Pieces of My Heart (18 page)

I had been looking forward to working with Fredric March, an actor I had admired tremendously for years, even when he was desperately trying to steal scenes, as with his furiously fanning himself in
Inherit the Wind
. Unfortunately, Freddy was a bit disappointing. If you asked Freddy about a picture he’d made twenty years before, he’d reach into his pocket, pull out a little card that had a complete list of his credits, and refresh his memory. He was very much the Master Thespian, and he gave Vittorio De Sica fits.

Freddy was playing a character based on the founder of the Krupp munitions dynasty, and the picture opened with his character being given a fatal cancer diagnosis. Every day Vittorio would tell him, “Freddy, do not play self-pity. Do not fall into that trap.” And every single day Freddy would play self-pity and Vittorio would have to pull him out of it.

Freddy had a reputation of being incredibly, tastelessly bold with women, and the reputation was completely deserved. It was a remnant of the early part of the century, when leading men sleeping with their leading lady was practically contractual. Once he reached over to look at a brooch Marion was wearing, and he very obviously copped a feel of her left breast while pretending to admire her jewelry. The man was sixty-five years old, but he would have fucked mud if someone had held it for him.

Spencer Tracy had worked with Freddy on
Inherit the Wind,
and when I got back to Hollywood, I asked Spence about him. All he would say was, “He wouldn’t put down that fucking fan.”

But Freddy had been around for nearly forty years and picked up a lot of experience along the way. He gave me some good political advice. The company was planning to shoot in East Germany, and the American embassy didn’t want American citizens going across into a Communist country. Freddy took me aside and told me, “Look, you don’t want to be lumped in with Vittorio and Abby Mann and the rest of these left-wing guys. It’s a stigma; it won’t do you any good.” On balance, he was probably right. Freddy had been a man of the left all his life and had gotten into some trouble during the blacklist era because of it. He was thoughtfully trying to save me from trouble I really didn’t need.

In contrast to Max Schell, Vittorio De Sica couldn’t have been warmer or more welcoming. During production, he would stand right next to the lens so that he could see what the camera was seeing. He let me watch him work in the editing room and took me completely under his wing. One day he showed me a scene he had shot where I was on camera left and I didn’t have enough authority. “See,” he said, “be on the right side. And be more powerful. I want you to drop your voice.” And he put his hand on my chest, where my voice needed to be placed. Vittorio sent me to Professor Scurri, who helped me get away from the California voice I had been struggling with for a decade. And Vittorio reshot the offending scene, to much better results.

To be in Rome in the early 1960s was to be in the middle of an atmosphere of luxurious creativity. It was palpably
alive,
in the same way London would be a few years later. There was absolutely nothing about Rome I didn’t like—the people, the piazzas, the entire Italian attitude toward life. The Italians work in order to live, not the other way around.

The premiere of
The Condemned of Altona
was in Milan, and the picture was very well done and received fantastic reviews. When the movie premiered, Sophia insisted that I escort her. I remain proud of the picture—the European version. In America, Fox lost its nerve and edited the picture severely, and most of the atmosphere and all of the quality disappeared. A few years later, Fox would do the same thing to Luchino Visconti’s
The Leopard,
which contained a performance by Burt Lancaster that was truly majestic—a career performance. It was a better picture than ours, but by the time the studio had finished cutting and redubbing it, the magic was gone—just as with
The Condemned of Altona
.

From working with Vittorio De Sica, my next picture was with Blake Edwards. Marion and I were in Paris when we ran into Blake, and Blake promptly cast me in his new picture. Then John Foreman came over to Rome, and I was once again in a family atmosphere, where I’ve always been happiest.

It was June 1962, and Marion and I were in Rome. One night we were having dinner at the Hostaria dell’Orso, when Natalie and Warren walked in. It was one of those moments that can be classified as awkward, with the potential to become excruciating. Generally speaking, the movies do these scenes better than life.

The conversation was polite and stilted—“How’s your mother?” “Fine, how’s yours?” “Fine.” After the exchange of pleasantries was over, we looked at each other.

“Miss you,” I said.

“Miss you too.”

