Conversations in the Raw

by Rex Reed

  She has given up California (“You never see a poppy out there any more. They used to grow wild on the MGM lot. Now all you see is this damned ivy!”). She likes New York and wants to do stage work, but the roles are slim. “I always wanted to do a play but, with no training or technique, I was reluctant. You can’t learn to act unless you do it, so I toured for two years in Barefoot in the Park with Richard Benjamin and learned to hold for laughs and move in on the end of applause—in short, I learned my way around. I even won the Sarah Siddons award in Chicago. I’m ready for a play now, but with the way things are going in the theater, I don’t know if there is any place for the kind of sophisticated comedies I like.”

  She still likes movies, but she’s not exactly in love with the direction they’re heading in, either. “I admire some of the people on the screen today, but most of them look like everybody else. I will say one thing for the old days—we had individuality. There was none of that business of telling us we had to look like someone else. And we were protected. These poor kids today are totally exposed. They step off a plane without any sleep, looking terrible, and the flashbulbs start popping. I came along before the candid camera. Now the worse they can make you look, the better. Glamour is dead. Some of the rules we had were silly. In the Thin Man pictures, Bill Powell and I even had to have twin beds. But pictures were more sophisticated. Young actresses are always telling me they can’t go to an audition any more without undressing. The boys have to take their clothes off, too.

  “It’s too excessive, and it’s getting very boring, all this nudity. It’ll be a shame if it upsets people so much that it brings on the need for censorship. I hate censorship. But I’m afraid we’re heading in that direction. There’s no mystery! No privacy. And frankly, no sex, either. Most of the sex I’ve seen on the screen looks like an expression of hostility toward sex. I know mystery is a dirty word to the young people of today, but a suggestion of sex is much more interesting than actually showing it, don’t you think?”

  Don’t get the idea Myrna Loy is a prude. At one point in Lotus Land history, she caused a bit of a scandal herself by playing so many sexpots her navel was banned in movies. “Listen. Last week Roddy McDowall called me up and got me over to his apartment on the pretense of showing Wuthering Heights. But when the lights went out, the big surprise was The Mask of Fu Manchu, a terrible movie in which I played Boris Karloff’s evil daughter. I carried around a pet python and whipped a young man tied to a rack and all sorts of dreadful things. Now I had been reading a little Freud around that time, so I called the director over one day and said, ‘Say, this is obscene. This woman is a sadistic nymphomaniac!” And he said, ‘What does that mean?’ I mean, we did it all before these kids today ever thought of it, and we didn’t even know what we were doing!” The sound in the voice stops being a smile. It’s a full-grown laugh now. Pure Myrna Loy. And wicked enough to make Dracula cry uncle.

  The Academy Awards

  April, 1968

  It must have been a bad joke. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and discover, hopefully, that the 40th Academy Awards didn’t really happen. Maybe it was just a rehearsal of how rotten and boring and humorless the whole thing could be on some future Oscar night if everything went wrong, everything fell apart and nothing about it meant anything to anybody any more.

  But then I see this tacky little program soiled with coffee stains that happened when I got shoved into the coffee urn backstage when more photographers and press agents than you could beat off with a stick chased Rod Steiger out of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium yelling, “I gotta get outta here,” and I know the whole sad, depressing little event really happened, all right, and I can’t say I wasn’t warned.

  • • •

  It got off to a bad start. Bosley Crowther arrived with no studio limousine to meet him, rented a Hertz at the airport and drove to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he was told, “There’s no room for you,” and ended up sitting on top of his luggage at 3 o’clock in the morning, looking for a place to stay. Bad sign.

  Then the whole thing had to be postponed two more days for the first time in history.

  Then Denise Minnelli leaned across the dinner table at columnist Joyce Haber’s house and told Donald Brooks: “Darling, may I tell you something? Nobody goes to that thing unless they are nominated for something.”

  Out at the beach Christopher Isherwood and playwright Robert E. Lee announced to Patty Duke and Angela Lansbury that there were only two things in California they wouldn’t be caught dead at: The Rose Parade and the Academy Awards.

