to enjoy a high-profile career all its own.
For sudsy trash, The Sandpiper boasted a classy pedigree. Blacklisted writers Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson (who had scripted Taylor’s magnificent A Place in the Sun) were engaged to write the screenplay based on producer Martin Ransohoff’s “original” scenario. William Wyler was initially approached to direct, but he wisely turned the offer down and made the Oscar-nominated The Collector instead. This left the field open for the Burtons’ second choice: Minnelli, who had misgivings but proceeded anyway, knowing that a Taylor-Burton enterprise not only would generate a tidal wave of publicity but virtually guaranteed impressive box-office returns.
It’s to Taylor’s credit that she attempted to enliven The Sandpiper with a bit of nontraditional casting. For the role of her lover-sculptor Cos Erikson, Taylor suggested Sammy Davis Jr. Although an interracial romance might have perked the picture up considerably, Minnelli and Ransohoff agreed (for perhaps the first and only time) that it would simply be too much. “There was no time to work on the script because all our preliminary time was taken up with whether or not Sammy Davis should play the part of the sculptor,” Minnelli recalled in the notes for his autobiography. “I objected to him. It was just a spectacular effect—a bid for trying to fit a black man into a niche not right for him. It put a different onus on the story. He dropped out and Charles Bronson played the part.”2
The Burtons insisted that the film had to be shot in France so they could receive a tax break. So although production launched in September 1964 with some stunning location work at Big Sur, much of The Sandpiper would be filmed at Billancourt Studios in Paris. The highly entertaining Liz and Dick show (which at times seemed like a variation on their roles in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) was performed daily for the supporting cast, crew, and visiting members of the press. There were lover’s quarrels, an ever-present entourage, and drinks for everyone. “Wine flowed as if Jesus had turned all the water in Paris into vin du pays,” visiting reporter Liz Smith noted.3 In fact, there was so much imbibing behind the scenes that The Sandpiper often looked more like a Metrocolor remake of The Days of Wine and Roses.
“Elizabeth and Richard liked to sip champagne all day, which is a nice way of putting it,” recalled MGM publicist Robert Crutchfield:
By lunchtime, they were in pretty good shape. Some of these press people who had lunch with them tried to keep up with Richard … and you just don’t keep up with Richard. I helped many reporters back to their hotels and took their faces out of the gravy and mashed potatoes. It was an incredible experience because working with [Taylor and Burton], you don’t really stay on schedule. I bought my first house with the extra money—the “golden time”—I made on that film.4
When not functioning as the production’s designated driver, Crutchfield also had an opportunity to observe the lack of chemistry between Minnelli and producer Martin Ransohoff, an unlikely duo whom he describes as “the real odd couple”:
Marty was a great, big Broderick Crawford-type slob that wore sweatshirts with real sweat rings under the arms and he had a piece of hair that he strategically wrapped around his head so that no one would know he was bald, and of course, he would get nervous and he’d start twirling that hair in his finger, and he’d stand up on the cliff and watch Vincente down there with his long cigarette holder and beret mincing about the beach. Minnelli was brilliant, but he certainly didn’t make any attempt to hide the way he behaved… .
