Just One Catch (50 page)

The cockpits and the bombardiers' perches were so small, the crew had difficulty fitting actors, cameras, and cameramen in the planes. Nichols spent hours one day setting up a scene, arranging the camera the way he wanted it. The equipment filled the cockpit. “Uh—Mike—who's going to fly the plane?” Tallman asked.

John Jordan, a second-unit director, refused to wear a harness. While in the air one morning, in the tail gunner's spot, filming one plane from another, he sent a hand signal to a crew member in the other plane, lost his grip, and fell four thousand feet to his death, a late casualty of the war.

Painstakingly, Nichols staged the scene where Milo Minderbinder calls an air strike against the base; Yossarian watches in horror as building after building is destroyed. The crew set off tons of explosives. Afterward, Nichols told Arkin, “That was good terror, Alan.” Arkin replied, “That was
real
terror, Mike.”

The actor playing Snowden wore a flight suit packed with animal offal to simulate the spilling of his guts.

“I don't think of this as a film about World War II,” Nichols told Nora Ephron. “I think of it as a picture about dying and a picture about where you get off and at what point you take control over your own life and say, ‘No, I won't.
I
decide.
I
draw the line.'”

The
Time
reporter observed, “Nichols … was aware that laughter in
Catch-22
was, in the Freudian sense, a cry for help. It is the book's cold rage that he has nurtured.”

“He caught its essence,” Joe said of Nichols's approach to the book. “He understood.”

The actors and crew revered the novel. On the wall of a portable men's room on the set, someone scrawled, “Help Save Joe Heller”—a reminder to everyone to preserve the book's integrity.

The novel's repetitive, retrospective structure did not translate easily to the screen. Nichols tried to give the film narrative coherence by folding the events into Yossarian's fever dream following a knife attack. A spirit of the absurd carried over from the novel in the actors' broad mugging (Borscht Belt–style) and in touches like the changing portrait on Major Major's wall—first it's FDR, then Winston Churchill, and finally Joseph Stalin.

“For the actors … making an Air Force film has turned out to be very much like being in the Air Force,” Ephron reported.

“I'll tell you what we do around here in our free time,” said Arkin. “We sit in the barracks out at the set with our muddy boots on and talk about women. That's what you do in the Army, isn't it? Sit around in your muddy boots and talk about women? I don't know why we do it.”

Orson Welles had a small part in the movie. His arrival on the set discombobulated the crew: He went about criticizing performances, scene preparations, and camera setups, yet when it came time for him to deliver his lines, he nearly always flubbed them. Nichols sympathized with him. “I was very moved by Welles,” he said. “I knew [he was] used to being in control—and I was sorry when people didn't see what that felt like.… I know that if I were acting in a movie, it would be very hard for me not to say, ‘I wonder if you would be kind enough to consider putting the camera a little more there so that when I do this…' How do you kill that knowledge?”

On another occasion, John Wayne dropped by the set on his way to film a Western in Durango (and to look at some nearby land he wanted to purchase). He expected a welcoming party, but none of the younger actors knew who he was. Nichols and Henry were not informed of his arrival. Angry, convinced he had been snubbed for political reasons, he went to the Hotel Playa de Cortes in Guaymas, drank and smashed glassware in the bar, and wound up breaking two ribs in a nasty fall. “We're trying to make up [for not greeting him] by getting a print of
The Green Berets
and showing it to the crew,” Buck Henry said. “In the meantime, we've just been sitting around here, watching the days go by, and waiting for him to come back and bomb us.”

The Welles and Wayne incidents threatened crew morale. Nichols's energy kept everyone on task. Of being directed by Nichols, Dustin Hoffman once said, “He makes you feel kind of like a kite. He lets you go ahead, and do your thing [as an actor]. And then when you've finished he pulls you in by the string. But at least you've had the enjoyment of the wind.”

During the shooting of a love scene between Arkin and Paula Prentiss, Nichols wanted a more passionate vocal reaction from the actress. He set the cameras rolling. While Arkin and Prentiss embraced, he sneaked up behind her and squeezed one of her breasts. “I let out this great hoot,” Prentiss said. Nichols was pleased. “Then I was so overcome with emotion I had to go in a corner and be alone,” Prentiss said. “Whenever someone touches me I'm in love with him for about eight hours.”