  Finally Truman Capote, outraged at the nominations, told the L.A. Times: “It’s outrageous! It simply proves that it's all politics and sentiment and nothing to do with merit.”

  • • •

  He’s absolutely right, but I went to see it anyway, and the first thing I saw was 300 limousines locked in a lethal traffic jam so tangled people were deserting their drivers and walking.

  The next thing I saw was the sun, beaming down from a cobalt blue sky on what looked like several thousand screaming teenie-boppers being led cheerleader-style by a local cretin called Army Archerd, who conducted some kind of local TV broadcast from a platform on which he interviewed (if that’s the word) the arriving stars with the aplomb of a third-rate sideshow barker in one of those cheap circuses that always play cow pastures. “And here she is, folks, stepping up to the stand, a nominee for Barefoot in the Park, Miss Natalie Chadwick!” Mildred Natwick promptly looked sick, but she was too much of a lady to punch him in the nose. “It’s Mildred Natwick,” she sniffed coolly. “And how many Oscars does this make for you?” “Well, none actually …” “Thank you very much, Miss Mildred Catwick …”

  They were coming fast and furious. Natalie Wood. (“I know why I won’t see you up there getting an Oscar, Natalie, it’s because you didn’t make a picture this year, har har …”)

  Edith Head.

  Ed Begley.

  Danny Kaye.

  Sonny, in a sequin taffeta cossack suit, and Cher, looking like an Egyptian slave girl in an old Maria Montez movie.

  Phyllis Diller in red ostrich plumes sticking out of a chinchilla dress (“It’s a Brillo pad, stretched.”).

  The teenagers yelled their little heads off.

  George Cukor and Stanley Kramer, get them out of the way quick, no glamour, folks, to make way for, yes, it was she, in person … Annette Funicello! Baby Annette! Wearing the ugliest gown of the evening, a banana-split nightmare by Mr. Blackwell, if you’ll excuse the expression.

  • • •

  By 6:30 there were more stars stepping on one another and shoving their way into the auditorium to avoid teenie-boppers in Bermuda shorts than the dog show (held in the same building) had fleas.

  Greer Garson, Ann Miller, Angie Dickinson, (in a Ray Aghayan backless with her navel peeking out through piecrust lace), Mrs. Gregory Peck in a lime sherbet Yves St. Laurent (“Yessir, he’s really great, that Yves,” hollered Army), Rosalind Russell in a black-beaded Galanos, Dustin Hoffman with Senator McCarthy’s daughter, Ellen, Anne Baxter, Katharine Ross with some guy in a cowboy hat, Audrey Hepburn, men in Don Loper turtlenecks and hippie beads, Martha Raye in monkey fur. And on and on, all being insulted by this Army Archerd character, because that’s the way the Academy sets it up, see.

  And all the time, the sun is shining!

  By the time Dame Edith Evans, 80, practically got pushed off the stand into the arms of a gang of Lotus Land’s hungriest paparazzi (“You wanna snap her?” “Who is she?” “Dame somebody.”), I had had enough outside.

  • • •

  Inside stars and fans alike were pushing and shoving and sweating their way into an illuminated grotto surrounded by eight color monitors and decorated with three Spanish panels on each side of the auditorium holding lighted chandeliers. At 7:05, 153 klieg lights were turned on the audience with a blast of heat that made you feel like you were being slowly fried to death. The curtain rose, in a roar of applause, reve
aling chandeliers, potted palms and plastic Sears, Roebuck flower arrangements, with more gold paint on the walls than on the Oscars, which only cost $60 apiece. (Actors used to hock them, now it’s forbidden by law. The Academy buys them back for $10.) They make good doorstops.

  At 7:20 Gregory Peck gave a boring speech about electronics. (What happened to the Martin Luther King speech the Academy got so much publicity out of announcing? Do I detect phony liberalism?)

