Mark Griffin (54 page)

But Arkoff didn’t stop there. Believing that his middle initial gave him license to dabble in a little David O. Selznick-style showmanship, the man who gifted the world with
Reform School Girls
decided that
A Matter of Time
was sorely lacking in
La Dolce Vita
. Arkoff insisted on bookending the film with scenes of Nina as a fur-draped, limo-riding superstar. Although Minnelli had shot this footage to placate the meddlesome producer, he never intended to actually incorporate any of it into the picture. A muddled and disjointed film now had to contend with a flashback device straight out of
Funny Girl
.

AIP’s mutilation of
A Matter of Time
was so reckless and arbitrary that the release print unreels like one of the countess’s hallucinations. The picture is an insane jumble, though at the same time oddly moving. Every so often it’s even fascinating, especially in those stretches that are pure and unadulterated Minnelli. In the film’s most beautiful and fully realized scene, Bergman’s Sanziani, seated by a window, observes thousands of birds flying over Rome. “At the sunset hour, these starlings fly over Rome—thousands of them. It’s one of the mysteries of nature. And did you know the noise of the rain so often heard in the music of Berlioz—it’s the chirping of these little birds?” After this wistful observation, the contessa hands the chambermaid an ornate Florentine mirror and invites her to take a different look at herself, “You’re only what you wish to be. . . . Take it all. Take everything you can from life. It never gives anything back.”

Amid the shattered remains of the movie are the fragments of what many hoped would be Ingrid Bergman’s “Norma Desmond” performance. Deprived of a complete characterization, the viewer must be satisfied with tantalizing bits: During a solitary dinner, Sanziani absentmindedly reaches for a treasured watch she was forced to pawn; in another sequence, the contessa whips herself into a hysterical frenzy as she realizes that she is seventy-two, the age at which a fortune teller prophesied that she would meet her doom. In these moments, there are glimmers of what might have been. But surrounding this
are Arkoff’s amateurish and arbitrarily inserted travelogue shots of Rome, a pair of inspired but out-of-place John Kander and Fred Ebb songs, and such incompetent post-production dubbing that the synchronization on
Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster
seems Oscar-worthy by comparison.

Minnelli on Minnelli: Vincente prepares Liza for a scene in
A Matter of Time
. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST

According to Arkoff, it was Liza who suggested that her then husband, director Jack Haley Jr., be brought in to attempt to salvage
A Matter of Time
. As Arkoff recalled, “By the end of our meeting, I told him, ‘Why don’t you see what you can do with the picture? Maybe you can save it.’ Haley went to work on the picture, although we never publicly announced his involvement in the movie. . . . Despite Haley’s best efforts, even he couldn’t rescue it.”
¹²

“God, did they rearrange that movie,” says John Gay. “It was so painful when that thing got butchered every which way. It was hard to look at it, you know? I just wiped it out.” So did the director. When
A Matter of Time
opened at Radio City Music Hall (of all places) in October 1976, Vincente refused to see it. In later years, it remained a sensitive subject and one Minnelli was reluctant to discuss, as film scholar Joe McElhaney found out. “When I met Vincente, the first question I asked him was, ‘Is there any chance that we’ll ever get to see the original cut of
A Matter of Time
?,’ which was the wrong question to ask him,” McElhaney said. “He went completely white and his
face fell. He talked in this very tiny voice about the production circumstances of the film and how unhappy it all was and he said, ‘No. There’s no chance of it ever being restored.’” This was not some overproduced spectacle like
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
, but a poignant character study that Minnelli had genuinely cared about—to see his final film destroyed would stand as one of the great tragedies of his career.
¹³

“Vincente Minnelli’s
A Matter of Time
has been grossly tampered with,” Pauline Kael announced in
The New Yorker
. “From what is being shown to the public, it is almost impossible to judge what the tone of his film was, or whether it would have worked at any level.” Though Kael panned what remained of the movie, she saluted Ingrid Bergman’s contessa. “She has a glamour in this role beyond anything she’s had before onscreen. . . . Bergman’s role has been reduced to shreds, so one cannot judge whether her performance had any rhythm; scene after scene has been cut. Still, there’s something going on when she’s on the screen, and with her gowns hanging straight down from her shoulders, she’s as tall as a legend.”
¹⁴

While most critics scratched their heads, Minnelli devotees saw
A Matter of Time
—even its gutted form
^bb
—as a moving culmination of the director’s career. As the greatest love goddess in all of Europe offers life lessons to an awkward chambermaid, there are echoes of Aunt Alicia taking her niece under her wing in
Gigi
. The time-traveling episodes are reminiscent of
On a Clear Day
, while the film-studio scenes recall
Two Weeks in Another Town
(though never quite
The Bad and the Beautiful
). Beyond the self-reflexive nods to his own work,
A Matter of Time
poignantly mirrored the director’s own situation. One Minnelli at the end of a remarkable career was passing the mirror on to another who was just beginning.

THOUGH TYPICALLY DESCRIBED AS an “elegant Scotswoman,” Vincente Minnelli’s fourth wife, Margaretta Lee Anderson, was born (somewhere around 1909) in Croydon, England. In the summer of 1940, Anderson and ninety-six other passengers fled war-torn England by boarding the
Eastern Prince
and sailing to America. Although most of the ocean liner’s passengers would make ends meet by living with friends and relatives for the duration of the war, Lee Anderson (who had already dropped the “Margaretta”) had come to America to marry a millionaire.

