Mark Griffin
Page 35
Even with a red hot, post-Cabaret Liza on board, a character-driven drama about a dreamy chambermaid and a senile countess didn’t seem destined for box-office glory. As Carmela would be competing against the likes of Mother, Jugs and Speed, and Corvette Summer, the story the Minnellis were pitching seemed almost hopelessly quaint—about as up-to-the-minute as the Victrola. From a marketing standpoint, there was no sizzling romance to exploit, at least not one of the traditional Streisand-Redford variety.
“Actually, the thing was a love story between the chambermaid and the countess, if you want took at it that way. That’s really what it was all about,” says Gay.3 But who would finance such a commercially risky venture? The major studios, including MGM (which for a time had optioned the property) took turns turning down the Minnellis. “I found myself, in a way, auditioning the project before the money men,” Vincente recalled. It was a humiliating experience. Despite his legendary Oscar-winning track record, the elder Minnelli wasn’t received with open arms by junior executives in search of the next big roller-boogie cash cow.
Then came a glimmer of hope from a most unlikely source. Samuel Z. Arkoff’s American International Pictures was famous for such four-star schlock as The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini and Attack of the Puppet People. AIP, which had launched the careers of Jack Nicholson and “King of the B’s” director Roger Corman, expressed interest in cofinancing Vincente Minnelli’s long-awaited return. In taking on Carmela (as the project was then titled), Arkoff would be acquiring two Oscar-winning Minnellis at bargain-basement prices, plus a prestige project that might single-handedly obliterate the memory of such dubious Arkoff enterprises as I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Girls In Prison. A Vincente Minnelli movie was AIP’s opportunity to finally go legit.
John Gay attempted to warn the film’s leading lady about the type of fly-by-night producers they now found themselves in bed with. “I said to Liza, ‘These guys are very tough. I mean, Vincente better watch out.’ She said, ‘Are you kidding? Daddy may look flighty but he’s hard as nails. He can handle any of these guys.’ But Vincente was weaker at that time. He was getting older. I don’t think that Vincente had the old stamina that Liza said he always had.”4
Arkoff was being cautioned as well. As the producer recalled, “A couple of my friends in Hollywood warned me, ‘[Minnelli] hasn’t done a picture in a number of years. Be careful what you’re getting yourself into. When he was making the big musicals, MGM surrounded him with the best cameramen and best set designers. All of them knew what the pictures needed without even asking him.’”5
With both factions forewarned, the producers turned their attention to the crucial casting of the secondary lead. Two-time Oscar-winner Luise Rainer and Italian leading lady Valentina Cortesa were both considered for the pivotal role of the grandest dowager of them all, the Contessa Sanziani. AIP and its Italian cofinancier, however, insisted on an actress with more potent box-office allure, and they got exactly that in the form of the incandescent Ingrid Bergman, who had recently won her third Oscar for her supporting role in Murder on the Orient Express. Although Bergman readily accepted the challenging role, she was quick to point out that she was nothing like her character: “She is just the opposite of myself, because she is destroying herself by dreams of her youth. I don’t dream about my past. I accept my age [sixty] and make the best of it.”6
Cast as Lucrezia Sanziani’s former husband was Minnelli favorite Charles Boyer, who had appeared opposite Bergman in Gaslight and Arch of Triumph. With such a high-profile cast assembled, it seemed as though everything had finally fallen into place for Minnelli. Nevertheless, once shooting began—on location in Rome—it wasn’t long before word leaked out that the production was floundering; the director known for his attention to the most microscopic details was said to be having inordinate difficulty focusing. Present on the set to interview Liza, writer Clive Hirschhorn observed that Vincente was no longer in full command. “He was really doddery and old and he was shouting ‘Action!’ when he meant to say, ‘Cut!’ and vice-versa,” Hirschhorn says. “It was a very sad occasion. No one seemed to know what they were doing.”7
Tongue-tied and unintelligible even under the best of circumstances, Vincente found himself at a loss for words on the set. To make matters worse, he was attempting to address a largely non-English speaking crew. Pacing—never Vincente’s strong suit—was another challenge. “Almost immediately, … the production fell behind schedule,” Arkoff remembered. “When I was on the set, Vincente would talk endlessly about the sets and costumes, but he just couldn’t seem to pull the picture together… . I tried to talk to him a few times—‘Vincente, I think you need to take stronger control of the picture. These actors need more guidance from you.’”8
