Mark Griffin
Page 34
Budgeted at $10 million, On a Clear Day would be the most expensive production of Minnelli’s career. After principal photography was completed on the Paramount lot, the sumptuous flashback sequences would be shot on location in England at the jaw-dropping Royal Pavilion at Brighton.
Even before cameras rolled, industry insiders wondered if Vincente, now sixty-six, was up to such a monumental undertaking. And even if he was, would he be any match for the indomitable Streisand, who had reportedly overpowered director William Wyler while shooting Funny Girl and clashed with Gene Kelly during the making of Hello, Dolly! Imagine the company’s collective surprise when Streisand’s anticipated skirmishes with Minnelli never materialized.
“There was never a crisis that I remember between Barbra and Vince,” says John Poer, who, at age twenty-eight, was hired as the film’s second assistant director. “I was assigned to be almost completely responsible for Barbra Streisand’s maintenance,” Poer notes:
She was then and is now a prickly person to deal with but not a foolish one. She’s a very intelligent person, and everybody quickly learned that even though she often had opinions about the way things should be done that conflicted with what was going on with the show, she was very often right—when it related to her. You can look at it from a selfish point of view or from just an intelligent one, but she didn’t worry about what went on with other people. But when it concerned her, she was very particular… . I respect her and I think she’s a professional. At least with On a Clear Day, I don’t consider much of what she requested to be nonsense. I mean, I worked with Joan Collins for a long time and trust me, Barbra Streisand is a puppy dog compared to Joan Collins.3
Daisy Gamble was certainly no pushover either. “If I remember correctly, Barbra insisted that her trailer-dressing room be much bigger than Yves Montand’s,” recalls assistant art director Lawrence Paull. Streisand’s meticulously designed dressing room (complete with hand-painted ceilings and an ornate bed with swan-shaped headboards) was the handiwork of legendary production designer John De Cuir. Barbra’s over-the-top trailer was as stunning as the period sets De Cuir created for Clear Day. As the ultimate star perk, it left no doubt in anybody’s mind who wielded the most power on the set. As Paull recalled, “She was paranoid because Yves Montand had a reputation of being a real ladies’ man who bedded down a great many of his leading ladies over the years… . I think there was a concern there for awhile. She didn’t want to be taken in by his guiles, so to speak. From what I remember, he kept a very, very low profile on the whole film.”4
With a story that seesawed between 1814 and 1969, Minnelli had an opportunity to create what Molly Haskell would describe as “a contemporary world which is set in quotation marks, and a historical one in double quotations.” Not since Gigi had Minnelli’s camera been this inspired. “Visually, when it’s exciting, that is all about Vince,” says John Poer. “In fact, it’s possible that he was better at the look of the film than he was with directing the cast… . I think he knew what the action was supposed to look like and he’d just hope that the actors got it right. It’s that old gag of hire really good talent and then stay out of the way. And I think to a great extent, he was doing that.” Or, as Lawrence Paull puts it, “My impression was that at that point, he was basically walking through it.”5
Liza Minnelli recalled that there was at least one element of On a Clear Day that completely captivated Vincente. Before shooting began, father and daughter were sitting in a pancake house on Sunset Boulevard when Vincente suddenly had a revelation. “He said, ‘I know what it’s gotta be … I just know what it’s gotta be,’” Liza recalled. “He said, ‘You’ve got to be so interested in those flashbacks that you can’t wait to get back to them.’”6 Vincente’s fixation with the regression sequences would infuse those scenes with an unusual beauty and power. Reviewing the film in the New York Times, Vincent Canby noted that “the movie, Minnelli and Miss Streisand burst into life in the regression sequences… . Minnelli’s love of décor transforms the movie into very real fantasy.”7
In fact, On a Clear Day contains one of the most sublime and wholly satisfying sequences of Minnelli’s entire career. In the Royal Pavilion’s sumptuous Banqueting Room, Melinda seduces her future husband with a strategically placed wine goblet (buried in her bosom) as her thoughts are telepathically transmitted to the tune of “Love with All the Trimmings.” The sequence succeeds not only because it’s exquisitely crafted but also because Minnelli and Streisand are painting from the same palette. Like Melinda, director and star are experts in the art of seduction; in many ways, On a Clear Day is something of a shared autobiography. Streisand had transformed herself from a fatherless mieskeit into a multimedia goddess in much the same way Melinda ascends from the Angel of Mercy Orphanage to the House of Lords, whereas for Minnelli, the story of a gifted yet unfulfilled individual with an alternate identity buried within must have seemed somewhat familiar.