Both Marion and Warren were standing there while we had our little moment. Maybe they minded. I don’t really know, and I guess I don’t really care. Neither of us could say what we were feeling, but there was a strong vibe in the air, and I could sense she was just as aware of it as I was. Afterward, I dropped Marion off at her apartment, went back to my place, and sat down and wrote Natalie a letter. I told her how much I valued our relationship; I told her that she would always be in my heart.

As soon as I was finished, I went back to her hotel—the Grand. I stood there, scanning the building, wondering which room was hers, hoping I’d see her outline against the shades. Finally, I went in and handed the letter to the concierge and told him to give it to Miss Wood. He walked over and put it in her mailbox. I went back to my apartment, and first thing the next morning I went back to the Grand. She had checked out early. The letter was still in the mailbox, unopened.

Over the next eight years, we would run into each other a number of times, although that was the only time it happened when I was in Europe. These moments were always intense—it was as if everybody else in the room froze and the sound died away and we were the only two people still moving, talking, and breathing.

With David Niven and my friend and publicist George Kirvay, at David’s house at St. Jean-Cap Ferrat in the south of France.
(COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
)

I
f you loved David Niven—and everybody did, with the tragic exception of his second wife—you called him “Niv.” I had first met Niv years before, on Bogart’s yacht, the
Santana,
and we immediately struck up a friendship. Later, when he was having an affair with that wonderful woman and actress Deborah Kerr, Natalie and I spent a great deal of time with both of them. So the Cortina d’Ampezzo location of
The Pink Panther
was as much a reunion as it was a film set.

I loved David. I loved the way he lived his life. I loved the way he left Hollywood and went to Europe, which was one of the reasons I did the same thing. And when we met up in Europe, David became another mentor for me. He took me to his tailor, he took me to his shirtmaker. David dressed in Turnbull and Asser, not to mention Schifanelli. He would put on a gorgeous dress shirt and roll the cuffs back—a marvelous sense of style, elegant and casual at the same time. Along with Marion, he helped give me a new style for my new life, and at a time when my confidence had flagged, he worked hard to give me a sense of my own possibilities.

Now, at Cortina d’Ampezzo, there was a chairlift that went up to the top of the mountain, with a restaurant at the top. The height went from two thousand feet to eight thousand feet, and it was a beautiful place. One day in particular began with stunning weather, so David and I went up the mountain to have lunch. We were dressed casually in slacks, but once we got up there, the bad weather moved in, and it got cold. Really cold.

As we came down after lunch, Niv was sitting in the chairlift saying very matter-of-factly, “My cock is frozen. I have a frozen cock. Frozen solid.” When we got down to the hotel and bar, Marion was waiting for us. David explained his predicament and asked Marion to sit on his lap and save the life of his favorite friend. Having a strong maternal disposition, Marion sat in his lap and saved a very valuable part of David’s life.

Niv ordered a brandy. And then he told me to follow him, and we went into the john, where he unzipped and dropped his unit into the brandy snifter to try to save it from frostbite. I was staring at something I never imagined on the eleventh hole at Bel-Air.

It was at that point that the bathroom door swung open, and in came a man in a military uniform. And he looked at David with his cock in a brandy glass, and me staring at it, and stopped dead, with a stunned look on his face. At which point Niv looked up and said, “I always give it a little drink from time to time.”

I just fell over laughing and was so hysterical I literally wet my pants. From that day on, Niv always referred to Marion as the family bird-warmer because she had sat on his lap and warmed him up.

He was a special, special man.

Niv specialized in a smooth, blithe manner and an authentic wit and joie de vivre. Beneath that was a lot of pain that he worked very hard not to let anybody see. It wasn’t that he was protective of himself; I think he thought that there was quite enough misery in the world, and he saw no reason to add more.

After David came back from the war, during which he helped plan the raid on Dieppe and was attached, among other places, to Montgomery’s army, he resumed his career in Hollywood. On May 19, 1946, he and his wife, Primmie, were at a party at Tyrone Power’s house. Rex Harrison, Lilli Palmer, Patricia Medina, and Richard Greene were also there. Soon after they started to play a hide-and-seek game called “Sardines” that had to be played in the dark, there was a terrible thud. Ty Power put the lights on, and everybody realized that Primmie had mistaken the basement door for the bathroom door and taken a terrible fall down the stairs—twenty feet, headfirst. She was at the bottom of the basement steps, unconscious.