But the rigors of shooting a major production in a foreign location were proving to be too much for Minnelli, who was grappling with challenges far greater than the movie. “We didn’t realize it yet, but Vincente was already in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease,” Liza’s half sister, Lorna Luft, would recall in her memoir:
There wasn’t much knowledge of Alzheimer’s at the time, and we didn’t understand why Vincente was acting so strangely. We kept trying to laugh it off when he made odd mistakes. One day he came into the dressing room and called Liza “Yolanda.” … We comforted ourselves with the notion that he was getting older, and that he hadn’t directed a movie in many years. It was tragic to watch the brilliant man who’d directed An American in Paris struggling just to function.9
By all accounts, Liza offered Vincente unwavering support throughout the production, though even she felt the need to turn to others for guidance, including screenwriter John Gay. “There was one scene where the contessa is by the window,” Gay recalls:
[Liza and Ingrid] had this scene together and the Contessa talks about the birds. And just before that scene, Liza said to me, “Oh, I’m so worried about this scene. Would you please watch it to see how I do?” So, I did. I watched the scene and I was so elevated by Bergman. She was so absolutely wonderful in that scene. When it was over, I rushed over to Bergman and I said, “That was wonderful …” and I turned to Liza and I realized I should have gone to her first. She asked me to watch the scene. She was nervous about the scene. Oh, that was a real faux pas.10
The Minnellis and Ingrid Bergman on the set of A Matter of Time. Vincente’s final film was mutilated by American International Pictures, motivating director Martin Scorsese to publish a protest in Hollywood trade papers signed by over thirty directors. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
While production wrapped on March 13, 1976, Vincente’s real battles were only beginning. The rough cut of the picture, now retitled A Matter of Time, seemed unusually long even by Minnelli standards. The psychological subtleties and emotional nuances of the story were apparently lost on Arkoff, who found Vincente’s initial assembly incoherent and interminable. When asked to outline his intentions, Minnelli had difficulty verbalizing his overall vision of the film. Frustrated and impatient, the producer announced that he would supervise a drastic re-edit. After Vincente and Liza pleaded with Arkoff for an opportunity to rework the footage, the producer relented, but he would only allow Vincente to use the footage from his initial assembly—nothing more. Arkoff deemed Minnelli’s second attempt unsatisfactory as well and sharpened his scissors.
Vincente had endured studio tampering with his work before. The Pirate, The Cobweb, Two Weeks in Another Town, and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever had all fallen prey to the editor’s sheers, but nothing could have prepared Minnelli for the ensuing massacre. Arkoff gutted the picture. Scenes in which “Sanziani dragged the little maid across Europe on a tour of hallucination” (as Maurice Druon had put it) were mercilessly pruned. 11 Virtually all of Edmund Purdom’s scenes were axed. Anna Proclemer’s role as the contessa’s faithful confidante, Jeanne Blasto, was hacked out entirely, though references to her character remain in the release print.
But Arkoff didn’t stop there. Belie
ving that his middle initial gave him license to dabble in a little David O. Selznick-style showmanship, the man who gifted the world with Reform School Girls decided that A Matter of Time was sorely lacking in La Dolce Vita. Arkoff insisted on bookending the film with scenes of Nina as a fur-draped, limo-riding superstar. Although Minnelli had shot this footage to placate the meddlesome producer, he never intended to actually incorporate any of it into the picture. A muddled and disjointed film now had to contend with a flashback device straight out of Funny Girl.
AIP’s mutilation of A Matter of Time was so reckless and arbitrary that the release print unreels like one of the countess’s hallucinations. The picture is an insane jumble, though at the same time oddly moving. Every so often it’s even fascinating, especially in those stretches that are pure and unadulterated Minnelli. In the film’s most beautiful and fully realized scene, Bergman’s Sanziani, seated by a window, observes thousands of birds flying over Rome. “At the sunset hour, these starlings fly over Rome—thousands of them. It’s one of the mysteries of nature. And did you know the noise of the rain so often heard in the music of Berlioz—it’s the chirping of these little birds?” After this wistful observation, the contessa hands the chambermaid an ornate Florentine mirror and invites her to take a different look at herself, “You’re only what you wish to be… . Take it all. Take everything you can from life. It never gives anything back.”
