Conversations in the Raw

by Rex Reed

  It took a 32-year-old boy from the Mississippi Delta to break the mold, but Mart isn’t featuring pulpit preaching this season. “What do I know about social causes? I only wrote it for my own survival and personal fulfillment after years of failure. It’s not a confession and it’s not autobiographical, but there’s a little of me in all the characters and there’s a little of all the people I’ve known. I never meant it to be a piece of camp, either. Camp is dead. The only camp in it is there because it is indigenous to the characters. The Emory character (who wears Bermuda shorts and eye makeup) is campy because all the Emorys I’ve known in my life have depended on camp to get them through. I didn’t write a satire. Wasn’t it George Kaufman who said, ‘Satire is what closes on Saturday night’? If you once get over the fact that eight of the characters are overt homosexuals, you know the most sensational thing in it. The thing I always hated about homosexual plays was that the homosexuality was always the big surprise in the third act. Well, life is not like that. Not all faggots bump themselves off at the end of the play.”

  A year ago, Mart was an unemployed Hollywood script writer at the end of his rope. After four years of analysis, he locked himself in the library of Diana Lynn’s house in Beverly Hills and forced himself to write one last effort before the gallows. He turned out The Boys in the Band in five weeks. Now the same film companies who wouldn’t give him a job are offering him Wall Street to let them do his play as a movie. But Mart has not accepted a penny. “I could take the money, go to the seashore and say, ‘Take my play, Hollywood, and do what you’ve always done—ruin it.’ Well, over my dead body. I have had it with Hollywood. If anybody’s gonna screw it up, it’s gonna be me. One studio offered to let me be a ‘consultant to the screenwriter.’ I said thank you very much, goodbye. Another Hollywood person said, ‘I don’t think we should use actors at all, let’s just use the people who are in it now.’ What does he think they are? They told me the same things before we did it onstage—you can’t do this play, the stage is not ready for it—I just don’t believe it. If this play is made as a movie, it will be made my way, written by me, with me as the producer, and filmed in New York by the best technicians I can find. I’m still improving it. We have a rehearsal tonight. I’m relentless in my involvement, from what’s going on the box office to how the posters look in the lobby. I shopped with the actors to find the clothes they wear, I bought props with my own money. There was this wine glass one of the boys drinks from and it had to be a green Rhine wine glass. They couldn’t find one because they were shopping at Woolworth’s. I ended up spending twenty bucks for the glass at Baccarat. In fact, the only time we ever fought during rehearsals was over the light bulbs in the lobby. I am committed up to my neck. I can’t just sell it for a lot of money and play it safe and go on to something else. I mean, you can’t do that with life, can you? Otherwise, you might as well go back to Bloomingdale’s and sell your ties. This film can be made for a mere $800,000, no more than the expense budget on an Otto Preminger movie. If that’s asking for the moon, then I’m asking for the moon. What I want is someone to give me the money and leave me alone with the artistic autonomy to do the movie the way I want to do it, or there will simply never be any movie. And don’t give me that Hollywood stuff about ‘You can’t make a movie because you never made a movie before.’ Bull. I’ve been making movies since I was five years old. I just never had a camera before.”

  Meanwhile, a movie of Mart’s own life to this point might do just as well. The first reel begins in Vicksburg, Mississippi. An only child, his father owned Crowley’s Smokehouse (“which had nothing to do with sausage, baby”)—a pool hall with the motto “Where all good fellows meet.” (He’s kept the stationery all these years to prove it.) He was a sickly child given to asthma attacks (“Haven’t had one since the day I left Vicksburg.”), who fished on Tennessee Williams’ famous Moon Lake and drank Grapettes while a Negro man held an umbrella over his head to keep the hot sun out of his eyes. Like most frail and sensitive Southern children allergic to heat and growing up in a cultural eclipse, Mart lived in air-cooled movie houses from the time he was tall enough to reach the ticket counter. “The only theatre I was allowed to go to showed Warners and Paramount movies, but the MGM house was a firetrap and my mother wouldn’t let me go inside. Every year my father would make us go to the Sugar Bowl game in New Orleans, which I hated, so I would sneak off to Loew’s and catch up on all the MGM movies.” On occasional trips to New Orleans, he’d see Tallulah Bankhead in Private Lives or some B-company road tour of South Pacific, but movies were his staple diet and he daydreamed of running away on a Greyhound bus to Hollywood and Vine to meet Esther Williams.

