American Prince (17 page)

A
fter
Houdini
came the film
All American.
I played a college quarterback whose parents are killed in a car crash on their way to watch him play in a game. My character comes from an Italian family and goes to a fancy college. He has long hair, and everybody plays a number on him because of his hair, just the way they did to me in real life. Dick Long, my buddy who would go on to TV stardom in such shows as
The Big Valley, Nanny and the Professor, 77 Sunset Strip,
and
Maverick,
was in the film, as was Mamie Van Doren, another of Howard Hughes’s big-busted discoveries.

It was a typical low-budget Universal movie. We went out to UCLA, which had agreed to let us use their football field. As the star quarterback I threw touchdown passes and got tackled by Frank Gifford, the all-American football player.

Mamie Van Doren was another version of Marilyn, only even more voluptuous. She was another actress trying to climb her way up, but I didn’t think she was smart enough to make it. Nobody was really that interested in her. She didn’t really have any style; she just had this incredible body, she was sweet and kind, and she wanted a career in film. To my surprise, she was wonderful in
All American.
She played a villainous character who was fooling around with Dick Long, who came from a very high-class family. I still wasn’t convinced Mamie had what it took to get into the big time, though. Hollywood was a tough nut to crack in those days. (I think it’s even tougher now.)

My next forgettable movie was called
Forbidden,
which ostensibly took place in Macao, China, but was actually shot on Universal’s back lot. This was a low-budget knockoff of
Casablanca,
with me playing the Bogart role. In the movie I owned a casino, and Joanne Dru played my love interest. Joanne had starred in a lot of westerns in the ’40s. How she got this particular part, I’ll never know. She must have had a studio connection, because she was too old for the part—or, I should say, she was too old for me. We didn’t have any chemistry, but I made a great effort, and we did okay. This was another typical Universal penny-ante film. Eight days after they got the idea they had a treatment, and nine days later they had a script. That was the way Universal did it back then. My job was to do the pictures they put me in, and I always got them done, which was all they wanted from me.

In 1954 I made the movie
Beachhead,
a very intense film about two American soldiers on a Japanese-occupied island during World War II. The movie was shot in Hawaii, and I had to go out there alone, which I didn’t like, but Janet was working too: she was filming the movie
Prince Valiant.
While I was in Hawaii, I got a phone call saying Janet had had a miscarriage. She was in the hospital and wanted me to fly back to LA.

The news of her miscarriage was devastating, and not just for the obvious reason. I hadn’t even known Janet was pregnant! As I thought about it, my insecurity and my overactive imagination started wreaking havoc. Why hadn’t she told me she was pregnant? It was possible that she herself hadn’t known, but I couldn’t help but wonder if she was keeping it secret for some reason of her own.

Our marriage wasn’t thriving by this point, as you may have guessed. Neither Janet nor I was the best of spouses, so we’d gotten pretty distant. All I knew was that I had finally attained my dream of being in the movies, but I kept being distracted by my personal life. I couldn’t believe how flimsy our relationship had become, but I stayed in it.

After receiving news of the miscarriage, I had a decision to make: fly home or stay in Hawaii and keep filming. I wanted to fly home, but this particular movie was very low-budget, and I had to act in most of the remaining scenes. This meant that if I left, the studio would just shelve the movie rather than eating the extra production costs caused by the delay. Also, they told me there were only three or four more days of shooting. Once we were done, I could get on the first plane home.

I talked to my agent, Jerry Gershwin of MCA, and he told me he was in touch with Janet and everything was under control. I still wasn’t sure what to do, so I called Janet in the hospital and told her my dilemma; she told me not to worry, that she’d be fine. I decided to stay and finish the movie, but I couldn’t help but be distracted by the thought of Janet in a hospital room.

My costar in
Beachhead
was Frank Lovejoy, who played my lieutenant. Our job was to help a scientist and his daughter get safely across the occupied island, where a ship was waiting to take them to safety. The movie had lots of action. In it Frank’s character stops my character from having an affair with the scientist’s daughter, played by Mary Murphy. Mary was a very beautiful young woman who was dating Curt Fringes, a big-time agent who was about twenty years older than she was. Curt intended to divorce his wife Katy, a very powerful screenwriter, and marry Mary. Meantime, he was hell-bent on making Mary a star. While we were in Hawaii, Mary told me that she and Fringes were having problems; among other things, he wasn’t happy about the fact that another agent had gotten Mary her role in
Beachhead,
and that before Fringes even knew about it, she was on her way to Hawaii.

