My Blog

NOEL’S LITTLE DARLINGS/PART 1

Thu, 10 May 2012 17:57:48 -0800

The Criterion Collection has just released a stunning BluRay boxed set of restored Noel Coward titles: In Which We Serve, This Happy Breed, Blithe Spirit and Brief Encounter. But what most fans of Coward and British cinema do not realize is that the true author of this quartet of films was not “The Master” (as Coward was known in London’s West End) but a trio of young men whom he referred to fondly as “my little darlings”.

By 1942 England had been at war with Germany for four years. Coward, a staunch patriot, was a great friend of Lord Louis Mountbatten. With his constant co-star Gertrude Lawrence, they’d played a comic version of Dickie Mountbatten and his oh-so-social wife Edwina in the delightful farce, Hands Across the Sea, one of the ten one act plays presented as a theatre cycle under the title Tonight at 8:30 in 1936. When the Second World War broke out, Mountbatten recounted to Coward the saga of his ship, H.M.S. Kelly, that had been sunk by German torpedoes off the coast of Crete. Though he had never directed a movie, Coward knew the sinking of the Kelly would make a great film. Once again he would be playing Mountbatten - but a deadly straight version this time.

Enter Filipo del Giudice, an Italian producer, who had been interned for several months on the Isle of Man when war was first declared. Like his flamboyant Hungarian counterpart, Gabriel Pascal, who had tied up the film rights to Bernard Shaw’s plays, Del wanted his own big name British playwright. Fortunately his associate, Anthony Havelock-Allen, an aristocratic producer of “quota quickies”,who was married to film star Valerie Hobson, knew all the right people. A meeting was arranged between the Master and Del Giudice, who agreed to produce Coward’s naval epic. What he neglected to mention was that he had no money at his disposal.

Coward set about learning the movie business. Even though he was to produce, direct, star and score the film, he had no idea how to proceed. Director Carol Reed told him over drinks at The Ivy: “You can’t direct a film without David Lean.”

Raised a Quaker and forbidden to visit the cinema as a child, David Lean, by 1940, had become the best film editor in Great Britain. He had essentially co-directed two of Gabriel Pascal’s Shaw adaptations, Pygmalion and Major Barbara, credit for which had gone to Anthony Asquith & Leslie Howard and Pascal himself respectively. On both films, editor Lean had to be sent for on numerous occasions to line up what the shots should look like. Lean was determined not to be done out of his credit again.

When Coward caught up with Lean he was editing One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing, his second assignment for director Michael Powell. The film was being shot by the affable and inventive Ronald Neame, whom Lean had worked with and befriended on the set of Major Barbara. Neame was a second generation filmmaker - a rarity at the time. His parents were pioneers of British cinema: father Elwin Neame was a photographer who turned his beauty queen wife, Ivy Close, into an authentic film star. She would go on to star in Abel Gance’s epic La Roue. Their son, Christopher Neame, would become a successful screenwriter/producer and grandson Gareth Neame would be the award-winning producer of the TV phenomenon Downton Abbey.

Powell knew of Lean’s aspirations and arranged for him to direct a screenplay written by Emeric Pressburger. But Lean took Coward up on his offer instead, which enraged Powell.

“You’re like a cheap tart walking down Bond Street,” said Powell. “You see an expensive, glittering jewel in a window and you just can’t resist it.”

Lean, Neame and Havelock-Allen went to visit Coward in his London studio. The Master read them his screenplay - which took over three hours. The trio, whom Coward would shortly dub his “little darlings”, pointed out that what was written would take six to eight hours of screen time. Thus began the editing, rewriting and often writing (mostly on Neame’s part) of the four screenplays that would eventually bear Noel Coward’s name only.

John Mills, who appears in In Which We Serve and This Happy Breed, said: “Out of the three of them, Noel absolutely loved Ronnie best. He admired David, but he didn’t have the warmth. He respected Tony, but in Ronnie, Noel recognized a very sweet man. They all worked very well together.”

Before proceeding on shooting what would become In Which We Serve, Coward asked Lean what sort of credit he wanted. Lean insisted on co-director. Coward, who had been sent by Lean to see the recently released Citizen Kane to study the flashbacks, agreed. But only if Ronnie Neame had a ‘Photographed by Ronald Neame’ credit on the same card - much as Orson Welles had done for Greg Toland on Kane.

Lean and Neame worked masterfully in tandem and Coward eventually stopped coming to the set on days when he was not acting. Neame, who had invented a special “Wendy light” on Major Barbara for the difficult- to-shoot Wendy Hiller, performed similar feats of magic for Serve. He invented the ripple affect for the individual flashbacks as Coward and his crew clung to the dinghy for days after their ship, now called H.M.S. Torrin, was torpedoed.

Coward and his fellow actors spent a week in a tank at Denham Studios filled with real oil and filth to simulate the polluted sea they were bobbing about in. Coward was the first to dive in and test the water. His first remark when he surfaced in classic, clipped Coward cadence was: “Dysentery in every ripple.” Then he realized how cold it was and insisted the water be warmed before he’d let the other cast members go in. Shooting was halted for a day while the tank was heated. The next day the water was boiling like a caldron and shooting was halted yet again. By the end of the first week, Coward was leading the other actors in a revolt against working conditions.

The little darlings came to his dressing room to read him the riot act. They reminded him that was not only co-director but the producer as well. Coward said when he was acting, he was always on the side of his fellow actors. My former father-in-law, the late Hubert Gregg, who played the pilot of the Torrin told me that Coward - unused to and bored by the interminable time between takes - would amuse his fellow actors by making up rude lyrics to the distinctive tune of the Paramount News: The Eyes and ears of the World. Hubert sang the entire song for me thirty years after the fact but all I can remember now was the last line: “... scratching your balls.”

Coward had started in the theatre as a child actor and that training and discipline were his touchstones. A scene was being shot where seaman John Mills was at a family Christmas party before setting sail. Coward was rehearsing the scene and William Hartnell, one of the actors, had not appeared on the set. He asked Michael Anderson, an assistant director, to sit in for the part. When Hartnell finally turned up, Coward chewed him out for his tardiness and fired him on the spot. He then had Anderson play the part in a fake mustache. (Anderson would later go on to a distinguished career directing films like The Dam Busters and Around the World in 80 Days.)

Several weeks into the shoot, Del Giudice sent for the Little Darlings and told them behind closed doors that he had run out of money. What to do? Sam Smith ran a low budget studio called British Lion which was akin to Monogram Pictures in Hollywood. They put a rough assemblage together for Smith and he came in for the rest of the money. (“Noel Coward and the British Navy is goo enough for me,” said Smith.) The movie put British Lion on the map and it became of the U.K.’s most successful studios for the next sixty years.

In Which We Serve was a huge success. Its then unknown actors John Mills, Celia Johnson, Bernard Miles, Kay Walsh and 18-year-old Richard Attenborough would all become stars after the film’s release. The New York Film Critics chose it as the Best Film of 1942 and at the 1943 Oscars Coward received a special certificate “for outstanding production achievement”.

Thrilled with his three little darlings, Coward wanted to keep the ball rolling. Lean, Neame and Havelock-Allen formed a production company they called Cineguild. Their first film would be Coward’s 1939 play, This Happy Breed, about a lower middle class family struggling to survive between the two world wars. For the movie, Robert Newton would play the role Coward had originated on stage and Celia Johnson would be his wife. It would be David Lean’s first solo directing job, his first film in color and his first time dealing with actors on his own.

“David wasn’t very fond of actors or actresses,” said Ronnie Neame. “He knew they were very important to him and therefore he did his best, in a condescending way, to accept them as people.

“I’ll always remember on This Happy Breed that when he got a take he liked, he asked every one of us technicians what we felt. And I remember John Mills asking: Well, what about the fucking actors? Aren’t you going to ask us what we think about it?”

TO BE CONTINUED

Copyright © 2012 Foo Dog Productions

TCM FILM FESTIVAL 2012

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 19:40:30 -0800

Make no mistake of it: the TCM Film Festival is here to stay. And no one could be happier about that than me. I dived right into the third year’s festivities last Friday morning by attending the screening of William Wellman’s Wings at the Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. No wonder this movie won the first ever Oscar for best picture. It chronicles the odyssey of two small town boys (Buddy Rogers and Richard Arlen), who go overseas in World War I and become men in the flying corps. Wellman and Arlen (who bears a startling resemblance in profile to Atwill star Neil Dickson) had both been aces in the Great War (as it was then known) and they bring a frightening authenticity to their work. Arlen did his own flying - there is no rear projection work in this film - and Wellman, who had flown with the Lafayette Escadrille, makes the aerial photography truly breathtaking. The packed 9 AM house gave a round of applause to the long drink of water, who rolled over on his army cot and stood up to reveal himself as a very young Gary Cooper. With less than five minutes of screen time before his tragic death, Coop revealed the charisma that would make him a star for the next 33 years until his own tragic death from cancer. Clara Bow showed flashes of “It” in occasional scenes throughout the film. But it was evident from scene to scene when she’d been partying the night before and when she hadn’t. The moment when Rogers shakes her sequined dress and animated bubbles rise up from it is a moment I will never forget.

That afternoon I made my way through the unseasonable deluge over to Grauman’s to catch 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea on the big screen for the first time in almost half a century. I’d first seen it at the Nortown Theatre in Toronto when I was seven after being brainwashed by the “Making of” documentary in black and white on Disneyland. The Technicolor/Cinemascope combo in 1954 was incredible. So I was a bit disappointed by the digital presentation on Grauman’s big screen.. It lacked the crispness, focus and immediacy that 35 mm projection brings to any movie. But Friday afternoon’s screening did have the bonus of the film’s star, Kirk Douglas, turning up and boasting he was the oldest person in the house.

“I’m 95!” crowed Douglas, in his now familiar post-stroke slur. “Is anyone here 96?”

Pleased there were no takers, Douglas told host Ben Mankiewicz about singing the film’s nautical ballad “Whale of a Tale”, the only song audiences ever link to him.

“I was producing my first movie, The Indian Hunter,” said Douglas, “and I wanted a foreign actress to play the Indian girl. My wife saw a picture of Elsa Martinelli in Vogue and suggested hr for the part. I called Martinelli and she didn’t believe it was me. She made me sing Whale of a Tale to prove it. I called to audition her and she ended up auditioning me.”

Saturday morning I took my daughter Ethne to see her favorite movie, Auntie Mame, at the Egyptian. I don’t imagine there are many other 12-year-old girls, whose favorite actress is Rosalind Russell but Ethne marches to the tune of her own drummer and I have raised her on a steady diet of black and white classics since she was born. She’s seen the movie many times on DVD but never on a big screen. We were disappointed from the moment the colored rhinestone credits began. It was a 35 mm print but the color was faded and the print was badly scratched with black lines running through it for minutes at a time. The audience didn’t mind, though, as they howled at the smorgasbord of Patrick Dennis (the original novel), Lawrence & Lee (the playwrights) and Comden & Green’s (the screenwriters) witty lines for the film’s two and a half hour running time. The movie belongs to the ladies: Russell is a wonder in the role she had created on Broadway. Coral Browne is drop dead gorgeous and hilarious as the dipsomaniac Broadway star Vera Charles. (Hers is the funniest line in the film when she turns on Mame, whose tiny bells festooned to her dress are clanging incessantly backstage and hisses: “What have you got there? Reindeer?”) Peggy Cass repeated her Broadway role as Agnes Gooch, who took Mame’s advice to heart to live, live. live. And Joanna Barnes proved the audience favorite as lock-jawed Bunny Upson. Still it would have been nice of Warners to have struck struck a new and restored print for the festival. Perhaps there’s a restored BluRay of this wonderful movie in the works.

After the screening, Ethne and I strolled over to the Hollywood Roosevelt, where my daughter - dressed in 1940s hairdo, sweater, tartan skirt and spectator shoes - was spotted in the lobby by TCM producer Gary Freedman, who whisked her off to be interviewed by Robert Osborne. Ethne waited backstage with 1940s legendary noir film fatale Peggy Cummins, who wondered if the TCM faithful would remember who she was. The former Fox contract player who gained immortality as the sexually perverse, homicidal heroine of Joseph Lewis’s Gun Crazy had not been back to California since 1950.

