Peter Bart

by the Mob (And Sex) Infamous Players: A Tale of Movies

  The Josh Logan–Alan Jay Lerner favorite to play the lead was James Cagney, who had no intention of coming out of retirement. Their backup was Lee Marvin, who, like Clark Gable, Louis B. Mayer’s choice, couldn’t sing. Marvin, a famously heavy drinker, needed a job.

  His movie sidekick would be another apparent non-singer, Clint Eastwood. Having made his name in the Rawhide TV series and in Sergio Leone westerns (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, for one), Eastwood felt it would be a kick to sing in a Hollywood movie.

  Though few in Hollywood knew about it, Eastwood had once made an album in which he sang country-and-western songs—numbers that sounded as though they’d fallen out of a vintage Hollywood western. The album didn’t generate any excitement, but Eastwood was proud of it nonetheless.

  As his final casting inspiration, Logan settled on Jean Seberg to play the wife of the Mormon traveler who is auctioned off to the Marvin and Eastwood characters. Again, this marked a sharp departure; the actress had played the title role in Saint Joan and then appeared in Bonjour, Tristesse.

  The one decision on Paint Your Wagon I favored was the choice of location. By building a huge set in a remote section of northeast Oregon, forty-five miles from the town of Baker, Lerner and Logan guaranteed that few would bother visiting the set. The show would be isolated, as though it were a crazed relative. And starting in late spring of 1968, that is how it was regarded.

  The shoot was troubled from the outset. Arriving on location, Eastwood was indignant over Lerner’s extensive rewrites of Chayefsky’s screenplay. He felt the story had been conventionalized. Marvin started drinking heavily and was late to the set most mornings. Lerner and Logan soon started quarreling over performance and even camera angles, with Lerner criticizing his director in front of the company.

  Not surprisingly, the show was soon drifting behind schedule with Logan losing control of his set. Though the shoot was hermetically sealed from the outside world, word of trouble was now seeping out. One gossip column quoted Tom Shaw, the line producer, as saying, “We’re in one helluva fucking mess up here.” Eastwood summoned his agent to fly up for a meeting, and Lee Marvin was asked to join them. Marvin, having been drinking, promptly fell asleep at the table even as the salad was served.

  An alarmed Lerner started a furtive conversation with Richard Brooks, the veteran director of The Professionals and In Cold Blood, asking him to take over the reins from Logan. Brooks rejected the idea, but the approach nonetheless made a column item in the Los Angeles Times, thus causing Logan to fall further into panic.

  Evans flew to Oregon to reassure him. “Josh has been on lithium since preproduction,” Evans told me. “Now even the lithium isn’t enough to get him working.”

  Seberg and Eastwood, bored with the slumberous pace, had started a blatant affair. When Seberg’s husband, the French novelist Romain Gary, unexpectedly arrived on the set, he challenged Eastwood to a duel. Lee Marvin started disappearing regularly. The budget had almost doubled to roughly $100 million in current dollars. And Lerner, impotent as a producer, kept biting his fingernails so ferociously that the white gloves he habitually wore were bloody at the fingertips.

  Finally, production didn’t so much end as simply expire, its principals exhausted. The actors later grudgingly returned to rerecord their songs, Marvin’s in a low growl, Eastwood’s in a reedy tenor. Seberg’s songs were a total loss—another singer was summoned to record them. Lerner and Logan, meanwhile, kept quarreling, reediting each other’s work. One unexpected editing problem: Paramount wanted the film to be rated for family audiences, like most musicals, but its ad line announced: “Ben and Pardner shared everything—even their wife.” The motion picture code demanded an M tag, putting Paint Your Wagon in the rare position among musicals of earning a “mature audiences” admonition.

  Upon the film’s opening on October 15, 1969, the critics picked up on the off-center plot. Vincent Canby of the New York Times acknowledged his pique over “the rather peculiar psychological implications in the plot”—namely the bonding of the two leading males. Writing in Holiday, Rex Reed dismissed it as “a monument of unparalleled incompetence.”

  In one magazine interview, Logan described Lerner as having been “pieced together by the great, great-grandson of Dr. Frankenstein from a lot of disparate spare parts.” The director described the movie as “the most flagrant throwing away of money I’ve ever seen.” To be sure, he’d presided over the excesses.

