The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir

by William Friedkin

  As Phil and I left the theater, I thanked him again. “Phil, we’ve got the formula.”

  “No, kid,” he said. “You do. I may do a couple more things, but then I’m done.”

  In high spirits, we all went to the Governor’s Ball, where I accepted congratulations from people I didn’t know. I was in a daze—elated and empty, a curious combination. We stayed about an hour at the ball, then got a lift from friends to Nicky Blair’s restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, just west of the Strip. I promised my friend Nicky I’d come to his restaurant if we won, so I showed up with the Grosses, the Fantozzis, and the gold statue, which I placed in the middle of the table. People came by to touch and admire it. I looked at my watch—it was past 10:30. Nicky brought a phone to the table, and I dialed a number in the Valley: the guy who gave us a lift to the Academy Awards. He put his wife on the phone, and I thanked them both. They were giddy with laughter at their part in our victory.

  I thought back over the evening. The highlight of the show was an honorary award given for the first and only time after the Best Picture Oscar. During the commercial break, the winners and presenters stood on risers behind the closed curtain. In front of us, an attractive woman in her sixties, with jet-black hair tied in a bun, walked to center stage, holding the hand of a little man in a dark suit.

  In front of the curtain, out of our view, Daniel Taradash, a distinguished screenwriter, then president of the Motion Picture Academy, was speaking to the audience: “Humor heightens our sense of survival and preserves our sanity.” He was quoting the man about to be honored: “We think too much and feel too little . . . more than machinery, we need humanity . . . more than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness.” Then Taradash spoke his own words: “He has made motion pictures the art form of this century.” Just before the curtain opened, the woman who was clutching the little man’s hand squeezed it and hurried offstage. She was Oona O’Neill, daughter of Eugene O’Neill, and the man she’d walked to the stage was her husband, Charles Chaplin. A portion of the curtain opened, and he walked onstage in a solo spotlight: a short man, now heavyset, his crop of hair now thinner and all white. The audience leaped to its feet, applauding, screaming, crying, cheering. On the backstage monitors I could see Chaplin’s twinkling eyes fill with tears as he acknowledged the ecstatic ovations and bravos. He had been banned from entering the country for twenty years. Now, here he stood, the “Little Tramp,” one of the founding fathers of world cinema. Taradash presented him an honorary Oscar, and when the audience response died down, Jack Lemmon appeared with the signature top hat and cane of the “Little Tramp.” Chaplin tried on the hat, but it fell off. He smiled and kneeled to pick it up, but didn’t try it on again. When the applause died, he spoke in a small, high-pitched voice: “Words seem so futile . . . so feeble. Thank you for the honor of inviting me here . . . you’re wonderful, sweet people.” He blew kisses to the crowd, and the curtain was raised to reveal all of us onstage behind him. We sang to him the song that had become his signature, “Smile,” from his 1936 film Modern Times.

  It was a moment of sincere deep emotion; no one who was there will ever forget it.

  The first phone call the next morning after a late night was from Mel Stuart, my former mentor at Wolper: “Well, asshole, you fooled them again.”

  I felt let down, I couldn’t get out of bed. Not since the death of my mother could I remember feeling so depressed.

  “What the hell’s wrong?” Ed Gross asked.

  “I don’t know, Ed, I can’t explain it. I just don’t feel I deserve this. Not at this time in my life.”

  “Billy, I think you better see a psychiatrist,” Ed offered. “This should be the happiest day of your life.” He got me an appointment to see a well-known shrink at his office in Beverly Hills. The room was dark, and I sat in front of his desk. There was no couch. We shook hands, and he picked up a yellow legal pad. He asked me to talk about myself, anything I wanted to tell him. I didn’t know where or how to begin. I’m with this total stranger who never looked up from his pad, writing down everything I said without looking at me for the entire fifty-minute hour. I made up stuff. Total lies. I didn’t feel comfortable discussing my deepest feelings with him. When it was over, he asked if I wanted another appointment. I said I’d call him, and got the hell out of there.

