I Hated to Do It: Stories of a Life

by Donald C. Farber

  Rochelle Owens and her husband, George Economou, became good friends of ours, and we attended many of the plays written by Rochelle. All of her plays are dramatic and riveting, even that play that some of us may have found hard to figure out where it is going. Her plays are always fascinating to watch.

  Kurt’s Film Deals

  I did make a few film deals for books that Kurt wrote. Kurt’s attitude was always let them make the film and keep him out of it. He said that he really knew nothing about filmmaking, and as long as I made a good deal on the sale of the rights, the book the film was based on had already had its success and they could not hurt him.

  Kurt did love what George Roy Hill did in directing the film of Slaughterhouse-Five. He always said that George would consult him and ask his advice and then ignore what Kurt told him. He was pleased with what Nick Nolte did with Mother Night, although the film of Mother Night was not all he thought it could be. He was so upset with the film of Breakfast of Champions that we walked out of the theatre after it was screened for Kurt without even stopping to talk to the members of the cast who were there. He really didn’t think Slapstick or Happy Birthday, Wanda June were all that great, although he was thrilled with the stage play of Wanda June.

  The Movie Slaughterhouse-Five and Kurt’s Characters

  Kurt had a habit some other writers have that can be a real headache for the attorney or agent representing him. When the film rights to a novel are sold, the purchaser buys the exclusive rights to the plot, the characters, and all aspects of the story line. Kurt liked to put the same characters in more than one book, including Kilgore Trout. Kilgore is not so bad, but when you include a character like Elliott Rosewater and Howard W. Campbell in Slaughterhouse-Five it can complicate matters, since they were each the main characters in other books Kurt wrote.

  Kurt’s agent, Max, made a deal with Universal Pictures and sold the film rights to Slaughterhouse-Five, which meant he sold the exclusive rights to Elliott Rosewater, Howard W. Campbell, Kilgore Trout, and other persons whom Kurt put in the slaughterhouse with him. Then someone came along and wanted to purchase the film rights to God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and as we know, Elliott Rosewater is the main character in this book and an essential part of a proposed film. Max, without realizing, then sold the film rights to God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, thus selling the exclusive rights to Elliott Rosewater twice, since Elliott was in the slaughterhouse in that book and also appeared for a few seconds in the slaughterhouse in the film.

  It is an elementary principal that one can only sell “exclusive” rights once. If the exclusive rights to a character are sold twice, it is not an exclusive sale. I discovered this when I woke up to the fact that I was about to sell the exclusive rights to Elliott Rosewater a third time as I negotiated a TV deal for the story. I didn’t do it. I stopped, and then I had to unravel the exclusivity of Rosewater given to Universal so a sale of the whole story in the book God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater could be properly sold.

  Some negotiations took place with a very considerate person at Universal who understood that the twenty seconds Elliott is in the slaughterhouse in their film should not preclude the making of a film based on the book God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, which would require the character as the main character of the film. A deal was made and Universal released Elliott Rosewater from exclusivity.

  Howard W. Campbell was the main character in Mother Night, and he also was a character in Slaughterhouse, so he too had to be released from exclusivity, and Kilgore Trout as well. A film was made based on Mother Night, and Nick Nolte was Howard W. Campbell.

  This concept was of real importance to me when I was representing John D. MacDonald and I was negotiating the sale of the film rights in the book Darker than Amber. John D. had written a whole series of books, each title including a color, and the main character in all of this series was the private investigator Travis McGee. There were over twenty Travis McGee books in the series, and if I sold Darker than Amber for a film, they would be buying the exclusive rights to Travis, and although the film company could not use Travis in any other films based on any of the other books in which Travis appears without getting the rights, neither could John D. sell the film rights to any of the other books in which Travis is a character.