Later that afternoon my wife, producer Kim Eveleth, joined us for the screening of William Wyler’s neglected 1933 masterpiece, Counsellor-at-Law, starring John Barrymore in one of his greatest and overlooked performances. It was introduced by actress Illeana Douglas, who seemed to have no knowledge about the film other than the fact that her grandfather Melvyn Douglas was in it. Paul Muni had created the role of George Simon, a hotshot Jewish lawyer, who had been brought to American in steerage and fought his way up from poverty to be the top lawyer in New York. When Universal bought the rights to the hit play, they never considered Muni for the film. When the former Yiddish theater star heard that Barrymore would be playing his part, he bitterly said: “They should also change the title to Goy Meets Girl.”

Sour grapes, Muni. Barrymore is extraordinary in the role. He rattles off the lines with machine gun precision. And William Wyler keeps his camera moving at the same pace. It’s probably one f the most affective adaptation of a play ever shot. No attempt is made to open it up. It’s all in the law offices of Simon & Todescu and it’s a roller coaster ride from beginning to end. And what an extraordinary collection of women: Bebe Daniels, Isabel Jewell, Mayo Methot (Bogart’s third wife ‘Sluggy’, whom he left when he met Betty Bacall) and the breathtaking Thelma Todd, whom I can never get enough of whether she’s working with Laurel & Hardy, the Marx Brothers or her two-reelers with Patsy Kelly. Finally, the lost gem of this movie is Broadway actor John Hammond Dailey in his only screen role recreating his stage performance as Simon’s leg man Charlie McFadden. The film is available as a Kino DVD and I urge fans of Barrymore, Broadway and great movies to watch it.

On closing night, Kim, Ethne and I went to the Egyptian Theater to watch Douglas Fairbanks in a restored version of the 1924 silent The Thief of Bagdad. The Mont Alto orchestra performed live and it was a truly magical experience. Fans of this year’s Oscar winner The Artist can clearly see where Jean Dujardin drew much of his inspiration from. And fans of the ballet can clearly see how Fairbanks, in turn, was inspired by Nijinsky for much of his physical posturing.

I urge every film lover to attend next year’s edition of the TCM Film Festival - which can only be bigger and better.

Copyright © 2012 Foo Dog Productions

TONY at 80

Fri, 6 Apr 2012 12:35:03 -0800

Tony Perkins died twenty years ago. For the last seven years of his life, he was my best friend. We worked together, laughed together and traveled around the world together be it in Los Angeles, New York, London, Klosters or Budapest. He would have turned 80 this past week and is sorely missed by all who loved him. Here is an excerpt from my unpublished manuscript, “Tony & Berry: A Love Story”, in which I describe how our writing collaboration began.

I’d written a screenplay six years earlier – an adaptation of Ross Macdonald’s first novel “The Three Roads” – which became the movie “Double Negative” (and “Deadly Companion” on video). Perkins and I spoke on the phone once prior to shooting but we had never met. The movie, financed by Canadian tax shelter money, had been fraught with problems. Director George Bloomfield had informed the film’s neophyte producer, a dilettante film buff, who insisted on taking a hands-on approach in a world he knew nothing about: “Producers are supposed to keep people like you away from me. So what do we do now?” The writer I had been hired to replace – a drinking buddy of the producer’s - refused to quit writing and rewrote everything I did. (This after the misguidedly loyal producer had given me an impossible three day deadline to write my own draft of the screenplay.) The producer subsequently choked to death over an elegant lunch and the film barely saw the light of day. Faithfully sticking to the dialog I had written, Perkins’ elegant villain, Lawrence Miles, emerged as the best thing in the film.
Perkins inquired if I had been writing anything lately. I told him about my play, “Leslie and Lajos”, a black comedy, whose main characters bore similarities to cinema legends Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. I described my play as “the Sunshine Boys of horror films”. Perkins’ face lit up and he asked how soon he could read it – with a view to possibly directing it. I was leaving for Vancouver the next morning but said I could drop off a copy on my way to the airport.
When I returned from Canada there was a message from Perkins on my machine asking me to come over to his house and discuss the play.
His house was in a cul-de-sac; the grounds surrounded by a six foot wall. A winter’s supply of firewood was stacked up next to the carved front door. I had been there once before a few years earlier to pick up my little cousin Adam Iscove from a play date with his classmate Elvis Perkins. I remembered someone playing the piano inside as I knocked at the door. I knocked louder and louder but the piaying never ceased. Finally the door opened and Adam slipped out of the house without my learning the mysterious pianist’s identity.
Now I was inside the house. Dimly lit with a definite Southwest feel. Steer skulls on the walls and curtains made from Navajo blankets. Perkins led me across the tiled entranceway and down three steps to a sunken hardwood living room bordered by French doors with a large stone fireplace dominating the far end of the room. A ceramic bust of Edgar Allan Poe – the Mystery Writers of America’s Award – rested atop it. Perkins had shared the coveted Edgar Award in 1974 with composer Stephen Sondheim for their screenplay “The Last of Sheila,” a complex thriller filled with the kind of mind games I would soon come to learn played an important part in Perkins’ life. Tucked into a corner on the opposite end of the room next to a shelving unit containing hundreds of LPs was the “mysterious” grand piano I had heard years earlier. Hanging on the wall above the piano was a huge black and white blowup of Berry Perkins – photographed by Paul Jasmin - puffing on a cigarette - looking every inch the film noir heroine.
“Do you smoke pot?” Perkins asked in his unique staccato tones. Clearly there was to be no offer of coffee or a soft drink.
“I..uh .. I..”
“Good.” Perkins vanished from the living room and reappeared moments later with a pipe attached to a thick plastic mask which covered the smoker’s nose and mouth. Years later I would recognize the identical prop used by Dennis Hopper’s maniacal Frank Booth in “Blue Velvet”. Perkins clamped the mask to my face, lit the pipe and within minutes – cheap date that I am – I was wrecked.
“Now, let’s talk about the play. Very funny. Well written. But the climactic revelation that Leslie’s gay? I don’t think so. I’m more interested in the younger Leslie. When he was a star. A murder mystery. But very funny. Populated by the people who made those tacky B-movies. I see it as a vehicle for myself. Do you understand what I mean by a vehicle? The sort of thing Donald Cook used to do. Do you remember Donald Cook? Did you ever see him on stage? Fabulous! He was my idol. Patterned myself on him. Ah! Elvis.”
Perkins rose abruptly from the sofa and walked up the stairs towards the kitchen where his then 9-year-old son Elvis was getting a snack from the refrigerator. A serving counter separated the dining area from the kitchen creating a puppet theatre appearance when viewed from the sunken living room. Whispered words came from the “stage” followed by the sound of a slap. Looking up, I was shocked to see Elvis clutch his cheek and rush out of the kitchen. It would be months before I realized this little scene had been staged for my benefit. (While driving in Tony’s beloved blue station wagon another schoolmate of the Perkins boys once asked with a mix of innocence and dread: “Mr. Perkins? You don’t really have an ejector seat in this car, do you?” A deadpan Tony nodded: “Oh, yes.”) Clearly, kids or grownups took their chances entering the Perkins household, where the only children’s books on display were those of Edward Gorey.
“This has been a good start,” said Tony, tugging my spaced-out self up from the chair and swiftly steering me towards the front door. “We’ll continue tomorrow.”
Good start? Continue? How the hell was I going to get home? What had just happened? I felt like I’d entered the world of John Fowles’ novel “The Magus” where mind games and staged tableaux abounded. Fortunately it was only a two minute drive back to my house.
* * *
My knowledge of Anthony Perkins up to that period was based on his brilliant portrayal of motel owner Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s “Psycho”. The role had straitjacketed him at age 28 into a series of similar characters which he essayed on screen for the next quarter century. Tortured, twisted outsiders he made his own like Dennis Pitt in “Pretty Poison”, who more than met his match in Tuesday Weld’s homicidal Sue Ann Stepanek (she later requested Perkins as her co-star in the screen version of Joan Didion’s “Play It As it Lays”. The two made a remarkable team in both films and she was probably his most effective leading lady.) Other memorable excursions into post-modern angst and murder included “Five Hours to Midnight” and “WUSA”. But none of these had been box-office hits. When he did appear in moneymakers like “Murder on the Orient Express” or “The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean”, his were supporting roles or cameos.
So when “Psycho 2” reared its inevitable head, Perkins put Norman’s shoulder-padded shirt on again and returned to the Bates Motel (with his 8-year-old son Osgood playing young Norman in flashbacks).
The movie made money but – at age 50 - only reinforced Perkins’ image as a middle-aged crazy. The kind of film offers he longed for were not forthcoming. Two years later, having just completed “Psycho 3” (which he directed as well as reviving Norman yet again), Perkins sat alone perched high in his director’s chair tucked away in a dark corner of the dining room biting his nails and contemplating… who knows what?
One thing I did know, the man was a gifted comic actor. I’d seen him years before on Broadway in Neil Simon’s short-lived comedy “The Star Spangled Girl”. He and Richard Benjamin had played sophomoric versions of Oscar Madison and Felix Unger. A tightly-wound Perkins moved around the stage performing great feats of physical comedy while delivering lines in his unique staccato tones. “Toy food! You spent all that money on toy food?” (The memory of one piece of business where he pressed his sports jacket under the cushion of a Swedish modern sofa still makes me laugh.) His fast-talking, womanizing avant garde magazine publisher was as far removed from Norman Bates as one could imagine.
In subsequent years, Perkins would return successfully to the stage replacing Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Dysart in Peter Schaffer’s “Equus” (where one stage hand told him: “We couldn’t understand a word of this till you did it. It’s a good play!”); opposite Mia Farrow and Holly Palance in Bernard Slade’s “Romantic Comedy”.
He loved working in the theatre – both as actor and director. It was a link to the world of the father he’d never known and it helped him escape from Norman Bates’s shadow.
I was looking forward to writing this new play with Tony. I’d never collaborated on a play before and wondered what the method of work would be. As a young actor, I’d read Moss Hart’s inspiring memoir, “Act One”, which detailed his collaboration with the moody and distant George S. Kaufman, who addressed his junior colleague as ‘er’ and starved him until tea was served at four. Tony was nothing like that. After a few weeks, he called me ‘doll’ and whipped up great grilled cheese sandwiches. And those wonderful stories! About himself and the legends he had worked with on stage and in films.
After his father’s death in 1937, his mother had taken 5-year-old Tony back to Boston where she attempted to rule with an iron hand. When Jane Perkins didn’t want her only child to do something, the standard rejoinder was: “You won’t like it.” (Until the day he died, Coca Cola had never passed Tony’s lips because Jane had announced: “You won’t like it.”)
When touring productions of Broadway shows came to town, Mrs. Perkins functioned as the American equivalent of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office pronouncing which plays were suitable for public consumption. A hit comedy with macabre overtones piqued Tony’s interest. His mother gave it thumbs down: “You won’t like it.”
For the first time, Tony disobeyed his mother and went to the Saturday matinee without her permission. And he liked it! The play made him laugh and scared him at the same time. This combination of comedy and terror became a touchstone of his being. When the show was over, Tony lingered behind in the auditorium, got up on the stage and walked around the set. He was determined to be a part of this world. The play was “Arsenic and Old Lace”.
The movie, a mega-hit adaptation of the black comedy concerning the lovable, old Brewster sisters, who performed mercy killings on elderly bachelors, had had the same affect on me when I was thirteen. Once I discovered it had been a play, I produced a half-hour production of it as the entertainment for my grammar school graduation. “Arsenic” became the first great bond for Tony and me.
Over the next few weeks, Perkins pushed me to write the new “Arsenic and Old Lace” which would be the vehicle he dreamt of starring in on Broadway. During the period of our work, he received an offer from Washington’s Kennedy Center to appear in a revival of “Arsenic”. Not in the coveted light comedian’s role of drama critic Mortimer Brewster but as his serial killer brother Jonathan, the role Boris Karloff created in the original. Tony turned it down. He didn’t want Norman Bates preceding him on stage.
The play we started writing was set in Palm Springs in 1949. Was that the same year Tony had toured with Kay Francis playing her son in Somerset Maugham’s “Theatre”? Kay Francis had been Warner Brothers great female star just before Bette Davis arrived in Burbank. Her eyes were great limpid pools which made one forget her unfortunate speech impediment. Audiences in the 1930s howled with unexpected laughter when Miss Francis breathlessly urged her screen lover to “come and see my womb”. Screenwriter Mary McCall once told me her first job at the studio was combing through all of Miss Francis’s scripts in search of any words with offending R’s and changing them.
Kay Francis had been off the screen for some years when Tony worked with her.
“Every night before the curtain went up, her voice would ring out breathlessly backstage: ‘Anthony! Anthony, where are you?’ And I’d go scampering to her dressing room. ‘Oh, Anthony! Do it for me. Please, please, do it for me’. And I’d lean over the chaise she was sprawled out on and, dutifully, I’d put eye drops in those great limpid pools of hers.”
The payoff wasn’t quite so innocent when Tony had the dressing room on the Paramount lot next to a famous blond singer a few years later. Making her dramatic debut in a thriller, the singer was a nervous wreck, to put it mildly. Tony could hear her sobbing uncontrollably on the other side of the wall and wailing unintelligibly. In a pre-Norman Bates bit of business, Tony picked up a glass tumbler, put it to the wall and listened.
“She was begging her hair dresser to have sex with her,” said Tony. “Said it was the only way to calm her down.”
On another occasion, Tony and I were watching an old Paramount picture on TV. A three strip Technicolor noir set in a remote Nevada casino. The heroine was shooting craps with a crowd of extras squeezed behind her. To the left of the frame was a voluptuous woman in a black dress.
“See her?” said Tony. “She’s there to blow the crew. Anytime you see a woman in a black dress in a Paramount crowd scene, that’s what she’s there for. Everyone knows that.”
The things they don’t teach you at film school! Like posing for a group picture. Tony went back to the studio one day to pose for a Life Magazine cover commemorating Paramount’s 60th Anniversary. All the actors drew numbers from a hat to see where they’d stand. Tony ended up in the third row next to a considerably shorter Henry Winkler, who couldn’t help noticing Tony standing on his toes.
“What are you doing?” asked Winkler.
“You can’t be too tall,” replied Tony.
Winkler got it and went up on his toes, as well. But the photographer was taking his time, as well he should when shooting the likes of Ginger Rogers, Dorothy Lamour, Victor Mature and Burt Lancaster (who informed Tony at the shoot how well hung Mature was). Winkler couldn’t stay on point for long.
“Too bad,” replied Tony when Winkler sank down to his normal height. And Tony was right. In the group shot, Henry Winkler was barely visible standing next to the more savvy “giants”.
Tony’s mine of such cinematic nuggets was virtually endless. Not a day went by when he wouldn’t top himself with such ribald reminiscences. My all-time favorite was his lunch with Humphrey Bogart.
It was 1953 and Tony was attending Rollins College in Florida. He’d read that MGM was making a film version of Ruth Gordon’s autobiographical play “Years Ago”. He’d played the small role of Fred Whitmarsh, Ruth’s gawky suitor, on stage in summer stock and felt he had a shot at the movie.
“I studied the roster of juveniles under contract at Metro – Carleton Carpenter, Robert Horton – and knew none of them was right for the part.”
So Perkins made his way out to California, haunted MGM’s Washington Boulevard gate in Culver City and, eventually, got the role.
“I kept a book with the names of all the actors my father had worked with onstage,” said Tony, “and I’d look them up when they came through Boston to try and learn about my Dad. Bogart had done a play with my father so I contacted him when I arrived in Los Angeles. He invited me to lunch at Romanoff’s.
“‘So you’re Osgood’s kid!’ said Bogey, sitting at his usual banquette along the wall. ‘Your old man was quite a guy.’ And he began to regale me with stories about my father. After a few minutes, he stopped abruptly. Something – actually someone – had caught his eye. He excused himself, rose from the banquette and crossed the restaurant floor to another booth where a beautiful young woman had been giving our table the eye.
“A few moments later, Bogey came back to the table shaking his kid. ‘It’s not me, kid. It’s you. Here.’ And he tossed me a set of car keys. ‘Take my car. Have fun.’
“I stared in terror at the keys, the girl and Bogart. And somehow I managed to croak out: ‘I don’t know how to drive!’
“Bogart stared at me with a look I had never seen in any of his screen performances. It was a mixture of pity, contempt, disillusionment and disappointment. He put the keys back in his pocket, hiked up his trousers, resumed his seat and said: ‘So you’re Osgood’s kid! ... Your old man was quite a guy.”