  I never tried psychiatry again, but I did come away with an insight: the bar had been raised too high, too soon, and I didn’t think I was skilled enough to sustain this acclaim with consistency. When I was finished with The French Connection, I was like a club fighter who lost thirty straight fights and got the shit kicked out of him before improbably winning a championship. Even though my arm was raised in victory, I was too beat up to bask in its glory.

  Things took a turn creatively when I heard about a man named Slavko Vorkapich, dean of the Department of Cinema Arts at USC. In the spring of 1972, Vorkapich began a series of two-hour lectures at the Regent Theater in Westwood, for twelve Saturday mornings. Seventy-eight years old at the time, he was considered a master of film montage, most famously the earthquake scene in San Francisco. The term montage implies a passage of time through a series of overlapping visuals that suggest a sequence of events. So skilled did Vorkapich become in this technique that montages were often referred to as Vorkapiches. His work could be described as pure cinema.

  No more than seventy to a hundred people attended each lecture, but I never saw anyone I knew from the Hollywood community. A small man with a flowing mane of white hair and thick glasses, he had an Eastern European accent, but his talks were inspiring. His theories gave me a new freedom that I continued to put into practice with each new film. The traditional way of shooting, let’s say, a conversation between two people involves maintaining the correct screen direction. Vorkapich derided this practice, showing examples from various films. In the documentary Man of Aran, directed by Robert Flaherty, one sequence shows a man breaking a large rock with multiple blows of a sledgehammer. The man is seen bringing the hammer down from right to left, but the close-up of the hammer hitting the rock is left to right; then the hammer comes down left to right, and we see in close-up the rock shattered, right to left. Shots of the man’s face are intercut, changing screen direction as well. These shots are cut together rapidly, and seem to draw our attention to the action more intently than if the proper screen direction had been maintained. It was a kind of cinematic cubism. Vorkapich said the most important function of a film director was to immerse the audience so deeply in a sequence that they would not be conscious of screen direction.

  When I first began to direct films, I followed the time-tested rules diligently. Do this often enough, and your creative freedom drops into a lockbox. Every generation rewrites the rules as the techniques of the past are absorbed. Contemporary audiences viewing masterpieces such as Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour, or Fellini’s 8½ would be hard pressed to recognize the innovations these filmmakers originated. The Vorkapich lectures increased my understanding of the possibilities of cinema.

  6

  THE MYSTERY OF FAITH

  “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

  —PAUL’S EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS (11.1)

  It was the era of the antihero. The temper of the times was irrational fear and paranoia, both old friends of mine. Filmmakers and audiences no longer believed in a man on a white horse. We knew he was flawed because we were flawed. Dirty Harry shot a suspect in cold blood, and audiences cheered. When Popeye shot the French hitman in the back, at the end of The French Connection chase, there was applause in theaters across the country. When Popeye used the N-word, African American audiences laughed, because they saw it as an honest portrayal of police attitudes. The films of the 1970s started to depict the moral ambiguity we recognized in ourselves.

  William Peter Blatty was born in the Bronx in 1928. His Lebanese parents came to New York City on a cattle boat from Beirut, with Blatt
y’s two older brothers and a sister. His mother was Mary (Miriam) Mouakad, a feisty, hardworking woman. His father, Peter Michael Blatty, was a quiet man. One of Peter’s first jobs in New York was picking up loose paper in the subway with long poles, a sack tied to his shoulder.

  The Blattys’ religious roots were deep. Outside a monastery in the town of Harissa, in Lebanon, there is a statue of the Blessed Virgin. Blatty’s great-uncle, Germano Mouakad, Bishop of Baalbec, founded this monastery in the early twentieth century.

  When Mary Blatty applied for U.S. citizenship, a judge asked her, “Mrs. Blatty, why do you want to become an American citizen?” She answered, “For my children.” Then he asked her a test question: “In the event of the United States president’s death in office, who takes his place?” She answered, “His son.” The judge laughed, corrected her, and granted her citizenship. He must have liked the first answer.

  When Bill was three, his father left the family. He gave Bill a kiss on the forehead and was gone. Bill remembers him walking slowly from their tiny apartment building to the corner with one suitcase. He never came back.

