My Life as a Mankiewicz

by Tom Mankiewicz

  I said, “You're going to have a child.” And he was going crazy. That girl is Mrs. Michael Caine, Shakira Caine. They got married, and they had a child, and they're still married. Shakira is one of the most beautiful women in the world. She played a small part in The Man Who Would Be King with Michael and Sean. She is still convinced I have some higher power. I run into them every couple of years, and she'll say to other people, “He knows things.”

  Location, Location

  We started the picture with Cubby, but Harry took over the actual producing. Cubby and Guy and I went to New Orleans and Jamaica to find locations. A lot of the Bonds were written on the fly on those trips. You'd see something, and all of a sudden it would become a sequence. We were driving around Jamaica on the back end of the island, and we saw a wall and fence and a sign—”Warning, trespassers will be eaten.” We screeched to a stop. It was a big crocodile farm. The now-famous sequence where Bond hops over the tops of the crocodiles was born. The guy who owned the farm was named Ross Kananga, a white guy. The villain played by Yaphet Kotto was Dr. Kananga. I named it after him.

  When you were in New Orleans, everything was fine. The minute you went out into another parish, it was like going back a century. The local sheriff ran everything. (You saw what happened after Hurricane Katrina, how miserably black people were treated in the parishes outside of New Orleans.) There was a big boat chase in the picture going through the bayous, and we were going to shoot in one particular parish and drop a million dollars, which would have been huge. We met with the sheriff, and he was thrilled to have us: “James Bond, goddamn.” He said, “I understand there's a lot of nigras in the cast.”

  We said, “Well, yes.”

  He said, “Now are there any nigras on the crew?”

  We said, “Yes, we will have some on the crew.”

  He said, “We're happy to have you shoot here, but I don't want nigras behind the wheels of your trucks driving. It could upset some folks to see a lot of black people driving.”

  Cubby said, “Well, sheriff, I guess we'll just have to spend our million dollars in another parish.” God bless him for saying that.

  The sheriff said, “No, hold on, hold on. Okay, but keep it down to a dull roar, will you?”

  And Cubby said, “We'll keep it down to a dull roar.” As we were leaving, he said to the transportation captain, “I want a black guy behind the wheel of every vehicle. Fuckin' cracker.”

  That's 1972. You're in the back country. You're not in New Orleans with the big city folks anymore. The rules were different out there. When Dick Donner shot The Toy with Richard Pryor, there were many death threats on Pryor. They were shooting outside of Baton Rouge in that parish. They had police and state troopers living in the motel where Richard was. They were scared.

  Cubby and Harry staged a huge press conference in Jamaica, where we were shooting. Press from all over the world came because Roger Moore, who was quite well known, was starting his career as James Bond. There must have been four or five hundred press. The first question was inevitable. “What does it feel like to take over from Sean Connery?” Nobody mentioned George Lazenby. Next up—”Why are you doing this?”

  Roger answered, “When I was a young acting student at RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, I was in a play and we were lucky enough to have Noel Coward in the audience. After the play was over, Noel came backstage and said to me, ‘Young man, with your devastating good looks and your disastrous lack of talent, you should take any job ever offered you. And, in the unlikely occurrence you're offered two jobs simultaneously, take the one that pays the most money.’ And, here I am.” He disarmed everybody. Noel Coward had just died. He said, “And pity Noel couldn't be here to watch me as Bond, because when he saw me in the play, I only had four expressions. Now I have six.” Well, you just had to love him.

  One of the first days shooting, Roger was supposed to run for a double-decker bus. There was a bus chase, and the top half of it was sheared off by a low bridge or something. Guy Hamilton said, “All right, Roger, just run across the square and hop onto the bus and that's a cut.”

  Roger said, “I think I ought to tell you something, Guy. I can't run.”

  Guy said, “You can't run?”

  Roger said, “Well, of course I can run. But when I run, I look like a giant twit.”

  Guy said, “All right then, run for us.” And he ran. Roger has such long legs that he bounded when he ran, sort of like Bambi. He was perfectly in shape, but it did look kind of odd. Guy said, “All right, then, Roger, on action, walk briskly toward the bus.” Oh boy, look at James Bond, he can't run. But Roger was absolutely a delight.

