Conversations in the Raw

by Rex Reed

  She stands giggling in the kitchen door, with the baby in one arm and two dogs yapping at her bare feet. “I’m the only movie star who still rides the Super Chief. I’m taking the train back to Connecticut next week, then Paul starts a new western in Mexico and I’ll come back so he can come home on weekends. If we get rid of him one night, come on over for soul food. Turnip greens, cornbread and sweet potato pie. He hates it.”

  Walking down the driveway into the periwinkle blue California day, I’m suddenly confronted by a carful of tourists reading a guide to movie-star homes, leaning out of a car with Oklahoma license plates. “Who lives there, in that house?” they ask, opening their Brownie cases and staring bewilderingly from their map to the sign on the sculptured lawn.

  “Just ordinary people.” And behind the door that is being closed by the blonde Scarlett O’Hara nobody recognized, you can still hear the dogs barking as the car pulls away, disappointed.

  Joseph Losey

  London, 1967.

  Notice the eyes. Tired, curved down at the edges, and he rubs them a lot. Joseph Losey’s eyes tell the story of a life of hard knocks, a man without a flag and a career applauded everywhere but home, where it matters most.

  The name, in Europe, is golden. No Losey film here is just another movie. King and Country and The Servant both won film festival awards, and The Damned won the Trieste science-fiction festival award. For the second time in three years a “Joseph Losey Season” has been held in London for two months this year at the National Film Theatre. The British Film Institute thinks so much of his work that it recently held a special festival just for the showing of his TV commercials. Ironically, he even received the Best Foreign Director award from America’s foreign film importers.

  Why is it ironic? Because he’s not a foreigner at all. He was born in Wisconsin and while he has little taste for America (and no taste at all for most American films) he is still as American as a hamburger. His feelings are understandable. Seldom has there been a case of a native talent treated so badly by the industry that bred him. Educated at Dartmouth and Harvard, he worked as a roving reporter for Variety, stage-managed the first Radio City Music Hall show, directed 13 plays on Broadway in the 1930’s, and landed an MGM contract in 1938. One of his documentaries won an Oscar nomination, the movie industry began to sit up and take notice, and a series of films resulted which were years before their time. One of these was The Boy with Green Hair, which was produced by Adrian Scott, one of the original 19 blacklisted by the film industry during the infamous McCarthy witch-hunts.

  The film is now considered a classic (It’s still almost impossible to find in America, but the Cinematheque Francaise shows it regularly in Paris to standing room only). At the time it was made, however, Scott served a year in jail. Losey was called a Communist and blacklisted too. (Incredible as it may seem, that’s the way we used to do things in America, folks.) Losey couldn’t get the jobs he deserved, so he directed the late Louis Calhern in The Wooden Dish at the Phoenix in New York, and in 1954, he just plain gave up. Gave up trying to sell educated and hard-hitting film suggestions to an ignorant coterie of Hollywood label-fixers who were too frightened to take a chance with a man who had been associated with the word “Commie.”

  Accident, his 18th film, is now being made the way he makes all of his films in Europe: quietly. A visit to the set in the glimmering green Indian summer of a peaceful Queen Anne farmhouse near London does, in fact, give little indication that a movie is being made at all. Losey likes it that way. The budget is almost invisible. Interiors are being shot at Twickenham, a tiny powder-box studio with three sound stages six miles from London. Accident occupies two stages and a murder mystery on a train takes up the third. There is nothing to remind you of Hollywood. No air-conditioned trailers; the stars change in the farmhouse john and the makeup department consists of a wooden table with a hand mirror. Everyone eats on card tables under a cow shed and the film’s one luxury (a secretary for Losey) rides a bicycle from the house to wherever her boss is working in the nearby woods.

  “We do it the way most of my films are done,” says Losey, taking a tea break, “for almost nothing.” The actors working that day, Dirk Bogarde and Stanley Baker, sat on the grass with their shirts off, playing with the farmer’s kids. “They’ll never get rich in my films, but they keep coming back. Dirk has done five, Stanley three. Dirk turned down a Hollywood film worth ten times as much to do this one. He can afford it now. But then there’s my continuity girl, who gave up the biggest chance of her career on a picture with a $10 million budget for this. My cutter runs a pub to support his family so he can work with me. I try to surround myself with people who think “we” instead of “they,” but I make pictures so selectively that I can’t afford to pay them while they hang on waiting. Unusual people with creative ideas get ahead in England. This is where everything’s happening in films. People are more informed, more enlightened, freer to do things that say something. Of course that’s only half of the film group here. The other half is the same as in America—union men interested only in overtime, and men who want to make a fast buck on a cheap investment.”