  After the movie’s release, Marvin promised never to sing again. Eastwood vowed he would henceforth commit only to films made on a disciplined budget. Josh Logan never again directed a movie. Jean Seberg’s career all but disappeared.

  Lerner and Loewe would live to regret their exuberance over their Paramount connection. Despite Lerner’s creative control, or perhaps because of it, both Paint Your Wagon and Clear Day would be major failures at the box office, both critically and commercially. Coco never opened on Broadway. Instead, an original film for the screen called The Little Prince would go into production and it, too, would be a dismal failure. A version also failed on Broadway.

  Alan Jay Lerner in particular became embittered by his Paramount experience. It utterly confounded him that his films would seem to reflect, if not exaggerate, his weaknesses—extravagance and an absence of discipline—rather than give voice to his soaring imagination. To compound his frustration, Lerner was to see Paramount’s fortunes climb from the moment that he left the studio. It was as though the studio suffered from a Lerner curse.

  Bluhdorn was bitterly disappointed over Paint Your Wagon.

  He was now aware that while his ferocious willpower could reshape financial deals, it could not reshape a motion picture. Egos like Alan Jay Lerner’s and Blake Edwards’s were simply immune to the Bluhdorn bluster. He could rage and fume, but films would still fall relentlessly behind schedule. He could promise blockbusters to theater owners, but now they became keenly aware that he was delivering bombs.

  But, Bluhdorn was not ready to give up on the movie business. And even as he raged at Bob Evans, and tried to blame him for his own shortcomings, he knew that Evans in fact represented his only hope.

  Surrendering any measure of control was terrifying to Charlie Bluhdorn, but reality was beginning to sink in.

  CHAPTER 5

  Lovers

  It was an hour into the screening when I sensed something was amiss. A fidgety audience usually spells trouble, but this crowd was definitely unfidgety; in fact, it seemed eerily quiet. No one was whispering, no one was heading to the bathroom. Indeed, no one seemed to be breathing.

  Now there was a new sound in the theater, the sound of people sniffling. I stared through the flickering darkness. The hankies had come out and folks throughout the audience were dabbing at their cheeks or blowing their noses, men as well as women. One woman’s audible sob caused a nervous titter in the theater.

  Seated in the last row, I, too, found myself dabbing away my tears—tears of relief. I elbowed Robert Evans, seated next to me. His expression seemed dazed. Together, we were experiencing for the first time the curious alchemy of our movie, Love Story. This was its initial public screening, and the audience reaction confounded us. We had been told repeatedly that this movie—this old-fashioned “weepy”—couldn’t work. The times were too hip, the audiences too edgy. The people out there wanted Midnight Cowboy or Easy Rider.

  They were wrong, of course. Within days the entire community seemed to be uttering those signature words, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” I never really understood the meaning of that sentence, but it sold the movie. For some unfathomable reason, filmgoers wanted to accept that murky message and to indulge in its sentiment. The ultimate “date movie” was born.

  In the following weeks and months, hundreds of thousands of young couples would shed tears over Ali MacGraw’s cinematic send-off, would hold hands and comfort one another, and, from all reports, would go on to have comforting sex. Young men all over the world wou
ld testify to the qualities of the film as Hollywood’s supreme aphrodisiac. I remember running into one nineteen-year-old outside a Los Angeles theater telling me with great sincerity, “See it and score, man.” He loved the movie and had seen it three times with three different girls.

  Three weeks after the test screening I would be riding in a limousine on a dark Saturday night in December 1969, in the company of Charles Bluhdorn, the manic chairman. Bluhdorn wanted to tour the movie theaters in Manhattan to discover who (if anyone) would turn up to see what he’d labeled “this fucking tearjerker.” He had heard that the film had done well in its first screening, but was nonetheless skeptical. He had been there before—glowing reports had been delivered on other Paramount films and they had turned out to be turkeys. They’d been pricey failures at that—all of them Bluhdorn’s personal picks. Bluhdorn tensed as we saw the line outside the Loew’s State Theater on Broadway. It was already snaking its way around the corner. He stared at the marquee in excitement—Love Story was heralded in giant letters.