With a spellbinding star at the peak of her powers and a collection of consummate talents contributing to every facet of the production, Minnelli seemed to have the makings of a four-star musical, but a funny thing happened on the way to the release print.
With the dawning of the “Age of Aquarius,” lavish road-show musicals suddenly resembled woolly mammoths. When Paramount’s two other tune-packed extravaganzas, Paint Your Wagon and Darling Lili, both tanked upon release, the studio cast a cynical eye at Clear Day. It wasn’t long before the executive order came down: The road-show concept was out. Clear Day would be dumped into general release. An overture and intermission were scrapped. Paramount then began hacking away at Minnelli’s version, excising several musical numbers. Among the casualties were Nicholson’s “Who Is There Among Us Who Knows?”; Streisand and Larry Blyden’s rooftop duet, “Wait Til We’re Sixty-Five”; and Montand’s “People Like Me,”ay plus his half of “He Isn’t You/She Isn’t You,” which had been intended as a duet.
Barbra Streisand wearing one of Cecil Beaton’s eye-popping ensembles in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. Minnelli said of his star: “We got along beautifully. She’s very creative… . She realizes there are twenty ways of playing a scene and I’m inclined to think that way myself, so the great fun was finding it together.” PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
Perhaps the most damaging cuts involved Minnelli’s favorite part of the film—Daisy’s sumptuous past-life regressions. Pamela Brown, who had appeared in Lust for Life, saw her substantial role as Mrs. Fitzherbert whittled into a walk-on. Scenes depicting Melinda’s marriage and her metaphysical machinations in her husband’s business were eliminated. The absence of these episodes pointed up the film’s most obvious flaw: Melinda’s story is never resolved, it just goes away. “Those flashbacks—although they were the essence of the whole story—they were also a problem that Alan never quite resolved,” says Alan Jay Lerner’s assistant, Stone Widney. “Second acts in a musical are a bitch. Sometimes you just get lucky and it falls out right. Other times, you’re pushing the story around to make something happen that is positive.”8
The cuts to Clear Day were so extensive that the titles of two songs that survived, “What Did I Have That I Don’t Have?” and “Come Back to Me,” seemed to be commenting on the film’s dismemberment. In June 1970, the musical was unceremoniously dumped into theaters. “What the public saw was not the picture we envisioned,” Streisand informed the press. “I learned a very important lesson about final control.” Costar Yves Montand announced that he had learned some lessons of his own: “Streisand had the right to cut this film herself, so she cut me out so there could be more of her,” the actor grumbled to a reporter, overlooking the fact that virtually all of the excised scenes featured Streisand.9
The reviews for Minnelli’s final screen musical ran the gamut. Joseph Morgenstern gave it a thumbs-down in Newsweek: “The movie … keeps regressing, back through the Technicolored mists of time, to some of the dreariest, fustiest, mustiest habits of Hollywood’s great musical-comedy
era.” Stuart Byron, on the other hand, offered a glowing tribute: “Vincente Minnelli has always been the most misunderstood of great American directors, and never more so than with On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. Here the man created an authentic masterpiece, a unique personal statement—perhaps his most personal statement—and once again he found himself treated as a mere ‘stylist.’”10
“I suppose it’s the Barbra Streisand curse but I’ve always wondered why people don’t get it,” says Jeanine Basinger:
Was it that the picture came out a time when people really needed to be cynical? Is that what happened? And people just don’t look at it anymore. I wonder what the problem with that really is? Is it because there’s something so beautiful and rapturous about that movie and so heartbreaking and touching that people don’t want to accept it? The message is self-affirmation and it’s sumptuously presented. And Minnelli really does right by her. He really concentrates on presenting her in quite a marvelous way. I think in some ways, he must have identified Barbra Streisand with Judy Garland. The fact that Streisand really sort of popped out to the public on The Judy Garland Show. The fact that she could sing so powerfully as Garland did. Although they’re very different, he must have made that association.11
