by Gore Vidal
Now let us look at the villains of the book. “Although [Herbert Allen] was trim and fit, he had slightly sunken eyes which gave him a somewhat gaunt, tired look and projected coolness, cynicism, nonchalance, and even indifference, much more often than joy or sadness.” This does not sound at all like a well-coiffed person to me. The author keeps fretting about those eyes. “While Herbert’s slightly sunken eyes appeared to reveal fatigue and worry…they were an inherited characteristic,” and his Uncle Charles has them, too. Even so…Although Mr. Hirschfield’s sexual life is not discussed (marital strain is alluded to only toward the end), Herbert Allen’s girlfriends are noted by name and his suite on the Carlyle Hotel’s thirty-first floor is made to sound jumping: “…he was a bit compulsive about the physical standards he set for his women. He would mull over fine points of physique with cronies, etc.,” but then Allen was “divorced in 1971—after nine years of marriage and four children.” What any of this has to do with the Begelman case is a question best asked of the ghost of Jacqueline Susann, which hovers over these often steamy pages.
* * *
On the other hand, the relationship between Allen and Hirschfield is interesting. The latter was an employee of Allen and Company, a powerful investment firm run by Herbert’s uncle, Charles Allen. “Hirschfield considered himself superior in intellect and business acumen to Herbert Allen, Jr., the firm’s scion…who was four and half years younger than Hirschfield and, unlike Hirschfield, born to great wealth.” This has the ring of truth. “He, not Herbert, had saved Columbia. He, not Herbert, was one of the brightest young show-business executives in the nation.” Worse, the little that Herbert knew about movies he had learned from old-fashioned oldsters like Ray Stark. Fortunately, “none of Hirschfield’s feelings was stated or even hinted in Herbert’s presence, however. While never best friends, Alan and Herbert always had had a close, comfortable relationship which continued in the summer of 1977.” Summertime for Iago.
It is odd how widely Mr. McClintick misses the point of the relationship between Allen and Hirschfield. He writes as if they were equals. They are not. Allen is, as the author puts it, a “scion”; Hirschfield is a hired hand. From Mr. McClintick’s account it would appear that in the course of the drama Hirschfield may have had occasional delusions of equality—if he did, he destroyed himself because, as every scion knows from the moment he first teethes on that silver spoon, the one with the money wins because that is the American way. Since workers in the Hollywoods often make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, there is a tendency to think of them as rich. They are not or, as John O’Hara once said of the best-selling writer, “He has the income of a millionaire without the million dollars.” David Begelman was also a hired hand. But he had developed an expertise: He could put together successful films. That is a gift so rare—and often so temporary, fashions change rapidly in movieland—that the board of Columbia forgave him his trespasses by invoking mental illness and let him go on as before. With perfect hindsight, this was a stupid thing to do; but it was done and Hirschfield made no demur.
* * *
Mr. McClintick describes Ray Stark at considerable length. “As long as anyone in Hollywood could remember, Ray Stark had been known to friend and foe alike as ‘The Rabbit.’ ” The Wise Hack shook his head and wheezed, “News to me. And I go back to the first rewrite on that Hong Kong thing—The World of Herman Orient”—he meant The World of Susie Wong; the Wise Hack tends to mix up movie titles but he is precise when it comes to movie deals. “Although many people assumed that the tag originated as a sexual reference,” Mr. McClintick delicately sows a seed, “it was a physical description coined by Fanny Brice, who was to become Stark’s mother-in-law in the 1940s….Although he was far from being what Herbert Allen called him—‘the most important producer in Hollywood post-1948’ (he had produced little of artistic distinction, and his films had won very few Academy Awards, none as best picture)—Ray Stark had accomplished something that the entertainment industry admires more than anything else because it is so elusive—commercial consistency.” He means Stark’s pictures made money.