  The sun was hot and the tea with honey heady, so Losey wrapped it up for the day. In the car on the way back to London, more talk about the film and his life in Europe. Unlike the cars owned by most movie directors, it had a straight shift, most of the dashboard had been ripped out and instead of a chauffeur it was driven by a little old man in rolled-up sleeves and denim pants. Losey, worn by the day’s shooting, cupped his head in his hands, then massaged his temples. “Working like this over the years, sacrificing the big juicy jobs for the things I believe in, and doing it with no money and little encouragement—it’s been exhausting. This one is turning out well. Harold Pinter did the script, so you know it’s extraordinary. I think it’s the best thing he’s done since The Servant. I loathe films with too much dialogue. It’s 100 pages long and only about 60 pages of that is talk, so there’s room for the visual things.”

  What’s it about? “Well, Dirk and Stanley are two dons at Oxford. They represent people with double lives—academic, dull, defeated, custodians of knowledge who suddenly find themselves in the same impasses as the men in the street. Into the lives of these men, their wives and a young male student comes an Austrian girl who brings out the best and the worst in them all. She is the catalyst, the accident-maker. At one point, they all play the war game, which is the rage on TV here, and it suddenly becomes so real that they attack each other physically. Everyone lusts after the girl. Finally, at one point in the highway driving from Oxford to the farm, everyone’s life changes. The boy—Michael York, who just did Taming of the Shrew with the Burtons—is killed, the girl simply packs and leaves, and the others are left to face their own guilts. I guess it’s really about how civilized and courteous people can often be as vicious underneath as the lower classes. In some way, everyone affects everyone else in life. Sometimes we have the most powerful effect on others when we least suspect. The cast is really first-rate. Jacqueline Sassard, a French actress, plays the girl, Delphine Seyrig is Baker’s wife, and Dirk’s wife is Vivien Merchant, one of the most brilliant actresses in England. She’s really Pinter’s wife. Pinter’s in it, too. He started out as an actor, you know.

  “I hate working in color but you have to now. Without it you get only half as much for the TV sale. I tried it with Modesty Blaise and some of the critics said it was the best use of color they’d ever seen, but even after two years of working out the lighting, the rushes were better than any final print I ever saw of it. I’ve got the same cameraman, so we’ll do something low-key—blue-black with splashes of yellow spilling out of a house at night, violent splashes of red blood against sterile white for the accident, lots of mustard and rust at Oxford. Nobody does anything interesting with color these days. I was impressed with Red Desert’s color, but the film was so pretentious and boring it put me to sleep. I think the best color in ages was in Muriel.”

 
The mention of Modesty Blaise seemed to set his juices flowing. In England it is considered a masterpiece by some, a mistake by others. In America, some of the hardest-to-please critics think it’s one of the year’s best. Others think it’s hogwash. “It was meant to be the last and final word on the subject of camp, a film to extinguish forever—hopefully—the forces behind the garbage-can syndrome of movies Hollywood is turning out now. The fact that people are taking it seriously and complaining because it doesn’t make sense is proof of what I was trying to say. They’ve been brainwashed by the same kind of movie I’m putting down. As a result, I’m frustrated again. I’ve had letters from America saying it was degrading for me to have my name on it. Quite the contrary. It was made for a reason. Now the film is being thrown away by idiots who haven’t the slightest idea what it is about. Darryl Zanuck loved it, but he allowed his advertising department to destroy it by playing it up as a female James Bond. Sure, the picture has its flaws—I never did get the color I wanted, Monica Vitti had no sense of humor, Terry Stamp hadn’t the slightest clue to what I was getting at, and their performances show it. Still, it would’ve had a chance of finding its audience if it had been sold simply, stylishly, with an op-art design that told nothing about the plot, a teaser with taste—no nudity, no secret-agent stuff. It should have opened in an art house until they knew what they had, then sent out on the circuit. One theatre manager told me, ‘The picture’s a flop.’ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, watching the lines outside waiting to get in. ‘For every 2,000 admissions, we’ve had about five complaints,’ he said. ‘What the hell does that mean?’ I asked. ‘Normally, we don’t get any.’”

