You Must Remember This (2 page)

“I love her, too, Michael,” I said. “We all love her. But we have to go ahead with the wedding. There’s a church full of people out there, and they’re getting restless. You can spend all the time you want with Elizabeth after the wedding.”

Full disclosure: I was angry, so I might have said all this a little . . . brusquely. By this time I was heartily sick of the wedding, even though it hadn’t even taken place yet. What I wanted to do was have a drink with Bob Osborne and not be bothered by infantile bullshit.

I got them moving, but Elizabeth came out on the wrong side of the church—the guests were divided into men on the left and women on the right—and so she had to walk all the way around behind the pews. Since Elizabeth was fairly immobile and walked with difficulty—part of it was her back, part of it was the medication for her back, which always gave her a buzz—she had to be helped onto the altar.

Finally—
finally
—the wedding got under way. David gave Liza a 3.5-karat diamond ring from Tiffany’s. After the minister said he
could kiss the bride, David tried to suck the lips off Liza’s face. I was too appalled to say anything. Jill said, “
Ewww
.” Next to her, Liz Smith said, “Double
ewwww
.”

The reception afterward was huge. Andy Williams sang. Gloria Gaynor sang. Michael Jackson gave the toast. I noticed some people I hadn’t noticed at the wedding: Kirk Douglas, Joan Collins, and Sid Luft, one of Liza’s stepfathers. Elizabeth skipped the reception. I finally had my drink with Bob Osborne.

For a long time after that, David would call Jill and me to chat. “You two are the happiest people I know,” he would begin, “and now I’ve found the same thing. I’m so in love with her. I go to bed with her and I rest my head on her right breast.” Then Liza would come on the line and tell me how wonderful David was, and that she was finally, unbelievably happy. They were nuts about each other.

They divorced in 2007. It was, needless to say, acrimonious. For a while David lived in England; now I understand that he’s in Nashville.

That was the day I began to think seriously about the business in which I have spent my life. Ever since then, I’ve felt that while the wedding was not exactly a Fellini movie, it was close.

And it was then that I began thinking about how show business had changed.

Now, Judy Garland’s marriage to Vincente Minnelli was probably no more plausible than Liza’s to David Gest. But the difference is that the former was designed and directed by MGM so as to minimize damage to the reputations of a major star and a major director. The full extent of the emotional, psychological, and sexual misalliance between Judy and Vincente didn’t become apparent until years later, after they had left the protective shelter of the studio.

It needs to be pointed out that David was in many respects very
good for Liza. He got her thin; he got her performing again and her career has continued at a stellar level. But Liza’s way with men derives from her mother’s. She’s neurotic and she’s beguiling. She would put her life in someone’s hands and convince him that he was the only one who could possibly save her. At some point, either David became too exhausted to carry on or the intrinsic problems in the relationship reared up and destroyed the marriage.

Eleven years after that wedding, things are . . . even more bizarre. Recently I was idly watching TV when a formerly thin actress who’d become fat, then thin and back again in what is apparently an endlessly recurring cycle, showed up to promote a reality show. Since she’s now fat, nobody hires her to act, because there aren’t a lot of parts for middle-aged fat women, movies and TV being predominantly a medium of fantasy.

So her only means of making a living is appearing as a formerly thin actress grown fat who is trying to get thin again.

I turned to Jill and asked a question: “This is a career?”

I didn’t really expect an answer, which is good, because I didn’t get one. Some questions don’t have answers. And I’m compelled to admit that being a fat actress and playing oneself is not really a bad gig. If nothing else, she’s working. Intermittently, but still, she’s working.

All this got me thinking about the quantum differences between now and then—then being right after World War II, when I got into the movies. And it got me thinking not just about the movies themselves, but about the differences in Hollywood, the town I’ve been a part of for seventy-five years.

On the most basic level, the difference is 180 degrees. For instance, when I worked on
The Longest Day
for Darryl Zanuck, he commanded a huge force of actors and extras, and the film was shot on the actual locations, at Omaha Beach and so forth.