They got her up the stairs, and while they waited for the ambulance, Primmie opened her eyes and said, “I feel so strange…even when I had babies I never felt so….” And then she closed her eyes. “We’ll never be invited again,” she said. Primmie died two days later, at the age of twenty-eight. David was left with his two boys, David Jr., who was three and a half, and Jamie, who was six months old.

People who knew David at the time said he was completely devastated. David would talk about how he loved her, how cruel it was, and how he was never happy again. Clark Gable, who had lost Carole Lombard in a plane crash in 1942, when she was just thirty-three and they had only been married three years, helped him through it, just as in time David would help me.

Part of the reason David was always in some secret pain was his second marriage, a year and a half after Primmie died, to a woman named Hjordis Genberg. It was a classic rebound mistake, made partially because David didn’t want to marry any of the actresses who pursued him relentlessly after Primmie died. I think he wanted a wife for himself and a mother for the boys.

Hjordis was quite beautiful, but that’s a genetic accident; for the qualities that stem from character, she hadn’t had as much luck. Niv’s eventual nickname for her was “Nej,” which is pronounced “Nay,” and is Swedish for “no,” which she said all the time. Perhaps the early years were good, but by the time I met David in the mid-1950s, he was having affairs, as was Hjordis, who was also emptying a lot of bottles in the bargain.

David’s method for coping with all this was to pretend that nothing was wrong. He was a good, involved father, allowing for the fact that he was a successful actor and away making movies a lot. Otherwise, he was very concerned about his boys’ future and welfare.

David met Deborah Kerr when they were making
Bonjour Tristesse,
and they immediately had a great simpatico. They were the most wonderful couple I ever spent time with. They had the same sense of humor, the same sense of effortless continental style, and together they were a joy. Besides Deborah, the location of the Preminger movie exposed David to the Côte d’Azur, and he fell in love with that as well. A couple of years later, he bought his villa at Cap Ferrat, where he lived for the rest of his life.

Sometimes a hit has a tangible feel to it, because you’re having so much fun, and
The Pink Panther
was like that. Blake Edwards was a very spontaneous director, and extraordinarily gifted. Blake loved Laurel and Hardy, as did I; the essence of their comedy was the idea that the buildup to the joke is as important as the joke. A deliberate rhythm can make a joke much funnier than rushing to the punch line. Watching Blake gently impose that rhythm on his actors was one of the joys of making
The Pink Panther
.

Blake would arrive on the set and announce, “All right, let’s rehearse. Let’s try this. You do that. See if that works.” The dialogue was on paper, but Blake rehearsed a great deal, as you have to with physical comedy. And he shot a lot of takes. The mood was elevated, very happy, so it was a pleasure to work with him. When Peter Sellers replaced Peter Ustinov—Blake had wanted Sellers from the beginning—and the two of them started to work on Inspector Clouseau, there was such a feeling of creation. It was no slipshod thing—it was magical!

The only blight on the great experience of
The Pink Panther
occurred during a sequence when I was hiding in the bathtub with Capucine. The scene called for me to emerge from beneath the suds and between her legs, but the prop man first had to create the suds, which is hard to do under bright lights. He told me he had used baby detergent, but he had actually used the strongest detergent he could find. It burned and lacerated my eyes, it burned Capucine’s vagina, and it burned her under her arms.

I was in terrible pain, and I was scared. An ophthalmologist washed out my eyes, but I had to keep my eyes covered for an endless three weeks, opening them only to put in eyedrops. For those three weeks, Josh and Peter led me around. Back in Hollywood, some thought was given to writing me out of the script so that no production time would be lost, but David, Peter, and Blake refused to continue unless they could shoot around me while my eyes got better. After three weeks, my eyes were fine again. Because of my friends, I kept my job, which at that point in my life was of critical importance. The fact that the picture was an international hit was also a great help.

Most people in show business have some level of talent. Peter Sellers had a level of genius. It was Peter who helped break me of a bad habit I had fallen into. As
The Pink Panther
wore on, I began to develop a nasty case of stage fright. It didn’t have anything to do with the injury to my eyes; it was that my confidence was still a quart low, and I was working opposite Peter Sellers and David Niven, for God’s sake! They were so good, so seamless in their work, and I began to wonder if I was in their league. At first, I got a slight case of the shakes, and then it manifested itself as not being able to look the other actors in the eye.