Amid the shattered remains of the movie are the fragments of what many hoped would be Ingrid Bergman’s “Norma Desmond” performance. Deprived of a complete characterization, the viewer must be satisfied with tantalizing bits: During a solitary dinner, Sanziani absentmindedly reaches for a treasured watch she was forced to pawn; in another sequence, the contessa whips herself into a hysterical frenzy as she realizes that she is seventy-two, the age at which a fortune teller prophesied that she would meet her doom. In these moments, there are glimmers of what might have been. But surrounding this are Arkoff’s amateurish and arbitrarily inserted travelogue shots of Rome, a pair of inspired but out-of-place John Kander and Fred Ebb songs, and such incompetent post-production dubbing that the synchronization on Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster seems Oscar-worthy by comparison.
Minnelli on Minnelli: Vincente prepares Liza for a scene in A Matter of Time. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
According to Arkoff, it was Liza who suggested that her then husband, director Jack Haley Jr., be brought in to attempt to salvage A Matter of Time. As Arkoff recalled, “By the end of our meeting, I told him, ‘Why don’t you see what you can do with the picture? Maybe you can save it.’ Haley went to work on the picture, although we never publicly announced his involvement in the movie… . Despite Haley’s best efforts, even he couldn’t rescue it.”12
“God, did they rearrange that movie,” says John Gay. “It was so painful when that thing got butchered every which way. It was hard to look at it, you know? I just wiped it out.” So did the director. When A Matter of Time opened at Radio City Music Hall (of all places) in October 1976, Vincente refused to see it. In later years, it remained a sensitive subject and one Minnelli was reluctant to discuss, as film scholar Joe McElhaney found out. “When I met Vincente, the first question I asked him was, ‘Is there any chance that we’ll ever get to see the original cut of A Matter of Time?,’ which was the wrong question to ask him,” McElhaney said. “He went completely white and his face fell. He talked in this very tiny voice about the production circumstances of the film and how unhappy it all was and he said, ‘No. There’s no chance of it ever being restored.’” This was not some overproduced spectacle like The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but a poignant character study that Minnelli had genuinely cared about—to see his final film destroyed would stand as one of the great tragedies of his career. 13
“Vincente Minnelli’s A Matter of Time has been grossly tampered with,” Pauline Kael announced in The New Yorker. “From what is being shown to the public, it is almost impossible to judge what the tone of his film was, or whether it would have worked at any level.” Though Kael panned what remained of the movie, she saluted Ingrid Bergman’s contessa. “She has a glamour in this role beyond anything she’s had before onscreen… . Bergman’s role has been reduced to shreds, so one cannot judge whether her performance had any rhythm; scene after scene has been cut. Still, there’s something going on when she’s on the screen, and with her gowns hanging straight down from her shoulders, she’s as tall as a legend.”14
While most critics scratched their heads, Minnelli devotees saw A Matter of Time—even its gutted formbb—as a moving culmination of the director’s career. As the greatest love goddess in all of Europe offers life lessons to an awkward chambermaid, there are echoes of Aunt Alicia taking her niece under her wing in Gigi. The time-traveling episodes are reminiscent of On a Clear Day, while the film-studio scenes recall Two Weeks in Another Town (though never quite The Bad and the Beautiful). Beyond the self-reflexive nods to his own work, A Matter of Time poignantly mirrored the director’s own situation. One Minnelli at the end of a remarkable career was passing the mirror on to another who was just beginning.
38
Lonely Feet
THOUGH TYPICALLY DESCRIBED AS an “elegant Scotswoman,” Vincente Minnelli’s fourth wife, Margaretta Lee Anderson, was born (somewhere around 1909) in Croydon, England. In the summer of 1940, Anderson and ninety-six other passengers fled war-torn England by boarding the Eastern Prince and sailing to America. Although most of the ocean liner’s passengers would make ends meet by living with friends and relatives for the duration of the war, Lee Anderson (who had already dropped the “Margaretta”) had come to America to marry a millionaire.