  Would he ever work in America again? “Only if all the conditions were right. In England, I can make the kind of film I want to make. They may get badly distributed, but they’re the ones that interest me. I don’t need X millions of dollars and big-name stars, but I must control the advertising and distribution. The film must be mine. When Eva was released in New York I didn’t even recognize it. Jeanne Moreau and Stanley Baker and I drew up a petition to have our names taken off it. A film must bear the director’s stamp, or it’s nothing. I’d rather see a bad film with one really distinct style of badness than a film with 50 different kinds of badness.

  “Life is OK here. I’m not rolling in money; last week I had to direct a vodka commercial. But I’ve just taken a house for the rest of my life. I lecture at cinema clubs, do TV panels and film symposiums, and there’s a new book coming out on me in France. There’s another Losey festival this fall at Eton College in Windsor and a retrospective of my films in Australia. I’m doing a musical on the London stage in January with John Barry music and Sean Kenny sets and a script by another American expatriate, Lucas Heller. I’ve had lots of wives and although I’m presently married emotionally but not legally I’ve got a 9-year-old son named Josh and another grown son, Gavrik, who is a production manager for one of the London film studios. Not everybody needs America, you know. Some of us hold our heads up pretty well over here.” The car pulled up to an intersection on Brompton Road. Losey waved goodbye. He was off to see the rushes. Alone. (Nobody gets invited to see the rushes on a Losey film.) When the car pulled away, he was still rubbing his eyes.

  Omar Sharif

  Rome

  “The new Clark Gable” is what Hollywood calls Egyptian-born Omar Sharif. But once again, Hollywood is wrong. “They are so anxious to make me into a new romantic screen hero like Clark Gable they even sent me to the special showing of Gone with the Wind at the Cannes Film Festival this year. But I am like no other man. I am an individual,” he says. And to prove it, the first and only actor from the Arabic world who has ever become a star in English-speaking movies has turned out 13 films in which he has never played the same role twice. He was Sheik Ali in Lawrence of Arabia, a Mongol warlord in Genghis Khan, and Armenian king in Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, a Yugoslav partisan in The Yellow Rolls Royce, a Spanish priest in Behold a Pale Horse, a Russian poet in Dr. Zhivago, a French police inspector in Night of the Generals, an Italian prince in More than a Miracle, and, most recently, a Mexican heavy in McKenna’s Gold, Jewish gambler Nicky Arnstein in Funny Girl, Austrian crown prince Rudolf in Mayerling, a lovelorn lawyer obsessed with Anouk Aimee in The Appointment, and—close your eyes—Che Guevara! All adding up, quite naturally, to confusion in the minds of Omar Sharif fans. Who, they ask, is the man born Michel Shalhoub?

  To unravel the mystery, some clues. Outside his villa near the Colosseum in Rome, the city is asleep. A cat meows in a nearby garbage can. Stone statues stand motionless in the entrance. At the top of the velvet staircase, “the new Clark Gable” stands in his stocking feet with a Barbra Streisand record in his hands. “I live one day at a time,” he says, extending a hand, “I’m a very lazy person.” Inside, the Streisand record roars, battling in competition with the television set, which is tuned to the motorcycle races at Monza. Shoes and socks are strewn about the floor. Every table is covered with unfinished jigsaw puzzles. “You like? I had to have this place fumigated when I moved in because it was full of ants. I hate European hotels because they don’t let you bring women up to your room. I get very lonely in hotels.”