Darryl organized his version of the D-day landing by flying green flags for “Attack,” yellow flags for “Caution,” and red flags for “Stop.” I was in the sequence about rappelling up Pointe du Hoc, and we shot it at Pointe du Hoc, doing it exactly the way the American soldiers had done it less than twenty years before.

Today when a battle scene is mounted, the extra call is greatly diminished, and the body count and the effects are completed and amplified through the oddly weightless effects of computer-generated images (CGI). Through some inverted math, the numbers of the combatants are incalculably greater, but the effect is halved, because you don’t really believe what you’re seeing. The pervasive lack of reality of so much modern filmmaking has made spectacle less spectacular.

Back then, we worked a six-day week, there was no such thing as overtime, and the large board at the studio that contained the shooting schedule for each picture on the lot was rarely altered—if Darryl wanted a movie made in forty days and you fell a little behind, then you could confidently expect to be pulling an all-nighter on that fortieth day because it would, by God, be done in the allotted time.

When I started out, I worked in front of a camera filled with film, and each take was signaled by the
slap!
of a clapper board, which was used to synch the sound. Today, the cameras are all digital, with no gentle but comforting
whirrr
of the camera, and the “clapper board” offers only a digital readout.

And I can assure you that if an actress got too fat at Darryl Zanuck’s place of business—or, for that matter, Jack Warner’s or Louis B. Mayer’s—the studio would not have dropped her any faster than if she had contracted a venereal disease and infected half the studio.

Certain things weren’t done, and fat was one of them. Nor were there a lot of alternatives to the movies. TV was further down the
food chain, with less money and less prestige, although that began to change in the 1960s.

In the golden days of Hollywood, stars didn’t have much, if any, say over the parts we played, or, for that matter, over what movies we made. In fact, even famous executives like Zanuck and Mayer weren’t truly autonomous—Hollywood always had a way of answering to New York on matters of budget and overall policy.

Following this train of thought, I’ve realized that people in the movie industry, whether actors, directors, or producers, used to exercise real control only over their private lives. But even then things could be heavily monitored, as Judy Garland found out.

And all this is what has brought me to this book about the quantum differences between then and now, as seen in how we lived our private lives during the last gasp of radiance that was the studio system. I want to try to document a way of life that has vanished as surely as birch bark canoes. And I want to do this before the colors fade.

It cannot be overemphasized that the movie industry of the late 1940s was a family business. Jack and Harry Warner were running Warner Bros. just as they had been since World War I; Harry Cohn was running Columbia just as he had since shortly after that war; Louis B. Mayer was running MGM just as he had since the company was formed in 1924.

These men knew one another intimately, distrusted one another greatly, competed against one another constantly. They engaged in the kind of bitter squabbles and fights—at times physical—that can be understood only as family quarrels. Eventually, these men were squeezed out—by time, by death, once or twice by each other. I think it’s fair to say that, at least at Hollywood’s beginnings, they were too busy to really be conscious of what they were building, but they certainly believed in themselves, so they built something that
has lasted. More important, they made movies that will undoubtedly outlast the studios that financed them.

For all their at times petty vindictiveness, those brawling, hostile, often ill-educated men stood behind the movies that came from their studios in a way that the far more educated and sophisticated people who run the studios today don’t. Warner and Cohn, Mayer and Zukor, Goldwyn and the rest made movies they genuinely believed in; they made movies they wanted to see themselves. They took pride in the product.

For them, their work was intensely personal—a reflection of their dreams and aspirations.

The Harvard MBAs who run the multinational corporations who own the studios today don’t make movies for themselves. They make movies for an audience they don’t know and probably don’t want to know. They might be proud of their quarterly earnings, but, in most cases, they can’t possibly be proud of their movies.