  At Bluhdorn’s command, the driver pulled to the curb. A harried-looking man who seemed to be the theater manager was out front trying to shepherd the line. He, too, looked astonished by the size of the crowd.

  Bluhdorn now bolted from the limo. I saw him charging the theater manager. “Don’t just stand there,” Bluhdorn screamed at the startled man. “Look at this line! Do something! Raise the fucking prices!”

  It was a preposterous proposal, of course—one which the theater manager ignored—but it was pure Bluhdorn. And it told me that Love Story would change everything. The studio would never be the same, nor would my job. This little movie that no one wanted to make would, in its own way, become one of the truly transformative hits of the moment—the movie that would save Paramount.

  Love Story was effectively the first film that I had gone out on a limb for.

  Bob Evans had liked it, too, but in his job as production chief, he was consumed by corporate intrigues and fiscal shortfalls. It was my role to tee up new projects, and I decided to keep persevering on Love Story. Every time it fell apart I found an excuse to keep putting it back on the table. It became a standing joke between Evans and me—I was supposedly the overeducated literary type who kept salvaging this sentimental sob story.

  Its instant success made me both smile and wince: smile because we had defied the doubters, but wince because we knew that Love Story was at once as bogus as it was effective. As its advocate, I had also become a coconspirator. I knew that its story was absurdly manipulative, its characters wafer thin. The man who created the story would lie about its origins. The man who directed it took the job only to earn a quick buck and ended up with the biggest payday of his career. The man who starred in it opposite Ali MacGraw was persuaded by everyone around him that the movie would be career suicide for him, that he’d be forever labeled as the TV soap actor who went on to make a movie soap.

  And the final irony: Love Story would generate one of the major tabloid “love stories” of its time—one that would turn out to be as fragile as the plot of the movie. And costarring, in that brief melodrama, would be my friend, Bob Evans, whose entreaties had brought me to the studio to begin with, and Ali MacGraw, his bride-to-be.

  What had drawn me to Love Story to begin with? It was a question I asked myself many times that year, and since. The story was too square, too predictable.

  Perversely, that was why I liked it. Something in the back of my head kept saying, be counterintuitive, don’t scramble after the trend of the moment.

  Besides, there were effective elements in Love Story. The rich boy–poor girl theme had always worked in movies, as had father-son conflicts. I also liked the academic aura: Jenny Cavalleri really knew her Mozart and Oliver Barrett was a thirdgeneration Harvard student as well as a hockey jock. At least there was a slender core of intelligence to the piece.

  Despite all this, and despite the fact that the screenplay was slickly written, I was surprised by the total disdain that other studios had displayed. An agent turned producer named Howard Minsky had patiently plodded all over town submitting it and re-submitting it only to confront a stone wall of rejection.

  Indeed, when talent agents learned that Paramount had optioned the script and was trying to cast it, they, too, made it clear that it was “tired goods.” Too many submissions, too many rejections. Minsky, a sharp salesman, seemed beaten down.

  The project had been written by a young classics professor at Yale. His name was Erich Segal and he himself was a bundle of mixed messages. At our first meeting, Segal played the part of the serious academic. As I got to know him better, I realized that this young professor was also something of a hustler. In explaining why he’d written Love Story, he’d hinted that it was his story, that Jenny had been his doomed girlfriend. Yet Segal was in fact a thin, gawky guy from Brooklyn—the opposite end of the spectrum from Oliver Barrett III.

  Segal also seemed very conflicted about the impact Love Story would have on his academic career. This issue surfaced when I broached the idea of a novelization. The studio would pay him $15,000 if he would recraft his script into the structure of a novel.

  The idea seemed to alarm him. What would his fellow professors think about a pop novel? He’d kept his script a secret, but a novel was a different, more public, exercise.

  On the other hand, there was the money. Segal took the deal and churned out a novel in less than a month—one that was as slickly written as his screenplay. When I again raised the issue of the story’s origins, he changed the subject. The story was pure fiction, he seemed to be saying.