  On the outside, he is cool, the master of every situation. He can charm the stockings off even the sternest old-maid librarian. If he doesn’t like the direction a conversation is taking, he’ll look into your eyes until he hypnotizes you into submission with pupils that bore through you like two pieces of coal. He hulks above his guests with a six-foot frame, and he has skin the color of sable. But something’s wrong with the picture. On the inside, he’s not so secure. He suffers from a serious ulcer the doctors have been trying to remove surgically for years and he often has to take pain-killers to ease the discomfort. He is restless, often grouchy, and spends all of his spare time playing games and solving puzzles. He takes two pain-killers, washes them down with red wine, and explains why: “I should never have become an actor. My teachers wanted me to specialize in physics. I have a mathematical mind and being a movie star bores me. After I make a few million dollars, I plan to retire and play bridge the rest of my life. I bore easily, so I taught myself to do something between scenes sitting around on movie sets and now I have become an expert on bridge. When I finished The Appointment, I toured America with a team of five professional bridge players. We got $110,000 to play in tournaments against other teams. On the set, I have four hands going at the same time and between scenes I play each hand. I am very lonely. I make friends easily, but in this business each time you make a new friend it’s time to pack and leave. So I play games. I lock myself in my house until I solve each crossword. In Hollywood, when I was making Funny Girl, I spent all my spare time in the studio commissary playing the pinball machines. I even brought a Monopoly set to Rome. Gambling? It’s not the same pleasure, because there is no puzzle to solve. But I did work out a mathematical theory to win at blackjack. I went to Las Vegas five weekends in a row, won $10,000 each time, and now I am banned at the casinos.”

  How he has time for all those rumored love affairs is another mystery. But he admits, “I love sex, wine and food—after a hard day’s work, they are my rewards. Some people think my attitude toward women is unethical. But I’ve had a lot of experience. Women want to be dominated. I like to go with American girls, but they make terrible wives because they are too independent and money-crazy. Then they can walk out and sock the man for half his money. Even in divorce cases, American women get the sympathy of the courts. That makes the man weaker as the wife gets more aggressive.”

  Omar was separated from his own wife after ten years of marriage, but they are still friends. “I was married at 21 and my wife was a big star in Egyptian movies and since there are only about five stars in all of the Arab world, we both worked on three or four films at a time. It is not easy to keep a marriage together when you are both working in films. The temptations are strong. You are always meeting beautiful and exciting people. Unless you are matu
re, which we were not, it ceases to be exciting. We both became bored. Then I did Lawrence of Arabia and I was gone for a long time and the separation was too much for us. But we are still friends. I built my wife a house in Paris and she lives there with my 11-year-old son Tarek. We have an agreement that if either of us wants to remarry, we can get a divorce. But I have never found a woman to replace her. I know women in every city, but they are always women for temporary periods of time because of the travel. I am a big success now, but I’m having no fun.”

  For Lawrence of Arabia, he spent 14 months in the desert—7 in Jordan, 5 in the south of Spain, 2 in the Sahara living under a tent. For Dr. Zhivago, he spent a year in Finland on a frozen lake in 40-below-zero temperatures. He isn’t satisfied with any of his films. In Funny Girl, he feels he was upstaged by Barbra Streisand. “She’s a monster. I had nothing to do but stand around. But she’s a fascinating monster. Sometimes I just stood on the sidelines and watched her. I think her biggest problem is that she wants to be a woman and she wants to be beautiful and she is neither.” In McKenna’s Gold, he broke his nose in Kanab, Utah, when his horse bent over to eat some grass. He leaned over to pull up on the reins and the horse raised its head so quickly the great neck tendon slammed him in the face. “So you see, no fun. I have yet to do a really good part in which I can show my talent and be fulfilled. Everyone thought I was going to do it in Zhivago, but in 300 days of shooting all I did was react to everyone else. Every day people went to the daily rushes and came out saying, ‘Wasn’t Rod Steiger marvelous’ or ‘Wasn’t Julie Christie marvelous,’ and nobody said a word about me. I was in terrible despair. I was never off the screen, but I never had one good scene. A few more good parts and I’m finished with films. I have made a lot of money, but I’m not financially independent yet. American taxes take it all. I’m too lazy to keep papers so I end up with nothing. When you become a big movie star, you become a corporation, then you get into tax situations, alimony situations. You have to become a fighter. Then you lose your energy for fighting. To maintain your identity you must alternate the terrible spectacular movies for lots of money with the small artistic films for less money. That is why I made The Appointment for Sidney Lumet. It is the best part I’ve ever had in my life and it will kill me if it does not make money. Next, I want to work with Fellini. But I will never make enough money to retire and play bridge if I stop making big, terrible spectacles. And if I make big, terrible spectacles I lose my self-respect. I am now in a real dilemma.”