  At 17, he graduated from high school and under the pretense of visiting a friend’s aunt in Glendale, he climbed on a bus for California, found a room in the Hollywood Hills, got a job washing dishes in a cafeteria, and climbed the back wall at Twentieth Century Fox where, for an entire afternoon, he was in hog heaven roaming through the train depot in all the Linda Darnell movies and walking down the Main Street used in Chicken Every Sunday. His father wanted him to attend Notre Dame, but Mart wanted to study movies, so being sturdy Catholics, they compromised on Catholic University in Washington, D.C. “I subscribed to Theatre Arts and read about Walter and Jean Kerr and all the famous people from there who went on to Broadway and it sounded very glamorous.”

  It wasn’t. The next two years saw a little Southern boy “change from Palm Beach suits to Harris tweeds, going to parties at the Brazilian Embassy and spending the weekends in places like Larchmont! One day I woke up and said, ‘Just what are you doing here?’” Zap! Back to the California palm trees where he lived over a garage in Westwood, worked on an art degree at UCLA, spent his weekends watching Cecil B. DeMille make The Ten Commandments and became friends with the son of Pandro S. Berman. (He was easily impressed.) “I just couldn’t believe I was actually the friend of Pandro Berman’s son! He was like a celebrity!” Has he ever seen him since? “No, but I’ve seen Pandro.” (A roar.) “Anyway, I was still confused. Suddenly I realized movies were in the West, but all the people were in the East, and there I was in my Harris tweeds and everyone else was in alpaca!”

  Zap! Back to Catholic University, where he wrote a revue sketch with James Rado (now the author of Hair), spent every weekend in New York seeing plays (“I’m practically a second Collier brother with the stack of Playbills I’ve collected”), worked as an apprentice in a Vermont stock company where Bob Moore was directing, and flunked Greek three times. One summer when he went to Vicksburg to see his mother, they were shooting Baby Doll down the road, so he followed Elia Kazan into a cafe called Doe’s Eat Place and got him to write a gate pass on a napkin. After that he hung around the set, asked a million questions and struck up friendships with people who later got him jobs in New York.

  He moved to the Big City in 1957, lived in a cold-water railroad flat with lots of roaches and badgered his way into assistant jobs on Butterfield 8, The Fugitive Kind and Splendor in the Grass, where he became so friendly with Natalie Wood that she asked him to become her secretary. He worked for her for two years and her encouragement led him into a writing career. He went back home to Mississippi and wrote a screenplay for Natalie based on Dorothy Baker’s book Cassandra at the Wedding, slipped into a severe depression, went to live with Robert Wagner in Rome, illustrated a children’s book by Kay Thompson, and returned to California with French director Serge Bourguignon to make Cassandra. “Suddenly I was the very hot young writer about town. Dinner invitations poured in. Then the movie fell through and I was dropped like a hot potato. The same thing is happening all over again now, but I’ve been around the track enough to know the race by heart,” he says.

  Other writing jobs opened up, all ending abortively—screenplays optioned and dropped, TV pilots that didn’t sell. Then Paramount hired him to write Fade In, a film made in 1967 in Utah. He scouted locations in Moab and settled down to work with a young director in an office on
the Paramount lot which he calls “The William Holden-Nancy Olson Memorial Sunset Boulevard Building” and sweated it out. The front office sent memos that he was not writing the movie they had in mind, and his director was fired and replaced by another director who locked himself into another room in the building with his writer, the idea being that the two writers could each write a separate script and paste the screenplays together. “I ended up getting stoned every day on martinis, sleeping on the couch in the office and reading Time magazine while the director and his writer turned out a completely different script and nobody ever communicated with anybody else.” Mart took his money and fled suicidally to Acapulco. “Acapulco out of season when you’re unhappy—it didn’t work out. I just switched to tequila and kept reading Time magazine while it rained.” He never heard another word from Paramount, and Fade In has never been released.