Copyright © 2012 Foo Dog Productions

zeydah lou

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 10:46:09 -0900

It was a spring day in 1966 and I was walking down Seventh Avenue with Lou Jacobi. The former Louis Jacobovitch, he of the smudge mustache and hunched shoulders, who was then starring on Broadway in “Don’t Drink the water”, a first play that a young comedy writer named Woody Allen had written expressly for him. A natty dresser, who bought everything from Brooks Brothers, Jacobi stared with displeasure at the lack of crease in my trousers. Abruptly wrapping an arm around my shoulder, he boomed aloud with his unique voice that could blend both affection and reprimand in the same breath: “Charlie! I’m gonna blow you to a pant press.”

Before I could question the meaning of the statement, Jacobi had steered me into the back room of a dry cleaners whose proprietor clearly knew him. Jacobi told me to whip off my trousers and did the same himself. The owner handed a copy of Variety to Jacobi to help pass the time as we both stood there in our underwear.

“Olivier wouldn’t do this for you,” said Jacobi, thumbing through the show business bible until he came to the obituary page whereupon he announced: “Ken Soble died.” The recently deceased was a Canadian broadcaster who hosted Ken Soble’s Amateur Hour on radio and later on the Hamilton TV station that he owned. “That putz would never book me on his show.”

As we stepped back into our freshly pressed trousers, I realized that success would never erase the hurt and rejection that Jacobi - a man who never left home until he was almost 40 - had suffered in his native Canada from both entrepreneurs and his own father.

Lou Jacobi would have turned 98 today. Amazingly, he only passed away two years ago. He was my second father. Coincidentally, their birthdays were only four days apart so their respective chi was very similar. (An “alte Capricorn”, as Lou referred to himself in later years.)

Born Louis Jacobovitch in Toronto in 1913, he was both an actor and a violin prodigy. He appeared as a child in a play called The Rabbi and the Priest and was so impressive in the role that he was invited to tour the United States in the show. But, as he confided in me years later, his mother didn’t trust his father (who was to chaperone him on the road) not to dally so American audiences would have to wait 30 years to see the former child prodigy on the stage.

Lou’s relationship with his his father was tempestuous. Mr. Jacobovitch worked in the garment trade all year but at High Holidays was in demand as a cantor. He had a theatrical manner about him and Lou would absorb and eventually achieve fame channeling his father on Broadway as Mr. Baker in Neil Simon’s first hit Come Blow Your Horn. When Lou berated his son on stage then turned to a chair for corroboration, it was something his own father had done many times before.

Which brings us to the famous Jacobi sound “Enhhhhh?”. It beggars description. Starting on a low note from somewhere in the kishkes, it ultimately rises to a triumphant bellow incorporating both “I told you so!” and “See what I mean?” Definitely, it’s the noise he directed at the chair in the Simon play.

When Lou was a boy, he attended a matinee performance of Ansky’s classic play of the supernatural The Dybbuk - performed by a traveling Yiddish Theatre company on Spadina Avenue. Returning home greatly impressed, his father wanted a critique. Lou said it was terrific but felt when the girl died on stage, it would have been better to have a yellow light. Mr. Yacobovitch turned to a nearby chair and said: “Enhhhh? Twelve years old and he’s an expert on the theatre.”

Lou’s observation would be vindicated when he appeared on Broadway in Paddy Chayefsky’s play The Tenth Man, a modern retelling of The Dybbuk. The heroine was played by Risa Schwartz, the grand-daughter of Maurice Schwartz, the John Barrymore of the Yiddish Theatre. The cast surrounded the legend afterwards backstage wanting to know what he thought about the play. “Not bad,” replied Schwartz in lofty tones,” but when the girl died, you should have had a yellow light.”

There was no resident professional theatre in Toronto in the 30s and 40s so Lou survived by entertaining at summer resorts in Muskoka and playing stags and bar-mitzvahs in the off-season. (“Very funny,” a guest told Jacobi after the show one night, “but what do you do in the winter?” Lou drew a breath and with his inimitable delivery replied: “In the winter, I wear an overcoat.” )

Lou had an encyclopedia of jokes in his brain and into his 80s when his memory started to go, he would carry scraps of paper in his pockets with punchlines written on them. (He also carried clippings of his legit reviews in his wallet.)

By 1950 Jacobi realized he had to leave Canada and his father’s house if he was ever to make a name for himself. “Go! Go to Great Britain!” bellowed his father, standing on the porch of his house on Palmerston Boulevard at his tearful son standing on the sidewalk. “See what kind of a living you’ll make.”

Within a month of arriving in London, Jacobi was hired to play Big Jule in Guys and Dolls and to understudy the show’s star Sam Levene as Nathan Detroit. Lou also performed his own act in late night cabaret. Levene came to see his understudy one night and resolved never to miss a performance after watching Jacobi bring the house down.

Two years later he made his film debut opposite voluptuous Diana Dors in Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary? The two became great friends. Carol Reed made his first color film, A Kid for Two Farthings, a neglected Felliiniesque fantasy about life in London’s predominantly Jewish Petticoat Lane. The great filmmaker cast Jacobi (sans mustache) as a wrestling promoter and Lou stole every scene he was in - a feat he would continue for the rest of his screen career.

Garson Kanin brought Jacobi over from London in 1955 to make his Broadway debut as Mr. Van Daan in The Diary of Anne Frank. Lou locked horns with the play’s star, Joseph Schildkraut, a man with serious father issues of his own. They quarreled incessantly and one night Margalo Gillmore playing Mrs. Van Daan drew Jacobi aside and said: “Don’t hate him, Lou. You may have to play him some day.” (When Mr. Jacobovitch came down from Toronto to see see his son perform, Lou proudly took the old man round to Schildkraut’s dressing room where Mr. Jacobovitch pronounced: “Now your father, Rudolph Schildkraut - there was an actor!”). Jacobi made his Hollywood debut in 1959 recreating the role of Mr. Van Daan in George Stevens’ film version of the play.

Lou’s persona was unique. It inspired writers to create characters for him. Billy Wilder wrote Dr. Dreyfuss for him in The Apartment but the producers of The Tenth Man wouldn’t release him from his contract. So Jack Kruschen got the role and an Oscar nomination for impersonating Lou. (Wilder made it up to Jacobi a few years later by having him replace the dying Charles Laughton in Irma La Douce.)

I had moved to England in 1969 and didn’t see Lou again until I moved to California in 1974. He would frequently fly out to Los Angeles to guest star on Barney Miller and other shows and we would always see each other.

In 1976 I was commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to write a 90 minute play for television. Lou had complained to me for years that the CBC never brought him home to Canada. A pet project of mine had been to adapt Jonson’s Elizabethan comedy The Alchemist and set it in downtown Toronto’s Jewish neighborhood in the 1920s. It was to be called The Alchemist of Cecil Street and would be called The Alchemist of Cecil Street (named for the street off Spadina Avenue where I was born). I thought Lou would be thrilled.

About a week after I mailed the script to him in New York, I got a phone call from Lou in the middle of the afternoon” “Charlie? Jacobi here. I read the script. I gotta pass. The Jews don’t need this kinda trouble.” I had no idea what he was talking about but I knew he wasn’t going to do it.

A few months later I was in New York and I phoned Lou. We went for a walk and he laced into me.

“How could you write a thing like that? They’ll have pogroms in New Jersey if this play is produced.” The conversation evolved into an argument resulting in our not speaking for nine years.

Then my friend Ed Begley Jr. invited me to lunch one day while he was shooting his TV series St. Elsewhere. It was pouring when I arrived at CBS Radford and I will never forget the image of Ed making his way across the lot carrying an outsized umbrella to come and get me. He led me onto the soundstage where I heard a voice I never thought I’d hear again. “Charlie? Is that you?”

