Part 9

The second version of _Mutiny_ got under way when an MGM expedition arrived on Tahiti at the height of the rainy season. It had to run before the weather and go back later for another try. The first of the thirty scripts to be completed by five writers, including Eric Ambler and Charles Lederer, was meantime coming hot off the typewriters.

Life on French Tahiti, where society is very proper and the caste system very strong, livened up considerably when Marlon debarked. He unearthed a series of hide-outs to which he would retire when the mood came upon him. On bad days hours would roll by while messengers tracked him down so that filming could resume.

His taste in girls has always been off-beat, from the Hindu impersonator, Anna Kashfi, whom he married and divorced; through the fisherman’s daughter, Josanne Mariana-Berenger, to a barefoot waitress whom he found on Tahiti.

The first major casualty among the company was Oscar-winning Hugh Griffith, who was eased off the island by the French authorities after some spectacular high jinks. Another Briton, Sir Carol Reed, hired to direct, was replaced when it developed that he saw Captain Bligh as the hero, not Fletcher Christian. At the speed at which he was shooting, it would have taken years to finish the picture.

Sir Carol had also made the basic error of believing that when he told Marlon to do something in front of the camera, Marlon would obey. Reed was succeeded by Lewis Milestone, director and diplomat, who grew accustomed to handling difficult situations with kid gloves.

There were plenty to handle. The movie makers hit the South Seas like a typhoon. Liquor poured over the island like the Johnstown flood. A French naval lieutenant ran off with the second native lead halfway through filming, so that in one version two girls mysteriously alternated in playing the romantic scenes without a word of explanation being offered.

Marlon at one point was bowled over in a double feature by a popular local infection and a virus, forcing him to take to his bed for three weeks.

Aaron Rosenberg, the producer, couldn’t make a move without being balked and countermanded by cable and telephone from Metro’s front office, where Siegel found his reputation at stake. On Tahiti there was panic at the lack of a script. A succession of writers, concluding with Lederer, worked against the clock to get out scenes, often only one day in advance of shooting, sometimes rewriting lines at lunch time for the afternoon shift.

“In one two-week period we shot only two small scenes,” Richard Harris told me during filming--he came close to stealing the picture as one of the mutineers. “That wasn’t surprising since Brando was constantly demanding that scenes be rewritten. You never knew where the hell you were.” Marlon added his own seasoning to the stew by toying with the idea at one point of abandoning the part of Christian and taking on a different role in the picture.

Trevor Howard, playing Captain Bligh, left for home swearing: “Never again will I take part in an epic,” and to prove his point he turned down _Cleopatra_. He thought it was “the greatest travesty in the world to allow Brando to snap and snarl at me.”

In their steamy tents the sweating writers invented a game to preserve their sanity. They made up imaginary labels to hang on the cast. Trevor Howard: “a deafening answer to no question.” Aaron Rosenberg: “the persistent marshmallow.” For Brando, they had a tag so obscene that he brooded for days, trying in vain to think of some way to strike back at them.

At work, on a typical morning, he’d stand on the Bounty deck, draw his cutlass, and yell at the ship’s company: “I now take command of this....” At that second, his memory would falter. The crew and other cast members filled in for him. “Train?” somebody suggested. Marlon nodded his thanks and take eighteen began. This time he got it right ... “command of this ship.”

Charles Lederer insisted: “Brando is responsible for a great deal of whatever brilliance the picture has. But neither he nor anybody else I know can improvise and be better in five minutes on the set than a writer with three weeks at a typewriter.”

Marlon’s enthusiasm touched rock bottom when it came to playing scenes supposedly on Pitcairn Island, where the _Bounty_ mutineers landed. Rosenberg ordered him to perform. Richard Harris related the rest of the story: “Brando fouled it up good. He came to work for a few days, but I thought he was acting as though he wanted to scuttle it. So I finally told him: ‘When you’re willing to perform like a pro, I’ll be in my dressing room.’ The picture was suspended for three days, while they tried to get him to resume, but not a word about it got into print--it was all suppressed.”