This was an entirely new experience for me. When I had been starting out, I was nervous, of course, but stage fright goes far beyond nervousness. Stage fright limits your concentration because you’re not thinking about the scene—you’re not thinking about anything other than how terrified you are. It’s emotionally disfiguring.

Very little in life can be done tentatively. Certainly, acting can’t. It’s like telling a woman you’re in love with her when you’re not. The lie shows, and even if the audience can’t tell, you can, and you feel like a total fraud, which only increases your inner terror—“They’re going to find me out!”

One day Peter said to me, “What the hell are you doing with your eyes?” I was hooding them slightly, because I was afraid of the camera. Peter was the only one who noticed, and he forced me to confront it. I went to David with what was happening, and he said it was something that had to be worked through. David ran scenes with me numerous times so that I would be as comfortable as possible.

All this happened toward the end of the shoot, which, other than the incident with the detergent, had been an entirely wonderful event. It’s possible that I was upset about saying good-bye to a group of people who had become a sort of surrogate family for me. In any case, I knew the stage fright was something I was going to have to address.

Peter was always a little crazy, but I must say that I never found him that nuts. I did have to talk to him at one point: he liked amyl nitrate when he was getting oral sex, and I told him that unless he was careful he was going to blast his heart right out of his chest. Amyl nitrate extends the orgasm for a very long time, and it can be dangerous. And that’s what eventually happened: he had a massive coronary while making Billy Wilder’s
Kiss Me, Stupid
. After that, he got really crazy, but for some reason it never bothered me.

A few years after
The Pink Panther
I was doing
It Takes a Thief,
and Peter guest-starred for me, playing a man with a nautical shop. As always, he was great fun. He gave me a gold cigarette lighter, which I have kept by my bed for more than forty years.

This run of pictures put me right where I wanted to be—in a different world than I had been in back in Hollywood. And if I was a member of an ensemble rather than carrying the picture, that was fine with me, so long as the picture had some chance at quality.

N
ext up was
The Biggest Bundle of Them All,
with Raquel Welch and Edward G. Robinson, which also gave me a welcome reunion with Vittorio De Sica.

Eddie Robinson, of course, was just a wonderful actor, and he was also the most cultured and elegant of men. He had amassed one of the finest art collections in Hollywood when a toxic divorce forced him to sell most of it off. He sold Van Gogh’s
Sunflowers
to Stavros Niarchos, with the proviso that once Eddie got back on his financial feet he would be able to buy it back for the same amount of money Niarchos had paid him.

A few years later, Eddie had the money, but he could never get Niarchos on the telephone. It doesn’t matter how much money a chiseler may have—he’s still a chiseler. Eddie went on to rebuild his collection. He converted his garage into an art gallery, and he was the proud owner of a three-panel
Water Lilies
by Monet.

Raquel was a very difficult woman; her career was at white heat, she was only twenty-five or twenty-six years old, and as a result she was terrified. Her fear manifested itself in her constant lateness. She would be in makeup for hours while she kept everybody waiting. It was the same behavior that gradually alienated people from Marilyn Monroe, who was probably driven by many of the same fears.

Yet, as difficult as it was working with Raquel, I liked her and felt sorry for her. She didn’t seem to have the tools she needed to handle her life. She asked me once about a painting she was interested in buying, and I told her a story that Eddie Robinson had told me, about how purchasing a painting can change your life.

Eddie had been a struggling young actor in New York when he scraped the money together to buy a small Cézanne. He took it home and hung it over his mantel, then realized it didn’t look quite right. He changed the mantel, and the painting did indeed look better. Then he realized that the room wasn’t quite right, so he got new furniture that was more in keeping with the painting and the mantel. This went on until he moved to an entirely different apartment, just so he could properly showcase the Cézanne.

“You can’t worry about the value of the painting appreciating,” I told Raquel. “You just have to make sure that the painting feeds you in some way; you have to buy something you genuinely like, that you want to see every day. And if you can find a painting like that, then you have to have the right place to display it, and that’s how a painting can change your life.”

I told her all this, and she looked at me and said, “I don’t have any of that. How can I get that?”