It was Lou. We fell into each other’s arms and our friendship was never severed again. Nor was The Alchemist of Cecil Street ever revived as a topic of conversation. I will always be grateful to Ed for indirectly reuniting us.

At the time Jacobi was starring in Come Blow Your Horn, he became pals with another unique Broadway actor Walter Matthau. Matthau was no stranger to blowing his own horn and lamenting the fact that he hadn’t yet made a breakthrough as a great star. Lou had finally had enough of Matthau’s kvetching and took action. He wrote a letter to his fellow actor in Yiddish and mailed it to him at the Booth Theatre where he was appearing on stage in A Shot in the Dark.

Matthau couldn’t read Yiddish and sought out Jacobi after the show to translate. Lou perused the letter with feigned shock and awe.

“What is it, Lou? What is it?” demanded Matthau in his own inimitable tones. “Tell me.”

“It’s from the drama critic of The Forward. He’s raving about your performance.”

“What does he say?”

“‘Der Gang. Der Sprach. Der Stehl. Der Stimme.’”

“What does it mean, Lou?”

“Your walk, your speech, the way you stand, your vocal quality. ‘Und der Personality’. Not since Jacob Adler has there been such an actor on the stage.”

“Where? Where?” Matthau was near tears. “Show me.”

Jacobi pointed out the words but never told Matthau that the letter was a hoax.

In 1994 the two were reunited on what was to be Lou’s last movie, IQ. By then, Matthau (playing Albert Einstein) was the huge star he always wanted to be. His contract said he didn’t have to shoot after four in the afternoon. Lou was still on the set at four in the morning. He was 80 years old and decided he’d had enough.

I was living in New York by then and spending a lot of time with Lou whose memory was falling away in chunks. We would have lunch once a week at the Brooklyn Diner and ordering a beverage became the thirteenth labor of Hercules for him. He couldn’t remember the name of what he wanted to drink and the waitress and I would go through every possible drink imaginable.

Once he told me about a movie he’d sen on TV the night before. “With what’s her name... you know... seatbelt.”

“Bette Davis?” I asked.

Lou’s face lit up with joy. “You understand me!”

When my daughter Ethne was born in 1999, Jacobi became Zeydah Lou to her and he doted on her.

We moved back to California two years later but Zeydah Lou was always our first stop when we came to Manhattan. His beloved wife Ruth passed away a few years after that and Lou retreated more and more into himself.

On my last visit to him, the Trinidadian caregiver told me: “He don’t remember nothin’. He don’t speak no more.”

But the Ink Spots were singing If I Didn’t Care on a CD and I started to vamp a comic version of the speech they often delivered in the middle of the song.

“Honey Chile,” I said and started ad libbing in Yiddish.

Lou stared at me with his one good eye, then pointed a finger at me and uttered a triumphant: “Enhhhhh!”

Happy Birthday, Zeydah Lou! I miss you every day.

To hear and see Lou Jacobi at the top of his game as Judge Stern in Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders delivering the hilarious “No God in the ceremony” aria, click on the link below. The 1971 film was produced by and starred Elliott Gould and was directed by Alan Arkin.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imfWlHFEVLY

Copyright © 2011 Foo Dog Productions

charles laughton

Fri, 2 Dec 2011 14:56:19 -0900

There never was nor never will be another actor like Charles Laughton. Most film buffs think Brando was the first method actor to explode on the screen in The Men and Streetcar Named Desire. But it was Laughton, almost twenty years earlier, who totally immersed himself in the psychology, background and even the clothes of the characters he played.

Alfred Hitchcock, who directed Laughton in two films - one in England, the other years later in Hollywood - said: “Charles is a very, very oblique Method actor - not exactly Method. Let me put it this way: There are many, many artists in the world who are extremely talented and are geniuses, but they never become a pro. I think that was one of his problems - Charles never became a craft professional. He was always an artist and a genius, and he worked that way, so it became a disordered lack of control... Very often when we say a pro, it’s in the pro the art is concealed.”

Garson Kanin described Laughton as “the only professional I ever encountered who thought of himself as an amateur. He had a little set piece in which he proclaimed himself an amateur, said he was proud of it and never wanted to be anything else. There followed a discourse on the etymology of the word “amateur”; one who loves, who does something for the love of it.”

“A professional,” said Laughton, “is a whore.”

Laughton was obsessive in his preparation for a movie role. When he played Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty he tracked down the Saville Row tailors who had clothed the real Bligh 150 years earlier and who still had the tyrannical captain’s original measurements, bill and receipt for his uniform. Laughton also found the original hat makers and insured that the naval tricorn was equally ship-shape and Bristol fashion.

He was born in Scarborough, Yorkshire in 1899, to a former barmaid and a butler, who saved their pennies and purchased their own hotel. Perhaps, this was the reason he loved and was attracted to Ruggles of Red Gap, a classic comedy in which he, a butler, and ZaSu Pitts, a cook, open their own restaurant.

A closeted homosexual, Laughton went south to London and, with his hotel background, got a job at Claridge’s as an assistant night clerk. He was let go after a few weeks because he looked so weird it frightened the guests. He enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts but left to join the army in World War I. Offered a commission, he turned it down and entered the war as a private. Gassed in France, he returned to RADA after the war and began his remarkable career.

His widow, Elsa Lanchester, remembered their first meeting in 1927, when he was making a name for himself in London’s West End: “He looked quite without color - pale plump face, mouse colored hair - wearing wrinkled clothes, arms hanging rather listlessly at his sides with the back of his hands facing forward. Nevertheless, the actor-personality was strong. My first impression was that he looked like a baker’s assistant, who’d just left a bakery and dusty with flour.”

Lanchester was a free spirit, a fringe member of the Bloomsbury group whose well-to-do mother caused a furore in the late 19th century when she took for her lover a Cockney factory worker and proceeded to have two children with him without “the benefit of clergy”. Laughton on the other hand was raised a Catholic under the strict supervision of his mother, who remained a strong influence on his life into adulthood.

The Laughtons married in 1929 and arrived in Hollywood three years later under contract to Paramount, which immediately loaned him out to Universal for James Whale’s comic classic The Old Dark House in which he played a larger than life Yorkshireman opposite Boris Karloff’s broken necked butler. Back at Paramount, he made four movies in a row including The Devil and the Deep, playing a crazed submarine captain opposite Tallulah Bankhead and Gary Cooper, DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross as a flamboyantly gay Nero, a hilarious cameo in the Lubitsch sequence of If I Had a Million in which he let loose the biggest raspberry in movie history and as Dr. Moreau in the neglected horror gem, Island of Lost Souls.

His performances at Paramount all tended towards the Oscar Wilde variety. Leo MaCarey grew exasperated during night shooting on Ruggles, stopped Laughton in the middle of a take and said: “Jesus, Charles, do you have to be so nancy?”

“But, my dear fellow,” replied Laughton, “after eight o’clock a bit of it is bound to show.”

Following his portrayal of the marvelously creepy Dr. Moreau, he returned to England where he made The Private Lives of Henry VIII for Alexander Korda. The wily Korda had lured Laughton into the role by telling Lanchester that he was making a film called Henry VIII and his Fourth Wife. But by the time Laughton had signed a contract, Lanchester found herself playing Anne of Cleves along with Merle Oberon, Binnie Barnes, Everley Gregg and Wendy Barrie as the other wives. The film would be the first of the Laughtons many screen couplings over the next 25 years. Henry became the most successful British film ever made up to that point and Laughton won the Best Actor Oscar of 1933 for his performance.

“I think if Charles had his way,” said Lanchester, “he never would have acted at all, because in every part he played - every single one - after the first two or three days’ work, he tried to get out of the picture. He’d say ‘I can’t do it. I’m not suited to it”

He withdrew from George Cukor’s David Copperfield after a few days shooting for that very reason. He had lost his confidence completely as Wilkins Micawber and was replaced by W.C. Fields, who gave the performance of a lifetime.

But this was a minor glitch in his Hollywood career of the 1930’s in which he would portray Javert in Les Miserables, Moulton Barrett in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, and finish off the decade with his extraordinary Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

In 1935, Korda lured Laughton back to England to star in a film version of Cyrano de Bergerac but when that project stalled over script problems, the actor amazed everyone by going to Paris to appear with the Comedie Francaise as Sganarelle in Moliere’s Le Medecin Malgre Lui - performing in French to rave notices!

When he returned to London, Korda cast him as Rembrandt. Again Laughton traveled to Amsterdam to immerse himself in all things Van Rijn. It was an extraordinary performance and Lanchester played his final love, Hendrickje Stooffels.

The 1940s saw a steep decline in Laughton’s career. With the exception of Renoir’s This Land is Mine and John Farrow’s The Big Clock, most of his film work was unmemorable and, often, demeaning. He began a collaboration with the exiled Bertolt Brecht on what would become the classic play Galileo. But the initial productions in Los Angeles and New York went unheralded. Laughton began teaching Shakespeare from a school room in his home.

One night in 1950, Laughton appeared on the Ed Sullivan reading from the Bible. He had mesmerized audiences twice before reciting the Gettysburg Address in Ruggles and the 23rd Psalm in Rembrandt. A young MCA agent named Paul Gregory saw Laughton’s performance on TV in a Broadway bar; he ran backstage to the Sullivan show and rescued Laughton’s sinking career. Soon the hotel owner’s son from Scarborough was crisscrossing the country playing schools, town halls, wherever reading the Bible, Dickens, Kerouac and Thomas Wolfe. Later he would go on the road with Charles Boyer, Cedric Hardwicke and Agnes Moorehead in Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell.

The movies rediscovered him in the 1950s and he gave memorable performances for David Lean in Hobson’s Choice, Stanley Kubrick in Spartacus and Otto Preminger in Advise and Consent and, most triumphantly, for Billy Wilder in Witness for the Prosecution (both he and Lanchester were nominated for Academy Awards).

Wilder was about to direct Laughton once more as Moustache in Irma La Douce when the great actor died in 1962 at the age of 63.

The Criterion Collection has an astonishing collection of Laughton’s most memorable performances on DVD: Henry VIII and Rembrandt in the Eclipse series Alexander Korda’s Private Lives; his drunken, hilarious Henry Hobson in Hobson’s Choice and the sybaritic Gracchus in Spartacus. Now on BluRay, the seldom seen Island of Lost Souls where he famously cracks his whip and demands of Bela Lugosi: “What is the law?” Also on BluRay, the amazing The Night of the Hunter - the only film Laughton ever directed - complete with Laughton coaching the actors before each take. A chance for us all to share in the genius of Charles Laughton fifty years after his death.

Copyright © 2011 Foo Dog Productions

ETHNE

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 18:28:42 -0800

In 1998 I was living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with my wife Kim Eveleth. Our neighbors downstairs were a couple named Vicky and Nicolas Malouf: she was a blonde from Western Canada; he was a suave charmer from the Sudan. I asked him if he’d ever seen one of my favorite films, “The Four Feathers”, which had been shot on location in the Sudan by the Korda Brothers. (Alex produced it; Zoltan directed; Vincent designed the sets.) Nicolas had never seen it but his father had watched a lot of the filming when he was a boy.

So I whipped out my Laser Disc (the best available version at that time of this great British Empire epic) and we screened it in our living room on a Friday night. Nicolas was entranced by the film and, particularly, June Duprez as the heroine Ethne Burroughs. In fact, he kept referring to Kim for the rest of the evening as Ethne (pronounced Eth-nee).

The next day he sent us a thank you note addressed to Ethne and Charles. Except that Ethne was crossed out in thin black ink and Kim was written above it. He continued to address Kim as Ethne for the rest of the time he lived in the building.

“You know,” I finally said to Kim, “if we ever had a daughter, Ethne would be a beautiful name.”

We had a daughter the next year and we did name her Ethne. She’s had a love-hate relationship with the name ever since. I urged her to watch the movie and listen to the melodious tones of Ralph Richardson saying the name of his beloved. As her unrequited suitor John Durrance, he brings a breath to Ethne that is vintage Richardson. Or listen to C. Aubrey Smith’s no-nonsense pronunciation of the name as Duprez’s father General Burroughs.