The cast didn’t know what they were doing most of the time because the next scene usually contradicted whatever they were trying to play. Harris had another clash with Brando. He told me: “Brando said: ‘This is the final script. I want nothing changed, not a line, not a comma.’ On the strength of that, I memorized eight pages. We rehearsed it in the morning, went to lunch, and prepared to shoot in the afternoon.”

The company returned after the break, and the cameras rolled. Then “Cut!” Harris related: “They told me I was wrong. When I asked why, I found out they’d changed the script during lunch. I demanded that the producer be brought to the set.”

Aaron Rosenberg didn’t know that changes had been made. “Actors,” said Brando to Harris, “are paid to do their jobs without opinion.”

Harris exploded. “You like to pull the strings as though others are puppets. This scene was changed because you demanded it.” At that point Lewis Milestone walked off the set. So did Harris, who’s an outspoken Irishman. “When Mr. Brando is ready to perform, I’m available,” he said once more.

“It was a long way to my dressing room. You’d have thought I was radioactive the way everybody backed away from me. I lay down on my couch and closed my eyes. Presently the director stuck his head in the door to say sotto voce: ‘Everybody in the company wants to applaud. You were great.’ But still no one came in until Rosenberg shook my hand, said he was sorry this had happened, and added: ‘Thank you.’”

Eighteen months after the start, when MGM had poured more than $20,000,000 into this bounty on the _Mutiny_, Marlon was still acting up. The final scenes, months behind schedule, were being shot in Hollywood, costing still another two million. With the financial future of Metro itself at stake, with millions tied up in a picture which still had no ending, Marlon played Fletcher Christian in such a manner that, although the cameras turned, the film was unusable. He overplayed; he underplayed; he mumbled; he minced. It was a unique moment in our town’s history. Nobody before him had dared take hold of a mammoth studio, swing it by the tail, and make the bosses like it. The actors’ revenge was complete.

It takes avaricious agents with calculating machines for hearts to encourage stars like Brando to behave as they do. Now that no studio any longer has its own roster of stars tied by contracts, the agents and actors run Hollywood, as they always threatened to. The studio has to go cap in hand to the agent to sign up the big star for a single picture. No more than a half dozen actors and actresses alive today can attract an audience big enough to give a picture a hope of success at the box office.

The first giant among ten per centers hated producers and made no secret of it. Myron Selznick held it a point of honor to wring every dollar he could get out of the studios to settle the score for the wrong that had been done his father, Lewis J. The louder the bosses yelled “Murder!” the harder Myron squeezed.

Lewis J. was nicknamed “C.O.D.” for “cash on delivery” by starlets he lured to that notorious item of studio furniture, the casting couch. He lured plenty when he owned a $60,000,000 film corporation in the silent twenties. But as a financier he overreached himself. His sons, Myron and David, blamed rival movie makers for plotting the ruin that overtook old “C.O.D.”

Myron’s first client was Lewis Milestone, who must have smiled philosophically to himself when he saw what Brando was doing to MGM. Acting for Milestone, Myron left his mark on the Howard Hughes studio when, in 1927, he squeezed out of them exactly twice the salary the then young director had anticipated receiving. Alva Johnston recalled the time when Myron went home rejoicing: “Remember what those bastards did to my father? They paid more than a million dollars for it today.”

Bill Wellman was Selznick’s second client. After him, everybody who was anybody--Carole Lombard, William Powell, Pat O’Brien, to name just a sample--rushed to get Myron to do battle for them.

But neither he nor the mob of imitators who followed him in business managed to hold the entire industry up to ransom as it is being done today. One reason was that under the star system of that era, contracts came up only once a year for negotiation, not before every picture. Another reason: producers and directors, to a great extent, could make or break a star.

As a tribe, actors and actresses seldom know what’s good for them. They usually judge any script solely by the number of lines of dialogue they get. Greer Garson announced to one and all that she wouldn’t be playing in _Goodbye, Mr. Chips_, one of the finest pictures that came her way, because “I’m only in a few scenes.”