  I solved this and preserved the rights of Travis for John D. I made the deal with the film company buying the Darker than Amber rights that they would have the exclusive rights to the character of Travis McGee only for a period of three years after the release of the film and made sure that there was a date that the film must be released. During the three years, the film company would have the option to acquire the film rights to any of the other Travis McGee books John D. wrote, and if they did not acquire the rights in any of the books, the exclusivity of the character Travis McGee would cease and John D. could then sell the other books in that series with Travis as the exclusive character in only that story.

  A Man Without a Country

  We have these close friends, Jean and Juan Cappello, whom we met in the lobby of our apartment. We have lived in this apartment house for over fifty years and are pleased as punch if someone we see in the lobby even says hello to us. We are just friendly people. Yes, there were a few exceptions through the years, Jerry Berns of the 21 Club who died in 2006, Jack Dreyfus, founder of the Dreyfus funds, and one or two other persons memorable for their friendliness.

  I would meet Jerry Berns at the bus stop on Fifth Avenue, and we would ride down on the bus together. The 21 Club was famous as a most celebrated speakeasy during the days of prohibition. No limo was waiting to take Jerry to work, and lucky for me, I too rode the bus with him. When the bus would approach the 50s Jerry would say, “How about breakfast in the basement?” How do you say no to an invite to have breakfast in the basement of the 21 Club, which was not open for breakfast? As he and I ate our breakfast, Jerry explained to me that they had ninety-one employees. What a treat.

  Jack Dreyfus, on the other hand, always had a car waiting to drive him. No buses, but he always sat in front with the chauffeur and was one class act. During his lifetime he became a master at bridge, a tennis player of remarkable talent, a chess master, and of course hugely successful at mastering the stock market maneuvers. He was one nice guy and gave a lot of his time to promoting the medication Dilantin, which he claimed saved his life and helped with his depression. He also invested millions of dollars to promote the medicine.

  I met Jack in the elevator going up one evening after walking Penny, our dachshund. Jack loved dogs and took in a lot of stray dogs and cared for them. Jack looked at Penny and said she didn’t look so hot and that I had to stay on the elevator and go up to his penthouse apartment with him. Actually it was two penthouses he had as one, and Penny and I accompanied him. He handed me a medication, Dilantin, of course, and said give it to Penny and she will perk up and be in better shape. I thanked him, and when I met him the following day I told him that Penny was better. It’s only now I have to admit that Dilantin may have been great for him, but I just could not give it to Penny.

  So we finally met Jean and Juan Cappello, both charming people. The doorman introduced us, and Annie and I decided to have them over for cocktails. We have been close, close friends ever since. Both are well educated and smart. They are mature parents and grandparents. Jean rides her bike all over the city, including the other boroughs, and once a week she works for the American Red Cross as a volunteer. She help people who are burned out off their homes by placing them in temporary housing. She drives the Red Cross truck and adds comfort and help.

  Juan is charming, an accomplished tennis player who, although in his seventies, gives some of the pros a game. He is important in Chile, where they still have a home. When I say important, although he will never admit it, I know he influences who will be governing Chile. He has worked in all the South American countries and is respected in all.

  So we were invited to the club for a special evening honoring Juan for his endeavors in Chil
e and his work in helping the country economically and politically. We were seated at the table right in front of the honored speaker and we had guests in town, as luck would have it, who were from Chile. JJ and his wife were here because JJ had purchased the film rights in Kurt’s book A Man Without a Country and was doing some filming.

  They seated me between JJ’s wife, Lo, and the Chilean ambassador to the UN, Heraldo Munoz, who during the coup in Chile was a real hero. But I felt an obligation to talk to the attractive wife of JJ on my left, since she knew no one in the US, and I guess I neglected Heraldo. At the end of the evening, after the inspiring words of Juan Cappello, Heraldo and I agreed that it was sad we did not have more of an opportunity to talk. He scribbled his address on a piece of paper and said cocktails at their house on Tuesday. Of course we showed up at their house for cocktails and a stimulating evening with people from all over the world, many from Chile.