  • • •

  The motto used to be “When in doubt, get Bob Hope onstage.” This year he was definitely off in timing, delivery and sharpness. Most of his quips with the stars had been either changed at the last minute out of hokey Academy genuflecting to the Negro cause and fear of stirring people up, or cut altogether, a fact which became apparent when his planned routine with Carol Channing left her looking yummy in the dress of the evening—a beaded rhinestone turtleneck covered with a sunshine yellow jumper coat by Ray Aghayan—with nothing to say. Instead, Hope left everyone yawning with last-minute lines like, “The women are all beautiful but Dame Edith Evans in a micro mini is too much.” (Closeup of Dame Edith, regal enough to bring tears to the eyes, looking thoroughly puzzled. She didn’t even wear a mini, which shows how much thought went into everything.)

  By 7:30 George Kennedy got the Best Supporting Actor Award, the first upset in an evening filled with weird and totally absurd developments.

  At 7:50 Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross gave the Cinematography award to Bonnie and Clyde with the animation of paraplegics. They were either scared to death or novocained.

  • • •

  About this time I began to understand the value of watching the whole thing on television. The awards are geared for the control room. In its mausoleum-like in-person atmosphere you can’t see anything, hear anything (Louis Armstrong did a stupid song with a stuffed elephant in total silence, which was just as well) and you burn up from the heat.

  Technically, the show was a mess. At one point the lectern got stuck in the floor and the mikes went dead, leaving Hope and Diahann Carroll to ad-lib their way through the Live-Action Short awards. Rescued momentarily by a hand mike provided by a stagehand, they had to walk across the stage to reach the cord, which wasn’t long enough, then kneel down onstage to be heard, since the mikes were still in the stuck lectern in the floor. Then they were down too low to see the cue cards.

  Martha Raye tripped on her monkey fur, then read a boring letter from General Westmoreland about entertaining the troops that had nothing to do with Oscars.

  The Kodak commercials were often shown off the backdrop because the stagehands missed their cues to lower the movie screen.

  • • •

  Elke Sommer (a real live-wire and all-around great actress who added glamour and excitement to the show when they could have gotten people who don’t mean anything, like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford) gave the Sound Effects award to The Dirty Dozen, an unbearably inept film which made a big impression on the Academy because it had a lot of guns going off.

  For the “best explosions, fires, earthquakes or hurricanes” Natalie Wood gave the Special Visual Effects award to Doctor Dolittle, a film with no explosions, fires, earthquakes or hurricanes.

  Between awards, Bob Hope fenced with the sound men in the wings; men nailed down the stage and knocked on walls.

  Art Direction and Set Decoration awards went to Camelot. Pretty amazing for a movie in which you never knew what season it was supposed to be, except when they sprayed detergent across the screen for snow. Also pretty amazing is the fact that the same film got the Costume award, when Bonnie and Clyde, which only started a fashion revolution, got nothing.

  The Editing award to In the Heat of the Night floored me, since In Cold Blood, Bonnie and Clyde and Two for the Road were all masterpieces of editing not even nominated. (This category, I learned, is nominated and voted for by film editors only and none of them like directors who edit their own films, such as Richard Brooks, Arthur Penn and Stanley Donen—consequently, no nominations or awards. Small wonder, then, that the best films of 1967 were ignored.)

  • • •

  By 9 p.m. people were already walking out, and although I didn’t blame them, they missed the spectacle of Barbra Streisand stepping all over Eva Marie Saint’s toes trying to get up the aisle to give out the Best Song. She walked on, giving everybody a drop-dead look with the personality of a frozen zesto, costumed in frizzy peroxided hair and black mascara like a Toulouse-Lautrec poster, and gave one of the most ludicrous awards of the night to “Talk to the Animals,” which had just been murdered by Sammy Davis, Jr., in a performance that could only be described with great generosity as lackluster. This whole category with the exception of Burt Bacharach’s song, “The Look of Love,” was painfully embarrassing. Lainie Kazan was forced to sing a song nobody ever heard of from Banning, a movie nobody ever heard of; Louis Armstrong sang some hideous song about monkeys from The Jungle Book; and that left only “The Look of Love,” the Dolittle song and the cute but hardly provocative “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” which oddly enough, in the magic hands of Angela Lansbury, provided the show with its only showstopper. You could hear the “Oh, nos” loudly in the theatre when the Dolittle song won, but I don’t know if they carried over the airwaves or not.