Only weeks after production closed on Clear Day, Vincente received a call from Liza informing him that Judy had died of an accidental overdose in London. She was forty-seven years old. Though deeply saddened, Vincente chose not to attend the funeral service at Frank Campbell’s in New York. He preferred to grieve privately, while vowing not to “wallow in useless tears.” “Judy would have been so contemptuous of them,” he wrote. “She didn’t carry herself as a tragic person, and we took the cue from her.”12
There were other endings as well. Denise informed Vincente that their marriage was over. Two years later, the gossip columns filled everybody in: “If her California divorce from film director Vincente Minnelli goes through on schedule, Yugoslavian-born Denise Minnelli, whose parties and pigtails were the talk of Beverly Hills during her Hollywood period, will marry Prentis Cobb Hale, the multimillionaire department store tycoon in San Francisco.” The New York Times reported that “the dissolution hearing took ten seconds.” Like almost everything concerning Denise, her divorce from Minnelli and marriage to Prentis Cobb Hale had everybody talking. And talking.
IN THE EARLY 1970S, a writer named Joel E. Siegel (who had authored a book on Cat People producer Val Lewton) began working on an ambitious biography of Minnelli. Siegel’s friend Howard Mandelbaum remembers that the would-be biographer went to extraordinary lengths preparing what he hoped would be the definitive exploration of Minnelli’s life and career:
Joel worked on it for a long time and he went and interviewed lots of [Minnelli’s] collaborators and friends. He spent a lot of time with Minnelli and he told me how difficult it was for Minnelli to communicate and to remember, which of course makes the ultimate title of Minnelli’s own book [I Remember It Well] a little ironic… . Imagine Joel’s surprise—as his book was nearing completion, it was announced that Minnelli had signed a contract to publish his autobiography, which Hector Arce collaborated on. So, Joel’s stories were no longer going to be fresh, because all of this material that he had pulled out of Minnelli was going to be reused in Minnelli’s own book… . Joel saw this as a real betrayal.13
It has been suggested that Minnelli went forward with the publication of his autobiography in part because of his dwindling finances. After the divorce from Denise, some of Minnelli’s friends noticed that the house on Crescent Drive looked rather “threadbare.” Vincente had not directed a film since On a Clear Day in 1969, and the offers weren’t exactly pouring in. Another motivating factor may have been the fact that, although the entire world was now on a first-name basis with superstar Liza, her father seemed to be slipping below the radar. Was it possible that despite his Academy Award-winning credentials and remarkable cinematic legacy, Minnelli might be forgotten? It often seemed that Vincente’s industry had a memory as short as his own. As Bob Fosse, William Friedkin, and Peter Bogdanovich were riding high in the swinging ’70s, golden-age directors such as Minnelli, Mankiewicz, and Cukor were written off as old-fashioned and out of touch. The publication of Minnelli’s memoir might remind readers that a certain Oscar-winning auteur was still around and available to direct members of the “me” generation.
Published in 1974, I Remember It Well was generally well received. Gene Siskel called it “a splendid and surprisingly personal recollection.” Other readers noted that the memoir seemed to suffer from significant memory lapses, as key figures and controversial episodes from Minnelli’s life were conspicuously missing. Older brother Paul Minnelli, Uncle Frank’s suicide, and Lester Gaba—all of this was banished from the autobiography. And throughout the text, Minnelli presented himself as exclusively heterosexual. “Read with pleasure but read with caution,” advised John Coleman in his Washington Post review.
The year I Remember It Well was published was also the year that MGM celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with the release of the spectacular documentary That’s Entertainment! Written, produced, and directed by Liza’s second husband-to-be, Jack Haley Jr., the movie presented clips culled from nearly a hundred of MGM’s glittering extravaganzas. Garland was glimpsed singing “Over the Rainbow.” Astaire danced on the ceiling in Royal Wedding. But it came as no surprise to movie buffs that many of the most memorable sequences were highlights from Minnelli productions. The ballet from An American in Paris was singled out as “MGM’s masterpiece” (though purists griped that an abbreviated version was included, and not the full seventeen-minute ballet). Haley’s film proved to be a sleeper smash, which spawned two sequels.