Our Ethne is twelve now and old enough to appreciate the magnificence of this extraordinary film now available on Blu Ray for the first time from the Criterion Collection.

For those who don’t know the plot of this oft-filmed story, it is the journey of jingoistic General Faversham’s only child Harry, who has no desire to take up the family business. Particularly on a revenge invasion to the Sudan in 1895 to avenge the slaughter of Gordon and his men at Khartoum ten years earlier. (There is an undeniable echo for a modern audience when one thinks of George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq to settle the score.) When Faversham resigns his commission on the eve of departure, his three best friends each present him with a white feather - the symbol of cowardice. The fourth feather is Ethne’s.

To prove to his friends and himself that he is not a coward, Faversham makes his way to the Sudan where he poses as a mute native and rescues his friends from death.

Until the release of David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia” over twenty years later, “The Four Feathers” went unchallenged as the definitive epic of the desert. Once again the Criterion Collection’s Blu Ray creates the almost magical impression that the film has never been seen before. The Technicolor photography of Georges Perinal in England and Osmond Borradaile on location in the Sudan is breathtaking. Miklos Rosza’s score is a classic. And Ralph Richardson rips your heart apart as John Durrance struggling with his blindness and the loss of the adored Ethne.

And what ever happened to the big screen Ethne? Twenty-year-old June Duprez was absolutely adorable as the daughter of the regiment.

Duprez’s father had been the successful American vaudeville monologist Fred Duprez, who had settled in England and appeared in dozens of British screen comedies in the 1930s. In fact, he was returning to England in triumph from America where one of his films had just opened when he died of a heart attack aboard the ocean liner in 1938 just as his daughter began filming The Four Feathers.

The film made Duprez an immediate star in England and she spent the next two years playing the Princess in the Kordas’ magnificent fantasy “The Thief of Bagdad” initially shot in England but - following the outbreak of World War II in September 1939 - moved to the safety of neutral California.

Duprez was happy to sit out the war in Los Angeles far from her insanely jealous and very rich Harley Street physician husband. But she ran afoul of Merle Oberon, Alexander Korda’s movie star wife, who had superseded the widowed Norma Shearer as the film capital’s hostess supreme. The half-caste Oberon (born Queenie O’Brien Thompson in India to an Irish father and Indian mother, whom the insecure actress passed off as her maid) was trying to pass as high society and didn’t need the real thing in the form of June Duprez stealing her thunder.

O’Brien omitted Duprez from the opening night guest list of “Thief” and this was only the beginning of her downward spiral in wartime Hollywood. Her agent, Myron Selznick, demanded an outrageous sum for her services, which none of the studios was willing to play for this exotic looking girl.

“They all thought I was Oriental,” said Duprez. “It was absurd. I’m not. Merle was.” Unsuccessful attempts on separate occasions by both David O. Selznick and Harry Cohn to rape her in her apartment left her branded as a possible lesbian and blacklisted at the major studios.

Banished to Poverty Row studio PRC, she made two quickies They Raid By Night with Lyle Talbot and Tiger Fangs opposite big game hunter Frank Buck.

Only her social status amongst the British Colony allowed her to be in the all-star British War Relief extravaganza “Forever and a Day.” Then she was back to serial work in “Don Winslow of the Coast Guard”.

Then nothing for a year. Only the goodness of Nigel Bruce and his wife kept her from being destitute. She had even approached the FBI in the hopes of becoming a spy for them.

Then Clifford Odets came to the rescue with “None But the Lonely Heart”. It was a pet project of Cary Grant’s at RKO and the two had spent months trying to find an English actress to be Ada Brantline, the Cockney femme fatale, opposite Grant’s ne-er-do-well Ernie Mott in Odets’s adaptation of Richard Llewelyn’s novel which The Group Theatre’s Bard was also directing. RKO refused to cast her but Grant and Odets dug their heels in.

And Duprez was brilliant. Sexy and vulnerable. “It was the first real role I had to play,” she later said. “Ohhh, what I learned from Clifford. I learned my craft from him. I mean, I learned how to act.”

Unfortunately, the film did no business despite Ethel Barrymore winning the Oscar as Grant’s mother.

But being in this prestige picture enabled Duprez to return from the Siberia of Poverty Row, albeit briefly. She was the heroine in The Brighton Strangler and Rene Clair’s classic And Then There Were None (reunited with C. Aubrey Smith) and her last Hollywood exotic opposite Alan Ladd in Calcutta.

Odets had raved about her work to people in New York and that grande dame Eva LaGallienne came west to meet her and offer her employment with the American Repertory Theatre. She appeared in Henry VIII, What Every Woman Knows and Androcles and the Lion with Walter Hampden, Victor Jory, Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson. The next year George S. Kaufman directed her in a short lived play called Town House based on a collection of John Cheever short stories.

Then it was over. She married, had children, returned to Europe, lived for a while in Rome, and died in her sleep in London in 1984. She was only 66.

But she is forever twenty and - if one can imagine it - even more divinely beautiful on Blu Ray in those two Korda classics, The Four Feathers and The Thief of Bagdad, now released by Criterion.

Copyright © 2011 Foo Dog Productions

dolores hope

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 18:13:52 -0800

It was August 1965 and I was 18-years-old. Working for the entertainment department of the Toronto Telegram. Back then the biggest event of the year was the Canadian National Exhibition. People would flock from all over the country to attend the various exhibits, hang out on the midway and see the show at the Grandstand. Usually featuring an imported American star.

That year Jack Arthur, the producer of the Grandstand Show, split the bill in half. Victor Borge was there for the first part of the season and Bob Hope for the last.

Hope was a legendary performer by that time and, much against his will, a controversial character. Ever since World War II, Old Ski Nose entertained the U.S. troops wherever there was a war or police action. No matter how dangerous the fighting, Hope was there in his fatigues, swinging his putter with a bevy of scantily clad starlets to keep the boys morale high.

But the Vietnam War, which was raging at that time, was a very unpopular war. Students were protesting in the street and the British-born Bob Hope - an uber patriot, like so many immigrants - wasn’t crazy about these kids exhibiting their rights to free speech.

Hope had landed at Toronto International Airport at 8:45 on the evening of August 27th. With his wife Dolores at his side, he descended the ramp of his plane to be greeted by the bagpipes of the 48th Highlanders. The comedian introduced his wife to the crowd and everything else was left up to lip-readers as the screeching of the pipes drowned out any conversation.

We members of the press were hustled off to the Maple Leaf Room for a press conference. I was close enough to Hope to hear him lay one of his famous double entendres on a female piper: “You blow so far away from where you finger.”

The CNE press office had made it clear that Mr. Hope would not be granting any one-on-one interviews. So all of us crammed into the Maple Leaf Room - a claustrophobic, windowless box, which I’m sure is now used to grill suspected terrorists - were a bit disgruntled.

What I was not prepared for was the level of hostility my fellow reporters exhibited to “Rapid Robert”.

They wanted to know how he could possibly support an “illegal” war in Vietnam.

“We’ve got to win the war,” said Hope, “or we’ll be fighting in our own backyards.”

This comment was met by groans from the Canadian reporters. The subject of the student protests came up and Hope reacted again.

“I don’t think they students know what they’re doing. I’ve spoken to a number of generals about the situation - including General Eisenhower. I think they know a lot more about the world because they’ve been a round a lot longer.”

This position further incensed the members of the Canadian fifth estate, who seemed on the verge of lynching Hope.

How could this be happening? I asked myself. Bob Hope wasn’t the President. Lyndon Johnson was. He didn’t dictate foreign policy. Bob Hope made people laugh. I remembered being seven-years-old and watching him on the big screen at the Nortown Theatre in Casanova’s Big Night, which I then thought was the funniest movie I’d ever seen. (In later years I learned it was one of Woody Allen’s favorite comedies and one he’d screen often.) When Hope broke the fourth wall and talked to the audience, I was sure he was talking to me. (I was also an avid collector of Bob Hope comic books. And how may people remember them?)

Eleven yeas later my childhood idol was in trouble and I was determined to save him. But how? How could I turn this hostile crowd around for Bob Hope?

Then I remembered Dorothy Lamour - Hope’s co-star with Bing Crosby in the Road series - had been through town the previous week appearing in summer stock at Vineland. She’d made the remark: “I’m no prude. Just ask Bob Hope.”

I threw the quote out to Hope like a fireman tossing a life line. Hope snapped his head towards me and I could see the tumblers in his mind unlock the vault to the million one liners he kept locked away up there.

“Dorothy said that? I’m surprised she’s still interested in sex.”

The room laughed. I asked Hope about Bing Crosby.

Hope relaxed his shoulders and replied: “Bing’s in big financial trouble - he’s down to his last city.”

The people in the room began to roar with laughter and I continued to feed Hope material for the next twenty minutes.

When the press conference ended at 9:30 everyone loved Bob Hope again.

As I walked out of the Maple Leaf Room,a woman seated next to the door reached out and touched my arm.

“Thanks for saving Bob,” she said.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I’m Mrs. Hope,” she replied. “Is there anything we can do for you?”

“I’d like an exclusive interview with your husband.”

“You’ve got it,” smiled Dolores Hope.

Two days later an amazed publicist called from the CNE and said: “I don’t know what you did, but you got an exclusive with Hope. Be backstage at the CNE tonight.”

I was rushed into Bob Hope’s dressing room a few minutes before he was to go on stage. He stared at me with little warmth then asked: “You the kid from the press conference?” I nodded yes. “Thanks. Make it quick.”

I only had fifteen minutes with him so it wasn’t the greatest interview of my career. But Dolores Hope had kept her word to me.

That lovely lady passed away two days ago at 102. Thanks for the memory, Mrs. Hope.

Copyright © 2011 Foo Dog Productions

colleen and g.c./part two

Tue, 5 Jul 2011 19:09:31 -0800

Back in Colleen’s dressing room we were discussing when she and G.C. returned to Circle in the Square to appear in a revival of O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms. Colleen was originally to have played Abbie opposite Franchot Tone’s Ephraim. But when Tone took ill, Jose Quintero invited a reluctant G.C. to play his wife’s elderly husband in this tortured tale of incest.

Drawing on all the emotions of their lives, Colleen and G.C. electrified the off-Broadway audiences every night. The slightest move or fidget from the other side of the proscenium, however, would set off the audience-conscious Scott.

“ ‘If they coughing, it isn’t working’ is his credo,” said Colleen.

One particular night at the dramatically-pitched moment where Abbie tells Ephraim that the baby she’s killed wasn’t his, a man in the front row walked right in front of the stage en route to the men’s room. In the tiny theatre where every whisper can be heard, the sound of a toilet flushing is akin to the roar of Niagara Falls.

The audience dared not laugh when they beheld Scott’s wrathful visage. The man emerged from the men’s room blithely expecting to resume his seat.

“The ushers grabbed the man by the arms,” said Colleen. “They were afraid George would kill him. And after the show George said to me: ‘We’ve got to face it, Colleen. That scene is not holding.’ So we rehearsed it that night till three in the morning.”

That kind of obsession and tension led the Scotts to divorce in 1965.

George Dewey Scott had remarried yet again and went to Mexico with his new bride after the nuptials - the same place his son and Colleen had gone for their divorce. The four spent a lovely week together. But the hotel management could never figure out why the younger Mr. and Mrs. Scott were sleeping in separate rooms while the older Mr. and Mrs. Scott were in the honeymoon suite.

“One of George’s saving graces,” said Colleen, “is his humor. And he is tremendously honest about himself.

“Our main thing - even through the worst - was our humor. We think the same way and find the same things funny. It was horrifying when we were divorced that we still laughed at the same things. In movies, we’d cry at things that were old and sentimental - things that we’d wisecrack at with other people. In San Francisco, we bawl at the ending. Walking into the sunset with Spencer Tracy, Gable and Jeanette MacDonald. If we were with other people, we’d be cutting up the photography and the old-time technique.

Of her own films (The Nun’s Story, Man on a Tightrope and A Fine Madness), Miss Dewhurst says: “None of them had anything to do with acting.”

Scott recently completed his tenth film, Petulia, opposite Julie Christie, Richard Chamberlain and Joseph Cotten. It was directed by Richard Lester.