  Finally he pulled himself together long enough to go back to his analyst, who told him “thinking time is working time,” and settled down in Diana Lynn’s house to babysit with her children while she was on her yacht in the Panama Canal. Thinking produced The Boys in the Band. He came to New York last winter with no agent and no money, just a play about a homosexual birthday party nobody would touch. Richard Gregson, Natalie Wood’s fiancé, wrote a letter of introduction to an agent who said, “Maybe in five or ten years, but not now,” but showed it to Richard Barr anyway as a favor. He loved it. Then Mart’s friend Bob Moore (whom he met back at Catholic U.) wanted to direct it. Things looked good, but they couldn’t get actors to be in it. “They were worried about their images. That kind of thinking is so Hollywood I can’t stand it. You don’t have to be gay to play a homosexual any more than you have to be a criminal to play a murderer. Now we have the actors with the guts to do it and they are brilliant and perfect, but it wasn’t easy. Cliff Gorman, who plays the effeminate fairy, is happily married. He didn’t know how to play it, so he came on at first doing a nightclub act. He was hilarious, but you hated him after five minutes. It was only after a lot of talk and rehearsals that he honed it down to what it is now. These people have lived with this play and they are the people who should do the movie, not stars.”

  Now everybody wants a piece of the action. Kirk Douglas tried to buy it. Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn brought six people one night and couldn’t get in, so they sat on each other’s laps in one chair to see it. Ray Stark offered Mart a boggling sum to write a film for Barbra Streisand. Even the old Cassandra project has been brought out of mothballs and Hollywood wants to film it again, trading on Mart’s new status as a writer emeritus. Mart hasn’t signed anything. He’s concentrating all his energy on the film version of his play. And he has not forgotten the people who stood by him through the trouble spots. People like Natalie Wood, who paid for his analysis once for six months; Dominick Dunne, vice-president of Four-Star TV, who dragged him to dinner parties for free meals and gave him a contract to write the pilot for a TV show for Bette Davis; or Jennifer Jones, who always invited him to her home when he was snubbed by the rest of Hollywood; or Billy Wilder’s wife Audrey, who used to give stern advice while she dished up knockwurst and sauerkraut. “These,” he says, “are the real friends who are happy for me now. R.J. and Marion [the Robert Wagners] weren’t standing in the lobby of the theatre last night crying for nothing. They kept me alive in Rome one winter. Marion used to take me to Gucci and buy me shoes when I was broke. They know how much they’ve carried me through, how many times I’ve passed out on their living room floor. My friends are responsible for saving me from death in a hotel room somewhere.”

  It doesn’t seem to bother Mart that the majority of the audience at The Boys in the Band looks like it belongs onstage. “The only thing that worried me was that it wouldn’t be funny. The night we opened I got a case of the fears and Bob Moore said, ‘Listen, they’ve been laughing at faggots since Aristophanes. They’re not gonna stop now.’ Besides, who’s gonna be the most interested in a play about homosexuals? Homosexuals! Right?”

  Right. And even if nobody goes to see The Boys in the Band except all the homosexuals in America, Mart Crowley could make enough money to keep himself in Dr. Peppers for the next ten years.

  Leslie Caron

  Paris, 1967

  It was a bad day for Lili.

  Shortly past three in the afternoon the Paramount limousine pulled up to the polished revolving doors of the George V, that gangrenous gilt-edged birthday cake of cupids and cupolas that serves as Paris’ finest (and most expensive) hotel. The voice on the little pink-and-cream- colored rococo telephone downstairs announced that Leslie Caron had been detained. Give her five minutes. “I don’t understand,” said the pretty press agent, “she knew we were expected.”