Two years earlier, actress Anderson had met Eugene Francois Suter, the developer of a permanent-wave hair-styling process. The same year that Suter met Lee, he divorced his first wife, who was the mother of his only child. Anderson married Suter in 1940 but the union proved to be short lived. Nine months after exchanging vows, the couple divorced. Although she always exuded an air of “to the manor born,” Anderson apparently did not profit from her marriage to Suter. She would have to work her way into society’s upper echelon, which is where she met her second husband.

Anderson’s next millionaire spouse, Arizona cattle rancher/rodeo star Marion Getzwiller, landed Lee a Beverly Hills address, though this marriage would also end in divorce in 1946. Single once again, the aspiring actress soon scored some legitimate stage work, including an appearance opposite future
Gigi
star Eva Gabor in the comedy
Candle-Light
. Anderson’s full-time occupation, however, seemed to involve getting her name in the society columns. Throughout the ’40s and ’50s, Lee’s every move was chronicled by
L.A.’s reigning gossipmongers. There she was . . . lunching with Lana Turner, sunning with heiress Kay Spreckles, or reporting that her $35,000 ruby earrings (a gift from an Indian maharajah to her late father) had been stolen.
¹
In 1948, Anderson became the social director of the Palm Springs Tennis Club, and it was here that she began to hobnob with the well heeled and highly influential, particularly her fellow British expatriates.

For someone as adept at self-promotion as Lee Anderson, it surprised no one when she ascended to the position of vice president of a Westwood-based public relations firm. “Lee was a real promoter,” says Hollywood insider Scotty Bowers. “If you had someone who had a few bucks and they had a lovely house but they didn’t know anybody, and they wanted to work their way into a certain social set, they would pay Lee as a party promoter. Lee would do her thing and all of a sudden, there would be a hundred people at the party. And that was Lee . . . always promoting something.”
²

Somewhere between keeping company with billionaire bachelor John Gillin and vying for the title of one of L.A.’s best twisters, Anderson managed to attend her first high-powered Hollywood party (upstairs at Romanoff’s) and chat up legendary gossip columnist Louella Parsons. “Every star in the world you can imagine was there,” Lee remembered. “Parsons took a liking to me and she said, ‘You sit by me.’” An elegant-looking gentleman with “big black eyes” caught Anderson’s attention and she asked Parsons about him. Louella gave Lee the inside scoop on the very married Vincente Minnelli. “I thought he was so wonderful,” Anderson said. “And I thought, ‘Oh my God, I am never going to see that handsome Italian again.’ This was awful. Dreadful.”
³

Several years later, while attending yet another glitzy Hollywood gathering, Lee Anderson met Denise Giganti, who announced that she was about to marry Minnelli. Anderson was devastated. “My heart sank to my boots,” she recalled.
⁴
There was still a glimmer of hope, however. Denise befriended Lee, and throughout the ’60s Anderson was often the “extra woman” at the Minnelli’s star-studded dinner parties.

Anderson would later admit that she carried a torch for her mild-mannered host for years. “I would look across the room and say to myself, ‘Oh, that’s the only man I’ve ever really been in love with.’” Lee’s prayers seemed to be answered the day Denise called to inform her that she was leaving Vincente for San Francisco millionaire Prentis Cobb Hale (whose wife, Marialice King Hale, died under mysterious circumstances in 1969). It was Denise who encouraged Lee to take over. “Lee is a very nice lady,” Denise told a society columnist. “Vincente really needed somebody to take care of him and Lee was marvelous at looking after him.”
⁵

It wasn’t long before Lee was ensconced in Minnelli’s Beverly Hills home. The two were inseparable—though, to some, it was the classic coupling of convenience. When the
New York Post
asked if there was any truth to the marriage rumors floating around, the couple laughed and Minnelli responded, “Why ruin a friendship?” But Lee remained hopeful that Vincente would change his mind and ask her to become his fourth wife. And she wasn’t the only one. “Everybody was rooting for Lee to marry Vincente,” remembered columnist Doris Lilly.
⁶
All of the cheerleading finally paid off on April 2, 1980, as seventy-seven-year-old Vincente married seventy-one-year-old Lee (the press reported the bride’s age as “fiftyish” and she made no attempts to correct them). The couple was married by Judge Edward Brand in the living room of socialite Virginia Milner.

When asked if he was directing the proceedings, Vincente told reporter Jody Jacobs, “I’m just one of the . . . well, company.” To which Liza responded, “Daddy . . . you’re the star.”
⁷
And befitting an MGM production, the star was backed by a glittering supporting cast. MCA founder Jules Stein was best man. The reception was attended by the likes of Al and Betsy Bloomingdale, Charlton and Lydia Heston, and Henry and Ginny Mancini. The orange blossoms came courtesy of Tony Duquette. The red velvet cushion that housed the wedding bands was a gift from designer Luis Estevez. Every detail had been attended to—except one. Hollywood’s greatest director of musicals would have to get married without musical accompaniment. But nobody seemed to mind, especially not the groom.

“I think I’m the happiest man in the world,” Vincente told his guests.
⁸

“MY FATHER IS FURIOUS,” Liza Minnelli announced to the star-studded crowd attending Vincente’s eightieth birthday party at the Museum of Modern Art in March 1983. The guest of honor was unable to attend his own celebration because he was in a Los Angeles hospital undergoing tests for the respiratory problems that had been plaguing him. “He’s the sweetest, gentlest man in the world, but he has a temper and I’m sure he’s driving the nurses mad,” Liza told the more than two hundred well-wishers who had gathered to pay tribute to the absent director. Several of Vincente’s stars were in attendance, including Joan Bennett, Hermione Gingold, and Farley Granger. Lillian Gish, who had appeared in
The Cobweb
, hailed Liza as “Vincente’s greatest production.”
⁹