Last Man Standing: Tales from Tinseltown (15 page)

Angie Dickinson was wonderful to work with on
The Sins of Rachel Cade
. The film was set in the sweat and heat of the Belgian Congo … but filmed entirely on the sweaty Warner back lot, with footage from
The Nun’s Story
for the location scenes.

Their petticoats and bras were swiftly dispensed with and the same scene was shot again – only with more in it, if you follow me.

One of these such scenes was filmed on a Friday afternoon very near to the 4 p.m. wrap time, but all the electricians and stage hands willingly offered to stay on to help oversee the ‘continental’ version being filmed – and no overtime was requested!

One of the more pleasurable bonuses of being an actor is to not only meet but to work with other actors whom you have admired in the past, and Ray Milland was one of those. Ray was born Reginald Alfred John Truscott-Jones, but took his stage name from a riverside street called Milland Road in Neath, South Wales, where he once lived.

I worked with Ray on
Gold
in 1974 and he, rather like Niven, was a great teller of amusing tales, one being of when he was working on a film on location in Africa and a male member of the cast turned up two weeks ahead of schedule. The director asked said actor why he had come so early and he told a story of being at a dinner party in Beverly Hills a couple of nights earlier, and seated next to a rather attractive young lady from the East Coast who was complaining of jetlag, having arrived from New York the day before. The actor suggested that he had some sleeping suppositories that worked wonders for him, and that he would be happy to let her have a couple. As she was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel he said he’d happily give her a lift back, and stop off at his place on the way to pick up the pills.

Upon arriving home, he thought it would be only polite to ask her in for a drink, and as the night was still young she obviously thought it was a good idea as well and a few minutes later they were drinking Jack Daniels in his living room. He popped into his bedroom for the suppositories.

‘They will take about half an hour to take effect,’ he explained.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Maybe you would put one of them in for me now, and then be so kind as to drop me at the hotel?’

The lights in his living room were rather low, so he asked her to bend over close to a lamp, enabling him to see what he was doing. She raised her skirt and bent down and as she lowered her underwear he took up a position behind. Just as he was about to put the suppository in the required position, the door opened and in walked his wife. She was supposed to be in Palm Springs. With there being no believable explanation about him performing an act of kindness to a jetlagged lady, he decided to leave for the location early. Very early.

‘Who was the actor?’ I asked Ray.

‘Can’t you guess?’ he smiled.

With Ray Milland in
Gold
in 1974. This one was filmed in South Africa, but only after a technician’s dispute was averted. We almost had to film it in Wales!

I performed an act of kindness for Ray myself – though not with a suppository, I hasten to add. Ray was suffering with a prostate problem during our filming together and found it very difficult to urinate. He suffered particularly great pain during a late-night shoot and I sympathized greatly because over the years I had suffered terribly with renal colic which, for the uninitiated, is way up at the top of the hit parade for being the most painful experience a man can undergo – they do say that having a child can ‘maybe’ be as painful. As a precaution against having an attack while away filming, my urologist had prescribed powerful painkillers for me to carry and I duly offered one to Ray. I’m sure that medics would recoil in horror at the thought of one hypochondriac actor giving prescription drugs to another, but needs must at times, and he found almost immediate relief and was able to finish the night’s filming.

Towards the end of his career Ray took on a number of, well, less-than-brilliant roles. When asked in an interview why he had appeared in so many bad films, he smiled and said, ‘For the money, old chap, for the money!’

In 1976 I made another foray into Italian cinema, signing up for a film called
The Street People ...
no,
The Executioners ...
no,
Opium Road ...
ah yes,
The Sicilian Cross
. It kept changing title but on paper it sounded quite promising, with a script by, among others, Ernest Tidyman, who’d written
The French Connection
. At that time I had a holiday home in Italy, and an Italian wife, so the idea of working there (and in San Francisco too) was rather appealing.