I remember Vincente was shooting this one scene on the beach and we started losing the light, but he wanted to do it again. And again. Then the water started to fill up the hole that we had dug for the camera to go down in because the tide was coming in. And Marty’s up on the hill screaming and hollering that we’ve got to get this shot and “What the goddamned hell is he doing?” They really were not at all compatible.5
With everyone’s eyes trained on the bottom line, it’s no wonder that what emerged on-screen was, as critic John Simon put it, “straight Louisa May Alcott interlarded with discreet pornographic allusions.” Everywhere you turn, The Sandpiper is simply bad—though in many ways, deliciously so. “For me, just seeing Elizabeth Taylor holding a brush and palette makes the screen start vibrating,” says film historian Richard Barrios. “I kind of liken Liz as a painter to when you see Joan Crawford in her nurse’s uniform in Possessed. When you see someone who can only be a movie star trying to play some kind of working person, it’s ridiculous… . With The Sandpiper, you can really sense a talented director trying to do his best with what he’s been given to work with.”6
An example of Metro gloss that has hardened into shellac, the movie offers plenty of camp compensations. MGM’s idea of a free-spirited beatnik is an ultra-glamorous Elizabeth Taylor, stunningly coiffed by Sydney Guilaroff, wrapped in a Sharaff poncho and dwelling in a palatial beach house direct from the pages of Architectural Digest. The entire movie follows suit. It’s a big, square commercial venture masquerading as 1965’s version of hip and cutting edge, complete with clean-cut, mild-mannered hippies sent over from central casting. There isn’t much that Minnelli could do with such an overblown “sex-on-the-sand soap opera,” except make sure it looked good—and this he did. Cinematographer Milton Krasner (an indispensable member of the expert team that now followed Minnelli from one picture to the next) captured some breathtaking images of the film’s two natural beauties: the violet-eyed Taylor and Big Sur.
If only the story was as arresting as the scenery. Taylor’s character, atheistic naturalist Laura Reynolds, may be the latest in a long line of Minnelli nonconformists, but she is unquestionably the blandest. It also doesn’t help that all of the characters speak in beatific platitudes (“Thinking is almost always a kind of prayer …”) instead of more naturalistic dialogue. It’s nobody’s best work, but Eva Marie Saint manages on
e good scene when she tells Burton off. And Robert Webber is a lot of fun as Ward, the creepy swinger who punctuates nearly every sentence with “baby.”
“The Shadow of Your Smile”: Laura Reynolds (Elizabeth Taylor) and Dr. Edward Hewitt (Richard Burton) go bohemian in The Sandpiper. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
Johnny Mandel and Paul Francis Webster’s haunting theme song, “The Shadow of Your Smile,” may be the only guilt-free pleasure associated with the movie. Recorded by everyone from Barbra Streisand to Pinky Winters, that lovely chart topper would win The Sandpiper its sole Oscar.
35
“At Best, Confused”
IN 1932, DEPRESSION ERA AUDIENCES had flocked to see Greta Garbo as the exotic temptress Mata Hari. And forever after, the public would identify “The Swedish Sphinx” with the slinky secret agent. But to Vincente Minnelli, Mata Hari had always been a more complex figure—a question mark. Did the cooch-dancing vamp who called herself Mata Hari betray her legions of French lovers by passing their secrets on to the Germans? When the alluring femme fatale was executed by a firing squad, was she gunned down more for her loose morals than for her spying?
Vincente believed all of the ambiguity surrounding Mata Hari would make for compelling drama. “I wanted the audience to leave the theatre having great doubts about her,” Minnelli would say of the central character in the stage production of Mata Hari that he ended up directing in 1967. He certainly got his wish. The privileged few who saw her would leave the theater having great doubts not only about the subject but about nearly everything else connected with the show decades after it was staged. Mata Hari still ranks as one of the most notorious debacles in theatrical history—Vincente Minnelli’s very own Springtime for Hitler.
In the beginning, a musicalized Mata Hari seemed like a sure thing. A trio of talented collaborators—Jerome Coopersmith (book), Edward Thomas (music), and Martin Charnin (lyrics)—had created an antiwar musical originally entitled Ballad of a Firing Squad. It retold the Mata Hari saga from the point of view of one of her lovers, Captain Henry LaFarge of French Military Intelligence. The musical juxtaposed Mata Hari’s exploits with scenes in which a character known only as “The Young Soldier” marches off to the front lines. In a haunting song entitled “Maman,” the young but no longer innocent soldier sings the contents of a letter he has sent home to his mother: “He was young, maman. He was small. I was trapped, maman, by a wall. Then he lunged, Maman, and I spun, face to face, Maman, gun to gun. Then and there, Maman, I could see … He was me, Maman. He was me. Just a boy, Maman, not a man … Can I kill, Maman? Yes I can.”