  But months later, celebrating publication day on the Today show, Erich Segal was once again tearfully relating the Jenny-and-Oliver story as though it were his own. And the audience bought it. By nightfall, Love Story had become a top-ofthe-list bestseller.

  Segal, it turned out, loved the sudden adventure of celebritydom. After he appeared on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and told some good stories, he was promptly invited back. He phoned to say that he was, despite his apprehensions, “a hero at Yale,” with some undergraduates comparing him to F. Scott Fitzgerald. In an interview with Time magazine, he admitted, “Before I finished writing the ending I cried and cried for forty-five minutes. Then I washed my face and finished writing the book.”

  A slender 212 pages, Love Story was to go through twentyone hardcover printings within twelve months. Its first paperback run totaled 4.5 million copies, a record for the time. The hardcover hovered for over a year on the New York Times bestseller list and evoked almost universal scorn from the critics. A Newsweek review said “The banality of ‘Love Story’ makes ‘Peyton Place’ look like ‘Swann’s Way.’” Nora Ephron, writing in Esquire, wrote that the book’s massive popularity remained “something of a mystery.” Early in 1971 the novel was submitted for consideration for a National Book Award, and the entire fiction jury threatened to resign as a body unless it was removed from contention.

  Soon Erich Segal’s concerns about his academic career proved to be justified. He was denied tenure at Yale, ultimately moving to London where he continued writing pop fiction and movies. He later cowrote the screenplay for the Beatles movie Yellow Submarine and ground out such novels as Oliver’s Story and The Class, as well as academic tomes such as The Death of Comedy and Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus. In one retrospective article, he acknowledged that the success of Love Story had unleashed within him “egotism bordering on megalomania.”

  But Segal took his writing seriously and was appalled that the Love Story legend stirred so much satiric scorn. In the 1972 comedy What’s Up, Doc? starring Barbra Streisand, her character repeats the “love means never having to say you’re sorry” line, and Ryan O’Neal’s character responds, “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.” Segal was not above reminding people that the precise line in the novel was “love means not ever having to say you’re sorry.”

  If Erich Segal sent forth mixed messages, so, too, di
d Ali MacGraw. The Segal script had been given to the young actress by Minsky, and she was enticed by it. She understood that Paramount was interested in it but no deal had yet been made.

  Ali had been a Wellesley girl; she felt she understood Jenny, a Radcliffe girl. She also understood her own limitations as an actress—her first movie had reminded her of that—but Jenny was a role she felt she could play.

  Ali’s passion for Love Story surprised me. After the success of Goodbye, Columbus, many projects had been tossed her way and she had turned them all down, making it clear that she distrusted Hollywood and its emissaries. Indeed, an odd tension existed between her and Bob Evans. Ali told me that, in her view, Evans embodied the prototypical shifty Hollywood operator. Evans, meanwhile, was equally impatient with Ali’s dismissive attitude. “She thinks she’s a fucking flower child,” he told me. “She thinks Hollywood is beneath her.”

  When Goodbye, Columbus enveloped her, she was neither flower nor child. At age thirty, her life seemed unfocused. She’d toyed with several possible careers, but had not committed to any of them. She’d had several brief relationships with men from sharply contrasting backgrounds, but none had proved enduring.

  Ali had been working as a stylist at a modeling agency when a young agent named Martin Davidson first contacted her. Though not a model, she had posed in one ad which had caught Davidson’s eye. Davidson immediately responded to what he described as “her crooked-tooth smile.” As he later put it, “She was beautiful, but not a beauty. She was too natural to be an actress.”

  Six months later, Davidson got a call from Ali. Her latest relationship had ended and she was now eager to pursue an acting career. Coincidentally, another client, a young director named Larry Peerce, had just become attached to a project called Goodbye, Columbus, based on the Philip Roth novella, and was trying to cast it. Impulsively, Davidson introduced Peerce to Ali, and he liked her.

  Two screen tests ensued with mixed results. Ali did not come across as an accomplished actress, and, for that very reason, she appealed to Peerce. His producing partner, Stanley Jaffe, loudly dissented; he pointed out that Goodbye, Columbus was a movie about a Jewish family and that “this shiksa” didn’t register as Jewish (no one knew at the time that she was, in fact, part Jewish on her mother’s side).