  Now, the big thing about Live and Let Die was in the beginning, I wrote Solitaire black. In the book she was white. I made some changes. Fleming believed in the British Raj. He was, in essence, a racist. In the kindest way. It wasn't vituperative racism. In the book Goldfinger, it says, “The swarthy Yid lifted his eyebrow,” referring to Goldfinger, who was clearly Jewish. In Live and Let Die, a lot of it took place in Harlem, and it was African Americans. But the last movie Fleming must have seen with African Americans in it was Gone with the Wind. This was 1972, and they were making Superfly and Across 110th Street. In the book, the black people were saying stuff like, “Sho'nuff.” Waiting on the levy. Waiting for the Robert E. Lee. Cubby and Harry asked me, “Which one do you want to do next?” I thought Live and Let Die was great because it was black, and it was of the times.

  So I wrote Solitaire black. She was the leading lady. And Bond would have to sleep with her. As a matter of fact, she's a virgin in the book, and he deflowers her. Diana Ross was interested in being in a Bond movie. She had been in one movie already, and she could act. As all of this is going on and we're working on the screenplay, David Picker reads the screenplay. He goes, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Everybody, we're going to have a meeting here. I can't have this. Solitaire can't be black.” I asked why, and he said to me, “Don't be such a Jane Fonda about this, will you? Listen.” He gave his reasons, which, if I were David Picker, I would have made. He said, “This is Roger's first movie, and I think he's going to be wonderful. But Diana Ross is one of a kind. What if she blows him off the screen? She's hot, and you bet she's going to be singing the title song, and she's in the movie, and we got a new Bond. But secondly, and most importantly, there are about eight countries in the world where I cannot release this film if they sleep together. And the biggest one is our second-biggest-grossing country in the world, Japan. They don't allow race mixing in Japanese movies. They don't like Koreans, they don't like Chinese. Now they don't care if white superheroes are with Japanese girls, but black and white, Chinese/Japanese, it's just anathema. They're not going to do it. Now, South Africa is also a big-grossing place for us. There are Middle Eastern countries. And also, when you have James Bond deflowering a black virgin played by Diana Ross, I'm not so sure you guys want to go to the Detroit opening of this movie either.”

  So we said, “Okay, okay.” In the script, Rosie Carver was white and Solitaire was black. Now, Solitaire was white and Rosie Carver was black. Jane Seymour had been in a British miniseries. I still think Jane looked too young in the movie, but it made her. Jane was cast as Solitaire.

  We were shooting in Jamaica, and Harry said, “You've got to get guards in Jamaica, it's dangerous. So I've taken the liberty of getting us all guards for our houses.” The first night we were there, we went out to dinner and all our guards robbed our houses. So things didn't work out for Harry a lot.

  We got to the crocodile farm, and there came the time when we had to do the stunt with Bond hopping over the tops of the crocodiles. Their little legs were tied down underwater, but their mouths and tails were free. The stuntman, Bob Simmons, dressed as Roger, hopped off the island onto the first crocodile and slipped. The crocodile turned its head and went whap, and just missed him. The stuntman said, “My fault, my fault.” He got back on the island. New set of clothes. He did it again, and he slipped on the second on
e, and the second one got his shoe. Just ripped it off. He said, “That's it, sorry. Not doing it.”

  Harry went berserk. “We've got Bond on the island surrounded by crocodiles, how do we get him off?” He turned to me and said, “You're the writer. How do we get him off?”

  I said, “Harry, I don't know. A helicopter comes by?”

  All of a sudden, a grip spoke up. “I have an idea. Why don't you go into Kingston into a sporting goods store? What if you got track shoes with cleats?”

  So we got a pair of track shoes. Painted them to look like Roger's beautiful shoes. And the stunt that's in the movie is the very first take. He hopped over all four and got to land. I learned, keep your ears open. People on the crew have suggestions. Here's big Harry Saltzman, the big producer; me, the hot young writer; and the great stuntman, and a grip said, “How about if you had cleats on your shoes?”

