As things turned out, Paramount’s flirtation with Julie Andrews and her husband would turn out to be a costly one. And Yvette never even got to have dinner with Julie. Almost immediately after getting into business together, Charlie Bluhdorn and Blake Edwards were at each other’s throat.
As I traveled between Paramount’s New York and Hollywood offices during the weeks when Darling Lili was coming together, I felt that I was working for two completely different companies. Bluhdorn had mesmerized the troops in New York into believing that the studio had finally found a superstar vehicle that would bring revenues and celebrity to the company. The marketing and distribution teams had apparently bought into it.
The attitude toward Darling Lili at the studio was the mirror opposite. “Evans won’t even listen when I raise the subject of cost. He walks out of the room. And the room is his own office,” complained Jack Ballard, who had recently become Paramount’s head of physical production.
As Ballard started reeling off his list of “hot buttons” on the project, I sensed that this tough, dome-headed production executive was close to desperation. This was a movie with complex song-and-dance numbers that would be staged on location in Europe. There would also be aerial dogfights featuring vintage aircraft. And it all would take place during World War I, which meant period wardrobe for vast numbers of extras.
And if shooting began to lag, what controls could the studio exercise? With a husband directing his wife, the studio would have no points of leverage, Ballard pointed out. And the couple had even chosen their own producer—another relative—so there would be no ranking studio representative on the picture.
When Edwards’s team finally submitted a budget, it totaled a mere $12 million, well below studio estimates, Ballard said. (In point of fact, the final budget would total three times Edwards’s estimate.)
I understood Ballard’s anxiety. No matter what warnings he would send forth, he’d still take the heat when the cost overruns starting coming in. If Darling Lili became a mess, it would ultimately be Ballard’s mess. Those were the studio ground rules—he understood them all too well.
While I empathized with Ballard’s panic, my problems with Darling Lili went beyond its production issues. Even when I described the story to my staff, I had trouble keeping a straight face.
Julie Andrews would play a German spy whose assigned mission was to seduce an American squadron commander. And the perfect actor for this role, Edwards had decided, was none other than Rock Hudson.
I found myself gasping over his casting epiphany. Where was the chemistry? Julie Andrews had been superbly effective as a governess in Mary Poppins, but her on-screen efforts at romance had never clicked. As an accomplished stage actress, she always seemed to keep a distance between her and the audience.
As for Rock Hudson, there were suspicions about his sexuality even in the late sixties. He never denied that he was gay, but he also went along with the official studio propaganda that he was dating various young actresses. I once found myself sitting next to him on a Pacific Southwest Airlines flight to San Francisco, and he cheerfully confided that he was going to “the baths.” At the time, I wasn’t even sure what “the baths” connoted. But, again, while Hudson was a friendly and scrupulously polite man, his “sex scenes” on camera registered zero on the passion index.
Within the first two weeks of principal photography, the predictable production problems began to loom. Edwards and Andrews arrived in Paris to shoot an elaborate scene at a railway station only to discover the city ablaze in rioting. Paris, like many U.S. cities, was caught up in sixties antiwar insurrection. The company quietly shifted to Brussels, where the scenes were shot at double the cost.
The next move was supposed to be to Ireland, but because of a production mix-up, no accommodations for director and star had been prearranged. Edwards’s producer charged that the Paramount production team was getting in their way. The Paramount folks responded that no one was running the show on Edwards’s side. Edwards himself was technically the producer, but his uncle, a gentle white-maned man named Owen Crump, was supposed to fulfill these duties. He in turn looked to a neophyte thirty-year-old associate producer named Ken Wales to hammer out the production details.
Wales knew he owed his career to his boss, Edwards, a man with expensive tastes. Panicked that no accommodations had been negotiated, he leased a thousand-acre estate that had long been the residence of one of Ireland’s wealthiest families. The sumptuous mansion was so vast it had a pipe organ in its grand salon.
When Julie Andrews saw it, she was ecstatic. There were even horses available for her to ride over the vast rolling acreage, and there were myriad rooms for guests.