And while I’m on the subject, let me just say that the importance placed on constantly improving corporate earnings is one of the worst things to happen to the movie industry, and quite possibly to America. It turns the attention of the public and the industry away from the quality of the pictures to the amount of money a picture or a company can make. In this way the movie business has been converted from a long game into a short game. At the same time, the multinational corporations that own movie studios seem to do it more out of corporate vanity than anything else, because a hit movie doesn’t really move the needle of their stock price—it’s like punching a blanket. If Zanuck had a hit, the stock price and the dividends both went up.

Darryl Zanuck and Jack Warner played it both ways, but when pressed to the wall, they played the long game. Darryl knew
The Grapes of Wrath
was not going to be a huge moneymaker, but he didn’t care. It wasn’t very expensive to produce, it would make money over time, and it would accrue prestige to the studio and the industry that made it.

And Darryl was right.
The Grapes of Wrath
broke even in 1940, and it has never stopped playing in more than seventy years.

I suspect that for the men and women who run studios today, it’s just a business. But for Warner, Zanuck, and the rest of them, it was a passionate pursuit—they had a vision they wanted to put on-screen, and Hollywood grew around that vision.

I guess you might say that
You Must Remember This
is my farewell to the lives that those of us lucky enough to be in the movie industry lived.

While the book is partly about style and status, I hope that it will also offer an intimate look at people and what they were like away from the studio and publicity machine—stars and filmmakers at home, entertaining, having dinner with friends. Some of the book will be about the stars I knew best, from the homegrown American variety (Gary Cooper, Clark Gable), to the British colony (Cary Grant, David Niven), to Americans who imitated the British colony (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.). Other parts of the book will be about our houses, the architects who built them, the haberdashers who dressed us, the restaurants where we liked to eat and why. It will be about the way Hollywood actually lived, told via a mosaic of memory.

I will trace the changing times and styles that I’ve lived through. For instance: For about twenty years, William Haines, once the only out-of-the-closet actor at MGM, was probably the preeminent decorator to the stars. After he got cashiered by Metro—it didn’t pay to flaunt homosexuality around Louis B. Mayer—Haines decorated a house for his friend Joan Crawford.

Then Billy bought a house on North Stanley Avenue in Hollywood and decorated it in a combination of colonial New Orleans and eighteenth-century English. The story goes that Irving Thalberg came to visit the house and, as Haines showed him around, kept asking, “Who did this?”

“I did,” Billy replied each time. Word got around, and Billy went into the interior decoration business and did extremely well.

The style that Billy evolved—white or bright fabrics, clean surfaces—began to go out of fashion in the 1950s. He still got decorating jobs, many from his friends in the Old Guard—he did a lot of decorating for the Reagans and their circle—but younger people wanted their own decorators, their own look. They always do. New designers came in, and styles changed.

Watching the ebb and flow of fashion in the microcosm of Los Angeles and its related towns, I’ve developed a sense of time as a river, always moving, always shifting the outlines of the banks. I see Los Angeles as a mutable organism—it never quite looks the same way twice. I remember a town of Red Car trolley lines and weekends spent at Catalina playing baseball with John Wayne and John Ford.

Gone, all gone.

This is a book about life outside the studio walls, from the very beginnings of Hollywood, to when I got there in the 1930s, through the 1950s and 1960s—a window into a bygone world of splendid glamour that can, for most, be experienced only vicariously.

My intent is for you to experience the same thrill I did, one night at Clifton Webb’s house. It was a dinner party, thrown with all of Clifton’s impeccable taste. And then it became something more. Roger Edens, the associate producer for the Arthur Freed unit at MGM, began to play the piano and Judy Garland got up to sing for the better part of an hour—Gershwin, Porter, Harry Warren.
While she serenaded us with that great golden trumpet of a voice, Clifton’s small poodles wandered around the room as dogs do, looking for food or affection.

I also saw Judy sing at the Palace in New York, but this was like nothing else. Watching her sing to a crowded theater paled in comparison to being in a room with her by the piano and fifteen people gathered around. There was a palpable, intimate quality that was unforgettable, and it was a complete thrill that I’ve never forgotten.