  About four minutes later a rather flushed Warren Beatty plunged out of the antique elevators wearing what people in the business have, through experience, come to regard as the Warren Beatty look: high-school basketball player face unshaven, suit rumpled, glasses horn-rimmed, expression enraged. The telephone tinkled bell-like in the cavernous silence of the padded lobby. Leslie Caron was ready now.

  The girl-woman who opened the door bore only a slight wispy resemblance to Gigi or Fanny or Gaby or what’s-her-name who fell in love with Daddy Long Legs. Shoeless, with tired little plum-like bruises under the drooping eyes, long silvered nails picking nervously at the cuticles holding them together, she curled up on a long red velvet sofa in the middle of her vanilla malted milk-colored suite in a wrinkled mass of champagne ripcord double-breasted Christian Dior material and looked for all the world like a tiny piece of icing that had fallen off the top of a rather overcooked French pastry.

  “Take off those glasses, so I can see what you look like. You Americans—always hiding behind dark glasses,” she said for starters. “I suppose you have come here to find out if I am a new Leslie Caron. Hell yes, and it’s about time. One can’t go on wading in brooks and eating ice cream cones forever.”

  New approach. After all the ugly headlines, all the unfavorable publicity surrounding her divorce from her second husband, Director Peter Hall, in which Warren Beatty had been named corespondent, did she think she had profited by her mistakes? “What mistakes? I might as well commit suicide if you consider everything a mistake. Living through something dreadful doesn’t make it a mistake. Life is not a production number. Some people, like myself, take the direct route to what they want. I once broke a contract with MGM and spent the next eight years in Europe bearing children. Now I’ve decided I’m not a statue. I’m tired of that part of my life and I desire to do something new. You can call it a mistake, but now I’m giving my private life what it demands. An actor I worked with recently came up to me and asked me to go to bed with him. If I did, he said, it would make him act better the next day. Well, I only go to bed with people I’m in love with. I’m not bragging. I haven’t the slightest idea what the public thinks of me and I don’t care. People like to get beaten with whips by girls in leather boots, but they don’t brag about it. What I do with Warren Beatty is nobody’s business. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  What would she like to talk about? The old days at MGM? “Please! Most miserable period in my life. I hate musicals. Warren is dying to do a musical, but I’ll never make another. I had toe-shoes on from 8:30 in the morning until six every night. I was constantly in agony. Ankles big as an elephant’s. I was in very bad health, worked under impossibly bad conditions, had to dance on concrete floors and windy sound stages. I had bruises and sprains that couldn’t heal. When I walked out of Hollywood, after years of unhappiness, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly both told me, ‘Leslie, you’re so smart to quit while you can still walk.’ I’m glad those days are gone forever. The only dancers I admire today are belly dancers.”

  If she hated musicals so, perhaps she was excited about her new status as a dramatic actress. “I thought The L-Shaped Room was a pretty good film in spots, but my God, I did it for practically no money at all. Money isn’t everything. Fina
ncially, I never have to make another film. I have a company, but I don’t read the Stock Exchange every morning. I couldn’t be more bored about all that. I hate to admit that because then everybody will try to take advantage of me. I’m not an idealist. But I’ll never work for nothing again.”

  What about her latest role in Is Paris Burning?—the grief-stricken wife of a Resistance leader who is torn from her arms and slaughtered by the Nazis on a public street? For months, the cinema talk in Paris had centered around nothing else: about how Director Rene Clement had begrimed areas of the city only recently cleaned up by Minister of Culture André Malraux, about how jack-booted Wehrmacht troops had set off bombs in the Place de la Concorde, thrown hand grenades into the Bois de Boulogne, uprooted the vast parvis in front of Notre Dame, even stormed down into the depths of Napoleon’s tomb to recreate the last five days of August, 1944. Surely a film costing several million dollars, involving 182 sets and six months’ work, in which even Charles de Gaulle will appear as himself, would be worth talking about.