Once Mary and I started talking, I became extremely attracted to her. She was very attentive and wanted to know all about me. While we were shooting the picture, we had fun connecting with each other with just a knowing glance or a shrug of the shoulders, and sometimes by stopping to talk. Though we both realized what was happening, neither one of us wanted to consummate the relationship. I didn’t want to do anything I would regret later; I didn’t want to jeopardize my already fragile marriage. It was a case of my eyes saying yes but the rest of me saying no. This was difficult for me, because saying yes was a helluva lot more fun. But it didn’t happen this time.

T
he next picture
offered to me was
Johnny Dark,
in which I played a brilliant but underappreciated car designer who designs a prototype that meets with disapproval from the owner of the car company (Sidney Blackmer). Don Taylor, who played Elizabeth Taylor’s husband in
Father of the Bride,
and I steal the car, aided and abetted by the company owner’s daughter (Piper Laurie) and we race it from Canada to Mexico.
Johnny Dark
wasn’t a bad movie, but by now I was looking forward to the day when my Universal contract would be satisfied and I would be free to pursue other possibilities.

My next movie,
The Black Shield of Falworth,
starred Janet and me. I played a peasant who was really a king. It was reminiscent of my sand-and-tits movies, but this time we were decked out in armor instead of pantaloons, turbans, and scimitars. There was a lot of action for me in this picture. I learned to ride a horse really well, and I loved walking around in my shiny armor, which was actually made of plastic. I did some jousting and a lot of swordplay. Janet was upset because she, as a female, didn’t get to do anything physical. She played a lady-in-waiting, and she got so impatient with all that waiting that sometimes she’d jump on one of the horses and ride around to let off steam.

Her unhappiness wasn’t due solely to the movie. Janet’s friend Barbara Rush was in the movie with us, and one day Barbara came up to me and asked, “Are you and Janet doing all right?” I had a feeling Janet had told Barbara we weren’t, and that Barbara had come to me to confirm it. I just said, “Janet’s not feeling well.” When the movie ended and Janet and I went home, I tried harder to behave in a way that didn’t anger her, and she made the same effort for me. We settled into a functional but unromantic marriage, the kind of life that was less unusual in Hollywood than you might think.

We threw huge parties at our big, beautiful house on Summit Drive. Janet invited the Debbie Reynolds crowd, and friends such as Danny Kaye. Danny was a major talent. He was born in Brooklyn, and after coming to Hollywood he starred in roles where he could act, sing, and play the comedian, movies like
The Court Jester, Merry Andrew,
and
Hans Christian Andersen.
I didn’t care for Danny at all, but Janet and I had agreed that each of us could invite whomever we wanted.

To my way of thinking, Danny was a very mean and bitter man, and most everybody seemed to agree with me. When we first met, he would belittle me all the time. He once asked me, “Where did you learn how to fence—the Bronx?” Another time he said to me, “How do you act in those high heels?” I said, “I don’t wear high heels.” Then I took a step closer to him, looked in his eyes, and smiled while I said, “Fuck you, Danny.” I don’t know why Danny had it in for me. Maybe it was because we both came from New York. Maybe it was because we were both Jewish, and he struggled with that in himself. Or it might have been some complicated sexual feeling.

It was widely rumored that Danny went with both men and women. One of the people Danny was believed to have had a relationship with was Sir Laurence Olivier. There had always been rumors about Larry’s sexuality, but he was nothing like Danny. As it happened, I acted in one of Larry’s most famous scenes, in the movie
Spartacus.
The irony is that this famous—or infamous—scene didn’t see the light of day for thirty years after it was filmed, because it was deemed too racy for audiences at the time of the film’s release in 1960. In the scene, Larry plays a Roman general, and I’m his slave, and he’s sitting naked in a tub. The general is trying to get the slave to have sex with him, so Larry says to me, “Do you like oysters and snails?”