The day before she left town for England to make the picture, she poured out her woe to me. “I’ve sat here for months doing nothing,” she said, “and now I’m going back to my native land in a picture that gives me a very small part. When I left England, I was a star there; my friends will think I’m coming home a failure.”

I wrote the story, but before she stepped on the train the next day, she begged me to kill it: “What if the picture’s a hit? I’d look like a fool.” So I kept a friend by sitting on the interview. _Mr. Chips_ made her an international name.

Vanity takes all kinds of shapes. In one of his earliest pictures Gary Cooper played a location scene so well that it was shot in a single take. That night Coop went diffidently to the director’s tent. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to do that scene over again in the morning,” he said. “I seem to remember at one point I picked my nose I was so nervous.”

The director knew better. “Listen,” he said. “You were so damn nervous you were great. You keep acting that way and you can pick your nose into a fortune.” That bit of advice registered with Coop. After he’d belly-flopped trying to dive into the deep end of acting with pictures like _Saratoga Trunk_, he saw his old director again. “Guess I’ll have to go back to my nose,” he said.

It took an eye doctor from South Bend, Indiana, to set up in the agency business and put the hammer lock on Hollywood; by comparison Myron only twisted arms. Dr. Jules Caesar Stein is the founder and board chairman of MCA, a flesh-peddling octopus with approximately one thousand clients ranging from actors to zither players, before it got rid of them all in a hurry under pressure from Washington’s trust busters. He and his wife, Doris, are also devout collectors of antiques; European furniture dealers used to rub their hands when they saw them coming, but they were soon crying in their porcelain teacups, because Jules had set up his own antique shops.

Dr. and Mrs. Stein have climbed so high since his college days--he worked his way through by playing the violin in little jazz bands--that they are now helping to refurnish the White House. Mrs. John F. Kennedy was pleased to announce last year that the Steins, as a gift to the nation, “will contribute pieces from their collection of eighteenth-century antiques as well as new acquisitions.”

Soon after the Steins moved to California--they now live in a beautiful Beverly Hills hilltop mansion--the good doctor told me at a party: “I’m going to be king of Hollywood one day.”

“You and who else?” I laughed. But I underestimated him. He succeeded, thanks to the shortsightedness of the producers when big stars are in short supply and desperate demand.

Besides Brando, MCA spoke for Marilyn Monroe, Ingrid Bergman, Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Dean Martin, Jack Benny. That’s just a sample. Agents used to hustle for salary and billing. Jules Stein’s poker-faced assistants demanded lots more than that. They often weren’t satisfied until they got a fat slice of the picture’s profits for their clients.

The first deal like that was made for Jimmy Stewart, whom I originally recommended to MGM after he and I played on Broadway together with Judith Anderson in _Divided by Three_. The slice that MCA carved for him out of Universal-International’s _Winchester ’73_ brought him more than $600,000. Now he’s a millionaire on the investments he made on the advice of a keen-brained business friend from Texas and he’s become a sober-sided industrialist as well as a fine actor.

With Kirk Douglas as a client Jules Stein did even better at Universal. After running up costs of $12,000,000 on _Spartacus_ in which Douglas starred and also produced with Universal’s money, the huge, 400-acre studio fell into a situation where it had to sell out, lock, stock, and acreage. MCA bought the place for $11,250,000 and set to work churning out television series. Now it’s called Revue Productions and it’s the best-run studio in Hollywood. If MCA plans work out now it has beaten the anti-trust suit--it is concentrating on production and stripping itself of the agency business--millions more dollars will be invested in an effort to make Hollywood the movie capital of the world once more.

Once an actor has seen his agent put the pressure on and turn a geyser of cash into Old Faithful itself, the sky’s the limit where his greed for money is concerned. Everything else is forgotten, including, of course, gratitude. William Holden, an MCA prize winner, did mighty well with _The Key_, though Trevor Howard stole the notices; and much, much better before that from _Bridge on the River Kwai_, which brought him millions. The producer of _The Key_ was Carl Foreman.