Two years earlier, actress Anderson had met Eugene Francois Suter, the developer of a permanent-wave hair-styling process. The same year that Suter met Lee, he divorced his first wife, who was the mother of his only child. Anderson married Suter in 1940 but the union proved to be short lived. Nine months after exchanging vows, the couple divorced. Although she always exuded an air of “to the manor born,” Anderson apparently did not profit from her marriage to Suter. She would have to work her way into society’s upper echelon, which is where she met her second husband.
Anderson’s next millionaire spouse, Arizona cattle rancher/rodeo star Marion Getzwiller, landed Lee a Beverly Hills address, though this marriage would also end in divorce in 1946. Single once again, the aspiring actress soon scored some legitimate stage work, including an appearance opposite future Gigi star Eva Gabor in the comedy Candle-Light. Anderson’s full-time occupation, however, seemed to involve getting her name in the society columns. Throughout the ’40s and ’50s, Lee’s every move was chronicled by L.A.’s reigning gossipmongers. There she was … lunching with Lana Turner, sunning with heiress Kay Spreckles, or reporting that her $35,000 ruby earrings (a gift from an Indian maharajah to her late father) had been stolen.1 In 1948, Anderson became the social director of the Palm Springs Tennis Club, and it was here that she began to hobnob with the well heeled and highly influential, particularly her fellow British expatriates.
For someone as adept at self-promotion as Lee Anderson, it surprised no one when she ascended to the position of vice president of a Westwood-based public relations firm. “Lee was a real promoter,” says Hollywood insider Scotty Bowers. “If you had someone who had a few bucks and they had a lovely house but they didn’t know anybody, and they wanted to work their way into a certain social set, they would pay Lee as a party promoter. Lee would do her thing and all of a sudden, there would be a hundred people at the party. And that was Lee … always promoting something.”2
Somewhere between keeping company with billionaire bachelor John Gillin and vying for the title of one of L.A.’s best twisters, Anderson managed to attend her first high-powered Hollywood party (upstairs at Romanoff’s) and chat up legendary gossip columnist Louella Parsons. “Every star in the world you can imagine was there,” Lee remembered. “Parsons took a liking to me and she said, ‘You sit b
y me.’” An elegant-looking gentleman with “big black eyes” caught Anderson’s attention and she asked Parsons about him. Louella gave Lee the inside scoop on the very married Vincente Minnelli. “I thought he was so wonderful,” Anderson said. “And I thought, ‘Oh my God, I am never going to see that handsome Italian again.’ This was awful. Dreadful.”3
Several years later, while attending yet another glitzy Hollywood gathering, Lee Anderson met Denise Giganti, who announced that she was about to marry Minnelli. Anderson was devastated. “My heart sank to my boots,” she recalled.4 There was still a glimmer of hope, however. Denise befriended Lee, and throughout the ’60s Anderson was often the “extra woman” at the Minnelli’s star-studded dinner parties.
Anderson would later admit that she carried a torch for her mild-mannered host for years. “I would look across the room and say to myself, ‘Oh, that’s the only man I’ve ever really been in love with.’” Lee’s prayers seemed to be answered the day Denise called to inform her that she was leaving Vincente for San Francisco millionaire Prentis Cobb Hale (whose wife, Marialice King Hale, died under mysterious circumstances in 1969). It was Denise who encouraged Lee to take over. “Lee is a very nice lady,” Denise told a society columnist. “Vincente really needed somebody to take care of him and Lee was marvelous at looking after him.”5
It wasn’t long before Lee was ensconced in Minnelli’s Beverly Hills home. The two were inseparable—though, to some, it was the classic coupling of convenience. When the New York Post asked if there was any truth to the marriage rumors floating around, the couple laughed and Minnelli responded, “Why ruin a friendship?” But Lee remained hopeful that Vincente would change his mind and ask her to become his fourth wife. And she wasn’t the only one. “Everybody was rooting for Lee to marry Vincente,” remembered columnist Doris Lilly.6 All of the cheerleading finally paid off on April 2, 1980, as seventy-seven-year-old Vincente married seventy-one-year-old Lee (the press reported the bride’s age as “fiftyish” and she made no attempts to correct them). The couple was married by Judge Edward Brand in the living room of socialite Virginia Milner.