  • • •

  Leslie Caron, whom everybody was trying desperately to keep on the opposite side of the auditorium from Warren Beatty, gave Mike Nichols a “Please forgive us for not giving it to you when you really deserved it for Virginia Woolf instead” award for Best Director; Audrey Hepburn gave Rod Steiger a “Please forgive us for not, etcߪ.for Pawnbroker” Best Actor award; and Sidney Poitier gave Katharine Hepburn a sentimental “Please accept our love for your devotion to Spencer Tracy and forgive us for being so stupid when you didn’t win for Long Day’s Journey into Night” Best Actress award for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a film which looked like it had been made 20 years ago. (It also got an award for Original Screenplay, although it also sounded like it had been written 20 years ago too.) The least Miss Hepburn could have done, embarrassing as it must have been to get nominated for a film this pretentious, was be there. Other actors took salary cuts, left Broadway plays, cut shooting schedules and disrupted routines to fly out for the awards. Why couldn’t she? The final thrust was In the Heat of the Night as Best Film instead of Bonnie and Clyde or far superior, overlooked films like Two for the Road, In Cold Blood and Ulysses. (Of the 2,980 Academy members who vote for best film, 883 are from such non-craft branches as “public relations,” “executives,” “administration” and “members-at-large” and 175 are producers. Richard Brooks never takes a producer credit on his films and is not a member of the Screen Producers Guild. This alienates the other unions, so that explains why In Cold Blood, perhaps the best American film of 1967, wasn’t even nominated.)

  By this time, so many furious people were walking up the aisles like buffalo herds nobody had time to ask one serious question: How can the Best Director of the year not have directed the Best Film?

  • • •

  In this whole night of back-stabbing and utter stupidity, only one award made any sense at all: Estelle Parsons, radiant and real as a newborn flower, totally deserved her Best Supporting Actress award for Bonnie and Clyde and accepted it with tears of genuine emotion and gratitude and no phony best-friend speeches.

  And there was only one major ovation: for Angela Lansbury, whose “Millie” number was four-and-a-half minutes of glittering, dazzling entertainment. She put the whole corny show in her little fur pocket and walked away with the entire evening. The audience gave her a screaming ovation that could only be stopped by changing the scenery. Even after it was over, it was all the audience could talk about. Mame came back to Hollywood and rubbed their noses in it.

  When it was all over, utter chaos reigned backstage. A mad, strangled attempt was made to get the stars herded through the press lines like cattle. They were shuttled through five rooms, laid out l
ike a funeral parlor—rooms for deadline stills, non-deadline stills, press interviews (where everybody crowded in and shouted at each other), newsreels, tape-recorded interviews—then back through a patio and out into the screaming mob of teenie-boppers, cops, photographers who couldn’t get press passes, fan-mag reporters, autograph hounds and the great unwashed public.

  Press agents rushed about trying to sell clients who didn’t get nominated for anything, writers got separated from angry photographers who couldn’t get into the writers’ arena. “How does it feel to win?” they yelled at Rod Steiger, who tried to run. “I gotta go to work at 8:30 tomorrow morning,” Steiger yelled back. Mike Nichols’ press agent frantically clutched the Best Director Oscar. Nichols had disappeared. Somebody asked Estelle Parsons—the only movie star who didn’t deliberately try to look like a movie star—who designed her gown. “I bought it four years ago in a store.”

  • • •

  There was more speculation about who was going to what party than there was about the Oscars. The most exclusive party in town was the one the Billy Wilders threw at the Bistro, where the Vincente Minnellis, Rosalind Russell, Cyd Charisse, Audrey Hepburn, the Irving Lazars, the Sam Goldwyns, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, Joe Mankiewicz, Irwin Shaw and Claudette Colbert were just some of the selected guests.

  The Bonnie and Clyde people all went off to the Kenneth Hymans and got drunk. The rest of the action ended up at The Factory, where Raquel Welch, Tony Curtis, Peter Lawford, Kevin McCarthy and Elke Sommer were all eclipsed by Angela Lansbury in a bra-less floor-length white satin Harlow dress, getting a standing ovation when she swept in. Carol Channing ate organic peaches from a Mason jar and grinned widely, “I can’t dance, because my dress weighs 36 pounds and I fall down when I stand up.”