Though the accommodations were felicitous, production delays continued to mount. A small theater in Dublin had been booked for the dance numbers, but its stage was too small to hold Edwards’s grand numbers. The initial scenes of an aerial dogfight went well, but suddenly the sun came out, the clouds disappeared, and Edwards and his cameraman, Russell Harlan, were cursing that they were stuck with a placid Southern California sky that didn’t match the first setups.
Then there was the inevitable Julie-and-Rock problem. The script called for an avid Julie Andrews to arouse passion in the stolid, dedicated American squadron leader, but, despite repeated takes and varied camera angles, the relationship between the two performers remained tepid.
Bob Evans was so irritated by the movie that after the first couple of days he abjured the ritual of dailies completely, and the rest of the executive staff followed suit. One day Jack Ballard joined me in the screening room, and he burst out laughing in the midst of a love scene. “I may never make love again,” Ballard blurted.
I found myself in Evans’s office later that day and, while I knew he hated Darling Lili stories, I could not restrain myself. “I was at a party last night when naked people were spilling out of the hot tub,” I said. “Everyone in this town seems to be fucking everyone else, and we’re making maybe the unsexiest movie in the history of Hollywood.”
“Rock’s a faggot,” Evans snapped. “What idiot would sign a faggot to shoot love scenes?”
The other individual in our company who was not watching dailies was Charlie Bluhdorn, but he had been briefed about the production delays, and his famous temper was steadily rising. Two or three times a day he would call Evans or Ballard to vent his frustration. “If you think you can control Blake Edwards, why don’t you go see him in person?” Evans finally demanded one day. He knew Bluhdorn hated confronting artists; but one morning Evans got a call from his boss in mid-flight, headed for Rome. On impulse Bluhdorn had diverted to Ireland. The time had come for a confrontation.
When Ken Wales got the call, he all but dropped the phone. This would be the worst possible moment for a Bluhdorn visit. Edwards had shot almost nothing for four days waiting for the clouds to return. The crew was playing soccer on the front lawn. Edwards’s daughter had broken her collarbone after falling from a horse, and Edwards was spending time with her while Julie was riding in the countryside with friends.
Wales phoned me in panic. “You’ve got to call him off,” he burbled, referring to Bluhdorn. “This would be a disastrous time.”
“He’ll be landing in a couple of hours,” I told Wales. “It’s out of my hands.”
“Then fly over yourself,” he urged. “Maybe if you were here ...”
I’d actually been planning a visit to the set in Ireland. I knew Bluhdorn’s visit would last only a few hours, but perhaps if I were on hand the following day I could comfort the survivors.
It was midafternoon when Charlie Bluhdorn arrived on the set of Darling Lili outside Dublin. He saw the crew kicking around a soccer ball. He saw the cameras standing idle. He saw no sign of his director—indeed no one was at hand except a stumbling Wales, trying to make excuses.
Sensing a major confrontation, Bluhdorn phoned his assistant in New York, instructing her to book a suite at the best hotel in Dublin she could
find. She came back on the line to report that Darling Lili had booked every room and, further, that Rock Hudson had reserved the grand ballroom that evening for a major party.
Bluhdorn jumped back into his limousine and demanded to be taken to the Blake-and-Julie estate. When he approached the baronial spread, his anger became a full-fledged tantrum. Emerging from his limo, Bluhdorn encountered Owen Crump, and he didn’t stop to shake hands. “Why the fuck is everyone standing around?” he roared. “Why are you living in the fanciest castle in Ireland when you are causing my company to go BROKE?”
His tirade went on for fifteen minutes and continued as Blake Edwards joined them. There were no questions asked. Bluhdorn was not interested in hearing any apologies or explanations. His message was clear and bellicose: start shooting some scenes or the movie gets shut down.
When I arrived on the set a day later, Edwards and his wife were shuttered in their mansion. Crump and Wales were still in shock, seeking sympathy and reassurance, neither of which I could offer them.