The film crew spent nearly four months in the desert, having little contact with the outside world. The budget ballooned from eleven million to over thirteen million dollars. “I wonder if I could see something in a less expensive model?” the producer complained to Nichols.

Hollywood studio heads feared nothing more than an auteur film swelling out of control. One disaster—critically, financially—could spell the end of directorial independence and a return to tight studio control. (The nightmares finally occurred in 1979 and 1980, first with Francis Ford Coppola's
Apocalypse Now
and then with Michael Cimino's
Heaven's Gate
; in essence, the age of auterism ended, and Hollywood turned to churning out predictable special-effects blockbusters.)

Nichols's
Catch-22
came dangerously close to being an auteur disaster. The fall he feared appeared imminent. Though the film ended up eighth on the top earners' list in 1970 (after
Airport, M*A*S*H, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,
and
Woodstock,
among others), it struck critics and studio executives alike as a disappointment, given advance expectations. Jacob Brackman, writing in
Esquire,
said “it seemed … [like] two movies … intercut by some moon-struck studio editor. The one a dark, hysterical masterpiece, a Moby Dick of movies. The other a dumb, undergraduatey jackoff.” The near-brilliant scenes, he said, played “as if Lewis Carroll had redone
The Inferno
—to make you laugh and steal the sound of your laughter.” These scenes were undermined by the “fairly contemptible burlesque” of other scenes. Vestiges of Yiddish theater were not welcome on the silver screen; it was an irony (and an indicator of the novel's deepest tones) that comedy—Nichols's calling card—was the film's weakest aspect.

In
San Francisco
magazine, Grover Sales declared “Mike Nichols'
Catch-22
 … an epic disaster.” He blamed this on the “children's pop novel on which [the movie was] based.” Sales had deeply resented social pressures to read the novel when it first appeared: “[O]ne could as soon avoid Warhol, Bob Dylan,
Blow-up,
or the zodiac.… The party-line of the middle-aged youth cult decreed that unless we dug
Catch-22
we couldn't relate to our kids,” he wrote. He found the novel “harder going than
Critique of Pure Reason
and as fully devoid of wit.” He was in no position, then, to evaluate the movie he was watching. Still, his disgruntlement echoed other critics' more measured responses.

Perhaps Nichols's biggest problem was the release, earlier that year, of Robert Altman's
M*A*S*H,
a similarly themed film made on a smaller budget, with a script that declared fidelity to the ordinary (overlapping conversations, situational humor). The actors (Elliott Gould, Donald Sutherland) were more conventionally antiestablishment—grizzled, irreverent, loose—than the tightly wound, highly spooked Alan Arkin.

In its spoof of
Catch-22,
Mad
magazine showed the
M*A*S*H
doctors threatening “Shmoessarian” with scalpels. They declared, “WE did this ‘Insane War Picture' bit FIRST … and BETTER!!”

For Joe, there was very little downside to all this. He had been paid; he didn't have to work on the movie; the critical failure was not his—in fact, the film's misfortunes were a boon to the book (lots of publicity). With a redesigned cover, touting the movie tie-in, paperback sales reached a million copies within six weeks. More than ever, the old ads, written by Robert Gottlieb, seemed true:
Catch-22
—the book—was showing signs of “living forever.” After all these years, it made the bestseller list. “As soon as they told me that, I stopped working on my new novel, and I won't have to do any more work on that for a year,” Joe said. Those who knew him understood how much fear his remark tried to hide. He said he took a “kind of sadistic” pleasure in knowing that many of the people who bought the new paperback edition “had never heard of the book before and … wouldn't be able to get past page six or eight. It's nice to get money from those people who make millionaires out of Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann.”

To an audience at the Ninety-second Street Y, he joked, “[A]s I talk to you now, I'm kind of rich and famous and successful, but unchanged by success; I'm still as corruptible as [I used to be] … and God willing, I'll remain that way.”