In thirty years Stark had gone from hired hand (he was a writer’s agent and then a movie producer) to movie mogul. When Columbia started to come apart in 1973, Stark could deal as an equal with the Allen family. Together Stark and the scion hired both Hirschfield and Begelman. Stark himself continued to make his own pictures; sometimes at Columbia and soemtimes not. Mr. McClintick discusses at length the relationship between the sixty-two-year-old Stark and the thirty-three-year-old Herbert Allen: Never at a loss for a Freudian cliché, he speculates that Stark is in need of a surrogate son, following “the death, apparently by suicide, of Ray’s son, Peter.”
“Cheap shot,” muttered the Wise Hack. “Anyway, Ray knew Herbert before the kid died.” We were seated in the study of the Wise Hack’s house. “I got the letters, too,” he added, with a McClintickesque tight smile. “What letters?” The Wise Hack’s style is often Delphic. “Here,” he handed me two badly Xeroxed letters. “These have been going around the town. Just like the book.” One of the letters was from our author Mr. David McClintick to Ray Stark. The other was Stark’s answer.
* * *
On September 5, 1980, Mr. McClintick wrote Stark a magisterial letter. He was, he said, disappointed that he had not been able to “break through the stiffness, awkwardness and discomfort that have always characterized our relationship if it can be called a relationship.”
“When Herbert and I first discussed my book nearly two years ago, he said that he would give me full cooperation and that he would do everything he could to encourage you and David Begelman to cooperate as well.” Apparently, Herbert Allen and David Begelman each gave fifteen hours of time to the author—“these sessions were painful,” McClintick concedes; doubtless the principals must find the resulting use of their time even more painful. “By contrast,” Mr. McClintick chides, “you have granted me precisely one hour in connection with my book. (A previous hour in your office in December 1977 concerned an article for The Wall Street Journal.) Not only was the time far too short, but the atmosphere was hardly conducive to a relaxed and candid conversation. Furthermore, you saw fit to bring a witness—a gesture to which frightened people sometimes resort, but which I found odd in these circumstances, and even a little rude.”
Unlike Allen and Begelman and the novel’s hero, Hirschfield, Stark was not about to help Mr. McClintick turn him into a fictional character. But Stark had no choice; Mr. McClintick is an auteur, a creator of true fictions or fictive truths in the great line of those ci-devant novelists Capote and Mailer. He can invent Ray Stark as both Mailer and Capote, separately, invented Marilyn Monroe.
Mr. McClintick mounts his high horse. “Ray, I’m sure that you feel that the one hour you gave me fulfills your commitment.” The word commitment is the giveaway—the auteur knows that he—and he alone—is the creator of this particular universe and none of his characters is going to be autonomous. “You have told me repeatedly how you rarely give any time to journalists, implying that I should be deeply honored to receive even one hour. All I can say is that I am not just another Hollywood gossip monger. I am one of the top investigative reporters in this country (Pulitzer Prize nominee) and am writing a serious book about events in which you played a major role…the book will include the deepest and most detailed portrait of you that has ever been written or ever will be written until someone does your biography or you do your autobiography…” At this moment any semi-autonomous character in a true fiction would have taken to his heels.
Stark’s response is benign: “I respect you as a Pulitzer Prize nominee and, therefore, I must respect your power of observation and presume by this time you should know that I am a very private person. I doubt whether you can find a dozen quotes or two interviews given by me in the last ten years….You and I have talked congenially, I believe, several times. Once at a premiere in New York and at
length, I thought, in my office in California. It may have only been for an hour according to your time, but since my interest span is short, it seemed like several hours to me.” Stark notes that one of his associates joined them for lunch not “as a witness because long ago I found it very difficult to refute what a writer may interpret or write regardless of there being a witness. She was along to refresh my memory.
“That misinterpretation on your part only strengthens my reluctance to break what has been my lifelong policy against interviews and personal publicity….The fact that you want to give ‘the deepest and most detailed portrait of me that has ever been written’ certainly motivates me not to talk to you.” Thus one of Pirandello’s characters tries to leave the stage. Stark notes that “it is difficult for me to express to you that I have nothing to hide. It is merely that I have no desire to have my privacy invaded.” He ends, cheerfully, “I wish that all of your efforts are fruitful for you. At least now you are in possession of one of the longest and most revealing letters that I have ever written to a member of the press.”