  In those days, there was no CGI. All the stunts were real. I would have to okay every stunt that I was writing with Bob Simmons. I'd say to Bob, “And it goes into a second-story window.” He'd say, “No, we can't, no ramp, we can't get up into a second-story window. We can go into the golf course.” For the boat chase, Jerry Comeaux set the record for the world's longest boat leap on film. It was ninety-eight feet. It went up and over Sheriff Pepper and everybody. Then, Bond is chasing the villain. Jerry played the villain, then Bond chasing him. There were no black stuntmen at the time who drove boats. So unfortunately, all of the black boatmen who are chasing Bond are white guys in blackface. We had black stuntmen who started to object, and then Guy Hamilton asked, “Well, would you like to take the jump?”

  They said, “No fucking way we're gonna take that jump. We don't know how to do that.”

  Guy said, “Well, we've got to have the jump in the movie.”

  Now, of course, there are black stuntmen that can do everything. That stunt was a big specialty. The unfortunate thing was, Jerry Comeaux did it twice, and then said he could do it better. And Guy let him. The boat flipped in midair, and Jerry broke his back. I found out later, when I was directing, if you've got a stunt to do and it's done well and the guy says, “I can do it better,” say, “No, thank you. I've got what I want.” Just take it.

  In the script that United Artists had, it said, “There follows the most terrific boat chase you ever saw.” Then it says, “Exterior. Hotel. Morning. Bond wakes up.” So finally we were already starting to shoot, and David Picker called and asked, “Could I actually read the most terrific boat chase I ever saw, because I think you guys are shooting and we just wanted to read it.” The boat chase itself written out was fifteen pages. I was doing it shot for shot. Almost storyboarding on paper.

  Walking the Tightrope

  In Live and Let Die, we had a wonderful character called Sheriff J.W. Pepper who's after Bond the whole time. I made him a racist southern sheriff. A wonderful actor from New York, Clifton James, played him with an accurate southern accent and a pot belly. We were shooting out in the boondocks in the bayou, and all the local sheriffs would come by and watch us shoot. They'd laugh like hell at him, and they all looked and talked exactly like him. When he stops one of the black hoods, he says, “Whirl around, boy. Ten fingers on the fender.” Then he spits between the guy's legs and says, “I don't imagine this is exactly your debut at this sort of thing.” The black audiences I saw it with were like, “Whoa.” Then he becomes a comical character, because everything happens to him and he never can catch anybody. But that, in many ways, was my proudest moment writing Bond. Vincent Canby in the New York Times gave me a wonderful review: “How did Mankiewicz write this screenplay with things the way they are racially in this country? All the villains are black and all the heroes are white, and he makes it work.” It worked great with black audiences. They loved that movie. It was walking that tightrope.

  Yaphet Kotto, who was a real up-and-coming black actor, was very worried at the start of the film about the dignity of the black man. At the end of the picture, his character gets inflated like a rubber ball and bursts. I had a long talk with him. He had just been in Across 110th Street, which was very much a blaxploitation movie in the best sense of the word. I said, “Everybody knew Goldfinger was Jewish, but nobody thought he represented an anti-Semitic character. This is not anti-black, it's a Bond movie.” And he was wonderful in it. He and Guy Hamilton didn't get along very well. Guy was very reserved, and Yaphet was like an open cut in terms of talking about people. Guy didn't like to say very much. Very British Raj. So in that sense, a very good director for Roger. Guy and Sean almost said nothing. By the time Sean did Diamonds, he'd played the part so often, there's no great mystery in those scenes as a way to play it. And Sean knew the way to play it.

  Moore McCartney

  John Barry had been such a great composer. Cubby was good friends with John, but it was a new Bond, and John Barry had a particular sound that reminded you of Sean. So Cubby had the idea of going for Paul McCartney. They made a deal with McCartney whereby McCartney owned 100 percent of the song, but United Artists could put it on the album. In those days, a movie soundtrack album sold a lot. So UA owned the album, owned the song 100 percent for the album. McCartney owned the rest to it; the single, the publishing. He was so huge at the time.

  Cubby loved Jerry Moss, my friend at A&M. He'd met Jerry a couple of times with me in L.A. and then in London, when Jerry was signing artists. There was a scoring session, and Cubby said to me the next day, “Well, we got taken. This is crap.”

  I said, “Play it.”

  Cubby put on a cassette. It was “Live and Let Die.” I said, “Cubby, I think it's pretty good. I'm not just saying that.”

  He said, “Oh, I think it's a pile of crap.”

  I said, “Jerry Moss is in London.”