“I thoroughly enjoyed doing it,” said Scott., “but I don’t know what it’s about. I never went to the rushes because I knew it wouldn’t help. Dick had three cameras going and you didn’t know where they were. And he had another hidden camera in marvelous places. You didn’t know whether he was shooting your butt or your teeth.”

“It’s the first picture I never really had close tabs on and maybe it’s a good thing. I’ve had bad pictures. The Flim-Flam Man was a disaster as far as I’m concerned because of editing. And in Strangelove my last third was cut out. I didn’t talk to Stanley [Kubrick] for a year and a half. We’re friends now. But the director’s the boss unless you produce it yourself.

With his many triumphs on stage, in films and on television, it would be hard to pick out Scott’s most outstanding achievement.

“The greatest award I ever got in my life,” said Scott, “ was the most valuable player award in the Broadway baseball show league. I pitched for the Negro Actors Guild. Tony Ponzini, Reni Santoni and I were the only Caucasians. proudest thing I ever did.”

G.C. and Colleen were probably the first couple in America who just couldn’t make their divorce work. Their little boys, Alex and Campbell, were confused. Daddy was still living with Mommy. But why not? If two people truly love each other, they shouldn’t let an institution like divorce stand in the way. Especially if they’re Colleen Dewhurst and George C. Scott.

So on Independence Day last year, they were married again.

“What do you do for an anniversary?” I asked Scott.

“What do you do for an encore?” he retorted.

Colleen once said of G.C.: “George has very simple ambitions. He just wants to own the Ziegfeld Theatre and the Detroit Tigers.”

“Well,” said Scott, when I quoted his wife. “They’ve torn down the Ziegfeld Theatre, so that’s it. But I till want the Detroit Tigers... I mean if you’re going to have absurd ambitions, have them.”

On a realistic level, Scott seems to “be leaning more and more towards production and direction in both plays and films.“ Miss Dewhurst wants to play a neurotic in a comedy “who does nothing but say funny things on stage”. Both are looking for an interesting bridge team to play against.

After all the years with G.C., Colleen has grown tired of questions like: How do two such strong personalities live together? How can you exist in the same house? What is the secret of your marriage?

“No sooner do you give out the great clue,” said Colleen, “than you end up in the divorce court in front of some judge.” She leaned back and let loose that earthy laugh of hers. G.C. would have laughed, too, if he’d been there. Or he might have told Colleen that was enough. Or......

WHAT I DIDN’T WRITE ABOUT:

Towards the end of our interview, Colleen leaned forward, touched my thigh and asked: “What else do you write?”

“Plays.” Her hand was still on my thigh and her cleavage was on view. I thought I was going to faint.

“What sort of plays?”

“I’ve just written one about John Barrymore.”

Colleen gasped, took both my hands in hers and said: “You must give it to George. He’s obsessed with Barrymore.”

“Sure.” I hoped I wasn’t sweating.
“Promise?”

“I don’t have it with me but I could mail it to him when I go back to Canada.”

“That would be wonderful. Now, I have to get ready for tonight.”

I left her dressing room feeling like the young Moss Hart in Act One. George C. Scott in Barrymore by Charles Dennis. He wasn’t the logical choice. After all, G.C. was probably the only actor who couldn’t play Dr. Jekyll. But if he was interested! Why not? I couldn’t get Christopher Plummer to read it the previous summer at Stratford.

So I mailed the play to G.C. And when I returned to New a month later, he told me he’d misplaced it.

“Do you have another copy?” asked Scott.

Now in those long ago days of 1968, there were no word processors. No HP All-in-one printers. You banged away at your play on a typewriter. And you always made a carbon copy. Usually just one.

And I foolishly sent G.C. my only carbon.

A few weeks later I was in New York again. As I’d had no written response from Scott about the play, I went backstage to see him.

When I entered the dressing room and before I could even open my moth, he roared at me in the mirror. “I’ve lost it! I’m sorry!”

I was bereft. All that work. All that research. All those words.

Never again, I vowed to myself. I will never not keep a copy of my work.

Six months later I had moved to England. My first play had been produced in between to excellent reviews and the pain of the lost Barrymore script had subsided.

I’d been living in London for a brief few weeks when I was cast in a big World War Two movie called Patton. And who was the eponymous lead? George C. Scott.

I arrived in Madrid at night only to discover that the company was in the mountains of Segovia shooting the Battle of the Bulge. I, too, was part of that battle with a deathless line to utter: “It’s the Third Army! He did it! Old Georgie did it!”

But my scene was to be part of the second unit. No Franklin Schaffner. No G.C. They were up in Segovia, which meant I’d be shipping out once they were wrapped.

But after three days there was no snow in Segovia. No snow meant no Battle of the Bulge. The company was returning to Madrid and the Bronston Studios. I learned that my old friend Larry Dobkin was also in the cast. So I ventured onto the set say hello to him. He told me where G.C.’s dressing room was and I thought I’d say hello.

He was seated with his back to me - head shaved for the part - kibbitzing with his dresser. Then he saw me in the mirror and shouted: “I can’t find the goddam thing!”

It took me a second to realize what he was talking about then I said that wasn’t why I was there.

“I’m in the picture,” I explained. “I’m an actor.”

G.C. snorted at the notion and turned his attention back to his dresser.

About a week later - it still hadn’t snowed in Segovia and it looked like I might be stranded in Spain all winter - Larry Dobkin came back to the apartment we were now sharing in the Torre de Madrid and said: “G.C.’s gone missing and Jane Deacy asked me to find him.”

Jane Deacy was Scott’s manager. (She’d also managed another bad boy, James Dean.) He was out on a binge somewhere and as he appeared in almost every scene in the picture, it would cost 20th Century Fox a small fortune if he failed to turn up for work the next morning. Larry had apparently directed G.C. in some TV show years before and he had some degree of respect for him. So Jane thought - like the legendary big game hunter Frank Buck - Larry could bring G.C. back alive. I was to keep Larry company on his quest.

So we went from bar to bar into the wee hours of the morning. Until we arrived at a dive that was off limits to U.S. servicemen.

There we found George Campbell Scott surrounded by a circle of African American soldiers.

As we drew closer, we heard that inimitable, snarking voice say: “Don’t give me that pity the poor nigger shit!”

Larry, who unlike George was legitimately bald, was a master of diplomacy. He cleared his throat and with that incredible radio voice of his called out in a cautionary but magisterial tone: “George...”

G.C. wheeled around and, in a fury, snarled at Larry: “Stay outta this, baldy!”

We went home without George. I don’t know what happened to him after we left. But I do know he wasn’t able to work for several days afterwards. They had to scramble around to find a scene to shoot without G.C. Which was how I ended up being upgraded to the first unit. (But that’s another story altogether.)

I never saw Colleen again - except on stage and screen. She continued to blossom in all media. She became the definitive O’Neill actress of the 20th Century. She even got to be funny as Murphy Brown’s mother and got an Emmy for it. And she died way too soon.

G.C. followed his own path, which eventually resulted in a tragic downward spiral. I saw him on Broadway one last time in 1996.He was appearing in Tony Randall’s National Actors Theatre revival of Inherit the Wind. Scott was Drummond (the Clarence Darrow character) to Charles Durning’s Brady. It was tragic watching these two, overstuffed actors stumbling around the stage. Especially when Tony Randall was appearing that night as Hornbeck in the role he’d created 40 years earlier - as trim and crisp as he’d been in 1955.

I didn’t go backstage afterwards.

Copyright © 2011 Foo Dog Productions

peter falk remembered

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0800

When Peter Falk passed away last week at age 83, the media mourned the loss of TV’s Columbo. But only three years before playing the rumpled, Los Angeles homicide detective for the first time, Falk had another series called Trials of O’Brien. That was when we first met.

In 1962, Peter Falk was my favorite living actor. I’d seen him on screen and his many TV performances on such series as Naked City, The Untouchables, Have Gun Will Travel, The Twilight Zone, 87th Precinct and as Colucci in The Sound of Hunting. I cheered when he won his first Emmy for 1962’s The Price of Tomatoes on The Dick Powell Theatre.

When Falk appeared on Broadway the next year as Stalin in Paddy Chayefsky’s short-lived The Passion of Joseph D. at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. I finally had an address for him. I’d never written a fan letter to anyone before but I was deep in the thrall of Peter Falk. He sent me back a hand-written letter, telling me to keep in touch.

Two years later I was working for the Toronto Telegram and on my way to New York to do a series of interviews. The top of my list was Peter Falk, who was about to star in his first TV series, Trials of O’Brien.

I tracked Falk down at the Filmways Studios in East Harlem and that familiar raspy voice got on the phone. “Who’s this?”

“Charles Dennis.”

“Charlie Dennis? The kid from Canada? How ya doin’?”

I told him I was working for a newspaper in Toronto and wanted to do a cover story on him for Showcase, the paper’s weekend magazine. He was delighted.

This is the article I wrote as it appeared on September 23, 1965. Falk had turned 38 a week earlier and he first episode of O’Brien had debuted that same week.

The day after Peter Falk’s new series, The Trials of O’Brien, debuted on CBS last week the American Bar Association branded Falk’s Daniel J. O’Brien “lazy, unkempt and messy” and took an instant dislike to the whole series.

“If they don’t like this show,” says Peter Falk. “They’re in trouble.

“The call him lazy. The guy’s a restless insomniac. Unkempt? I’m paying $135 a pop foe the suits I’m wearing and 25 bucks a week for some guy to come up here and cut my hair.

“Messy? Alright, the car and the office are messy but so was Einstein’s. Look at Lincoln and Darrow. Neither was famous for his sartorial attire. I think I’d like to take a look at the guy from the Bar Association and see what he looks like.”

The series has already been hailed by the New York Times, the herald Tribune and Time magazine as the best new show of the season and one that will appeal most Damon Runyon and Peter Falk fans.

O’Brienis a courtroom series and it’s fortunate that The Defenders went off the air because Lawrence Preston (E.G. Marshall’s straitlaced attorney character) would have had a heart attack watching the legal shenanigans of Daniel J. O’Brien.

As Falk plays him, he is a gambler and con man more easily reached in a pool hall or a race track than in his office. In one episode, Falk keeps postponing hi client’s case until they get a certain judge presiding because the District Attorney prosecuting the case smashed into the judge’s car in the court house parking lot.

And if this isn’t enough to harden Earle Stanley Gardner’s arteries, one of the regular characters on the show is O’Brien’s ex-wife (played by beautiful actress/author Joanna Barnes) with whom he is still very much in love. Will the two get back together again? Well, as Falk says in one of the episodes: “Hard to say. It’s a very shaky divorce.”

In addition, O’Brien has ‘a legal aide’, a near-sighted forger and safecracker called The Great McGonigle played by the Tony Award-winning actor david Burns, who steals the show every night on Broadway in his performance as Horace Vandergelder in “Hello, Dolly”. And did I mention another Broadway star, Elaine Stritch, who plays O’Brien’s wisecracking secretary Miss G? And another legendary actress/author, Ilka Chase, who plays O’Brien’s mother-in-law. (She’s divine,” says Joanna barnes. “ She walks through the scenes waving a martini glass in her hands. I keep saying she’s a pin-up girl for AA.”

Falk arrives on the set of Filmways Productions in East harlem at 7 am and rarely leaves before 7 pm. At lunch time he speeds in a car down to Pathe Studios where he watches the rushes of the previous day’s shooting. On weekends he is busy publicizing the show.

Between takes - a tie most actors devote to trade gossip, the telling of old jokes and the pursuit of a more lucrative next job - Falk can be seen pacing the studio floor executing staccato, karate-like gestures with his hands and going over his lines in his low, rasping voice until his performance is just right.

“He’s so wonderful,” says co-star Joanna Barnes. “He is the hardest woking actor. He gives everything all the time. I don’t know how he survives physically.”

Raised in Ossining, New York (its chief claim to fame is Sing Sing Prison, a corruption of the town’s name), Falk developed a tumor in his right eye at the age of three resulting in a glass eye effective in either menacing gangster roles or engaging comedy scenes.