* * *
Mr. McClintick’s revenge is outright. He accuses Stark of various crimes and then says that these accusations are either untrue or unverifiable. He quotes one of Hirschfield’s tirades: “Ray is in no position to threaten or blackmail. I assure every one of you that with two phone calls—to the SEC and IRS—Ray will be busy for the rest of his life. I will not hesitate to make those calls.” If that is not an accusation of corporate and personal crookedness, it is hard to know what is. But our auteur has put an asterisk beside this “quotation.” At the bottom of the page, there is a footnote in the smallest type that my eye can read: “This was a threat, made in the passion of a heated meeting, which turned out to be empty. Hirschfield had no evidence of any wrongdoing by Stark that would have been of interest to the SEC or IRS.” This is good to know but why quote a libel that one knows to be untrue?
Later, our auteur goes even further. Somehow, Mr. McClintick obtained a copy of a letter that the columnist Liz Smith wrote to Ray Stark. “I was trying,” she writes, “to explain why I had to come down harder on the Begelman affair than you might want me to, considering your friendship. All these items on my desk saying he owes you $600,000 and you had a deal with him to take all your worthless as well as good projects for Columbia, and on and on. All that has been kept out of my column. I consider that friendship, Ray…”
Now for the pussy-footnote: “Of course the ‘items’ about a $600,000 debt and Begelman’s buying Stark’s ‘worthless’ projects for Columbia were omitted from Smith’s column not because of friendship but because she could not verify them as anything more than unfounded rumors.” So our auteur prints slanders based on “unfounded rumors” that Liz Smith did not see fit to print, in order to make us think that Stark and Begelman were defrauding Columbia. There is no experience quite like being caught in an American journalist’s true fiction where the laws of libel—not to mention grammar—often seem not to obtain.
* * *
The Begelman affaire is of more interest as a study in contemporary journalistic practices than it is of skulduggery in the movie business. After Begelman’s reinstatement, the press found out what happened. As the storm of publicity broke over Columbia (Mr. McClintick’s style is contagious) Stark and Allen remained Begelman’s allies. Hirschfield waffled. Since every bad novel must have a good-guy hero, Mr. McClintick would have us believe that, from the beginning of the scandal, Hirschfield had been morally outraged and sickened by Begelman’s crimes. If he had been, then he was very much out of character—or at least out of that character which our auteur has invented for him. Apparently after Hirschfield became president of Columbia, he hired a man who had been fired “from CBS Records for misappropriation of funds and was under federal indictment for income tax evasion….
“‘What if Clive goes to jail?’ Herbert Allen asked Hirschfield.
“‘Then he’ll run it from Danbury [a federal prison in Connecticut],’ Hirschfield replied, only half in jest.” Later, at another studio, Hirschfield kept in office a man caught with his hand in the till. As our amateur gorgeously puts it: “Hollywood is a town that takes delight in spitting in the face of irony.”
The press did a good bit of spitting, too, and Hollywood was subjected to creative as well as investigative reporting. Characteristically, The New York Times took the low road. They assigned that excellent young novelist and West Point graduate Lucian K. Truscott IV to thread the Hollywood maze. He did his best—but West Point and the army are not much use when it comes to reading audits. Truscott heard all the old rumors, including the perennial one that organized crime and the movie business have often had carnal, as it were, knowledge of one another. Although there is probably a good deal of truth in this, one must first discover an authentic smoking gun. Truscott’s piece, according to Mr. McClintick, “was strewn with falsehoods, large and small.” Old Charles Allen was labeled “The Godfather of the New Hollywood”; a photograph of crime lord Meyer Lansky was published—and, of course, there was Begelman.