Before the movie's release nationwide, Joe, Shirley, and Erica attended a private screening of the film in an empty three-hundred seat theater near Times Square. Joe sat apart from his wife and daughter; he wanted to take in the movie alone. He “found it … overpowering,” he said. (Erica says her mother was simply “relieved” the picture wasn't embarrassing.) Joe said, “When it was over, Nichols was kind of slipping away and I took him by the arm and pulled him aside and I said, ‘Well, as far as I'm concerned, it may be one of the best movies I've ever seen.'” They went to the Russian Tea Room and toasted the movie.

Nichols's career would rise and fall, and rise and fall again, but his work on
Catch-22
remained crucially important to him. As soon as he had wrapped the film, he told a reporter, “
Catch-22
has made me feel differently about what I lay on the line.… [It] has helped me discover how I want to live—I'm going to get rid of myself in stages.… There are … so many things that we must do for one another to make sure that we continue to live on this earth.” He stayed in touch with Joe.

Joe had preserved pieces of his war—the war that could not be found. One of the B-25s restored for the movie is now on permanent display in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. During filming, in the spring of 1969, when eighteen remade bombers rose into the air, they constituted the twelfth-largest air force in the world.

 

15.
The Willies

“
IT WAS AFTER THE WAR
, I think, that the struggle really began,” says Bob Slocum in
Something Happened.

Just as Joe had arrived many years late with his great war book, he straggled in the rear with his business novel. Sloan Wilson and Richard Yates had tackled corporate facelessness in the 1950s in
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
and
Revolutionary Road,
respectively. William Whyte had thoroughly analyzed the organization man. But when Joe finally addressed the matter—the “thousand-and-first version” of “this written-to-death situation,” Kurt Vonnegut said in his ultimately ecstatic review of
Something Happened
—he made the subject his own, the way a great singer's cover version of a standard links that song to one voice. Joe stepped beyond Wilson's sentimentality and Yates's bitterness to eviscerate modern America's success ethic.

The subject screamed at him daily: middle-aged men, veterans of the war, muttering past one another on the sidewalks, indistinguishable in their suits, propelled, it seemed, by briefcases; frowning wives, wailing kids … the shouts of irritated drivers, convinced that if everyone else got out of the way, they would arrive at fulfillment, only to find, at their coveted destination, the parking lot full or the doors boarded up.

Joe witnessed all this in his walks around the West Side. It took him twenty-five minutes to get from the Apthorp to his studio. “There's no reason why I couldn't work at home,” he said, “but I like some demarcation between my personal life and my work life.… [T]here's a certain renewal of the imagination that comes from getting out of the house and walking to the studio. Most of the time I'm walking I'm working. It's psychological, I suppose.” Walking encouraged a “kind of free reverie within a very rigidly confined space.”

There was a store at Amsterdam Avenue and Seventy-ninth Street called Osner Business Machines, which sold Olivetti typewriters, Royals, and Underwoods. It was operated by a man named Stanley Adelman, a Polish Holocaust survivor, dapper, well dressed, soft-spoken. Joe frequented the shop to buy ribbons for his Smith-Corona or to drop off the machine to Adelman whenever it needed repair. Philip Roth, Nora Ephron, Tom Wolfe, and Irving Howe were among many other writers who shopped at the store. They “stood around all day [and] talked [to Adelman's wife, Mary] like she was their bartender,” Erica recalls.

On one trip to the store—or maybe it was a different afternoon when he went to Korvette or Brentano's with George Mandel (he couldn't remember)—Joe saw a commotion, people running toward the street, someone shouting, “Something happened!” A car wreck, a fallen pedestrian … whatever it was, the phrase stayed in Joe's mind.

As with
Catch-22,
he began
Something Happened
on what seemed like solid terrain, but by the time he finished the book, the tectonic plates had shifted in publishing. Of most immediate concern to Joe was the defection of his editor to Alfred A. Knopf. “As the sixties passed … Bob [Gottlieb's] reputation … had grown by leaps and bounds,” Michael Korda wrote. “He seemed capable of anything, from securing … the U.S. rights to John Lennon's book
A Spaniard in the Works
to publishing a whole string of ‘commercial' bestsellers.… [T]he news that he was leaving was a bombshell that rocked not only S & S but the industry.”