I say, “I like oysters.”

He says, “What about snails?”

“No, I don’t like snails.”

He says, “Well, I like both oysters
and
snails.”

Live and let live. I don’t look down on gays; it’s just not my thing. George Cukor, one of the great directors, was part of the Hollywood gay crowd. George would throw a big, formal dinner party at his house. Then, after the party was over, George and his friends would go cruise Sunset Boulevard, looking for young men; they called them “after-dinner mints.” To each his own.

When Janet and I threw our parties, her friends invariably outnumbered mine. That was fair. She had a lot more friends than I did. Sometimes Frank Sinatra would come join us, but you had to be careful not to push him. He never wanted to be forced into anything. You could ask him, and he might come, and he might not.

To tell you the truth, I wasn’t that nuts about parties, but I realized that Janet’s social networking was good for both of us. At that point our faces were on every magazine cover in the country. When Janet and I hit, we became the undisputed darlings of the Hollywood media. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor? Forget it. Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher? Not a chance.

The public liked me because I was rough around the edges, not only in my acting but in my life. I was different from Cliff Robertson or Robert Wagner, who were always so polished and cool. I was untamed, with an animal magnetism that immediately attracted young fans of both sexes. At the same time, I was always very decent to people, and they liked that too.

In Hollywood, working for the “right” studio gave you status. Actors like Janet, who were signed by MGM, had more status than anyone else. That was one reason Suzan Ball called me “Mr. Leigh”; Janet worked at glitzy MGM, while I was employed by low-rent Universal. And it was also true I was a Jew, which in those days was a strike against you in Hollywood—as it was in most places. So I had two strikes against me when I started. Despite those obstacles, I still managed to become a legitimate Hollywood phenomenon, which was fine with some people but made others unhappy; still others could go either way, depending on the situation. Debbie Reynolds was one of those people who seemed to blow cold, then hot, and then cold again.

To be fair to Debbie, she started to treat me badly when she and Eddie Fisher started having problems in their marriage. It was a time when Debbie was very hostile toward men, sparking rumors that she was gay, but I never saw any evidence of that. People wondered about her sexuality because she never did settle down with a man other than Eddie. While they were married, I felt bad for Eddie. Debbie was a lot like Jerry Lewis, very demanding and always wanting to be in control.

Debbie and Eddie had a daughter, Carrie Fisher (who became famous playing Princess Leia in
Star Wars
). Years after Eddie and Debbie divorced, Carrie would blame Eddie for her parents’ split, putting him in the category of “difficult Jewish fathers.” She put me in that class too. Carrie was angry at her father, much the way my daughter, Jamie Lee, would later be angry at me. According to Carrie, it was the fault of Jewish fathers when our marriages blew up.

After Eddie and Debbie separated, his romantic life took a surprising turn. Liz Taylor had been married to producer Mike Todd, who died in a plane crash. Eddie was a good friend of Mike’s, and after Mike died, he started taking care of Elizabeth. One thing led to another. I found it strange that Elizabeth would allow Eddie to look after her, since I got the feeling she didn’t really care for him. Besides, she and Debbie were good friends. It was a strange time for all of us in our profession. You never knew who was going to end up with whom, or who would make it and who would fall by the wayside, personally and professionally.

Janet, meanwhile, was becoming very critical of my behavior in public. We’d go to a party, and she’d watch me very carefully wherever we were. From a distance of fifteen feet, she would nod her head yes or no to approve or criticize the way I held my glass. She’d point to her own glass, and she’d mouth the words,
Hold it like this.
She was trying to teach me etiquette, and I began to resent it.

One night Janet and I were invited to have dinner with Cole Porter at his New York City apartment. I had never met Cole, so I was looking forward to getting to know him. Ethel Merman, Janet, and I sat around Cole’s couch with him. He was remarkably genial and friendly. Then someone came to the door and said, “Dinner is served.” Everybody started to get up, so I just followed along. All of us walked down a little hallway, around a corner, and into the dining room; when we got there, Cole Porter was already sitting at the head of the table.