He joined the Merchant Marine at 17 and managed to get in on the tail end of World war II.He received his B.A. from Hamilton College and went on to obtain his Masters in Business Administration from Syracuse University.

In 1949 he appeared in a a production of William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life at the Rooftop Theatre in New York City playing the lead role of Joe, the alcoholic philosopher. Eli Rill, who went on to form the Playwrights Unit at the Actors Studio, was also in the cast.

“He had no business doing the part because he was too young,” says Rill. “But he was quite excellent. Kurt Cerf, the director, told me I was good. But Peter had a little something extra. And he did. He would take his glass eye out and show it to me. We played baseball together. We used to kid him about his lack of ability to say “L”s. There was a girl named Gloria but he always called her Goria.”

Falk’s early excursion in to the theatre was a brief one, however, for in 1952 he went to work for the State of Connecticut as an efficiency expert and eventually became an aide to Governor Lodge. In 1955 he went to Westport, Connecticut and saw Eva LaGallienne teaching an acting class and became hooked on acting again. The great actress encouraged him. Perhaps he reminded her of another rough boy she took under her wing twenty years earlier - John Garfield. Certainly Falk was compared to Garfield for a long time. Falk gave up his life in civil service, went to New York and made the rounds.

His breakthrough come in 1956 when he played Rocky the bar tender opposite Jason Robards’ Hickey in Jose Quintero’s landmark revival of O’Neil’s The Iceman Cometh at Circle in the Square.

As the bartender cum panderer, Falk had his first major opportunity to impress upon people his distinctive characteristics; his sotto voce asides, the occasional staccato outbursts and a unique ability to make villainy lovable. It was a preview of the man o could bump people off and leave them laughing while he did it.

Shortly after that Falk entered feature films opposite the likes of Christopher Plummer, Burl Ives, Gypsy Rose Lee and Tony Galento in the Budd Schulberg-Nicholas Ray curiosity Wind Across the Everglades. He came to Toronto to star in a quickie called The Bloody Brood.

Then in 1960 he played Abe “Kid Twist” Reles in the movie Murder, Inc. As the notorious hit man and squealer (“You want names? I’ll give you names.”) who was thrown out of a hotel window by two “policemen”, who were guarding him from the mob, Falk created created a gangster type heretofore unknown to American movie audiences.

Robinson, Cagney and Bogart had represented the likes of Capone, Coll and Dillinger. But Falk was something else all together. In one scene Stuart Whitman made an impassioned plea for Reles to stop persecuting him and his wife. It was quite a moving speech but at the end of it Falk merely looked up and told Whitman: “You got bad breath.”

The line was hilarious, realistic and entirely Falk’s creation - as was most of his dialogue in the film. At the same time, it revealed Reles impassivity and the promise of relentless persecution. Newsweek said that Falk “put together a characterization of an average, unassuming killer-rapist - the psychopathic criminal next door - that was at once funny, moving and terrifying.”

Falk knew he was on to something with this B-movie and four-walled a theatre in Los Angeles for a week to qualify for Academy Award consideration. He also played Reles once again in the TV series The Witness. The results paid off. He was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. (He was also nominated for an Emmy the same year for his role on James Whitmore’s TV series The Law and Mr. Jones.)

When I arrived on the O’Brien set, Falk sat me down in his ‘Peter Falk” director’s chair, then went back to work.

Halfway across the soundstage, he turned around and asked me: “Are you alright?” I nodded. He took a few more steps,then turned again. “You sure?”

An hour later, he came back.

“You want one?” he asked, gesturing to the man carrying a cardboard craft services box of frozen sherbets. “Gimme an ice for Charlie, willya?”

Falk discovered he had no cigarettes and stopped one of the crew to bum one. The man gave him a look that indicated the request was not an uncommon one.

“Don’t worry,” said Falk. “I’ll buy ya. I’ll buy ya.” (Falk would become notorious in later years for never picking up a tab in restaurants._

“Reles was my idea of the way a New York-Brooklyn hoodlum behaves,” Falk told me between takes o the O’Brien set. “You don’t have to know the actual murderer. Guys that stand on the street corner are second cousins or relatives. They haven’t done anything but the delivery s the same. They all have humor.

“I think Bogart played himself. I do, too. With Reles there was a greater attempt t a particular characterization. A Brooklyn hoodlum of the Thirties. For all I know, Bogart did resemble those Mid-Western bank robbers. I didn’t know any of them.

In 1961 Falk was Oscar nominated once again for his performance as Joy Boy in Frank Capra’s remake of Damon Runyon’s fairy tale Pocketful of Miracles. ( Capra had his first big success with the story in 1933 under Runyon’s original title Lady for a Day. Falk’s role back then was called Happy McGuire and was played by that master of dead-pan Ned Sparks.)

Capra didn’t want Falk for the part originally thinking him “too severe” and too much of a heavy.

“When I went to see Frank, I asked him: ‘Do you read people?’ Frank was embarrassed and said nothing at first, then said: ‘I thought you meant was I a palmist.” No! I just want to show you I’m not that heavy. A guy from William Morris took him to see Murder, Inc. He laughed a few times and signed me that night.

Although he lost the Oscar again that year, he did pick up the Emmy for Price of Tomatoes on The Dick Powell Theatre. Falk’s performance as truck driver Aristedes Fresco opposite Inger Stevens pregnant illegal alien was tender, tough and funny - a forerunner of O’Brien.

Price of Tomatoes was written by Richard Alan Simmons, who is the executive producer of Trials of O’Brien and a man who knows what kind of dialog is perfect for Peter Falk.

“It’s a pretty happy marriage,” says Falk. “Nobody writes for me like Dick does. I like to fool around with rhythms. If directors are smart, they’ll turn me loose.”

Stanley Kramer turned him loose with fellow cab driver Rochester in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World getting involved with the mad cap legendary comedy stars trying to find the treasure under the Big W. Kramer was so impressed with his work that he called Falk in to rescue a turgid psychiatric melodrama starring Sidney Poitier and Bobby Darin called Pressure Point. (Kramer was so desperate to sell this stinker that he put Darin’s head on Tony Curtis’s body and used his old art work for The Defiant Ones.) Falk was given a scene with Poitier at the top of the movie to tray and jumpstart it into life. But the patient died on the projection room floor.

He played the Central American Police Chief opposite Shelley Winters’ Madame Irma in Joseph Strick’s adaptation of Genet’s The Balcony and Guy Gisbourne, the comic villain, opposite Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin in “Robin and the 7 Hoods.”

His most recent performance is as Maximillian Meen opposite Jack Lemmon’s Professor Fate in Blake Edwards’ epic comedy The Great race also starring Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood.

If Trials of O’Brien wins a favorable verdict in the ratings, Falk will be with the series for quite a while although he says: “I gotta do another play before I die.”

His last role on Broadway was Stalin opposite Luther Adler’s Lenin in the short-lived paddy Chayefsky play, The Passion of Joseph D. in 1963.

Falk owns the films rights to a book called The Professionals.

“It’s the best fight book ever written” says Falk. “The trouble with it is that it’s too legitimate. here’s no hokum about a fix or a crooked mob. It has a ring of authenticity and no contrived plot. It wold have to be done with a very subtle hand.”

Falk has been married since 1960 to Alice mayo, to whom he was engaged for eight years prior to their marriage.

Looking back on his brief ten year career, Falk’s favorite piece of work is “a photo finish between Mr. Inc., Price of Tomatoes and The Iceman Cometh, which covers film, television and the stage.”

Sadly, The Trials of O’Brien only ran one season - which was then 27 episodes. Certainly enough for the series to be put in a boxed DVD set or streamed on NetFlix. And look at the incredible names who guest starred on the show: Gene Hackman, Faye Dunaway, Angela Lansbury, Burgess Meredith, Charles Grodin, Frank Langella, Alan Alda, Robert Loggia, Roger Moore, David Carradine, Tammy Grimes, Lou Jacobi. Britt Ekland, Rita Moreno, Milton Berle, Herschel Bernardi, Will Geer, Pat Hingle, Betty Field, Claude Akins, Brock Peters, Marc Connelly and Mischa Auer. How good is that!

Despite its cancellation, David Burns still managed to defeat the competition and win the Emmy for Best Supporting Actor in a Series for The Great McGonigle.

Peter and I continued to see each other over the years. When I was living in London in 1969 he called me when he was over there shooting Husbands. When I moved back to Los Angeles in the mid 1970s we were constantly running into each other. He had an office at Univeral on the same floor as my friend Earl Pomerantz.

Peter continued to work in all three mediums with even greater success. Columbo immortalized him on TV. What would Falk’s subsequent career have been like if Bing Crosby had decided to skip golfing a few days a week and filmed the part that was offered to him originally?

He continued to make interesting choices on the big screen when John Cassavetes came into his life. Perhaps his funniest movie performance was opposite Alan Arkin in The In-Laws. And he will forever be beloved by kids of all ages as the Grandfather in The Princess Bride - despite the white shoe polish in his hair.

He returned to Broadway in triumph in 1971 as Neil Simon’s The Prisoner of Second Avenue and continued to work on stage whenever he could. I saw him here in Los Angeles in Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross”. He was a stupendous Ricky Roma. And as everyone’s favorite theatre producer, Sidney Black, in Moss Hart’s evergreen Light Up the Sky. Falk owned that stage. He greeted me effusively on both occasions when I came backstage afterwards to see him. But he seemed particularly touched after seeing the Moss Hart play at the Music Center’s Ahmanson Theatre.

“What brought you down here, Charlie?”

“You. I wanted to see you in the play.”

He squinted at me with his one good eye and, with tones bordering on amazement, said: “You drove all the way downtown... to see me?” As if I had ventured into darkest Africa without a map and native bearers.

We kept in touch mostly through our mutual friends Dabney Coleman and Ed Begley Jr.

When I first conceived the idea of writing Paid To Dream as a book a few years ago and going back to interview those people whom I’d first met as a kid in the Sixties, Peter was at the top of my list.

When we spoke on the phone, Peter said he couldn’t remember me. When I hung up I was angry. Later, when I finally learned the truth of Peter’s medical condition, I was heartbroken.

He was a unique individual and saw the world through... well, one real eye and one glass eye. That could explain his amazing, quirky take on life.

So long, Peter!

colleen and g.c./part one

Fri, 3 Jun 2011 18:43:21 -0800

If the Deschapelle coup, the backward finesse or the pseudo squeeze are familiar terms to you, stay away from a certain farmhouse on the New York-Connecticut border. They’ll grab you!

The contact is a beautiful, dark-haired woman with one of the great laughs of the century. She will introduce you to her husband, a man of classic Mephistophlean features. He will say nothing. You will begin to play bridge. And play and play and play. Hours. In total silence. Then he will go upstairs and she will thank you politely for coming.

You will have met Colleen Dewhurst and George C. Scott.

Those were the opening paragraphs of a cover story I wrote about the two, who in the 1960‘s were the American theatre’s most celebrated young acting couple.

It’s Colleen Dewhurst’s birthday today. She’d have turned 87. If she hadn’t been a devout Christian Scientist from her childhood. Hard to believe she’s been gone for twenty years. Harder still to believe it’s over 40 years since I met her and her husband George C. Scott. They had remarried only a few months earlier and were both working on Broadway in January of 1968. He had just appeared in a revival of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes directed by Mike Nichols and was in rehearsal for Neil Simon’s new comedy Plaza Suite opposite Maureen Stapleton with Nichols directing once again. And Colleen was appearing opposite the luminous Ingrid Bergman in the Broadway premiere of Eugene O’Neill’s More Stately Mansions.

Scott - known in the profession as G.C. - had been one of my idols in the early 1960s. I’d first seen him as the crazed preacher making his film debut opposite Gary Cooper in Delmer Daves’ 1959 western The Hanging Tree. How much of Scott’s performance had ended up on the cutting room floor? He barely had three scenes in the release version. But what was there was mesmerizing. The Province of Ontario barred me from seeing Scott.’s Oscar nominated performance as snarling prosecutor Claude Dancer in Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder because I was under 18. So It was TV that had made me an acolyte. As the ruthless police lieutenant on the trail of Olivier’s whisky priest in The Power and the Glory; as a 400-year-old warlock in The Burning Court; and opposite Dewhurst in a heartbreaking episode of Ben Casey called I Remember a Lemon Street. Later I would see him again on the big screen in The Hustler, Dr. Strangelove and The Bible. And, in between, there was G.C.’s groundbreaking, short-lived TV series East Side, West Side. Scott played Neil Brock, a New York social worker fighting City Hall, abortion, segregation, mental retardation - sometimes winning, sometimes losing - but eventually losing to CBS, who canceled the show after a year.