“Bluhdorn can’t fire Blake—Julie would walk,” Crump said. “And he can’t shut down the movie because too many millions have already been spent.”
The two men were not being defiant, I realized, but merely helpless. They were employees of a star director and his superstar wife. Bluhdorn might now be outraged at his impotence, but he had approved a deal in which the studio had no controls. My sympathy was more with them than with Bluhdorn.
We had a very alcoholic dinner together. Toward the end, Edwards himself materialized, looking pale and agonized, and started explaining his dilemma. “I’ve got a movie here that I don’t know how to shoot,” he said. “The goddamn sky—it doesn’t match. I could move the company to South Africa. The clouds are great there and dependable.”
“That’s a big move ...” Wales offered meekly.
“We never intended to spend the rest of our life in Ireland,” Edwards said.
When I next encountered Charlie Bluhdorn in New York, he seemed uncharacteristically subdued. He’d taken a beating from his board of directors. Gulf & Western shares were foundering, but there were ways of “finessing” the Darling Lili numbers, Bluhdorn assured me. He did not go into details. It was only a couple of years later that I learned of Bluhdorn’s scheme of shifting the rights—and hence the losses—from Gulf & Western to phantom companies. Suddenly they were not Paramount mistakes; they were the problems of another corporate entity entirely.
These were dangerous financial maneuvers, and Bluhdorn knew it, but he was desperate to save his Paramount investment not only from the fiasco of Darling Lili but also from the looming nightmare presented by his other would-be blockbuster, Paint Your Wagon.
Even as editing teams were still struggling to cut Lili into a coherent movie, yet another Paramount mammoth musical—one I had known virtually nothing about—was being unveiled to bewildered audiences on October 15, 1969. Paint Your Wagon had been an early Bluhdorn pet project—one he had been protecting like a mother hen. I had seen its title on the production sheets, but knew little about it.
All I did know was that its timing could not have been more disturbing.
Across town, Twentieth Century-Fox had just capsized because of its own musical calamities, thus abruptly ending the rule of the Zanuck dynasty at that studio. A close friend of Evans, Dick Zanuck, had inherited the studio from his fabled father, Darryl, and had turned out a series of worthy films such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Patton. All was going well for the young Zanuck until he, too, came under the spell of the musical. In quick succession his company produced bombs like Doctor Dolittle, Star, and Hello, Dolly, resulting in giant losses that threatened the very life of the company.
Dick Zanuck’s firing cast a pall over Evans. If the scion of the Zanuck dynasty could be abruptly dismissed, surely Evans, too, was headed for the guillotine, even though he had opposed the musicals that now enshrouded the studio.
Paint Your Wagon, like Darling Lili, grew out of an early Bluhdorn infatuation. Julie Andrews radiated stardom to Bluhdorn, and Alan Jay Lerner belonged in the same constellation. He was the impresario who seemed to own Broadway and who would surely have the same impact in Hollywood.
Bluhdorn had met Lerner a couple of times, and Evans had dated Karen Gunderson, the attractive young actress who was about to become Lerner’s fifth wife. A small, fidgety, hyperactive man, Lerner had been born into money thanks to his parents’ chain of low-end clothing stores. At forty-nine, he was determined to build his career in show business beyond Broadway. His partner, Fritz Loewe, at sixty-three, was a genteel European who pined for semiretirement.
Both had been frustrated by their earlier experiences in the movie business. The screen adaptations of Brigadoon and My Fair Lady had seemed tasteless and cheesy in their view. Lerner, a control freak, felt an urgent need to prove himself and to bring the same mastery to cinema that he had evidenced on Broadway.
Hence, Lerner was highly susceptible to Bluhdorn’s exuberant courtship. Not only would both Paint Your Wagon and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever be made, but Lerner would exercise creative control, and receive producer credit. To further sweeten the deal, Paramount offered to put up $2.5 million to develop yet another Lerner-Loewe musical called Coco, based on the life of the French couturier Coco Chanel. The show had allegedly attracted the interest of Katharine Hepburn.