While furthering the nostalgia craze that swept through the ’70s, That’s Entertainment! also revived interest in Minnelli’s movies, which were suddenly in demand in art houses and on college campuses. It was around this time that cults formed around some of Vincente’s more esoteric efforts, especially The Pirate and Yolanda and the Thief. In the psychedelic ’70s, Minnelli’s Technicolor fantasylands and surrealistic dream sequences suddenly found a very receptive—if heavy-lidded—audience.
In 1975, writer and documentarian Richard Schickel interviewed Minnelli on camera for his acclaimed eight-part television series The Men Who Made the Movies, which profiled master directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. “I stayed in touch with Vincente a little bit after The Men Who Made the Movies,” says Schickel. “He was a very kindly gentleman. He was kind of inarticulate—stammering and so forth. And sort of hidden in certain ways. You know, he wrote that autobiography I Remember It Well and I always laugh when I look at that title on the shelf because he didn’t remember anything. But he was a fabulous filmmaker. You know, as the years go on and you look at Vincente’s contributions, he seems to loom larger in film history than maybe he seemed to at the time.”14
37
A Matter of Time
FOR YEARS, VINCENTE AND LIZA had searched for the perfect project on which to collaborate. At one point, the Minnellis thought they had found an ideal vehicle in Nancy Milford’s acclaimed 1970 biography of Jazz Age icon Zelda Fitzgerald. Milford’s recounting of the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s free-spirited though deeply troubled wife seemed like natural biopic material. Although Paramount initially expressed interest, this Zelda with a “Z” was not to be. Undaunted, Vincente turned his attention to a story that had long fascinated him. “When I first read the English translation of Maurice Druon’s Film of Memory, I felt it would make a marvelous picture,” Vincente recalled. “The book had been optioned by several film producers over the years. Whenever I got my offer in, it was either too little or too late. I had given up hope that I’d ever be involved with that lovely story.”1
Published in 1955, Maurice Druon’s novel The Film of Memory seemed ready-made for Minnelli.az The story concerned Carmela, a timid, impressionable chambermaid living vicariously through the memories of the half-mad
Contessa Sanziani, a resident in the dilapidated hotel where Carmela works. The old Renaissance queen’s recollections of her glamorous past as a coveted European courtesan inspire Carmela to fantasize about an exotic existence beyond her mindless routine of changing bed sheets.
Teetering on the edge of insanity, the contessa tutors the unworldly fifth-floor maid in the fine art of living. As La Sanziani retreats further into her hallucinatory film of memory, she is more than a few frames out of synch with the world around her, and her decline seemed to eerily mirror Vincente’s fading status in the film industry. In an era dominated by the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and Martin Scorsese, the seventy-two-year-old Minnelli was seen as an out-of-touch, fusty relic and one totally dependent on his daughter’s star power to secure financing for any new endeavors. Friends recalled that after On a Clear Day, Vincente seemed perfectly content ensconced in his Crescent Drive sanctuary, lounging in an elegant silk robe and painting. Why should he have to trouble himself with mounting another elaborate film production when most of his colleagues were enjoying a quiet retirement?
“I think he did it because of Liza,” says screenwriter John Gay, who was tasked with transferring Druon’s psychologically layered prose to film. “[Vincente] looked at it as a project to star his daughter and they always wanted to work together. They really were devoted to each other.” Naturally, Liza would be playing Carmelaba—though an eternally sequined, Studio 54 habitué seemed more suitably cast as the hedonistic Sally Bowles in Cabaret than a mousy maid from the provinces. “I have to tell you I was a little bit surprised,” Gay says of casting Liza, the glittering showstopper, as a shrinking violet. “I mean, I know why he wanted his daughter for it but Liza is like you see her on the screen. I mean, she’s just all over. I thought the personality of Liza would be a little bit over the top, shall we say, and she’d have to hold it down to play the maid.”2