When Foreman had another picture in the works, _The Guns of Navarone_, he wanted Holden for his hero. “My price,” Holden declared, “is now $750,000, plus ten per cent of the gross.”

“But not with me, not after _The Key_,” Foreman said.

“With you or anybody else, that’s my price,” Holden replied.

Foreman had a few forceful words to say on the subject of gratitude, then hired Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn together for less than Holden demanded. To keep his bulging bank account safe from the hands of tax collectors, Holden moved his family to Switzerland, that temporary haven of fugitive American fortunes--temporary because I understand that President Kennedy has some fancy plans for correcting that state of inequity.

William doesn’t spend much time in his Swiss home, though his wife, formerly Brenda Marshall, does, together with their two sons. Her daughter by a previous marriage preferred staying behind in Hollywood as an interior decorator. When Brenda Marshall married, she was a happy, fun-loving woman. The last time I saw her, at a party Norman Krasna gave for me at Lausanne, Switzerland, her old contentment had gone bye-bye.

* * * * *

When Tony Curtis was fourteen, he wrote me a six-page letter from his family’s one-and-a-half-room flat in the Bronx, where his father worked as a tailor. The boy was then Bernie Schwartz, and he wanted to know how to become a movie actor. He’d beaten a path to Hollywood, but he wasn’t rated as much more than a curly haired pretty boy by most people when MCA started to steer him. No matter how hard he was asked to work to promote his career, he gave the same answer: “I’d love to.” He was eager and fun to be with, and I invited him to all my parties. There he got to know, among others, suave, immaculate Clifton Webb, whom he looked up to as the epitome of social form.

“You’re getting up there,” Clifton cautioned him as the months rolled by, “so you must dress better. That suit isn’t good enough for you, and your tie is awful.”

As soon as Tony could afford it, he bought himself a custom-tailored suit, which he christened at another party of mine where Webb was a guest. “Look, Hedda,” Tony said with pride, “isn’t it wonderful? All hand-sewn.”

“Lovely,” I agreed, “and that’s a good-looking pair of shoes, too.”

“A producer I know couldn’t wear them, so he gave them to me. They pinch a little, but aren’t they beautiful? They cost him $75.”

Clifton wandered over to add a word of praise for the suit. “But you can’t wear that tie with it.”

“What kind should I wear, Mr. Webb?”

“Come over to my house tomorrow and I’ll give you some.”

Tony found a wife who was used to being kept on a tight financial rein when he married Janet Leigh in 1951. Her father, Fred Morrison, who ten years later took an overdose of pills that ended his life, held the purse strings after her career got going. I remember coming across her at Rex, the mad hatter, where she was aching to buy a sweater for $75, but her dad said no. When he died, she was on the French Riviera with Mrs. Dean Martin, guests of Joe Kennedy.

Tony and Janet bought an eighteen-room house in 1958. (“Did you ever believe I’d end up a country gentleman?” he asked me.) They had enough money left to furnish the dining room, but not enough to buy much else. He was around at my house when I mentioned that I had a handsome, carved oak chair down in the basement, which I couldn’t use. “If you want it, take it. Go down and see.”

He came back conveying the heavy chair in his arms. “It’s wonderful,” he said. “I’ll put it in my car.” He’d started the motor to drive straight home before I caught him. “Come back here. We’ve got a party going. Janet can see it when you get home.” It still sits in their front hall, bleached and upholstered in white brocade.

MCA maneuvered Tony’s affairs so astutely that he now owns his own picture company, makes millions, drives a Rolls-Royce. “I hope that in a few years I’ll have enough security so I can drive around in an old battered station wagon if I want to,” he says. He lost Janet Leigh after he made a picture in South America with Yul Brynner, which featured a girl named Christine Kaufman, to whose apartment in the Château Marmont, in the company of her mother, Tony would go to have coffee on his way home.

He sent me another letter after I’d criticized him in the column last year over the postponement of _Lady L._ “I wonder,” I’d asked, “if actors realize they’re killing the goose that laid the golden eggs and are ruining their careers.”