The deal seemed too good to be true, and Charlie Bluhdorn even assured them that he would consent to Barbra Streisand starring in Clear Day—his admission that his disparagement of Funny Girl had been a mistake.
An aura of desperation seemed to surround Paint Your Wagon from its moment of inception. No one seemed to believe it would be a success. The sheer mention of the title evoked apprehension, even denial. Paint Your Wagon was like a virus, and everyone around it seemed eager to distance himself.
From the moment I learned of the project, my own attitude was one of disbelief. I vaguely remembered seeing the show, which had been launched during the 1951–52 Broadway season. I think I nodded off even then when an actor started to sing “I Talk to the Trees.” And I never understood why the wind was named Mariah.
On Broadway, the show got mixed reviews; critics found the plot about the 1849 California gold rush to be an odd setting for a musical. The book was weak and there was no runaway hit song. After a decent run, the show ended up with a modest $95,000 deficit.
Nonetheless, the team of Lerner and Loewe had already established an aura of invincibility. Paint Your Wagon seemed clunky, but there were hints of momentous things to come—My Fair Lady, of course, in 1956, was to transform Lerner and Loewe into theater royalty, as was Gigi, in 1958, and Camelot, in 1960.
The notion of a Paint Your Wagon movie musical had been dismissed by one studio after another since the show’s opening. The consensus in Hollywood was that the basic plotline of a drunken old prospector who finds love with a Mexican outcast was intrinsically unappealing.
Paramount had flirted with it as a possible Bing Crosby vehicle, but Crosby had rejected it. The MGM hierarchs considered it for Spencer Tracy and Kathryn Grayson, but that went nowhere. Louis B. Mayer optioned it as he was departing as boss of MGM, and he’d talked to Clark Gable as a possible lead (Gable couldn’t sing). Finally, Eddie Fisher, the crooner, optioned the show as a possible role for himself, but that, too, could not find a backer.
When I first learned that Paramount had acquired Paint Your Wagon, I told Evans: “This show is beyond creaky—it’s comatose.”
“Bluhdorn loves it,” Evans said defensively. “Alan understands the problem with the book. We’re hiring the best writer in the business to fix it, Paddy Chayefsky.”
“Paddy Chayefsky writes movies like Network or Hospital, I said. “He writes great satire, but this is a period musical—”
“It’s Charlie’s passion,” Evans said. “We’ve got a fighting chance with Chayefsky.”
As it turned out, Chayefsky’s take on the musical was b
izarre. Instead of sticking with the original narrative, he created a bawdy tale of a town called No Name City, which was occupied by French hookers and grumpy prospectors. The principal characters were two partners who apparently shared a wife and who hung out in saloons and bawdy houses.
My suspicion was that Chayefsky, who was rumored to have writer’s block, had simply decided to earn a quick payday. Still Lerner, to my surprise, said he liked the draft and was going to do some further work on it. He also was bringing aboard André Previn to create two fresh numbers to be titled “Gold Fever” and “The Best Things in Life Are Dirty” (Lerner’s old partner, Fritz Loewe, had quietly dropped out of the adventure).
Since the “new” Paint Your Wagon was even stranger than the original one, I felt that the studio would never find a director willing to tackle the project. Lerner had earlier approached Blake Edwards, who’d turned it down (unfortunately, one reason he passed was that he was about to spring Darling Lili on the studio). Don Siegel, another Hollywood veteran, also passed.
But Lerner had his own secret weapon in reserve—the veteran Broadway director of South Pacific and Mister Roberts named Josh Logan. Lerner went to Bluhdorn with the proposal to go with Logan, and the studio officially agreed. This was now a “go” picture, Evans informed me. “Grin and bear it.”
The subtext of what he was saying was clear: This was going to be a surreal exercise and all we could do was watch. How bad could it be?
Truly bad, as we were to find out. And each step in the process was, to use Evans’s word, increasingly surreal.
Peter Bart Page 6