  “Yeah, let's play it for Jerry Moss.”

  So we played it for Jerry, and Jerry said, “You don't like the song, Cubby?” He said no. Jerry said, “Well, I'll tell you what. For whatever rights you have to this song, I'll pay you a million dollars, because this song is going to go platinum. This song is gonna win the fuckin' Oscar.”

  Cubby asked, “You really think so?”

  Jerry said, “I really think so. I'm quite serious: if you want to negotiate with me, I'd love to take this song off your hands.”

  Starting the next day, Cubby said, “And we have the greatest fuckin' song you ever heard! This is unbelievable!” It wasn't his kind of music. Cubby liked Sinatra.

  Live and Let Die, to my knowledge, is the only James Bond film that was ever written end to end by one writer. I have sole credit. Nobody else touched it. Today they hire Paul Haggis to do the final rewrite, and they get different teams to write different scripts, and they pick the best one. Sometimes there are great sequences from scripts that they own, and they stick them in the one that they're shooting. It's a different way of doing it now.

  Writing for Roger Moore is different from writing for Sean. Roger is really an actor in a theatrical way. Where Sean would throw away the throw-away lines, Roger would play with them. The difference between them is that Sean could sit at a table in a nightclub with a beautiful girl and either lean across the table and kiss her or stick a knife in her gut under that table and then say, “Excuse me, waiter, I have nothing to cut my meat with now.” Roger could kiss her, but he looked nasty if he was going to stick a knife in her, because Roger looks like a nice man. Sean looks, in the best sense of the word, the best movie-star sense of the word, like a bastard. There's a twinkle in his eye and there's violence in his eye. When he comes into a room, you think, okay, look out. With Roger, you have to write the entrance more. He is much more Fleming's Bond. That's exactly who Fleming thought of as Bond. He's very English. Big and tall. Sophisticated. Roger looked like a nice guy. So the kinds of sadistic things that Sean could do that the audience roared at, Roger couldn't do.

  But Roger was a very sophisticated actor with a presence. For instance, in Live and Let Die, he's being chased in an airport by thugs, and he
hops into a place where a little old lady is waiting to take a flying lesson. He says, “I'll be your instructor today, Mrs. Bell,” and they go. They never leave the ground, but they smash through hangars, destroy things. And at the end of it, she's passed out and the wings have been sheared off the little plane. Roger looks at her and says, “Same time tomorrow, Mrs. Bell?” Well, he could do that and be charming. That's not a good line for Sean. Roger could play those lines. When the bad guys are going to feed Bond to the crocodiles—Roger is their prisoner, he's touring around the crocodile farm—the bad guy says, “Now, this is the time I like best. Feedin' time.” Roger says, “I suspect the highlight of the tour.” He could do it in a wonderful, English, sophisticated way. But that would not be a line for Sean. So you wrote for them differently. You just got into their rhythm.

  The Lizard

  After Diamonds Are Forever and Live and Let Die, back in L.A. I had a relationship with Elizabeth Ashley. In 1973 I was feeling pretty hot because Diamonds Are Forever had been a hit and Live and Let Die was completed, and I was going to do another one. Elizabeth had received a Golden Globe nomination for The Carpetbaggers and had appeared in Ship of Fools and on Broadway in Barefoot in the Park. She was nuts, high strung; just perfect for me. She had gotten divorced from George Peppard. And George was a real piece of work. He was a heavy drinker. He would come over, and sometimes he'd be drunk. He came over once when I wasn't there and fired his gun into the ceiling. He had terrible drinking problems. He was a really good actor, he did Breakfast at Tiffany's with Audrey Hepburn; he should have been a big movie star. But booze really, really hurt him.

  I was living at Elizabeth's off and on. George said to me, “You know, my agents tell me this movie I'm doing needs a rewrite, and they said, ‘Tom Mankiewicz would be good.’ And I'm not even aware of the fact that he's a good writer; all I know is he's fucking my wife.”

  I'm not a brave man. Maybe I'm not cowardly, but I'm certainly not brave. I said, “Well, George, what can I tell you? Your agent's right and you're right.” It came out before I'd even had a chance to think about it, and I thought, he's going to kill me. He just smiled and sat there. It's one of the few times in my life where my mouth was so far ahead of my brain.