“You might well have asked whether the studios realize what they are doing to actors,” Tony wrote back. “Because of the delays and stalling on this project, I have not made a film for eight months. True, I was paid a salary for part of that time but money alone can never make up for the fact that I might have two films during that period, that I could have been working in my chosen profession, could have been improving in the only way an actor can improve--by working.

“As a star, I have the right to pick my own parts, to decide whether or not a script is right for me. That is clearly understood by everyone who seeks to employ me.

“If the final script does not meet my requirements, the burden must remain with the company and not with me. The studio did submit a script I liked, which is why I signed to do the picture in the first place. Before we could get into production, they began making changes and the script they were finally ready to shoot bore little resemblance to the one I had approved.” He was right, the picture has never been made.

* * * * *

When press agents nudge an actor hard enough, he imagines he can write, produce, direct, and act simultaneously, as busy as a one-armed paper hanger. That was a delusion Clark Gable avoided.

“Why don’t you want to direct, like everybody else?” I asked him not long before he died.

“It’s hard enough to act without going into all those monkeyshines,” he said. “I just want to act and get the money. Let them take the grief.”

Clark loved money all his working life. I don’t remember that he ever gave a party. He nursed a grievance against Metro from the time Mayer loaned him to David Selznick to make _Gone With the Wind_. Clark thought he should have received an extra bonus for that, not simply continue on his salary of $7000 a week, fifty-two weeks a year.

When he cast off from Metro in 1954 and entrusted his business affairs to MCA, he boasted that he had “never really made any big money” until then. Like the rest of the monarchs of the movies, he wanted what they call “the most”--highest salary, biggest percentage.

“Why do you fight so hard for those enormous salaries?” I asked him, as I’ve asked them all. “Why can’t you put back some investment in the industry when it’s done so much for you?”

“I want the most because you’re only important if you get it.”

Money helped kill Clark Gable. That and his refusal to acknowledge that he was growing old. He couldn’t resist earning the most he’d ever get, when the offer came along for _The Misfits_; $750,000 plus $58,000 for every week the picture ran overtime.

On location in the Nevada desert, where the heat jumps to 130 degrees, he roped and wrestled with wild horses to prove to everybody who watched, including me, that he still had his old virility. “This picture will prove he is America’s answer to Sir Laurence Olivier,” said the ever-present Mrs. Paula Strasberg. He was encouraged by John Huston, a director with no qualms about making actors sweat. And he was outraged by the behavior of Marilyn Monroe.

He was habitually early on the set, ready to work at 9 A.M. Some days she wouldn’t show up until lunch time, sometimes not at all. Though he seethed inside, Kay Gable told me, he curbed his feelings by iron self-control. Clark was not a pretty sight when he blew his top, as he did when _The Misfits_ was completed, but Huston wanted one more retake.

The retake was never shot. Huston was still working the final cut of the picture when Clark died, nearly a million dollars richer, leaving a beautiful widow in Kay Gable and a handsome son he never saw.

_Seven_

Hollywood was always heartbreak town, though most of the world fancied it to be Shangri-La, King Solomon’s mines, and Fort Knox rolled into one big ball of 24-karat gold. We used to see the hopefuls stream in from every state of the Union, tens of thousands of them, expecting that a cute smile or a head of curls was all it took to pick up a million dollars. Many were old enough to know better, but not the children.

They came like a flock of hungry locusts driven by the gale winds of their pushing, prompting, ruthless mothers. One look into the eyes of those women told you what was on their minds: “If I can get this kid of mine on the screen, we might just hit it big.” I used to wonder if there wasn’t a special, subhuman species of womankind that bred children for the sole purpose of dragging them to Hollywood.

Most of the women showed no mercy. They took little creatures scarcely old enough to stand or speak and, like buck sergeants, drilled them to shuffle through a dance step or mumble a song. They robbed them of every phase of childhood to keep the waves in the hair, the pleats in the dress, the pink polish on the nails. I’ve had hundreds of them passing through my office asking for help.