It was essentially the tale of how a Mafia boss is wrongly suspected of smuggling a heroin shipment into San Francisco from Sicily, inside a cross donated to a church there, and so dispatches his nephew, a hotshot lawyer (that’s me, being typecast again!), to identify the real culprit. Along the way, I enlist the aid of my best friend, grand prix driver Stacy Keach, who has a penchant for destroying anything in his way. Well, that’s the essence of the story, but the rest of it – and the finished film – I don’t really understand … and neither did cinema audiences to be honest.

In an attempt to explain away my casting, lines such as: ‘The smartest thing I ever did was to get you out of Sicily and into that English law school,’ and ‘Being half-English, half-Sicilian was a good deal for both of us’, were written in.

Stacy was a delight to work with, and huge fun, but apart from he and me, all the cast and crew were from Italy and they all spoke in very loud Italian, leading to great confusion about our cues. It was all dubbed (badly) afterwards into English and I do wonder if it might have made more sense to American audiences if it had been left in Italian, or perhaps Double Dutch?

Our first day of shooting in San Francisco, down by the docks, was memorable in so much as we had terrible trouble closing off roads, and in fact any traffic control at all proved impossible. The director, Maurizio Lucidi, who was very,
very
Italian, made a call to the San Francisco Police Chief, who just so happened to be of Italian descent. The next morning we had police outriders escorting us to the location, with roads closed off all around and traffic officers all calling out, ‘
Ciao! Buon giorno
, Roger!’ as we drove by. We enjoyed a very smooth shoot in the city after that.

Stacy Keach and I were a little bewildered by the fast-talking Italians involved in the making of
The Sicilian Cross
. I don’t think either of us (or indeed the audience) really understood the plot!

While shooting in Rome I met up with Liza Minnelli, who was in town making a film with Ingrid Bergman called
A Matter of Time
, which her father, Vincente Minnelli, was directing. Liza had recently been in Mexico filming
Lucky Lady
with Gene Hackman and Burt Reynolds, and it appeared a few retakes had now been called for. Rather than wait for Liza to return to the US after completing her current project, the studio flew Gene, Burt and the director over to Rome for a few days. We all met for dinner one evening in a restaurant on the Via Veneto, and I’ll never forget seeing the lone figure of Burt Lancaster sitting at the
far end of the long dinner table that we’d been shown to. He didn’t speak to, nor acknowledge, anyone.

Towards the end of dinner, the ‘curse of Rome’ (otherwise known as the paparazzi) bundled their way through the door and started snapping. I’m not sure why, but all the actors immediately – almost instinctively – moved away from each other; not that there was anything going on, it just seemed to be a natural reflex to not be photographed with anyone else, thereby denying them a story.

At this point, Burt Lancaster now stirred into life. He placed his knuckles on the table and slowly raised himself to his full height. He slapped his left hand across his right forearm while pushing his clenched fist forward and upwards – the gesture is quite unmistakable in Italy. The paps did not need a second warning – they left, quickly, and we gazed with great envy at Burt.

Talking of Burt Lancaster, he did have a formidable reputation around the studios – apart from being a fine actor, he had one of the worst tempers in Hollywood. He had a well-known hatred of the press, and was invariably brusque and rude to them, once even resorting to physically throwing a hapless pap out of his hotel suite. But then he was well known for being ‘physical’ on set, too.

In front of the cameras Burt was a force to be reckoned with and, though prized as an actor, he was often to be found in the middle of a major row or the cause of some disruption. When filming one of his most famous films,
The Birdman of Alcatraz
, he and director John Frankenheimer were almost constantly at loggerheads. Burt was always known as an actor who immersed himself in his roles and he reputedly became obsessed with the character of Robert Stroud, the real Birdman, researching his life and reading
everything that was available on him. Apart from having the starring role, Burt was also co-producer on the film through his production company Hecht-Hill-Lancaster.

When shooting began, John Frankenheimer found Burt almost impossible to deal with – being the star and the money-man made the director’s job even trickier – and they argued about camera set-ups, dialogue, the lot. At one point, in an argument over where the camera should be placed for one particular scene, Burt physically picked Frankenheimer up and carried him across the set, depositing him where he thought the camera should go. Despite that treatment, Frankenheimer always admired the actor and they worked together again.