The opportunity of meeting Scott and Dewhurst was my goal. I pitched the cover story to my editor at the Toronto Telegram for Calendar, the paper’s weekend entertainment magazine. He said okay.

My friend George Bloomfield had directed Dewhurst in a prestige CBC production of Edna O’Brien’s A Cheap Bunch of Nice Flowers three years earlier.

“What you see when you see Colleen and G.C. playing together,” said Bloomfield, “are two people who mean everything they are saying to each other. Neither one is capable of theatrical tricks. They are very real people and their touch with reality is a day-to-day affair. It’s nothing that they’ve read about.”

Bloomfield also suggested that I contact actor John Vernon, who had co-starred opposite Dewhurst in the show and had subsequently become friends with her and Scott. Vernon was working in Hollywood at the time but his gorgeous wife Nancy invited me over to their house and told me the incredible story of how Colleen and George had turned up on their front door step at seven o’clock one morning.

G.C. had been playing the Old Testament patriarch Abraham in John Huston’s ambitious film The Bible. The role of his wife Sarah was played by the world’s most beautiful and passionate woman Ava Gardner, The two began the amour fou of all time while shooting in Avezzano in Italy’s Abruzzi mountains. Both were heavy drinkers but where Ava became mellow, Scott went berserk. He beat Ava badly. (I didn’t learn the details of the beating until years later.) And that was the end of the affair. Until Scott turned up in London where Ava was staying at the Savoy Hotel. He checked in as well and had to be stopped by hotel security after he tried to beat down Ava’s door. He later demolished his own hotel room and was led away by the London police and sent the night in jail. But it still wasn’t over. Scott assaulted Ava once more, breaking into her bungalow at The Beverly Hills Hotel by smashing his fist through the glass door.

Enter Frank Sinatra, Ava’s devoted ex-husband, who caught sight of Ava entering the Polo Lounge in oversized sunglasses. He removed the glasses and saw the severe bruising on his beloved’s face.

“Scott did this, didn’t he?” asked Ole Blue Eyes.

Ava refused to answer.

“He’s a dead man,” vowed Sinatra.

No stranger to brawling - how many times did that nose get broken? - after four years in the Marine Corps, Scott went ballistic. “That little wop! Just let him try something.”

But Colleen knew Sinatra wasn’t talking mano a mano. All Frank had to do was put a call in to the boys and Scott was truly a dead man. So Colleen knew if she was going to save her husband’s life, she’d have to get him up to Canada where she was filming Cheap Bunch of Nice Flowers.

So she phoned G.C. long distance and told him there was no truth in the rumors that she was having a torrid affair with her leading man John Vernon. Forgetting Ava for a moment, Scott flew up to Toronto to see what hanky-panky Colleen was up to. Which was how the Vernons discovered the Scotts on their doorstep at seven in the morning. Both couples were passionate bridge players and, within minutes, the cards were out and a marathon bridge game ensued. Scott did not speak a word for the entire twelve hours that they played.

With this background, I didn’t know what to expect when I arrived in New York. I certainly wasn’t ready for the dinner of steak and oysters Dewhurst had ordered in for us from Sardi’s between the Saturday matinee and evening performances. She lay stretched out on a cot in her dressing room at the Broadhurst Theatre wearing a dressing gown, talking to me in that distinct, gravelly voice of hers and occasionally bursting into her explosive, earthy laugh. The camera, as you know, either loves you or hates you. Clearly Colleen Dewhurst wasn’t one of its favorites. Pity. Because she was one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever met. As earthy as Ava Gardner. Which was probably why Scott had been attracted to both of them. And she played baseball. Which was G.C.’s other great passion after bridge and chess.

“You’re lucky you’re talking to us separately,” said Dewhurst, watching me curiously as I ate oysters for the first time in my life. “ I tend to ramble on. And G.C. is much more direct. He says: ‘Alright, Colleen, that’s enough.’

Born in Montreal in 1924, Dewhurst moved with her parents to the States at the age of six and finally settling with her mother in Wisconsin. After college in Milwaukee, she had a series of jobs which included dentist’s assistant, phys-ed teacher and an usherette at Carnegie Hall. She later attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York and by the late 1950s was known as the Queen of Off-Broadway. In 1958 she met George Campbell Scott.

The occasion was a revival of Edwin Justus Mayer’s 1930s play Children of Darkness at Greenwich Village’s Circle in the Square. The theatre had gained a reputation for reviving earlier flops and turning them into hits. Foremost was their recent revival of O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh starring Jason Robards and directed by Jose Quintero. (The trifecta of O’Neill, Quintero and Robards would play important roles in Dewhurst’s subsequent theatrical career.)

Shortly before the opening of Children of Darkness, the actor playing Lord Wainwright became ill. Wainwright was a satanic nobleman imprisoned for poisoning his wife but didn’t make an appearance until the third act. Someone suggested Scott, who had just walked off with rave reviews as Jacques and Richard III at Joe Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival.

“I disapproved of George,” Dewhurst told me. “I saw him in As You Like It and had heard so much about him that I was anti... He was wonderful. Jose walked him through the part once. Then George got up with the book and walked it. He was a million times better than the man who had done it before.

“I found him very much a man and very much in command. We were very formal with each other - Mr. Scott and Miss Dewhursting each other for months. After all, he came in for the third act and walked off with the play. I should have hated him.”

“Colleen’s a very impressive woman,” replied Scott when I told him what his wife had said to me a few days earlier, “and a very impressive actress. I guess I was impressed by her. I had to be. I don’t think I ever stopped being impressed by her.”

Scott had given me a much more direct and compressed response, just as his wife had described. Sitting on a couch on the stage of the Eugene O’Neill Theatre where Nichols was rehearsing Scott, Stapleton and a very young Bob Balaban prior to the play’s January try-out in Boston, Scott was taking his lunch break. He wore a red lumberjack shirt over his huge frame and furry boots on his feet. Though outwardly polite and gracious to me, his thoughts seemed to be wandering. Possibly to baseball or bridge. I asked him about his notorious rejection of an Oscar nomination for his riveting portrayal of gambler Bert Gordon bankrolling pool shark Paul Newman’s Fast Eddie Felson in Robert Rossen’s legendary film The Hustler. Scott’s competition - Montgomery Clift, Jackie Gleason and Peter Falk - eventually lost out to West Side Story’s George Chakiris, who disappeared into obscurity afterwards. (Ironically, Scott’s father, who was by then vice-president of the Ex-Cell-O Corporation in Michigan would win an Oscar for co-producing the best short documentary subject, Project Hope).

“That’s so typical of the beauty contest,” said Scott, of his walking away from the nomination. “It’s absurd. They sell the product. That’s all. And if you look at it that way, it’s perfectly fine. I’m for money as much as the next person. But it has nothing to do with any kind of standard, any sense of values at all. That’s what’s false about it. But that’s old hat. I’m sure nobody cares what I have to say about the Academy Awards - least of all me.”

I reminded Scott that British critic Kenneth Tynan had described his profile as looking like “a victorious bottle opener.”

“Victorious”, mused Scott, liking the adjective. Then he snorted: “That’s back when I was thin. In The Andersonville Trial.”

Long before he played the prosecutor of Confederate jailer and war criminal Henry Wirz on Broadway to great acclaim in The Andersonville Trial, Scott was born in Virginia in 1927 where his father, George Dewey Scott, was a coal miner. With the advent of the Depression, Scott’s father moved the family to Detroit where he found work on the line at Buick and eventually worked his way up in the company to an executive position. G.C. was terrified of his ambitious, hard-driving father but also idolized him. G.C.’s mother taught her little boy poems and encouraged him to recite them. When she died abruptly of peritonitis, the older Scott only told his son that his mother was not coming home from the hospital. G.C. was a few weeks away from his seventh birthday. Four years later, the older Scott would remarry and father two more sons. What affection the angry G.C. did receive after that came form his older sister Helen. Scott joined the Marines at 17 straight out of high school and spent four years in the service. After his discharge, he went to the University of Missouri where he studied journalism. He gave up his writing aspirations when he played Sir Robert Morton in a campus production of The Winslow Boy.

“It just clicked for me,” said Scott, “like tumblers in a safe.”

G.C. then became the resident actor at the Stephens Playhouse in Columbia, Missouri where he appeared in 135 productions over the next three years. He married for the first time and fathered a daughter. He also won a screen test at Warmer Brothers, which came to nothing. Scott returned embittered from the experience, ended his marriage and was ultimately jailed for failing to support his daughter. When a friend contacted G.C.’s father to bail him out, George Dewey Scott replied that he had two growing boys to take care of and that G.C. was now a grown man.

Martha Henry, the director of the Birmingham Conservatory for Classical Theatre at of Canada’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival, worked as an apprentice at the the Will-O-Way Playhouse in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan the summer of 1954 where Scott was the resident star.

“I was, of course, madly in love with him,” says Henry, who is appearing as Queen Margaret in Richard III at Stratford this summer, her 37th season. “I played his daughter in Goodbye, My Fancy, by Fay and Michael Kanin, and he was the most astonishing actor I had ever seen in my life. I hadn't known acting could be like that. Then I played the maid, Dora, in Night Must Fall when he played Danny - just amazing - and was directed by him in a production of a play about New Orleans, written by a friend of his called Chris du Monde. I was also an ASM on a production of You Can't Take It With You that he was in. And I used to go to the bar with them all, afterwards. I even played Claire de Lune for him on my Mother's piano one afternoon, a memory I recall now with some embarrassment. I took his picture with me to university when everyone thought it must be a photograph of my father - and I let them think that.

“I was paid $20 a week by his winter company during the Chris du Monde time. The check came to something like $18.25. It bounced. My mother went to George’s father to get the check honored. His father said: ‘I never thought that profession would come to anything. I'm certainly not going to pay you for his check.’ I still have it, somewhere. “

When I asked Scott about the failure of East Side, West Side, he said: “It was a fine experience in many ways. But I was so involved in struggling with the network to do something worthwhile that I didn’t have time to worry about acting and production values. We were lucky to get what did emerge. And one third of the CBS affiliates never showed it, which hampered us as far as ratings were concerned.”

But Scott did care about the theatre - passionately. A few years earlier he had formed Theatre of Michigan - the first stage production company to sell shares to the public and not selected angels. Based in Detroit, with Scott as its president, the company’s mandate was to assemble and rehearse plays in that city, then take them to Broadway. He had hoped that other states would follow suit and form the nucleus of The Theatre of the U.S.A.

The first two plays were General Seeger by Ira Levin and Great Day in the Morning by Alice Canon. The first play was to be directed by Scott and the second by Jose Quintero.

General Seeger starred William Bendix, who had spent years as Alan Ladd’s best friend in countless Paramount pictures and achieved TV immortality in The Life of Riley. Bendix quit five days before the New York opening and Scott took over the role. (Ironically, author Levin would go on to have one of Broadway’s longest running hits with Deathtrap.) The play folded after two performances. Great Day fared slightly better: it ran 15 performances. Ironically, Quintero and Dewhurst were both nominated for Tony Awards. Theatre of Michigan subsequently disbanded.

I asked Scott if the company’s $3 shares would ever be redeemable.

“Never, never, never,” he replied. “I took such a bath on it myself that it took a long time to straighten myself our financially. But regionality is now a growing thing in the theatre, which I think is very healthy. The unique thing about Theatre Michigan was the stock system of finance which was unknown at the time. It gave people, who didn’t have a great deal of money to invest, a proprietary feeling.”

As I sat staring at this sober, deeply committed man of the theatre, I never would have imagined that one year later I would be driving around Madrid combing off-limits bars in search of G.C. so he’d be able to resume filming on Patton.

TO BE CONTINUED

Copyright © 2011 Foo Dog Productions