“Word on the article was beginning to circulate, the price of Columbia’s stock was plummeting, and at noon Friday, the New York Stock Exchange stopped trading the stock because an influx of sell orders had made orderly trading impossible.” When it comes to mischief, never underestimate the power of The New York Times. But, for once, the Times had met its match. “That afternoon, Allen & Company announced publicly that it would sue The New York Times for $150 million for publishing false and defamatory statements….Three months later, after elaborate negotiations between lawyers for the two sides, The New York Times found it necessary to publish perhaps the most elaborate retraction, correction, and apology in the history of major American newspapers up to that time.” There is an obscure footnote to the effect that a Mr. Abe Rosenthal, identified as the executive editor of the paper, was away at the time that the price was published. Social notes from all over.
* * *
In due course, Begelman left Columbia. Then Hirschfield departed after he was caught trying secretly to get Sir James Goldsmith to buy Columbia away from the Allens—the sort of behavior that is bound to make irritable your average sunken-eyed employer. Although Hirschfield had always denied that he wanted to leave New York for Hollywood, he indeed went to Hollywood in a big way; currently, he is head of production at Twentieth Century-Fox. Meanwhile, Columbia, Stark, Allen and Company continue to prosper; and so it goes…Hollywood is what it is.
Traditionally, bad writers like to take fierce Moral Stands. They depict their characters in the blackest of black and the whitest of white. Ostensibly, Mr. McClintick is cleaning out the Augean stables of the Republic. He will give us the lowdown about Hollywood (all that money, all those movie stars!), a glittering cancer that is munching away at the very heart of what is, after all—in the immortal phrase of a writer very much like Mr. McClintick, Spiro Agnew—the greatest nation in the country. But, surely, the author knows that Hollywood is no more corrupt than Detroit or Washington. This is a nation of hustlers and although it is always salutary to blow the whistle on the crooks, it is hard to see, in this particular case, just what all the fuss is about. Begelman’s forgeries are psychologically interesting—but hardly worth a book when we still know so little about the man. The loyalty of the board of directors to Begelman could be interpreted as just that; hence, something rather rare in Hollywood. In any case, it was the board that notified the SEC; called in the auditors; and let Begelman, finally and messily, go. Hirschfield’s problems with Herbert Allen, Jr., belong to the realm not of mortality but of the higher hustler-dom and we know, at a glance, what makes him run.
The implicit moral of Indecent Exposure (thus, irony spits back) is not the story that the book tells but the book itself as artifact, the work of a writer who believes that he can take real people and events and remake them, as it were, in his own image. Worse, he is so filled with an odd animus t
oward most of his characters that he repeats accusations that he knows to be untrue so that he can then recant them, slyly, in footnotes to the text. If the “finest libel lawyer in America” told the writer that he could get away with this sort of hit-and-run tactic, I can only defer to what is, after all, a superior knowledge of our republic’s greasy laws; but as “an astute editorial critic” he should have advised the creator to forget all about instructing us in what Mr. McClintick refers to “as the lessons of power and arrogance” (which he is in no position either to learn or to apply), and simply tell the truth as far as the truth can ever be determined. This is what used to be known as journalism, an honorable trade, as demonstrated thirty years ago by Lillian Ross in her book Picture, where she recorded, in deadly detail, only what she herself had seen and heard at MGM during the making of The Red Badge of Courage. The result was definitive; and the really “real” thing.
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
September 23, 1982
CHAPTER 7
RONNIE AND NANCY: A LIFE IN PICTURES
1
I first saw Ronnie and Nancy Reagan at the Republican convention of 1964 in San Francisco’s Cow Palace. Ronnie and Nancy (they are called by these names throughout Laurence Leamer’s book Make-Believe: The Story of Nancy and Ronald Reagan) were seated in a box to one side of the central area where the cows—the delegates, that is—were whooping it up. Barry Goldwater was about to be nominated for president. Nelson Rockefeller was being booed not only for his communism but for his indecently uncloseted heterosexuality. Who present that famous day can ever forget those women with blue-rinsed hair and leathery faces and large costume jewelry and pastel-tinted dresses with tasteful matching accessories as they screamed “Lover!” at Nelson? It was like a TV rerun of The Bacchae, with Nelson as Pentheus.