  JJ was all over the city and the other boroughs filming for his adaptation of Kurt’s novel. He filmed in Central Park, he filmed on the Manhattan Bridge, he filmed Morley Safer, the regular on the TV news program 60 Minutes, in the basement of the Algonquin Hotel, he traveled to Boston and filmed Mark Vonnegut. He decided that he would film Annie and me in our apartment in the city, so I volunteered to make him a pizza. Wouldn’t you know it, he wanted to and did film me making the pizza, with the pizza stone, the works. Only problem was he brought more of a crew than anticipated so I ended up making three big pizzas.

  JJ finished the film. Went back to Chile and spent so much money on the film, but it needed a lot more work, so he started over with a new concept and a new partner. That’s showbiz.

  Nick Nolte in Mother Night

  When Nick Nolte was in town for the Mother Night movie based on Kurt’s book, I gotta admit I was a little proud to be walking down the street with a real movie star. I should have been used to it by then because Annie and I were the best friends of Joan Bennett, a genuine movie star who made seventy-four movies before her then-husband Walter Wanger shot her friend Jennings Lang in the Paramount Pictures parking lot. As such a close friend to Joan, we had many great times drinking and dining together and, of course, talking and attending movies and theatre. I always got a kick out of it when we would get into a cab with her and the cab driver would say, “You look exactly like Joan Bennett,” and I could proudly retort, “She looks like her because she is her.”

  Kurt was fond of Nolte, and my only meeting with him was a quick scheduled lunch, which he had to leave and miss the lunch, but we talked and I was impressed. He played the part of Howard W. Campbell, a double agent. Kurt left me puzzling about a lot of things in his writing and in his personal life, and most of the time I could figure it out. But when it came to Campbell, Kurt was playing a game with me, and I think he played the game because he didn’t know the answer either, or didn’t want to furnish an answer.

  In the end of the book, it is not clear just whose side Campbell was really, really on. Was he a loyal American spying on the Nazis for us, or a double agent working for the other side? So you know me, shortly after we parted from Nick, I boldly asked Kurt whether Campbell was a loyal American or not. His answer was so Kurt. He simply said, “Don, what do you think?” And when further pressed by me insisting that was not responsive, he made it even more confusing for me by inquiring, “What would you like to believe?” To this day, I don’t know whether Kurt had an answer to the question, and I think he wanted the reader to come to his or her own conclusion, which was the right conclusion for each reader.

  Joan Bennett

  I represented Tamara Geva, George Balanchine’s first wife, who was referred to me by Richard Barr, the producer who produced Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff and a whole lot of very important other plays by Edward Albee and other important playwrights.

  Tamara Geva decided to sublease her apartment on West 81st Street, and a young man, Zia Mohyeddin, who was starring in A Passage to India on Broadway came to our house after the late performance at eleven thirty p.m. to sign the sublease. He left at three thirty a.m. because Annie and I and Zia had so much to talk about. After the opening of Passage, the reviews for Zia were so great they put his name above the title, even on the marquee. We became close friends. In the meantime I got involved in the divorce between Tamara and her husband, John Emery, a tall, handsome, serious dramatic film and stage actor. John had taken up with Joan Bennett when he and Tamara split, and it was incumbent upon us to meet Joan, with whom he was living.

  I have to admit that the first dinner when we were invited to Joan’s house was memorable. She was such a beautiful, kind, gentle, caring woman. Of course the dinner was a lot more formal than what I was accustomed to. The scotch before dinner was usual for us, and the wine at dinner we were into, but another part of the dinner was a bit of a surprise.

  What did I know, a hick from Nebraska? So when the finger bowl was placed before me by the maid, Annie knew I mistook this ritual as a serving of soup and managed to warn me before I drank the contents.

  What I should have known, but how could I, was that in proper society after the dinner plate has been cleared, the waiter brings each guest a finger bowl, which is a small bowl filled with water, often with a slice of lemon floating in it.

  There is an urban myth about the guest who drank from her finger bowl, who like me thought the clear liquid was a kind of soup. In order to put her guest at ease, the hostess did the same thing and drank her bowl of water intended to cleanse the fingers.