  While a freshman at Brooklyn Prep, Bill was living with his mother in a small, narrow room at the Pierrepont Hotel in Brooklyn, when early one morning the phone rang. His mother answered, listened for a moment, hung up, and said, “You father dead.” At school, the headmaster called Bill to his office and said, “Blatty, I heard your father died. You can go home.” “I hardly knew my father,” Bill answered. “Go home,” the headmaster said. At the funeral parlor, Bill saw his father in an open casket, knelt, and convulsed. He ran back to the hotel, his body racked with sobs. At that point, he started to build a defensive shield that few of his friends, relatives, or acquaintances have ever penetrated.

  Mary raised the children alone. She made quince jellies and sold them in the street. Her favorite spot was Fifty-Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, at the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel. Bill would watch her from the fountain. He has a photo of her near the Paris Theater, where she used to beg. He has another photo of that same theater, taken long after his mother’s death, its marquee advertising “William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist.”

  When Bill was seventeen, his mother invited a woman friend for Thanksgiving dinner. The woman brought a date, a man called Neil Sullivan, who taught theology at Georgetown University. Sullivan had three helpings of Mrs. Blatty’s mother’s cooking, which pleased her. When the guests left, she said to Bill, “You gonna go to Georgetown.” Bill thought it was ridiculous, if not impossible. They were virtually penniless, but no amount of discussion could change her mind. “Momma, how we gonna pay for that?” Bill was then pushing a Good Humor wagon through the streets of Brooklyn. “You gonna win scholarship,” his mother assured him.

  At that time, Georgetown, a Jesuit school, awarded only one full scholarship a year, based on the best performance on a seven-hour college entrance exam. You could take the exam at the nearest school that administered the college boards. Bill took it at Columbia University. He left the exam convinced he had failed: “If my father had been Rockefeller and endowed Georgetown with a hundred million dollars, they wouldn’t have taken me based on my performance on that exam,” he told me.

  That summer, he was working in the Catskills as a waiter when the call came from Georgetown, telling him he had won the scholarship. In 1949, as a junior majoring in English literature and scholastic philosophy, he heard about a fourteen-year-old boy in neighboring Cottage City, Maryland, who was said to be the victim of demonic possession—only the third case of possession reported by the Catholic Church in twentieth-century America. Blatty heard about the case in a New Testament study class taught by Father Eugene Gallagher, a Jesuit priest. “He came into class all fired up one day about a Jesuit who was involved in an exorcism. He gave us a number of details, some of which turned out to be incorrect. But there I am, at Georgetown, just in time to hear about this case! My immediate thought was, Wow, talk about validating one’s faith! If it proved to be real—religious Nirvana! Gradually I began to think, maybe I could investigate the story myself and write about it, but not as a novel. I thought nonfiction was the only way to do this.”

  On August 20, 1949, an article appeared on the front page of the Washington Post that was the first mainstream account of what had happened. The account is straightforward, obviously from sources in the Catholic diocese of Washington, D.C. It begins: “In what is perhaps one of the most remarkable experiences of its kind in recent religious history, a 14-year-old Mt. Rainier boy has been freed by a Catholic priest of possession by the devil, Catholic sources reported yesterday.” Not the sort of thing you’d expect to see on the front page of a major American newspaper. The article went on to describe the manifestations experienced by the boy and his family—mysterious rappings in the walls of their home, radical personality changes, words appearing on his chest, profanity, screaming, blasphemy, shouting Latin phrases, bloody scratches appearing on his arms, projectile vomiting, inhuman feats of strength, objects flying around the house, and other inexplicable events, including levitation.

  The boy’s family was Evangelical Lutheran, not Catholic. They had exhausted all medical, pharmaceutical, and psychiatric treatments available at the time in an attempt to cure him, to no effect. Luther Schultze, the family’s minister, who had observed the manifestations, recommended the family consult the Catholic Church as a last resort, as the Lutherans had no experience with exorcism. According to the Washington Post, “The boy was taken to Georgetown University Hospital where his afflictions were exhaustively studied. . . . The doctors were unable to cure him through natural means.”

  The Catholic Church conducted a lengthy investigation to determine if this was an authentic case of demonic possession. There was scant precedent or documentation to verify this, but Archbishop (later Cardinal) Ritter decided with the approval of the family that an exorcism should take place. A young priest who had no knowledge of demonology, Father Albert Hughes of St. James Catholic Church in Mt. Rainier, was designated as the exorcist. But soon after he started the ritual, the boy ripped a metal spring from his hospital bed and slashed Father Hughes from shoulder to wrist, a wound requiring one hundred stitches. Father Hughes suffered a nervous breakdown and had to withdraw. Archbishop Ritter then had the boy moved to Alexian Brothers Hospital in St. Louis, where he appointed Father William S. Bowdern of St. Louis University as the exorcist, to be assisted by six other priests.

  Father Bowdern was fifty-two years old in 1949, and was to figure some ten years later in Blatty’s investigation into the case. The Washington Post article flatly stated that the boy was cured as a result of the exorcism. And it appears he was. As I write this, he is recently retired from NASA and appears to have no memory of what happened to him at the age of fourteen.

  A winding, unpredictable road led Bill from Georgetown to Hollywood. In Los Angeles, he took a job in publicity at USC and auditioned for work as an actor. He was chosen to ghostwrite a best seller called Dear Teen-ager, by “Dear Abby.” At a party given by the publisher, Bernard Geis, Blatty handed Geis a novel he had been writing called Which Way to Mecca, Jack? based on the experiences of his immigrant parents and his own adventures in Hollywood, posing as an Arab prince. Blatty became a comic novelist, receiving offers to write screenplays: The Man from the Diners’ Club with Danny Kaye, John Goldfarb, Please Come Home with Shirley MacLaine, the Blake Edwards films What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?; A Shot in the Dark; and Darling Lili, with Blake’s wife Julie Andrews. And Gunn, the script that brought us together, then separated us.

  In the fall of 1968, Blatty was ready to pursue the 1949 possession case that had remained in his consciousness for twenty years.

  He went to a New Year’s Eve party at the home of a friend, the novelist Burton Wohl, in Sherman Oaks, where he met the editor in chief of Bantam Books, Marc Jaffe. Bill had by then published four comic novels, none of them successful. Just to make conversation, Jaffe asked, “
What are you doin’?” Blatty’d had a few drinks, so he found the courage to tell Jaffe about his idea for a story about demonic possession. He didn’t speak for more than two minutes before Jaffe said, “I’ll publish that.” Soon Blatty received a contract from Bantam. Now, he had to write the book—but as fiction, since the facts of the original case were still unavailable to him.

  He read everything he could find on the subject of possession and exorcism. There was little available. The Catholic Church was closemouthed about these cases, to protect the privacy of the victims. He tried to find a priest who had performed an exorcism but was unsuccessful. But through his former theology professor at Georgetown, Father Gallagher, he was able to contact Father Bowdern, who was living at the Immaculata Retreat House in Liberty, Missouri. Bowdern was then seventy-one years old. Though they never met nor spoke on the phone, a seven-year correspondence began between them.

  From Father Bowdern’s response to Blatty’s first letter, October 17, 1968:

  As you stated in your letter, it is very difficult to find any authentic literature on cases of possession; at least I could not find any when I was involved in such a case. Accordingly, we (a priest with me) kept a minute account each day of the happenings, each preceding day and night. . . . Our diary would be most helpful to anyone placed in a similar position as an exorcist. . . .

  My own thoughts were that much good might have come if the case had been reported and people had come to realize that the presence and the activity of the devil is something very real.

  And then, this chilling passage near the end of the letter: “I can assure you of one thing: The case in which I was involved was the real thing. I had no doubt about it then, and I have no doubts about it now.”

  He went on to write that he would be of assistance to Blatty on his novel within the limitations of preserving the victim’s identity and under instructions from Cardinal Ritter, who ordered him not to publicize the case.