  I didn’t give Joan an opportunity to put me at ease by drinking the contents of the finger bowl after I did, because I didn’t drink it.

  John too was a very unpretentious, kind man. He and a film star of that time, Zachary Scott, in the thirties or forties, were vacationing from Hollywood in Mexico and were so bored they just got drunk and did the unthinkable, at least then it was unthinkable: they got their ears pierced and put in earrings and were trendsetters, the beginning of the practice of men wearing earrings in this country.

  A few years later John Emery died. After the funeral service there was a meeting of some friends at the apartment of Joan’s daughter Stephanie Wanger. Annie, always anxious to help, asked Mr. Steinbeck, who was also attending, if she could get him a drink. He took both of Annie’s hands in his and said to her, “Am I going to have to call you Mrs. Farber, or will you please call me John?” Annie returned with a drink for John. What a kind gentleman.

  Our Friend the Chancellor

  Harvey Perlman was our friend who had been the youngest dean of a law school in the country before he became the chancellor of the University of Nebraska. About twenty years ago, we took Harvey to dinner one night and he noticed I was limping along in pain. After dinner we were in front of the restaurant on 79th Street near 2nd Avenue at about midnight, and Harvey said that I didn't have to limp around in pain. The chancellor of the University of Nebraska took off his shoes under the lamplight and pulled out his orthotics to show me what an orthotic is. I got orthotics after that and could walk. I have been indebted ever since to the chancellor whose contribution to my education allowed me to walk pain-free. Don't ever underestimate the knowledge of our educators.

  Shepard Traube, Zia in Boston, and Alan Alda

  Shepard Traube, a film and stage producer, wanted to produce a play in 1963 and wanted to hire Zia Mohyeddin for the cast, since Zia was hot at the time, having received the rave reviews for A Passage to India. Zia really didn’t want to do it, so he asked for an outrageous fee about three times the offer, and he got it. Traube had become somewhat well-known in the business for having produced Angel Street, a play that also became a movie entitled Gaslight that starred Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman, who had previously gained real fame for her role opposite Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. So Traube engaged Pippa Scott, a sought-after ingenue, Zia Mohyeddin, an overpaid hot performer at the time, and a young aspiring actor, Alan Alda.

  The play previewed in Boston and was a total flop. We were in
Boston to see Zia perform. It was such a lousy play I don’t even remember the name of it, and as confirmation of how lousy it was, I can’t even find it on Google. The play closed even before opening, or right after opening, and again I am not sure when, and we were on a train from Boston to New York. There was a bridge game going on with Zia and this handsome young guy Alan Alda, and Annie and I were kibitzers. We became friendly with Alan and in a few weeks invited him and his charming wife, Arlene, for dinner and continued to associate with them for some time.

  Alan got busy, we were busy, and we did not see them for some years. He had landed a part in a television series called M*A*S*H and became one of the biggest stars in the business. Lots of stars “forget” their friends. Not Alan.

  We had not seen Alan and Arlene socially for about twelve years; we all just got busy. Annie was demonstrating by marching in the street and pitching our liberal cause, probably concerning the Vietnam War (back then some of us did that kind of thing), and Alan was out protesting too. Alan, now very famous, saw Annie in the mob, ran over to her, and started reminiscing with her about old times. One nice guy.

  Alan’s father, Robert Alda, was an established actor in film and stage and was the star in the original production of Guys and Dolls on Broadway. Frank Loesser composed the music and wrote the lyrics of Guys and Dolls and Abe Burrows and Jo Swerling wrote the book, which was based on two Damon Runyon short stories. Since I had developed a friendship with Frank Loesser, we were invited to the opening of the play, which at this time starred in addition to Robert Alda, Vivian Blaine, Stubby Kaye, and Sam Levine.

  I saw the performance in its entirety. I don’t know how much of the performance Annie saw because this guy Clark Gable, the megastar of Gone With the Wind, sat down beside her. She spent much of that evening gazing at him. I don’t know of a woman in the world who would blame her. Probably some men also.