Hollywood (23 page)

“Well, I’ll tell you, if you’ll calm down,” I said.

“I’m calm. Go ahead.”

“She’s going to give it to you.”

“What?”

“She’s going to give it to you.”

“What do you mean ‘give’?” he asked suspiciously. “What does she mean?”

“For nothing. Free. If you like it, it’s yours.”

He was thoroughly rattled by this unexpected strategy.

I went on. “And you’re wrong about her not wanting to work. She does. More than anything.”

“A script for
nothing
?” asked Cohn, in all disbelief.

“There’s only one condition—” I began.

“I knew it!” he shouted exultantly. “I
knew
there was some kind of a gimmick—some wienie.”

“Not much of a wienie,” I said.

“Go ahead. What is it?”

Even over the telephone, I could sense his resistance stiffening.

“Very simple,” I said quietly. “I want to come over and read it to you. I think it’s great and so does Jean and so does Frank. It’s a comedy. Hilarious. And romantic. It’s about wartime Washington and it’s got three terrific parts and—”

“What do you mean, ‘read it to me,’ you stupid bastard? What do you think? I can’t read? What am I? Some kindergarten you have to read it to me?”

“All right, Mr. Cohn,” I said. “Never mind.”

“Wait a second,” he said.

I hung up.

It was a calculated risk, but in the circumstance, I thought it worth taking. In five minutes, my phone rang.

“I have Mr. Cohn for you,” said a breathless operator.

“Fine,” I said. “Put him on.”

His voice was icy as he said, “I think we got cut off.”

“No,” I said. “I hung up.”

“You hung up on me?” he asked. “Is that what you’re trying to tell me? That you hung up on me?”

“I thought our conversation was over, Harry. I thought we both hung up.”

“I did,” he said. “What do you think? I’m gonna sit there holding an empty phone like a schmuck? I hung up.”

“That’s what I said. We both hung up.”

This seemed to satisfy him.

“Okay,” he said. “So when do you want to come over and read that crap out loud?”

“How about tomorrow morning?” I asked.

“All right,” he said. “Come on up to my office. You know where it is?”

“Yes.”

“That’s where we’ll do it. In my office. I don’t want you up here. I don’t even
know
you. This is strictly business. Not social. Business. Tell ’er I said so.”

“Tell who?”

“That crazy broad you’re workin’ for.”

“Ten o’clock,” I said.

“Don’t be late. And we’ll see.”

I rehearsed the reading with my cohorts and at ten o’clock the following morning presented myself at the offices of Columbia Pictures.

I was shown into Mr. Cohn’s office. He had gathered a small group of his executive assistants. We shook hands. Having met only his voice, so to speak, the rest of him surprised me. I found him attractive, magnetic, and charming. He was beautifully dressed and every detail of his appearance showed care.

After a few empty amenities and casual introductions, Cohn said, “Okay, go ahead. They all know what it’s all about, these guys.”

I took the script out of my briefcase and said, “It’s called
Two’s a Crowd
.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Cohn. “We can change it.”

Again, I recognized a crucial moment.

“Before I begin,” I said, “there’s just one thing I insist on and that is—”

“Don’t
ever
use that word around
me
,” said Cohn tightly. “‘Insist.’ Nobody does.” He looked around the room. “Tell him,” he added.

“How about ‘request’?” I asked.

“Request all you want,” said Cohn.

“I’d just like the opportunity of reading this to you from beginning to end without interruption. I mean I don’t want to get into a story conference here. Give me a chance to read it and then you can say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or ‘we can discuss it.’”

“What if I hate it right away?” asked Cohn.

This thought had not occurred to me. I replied, “Any time you hate it, say so and I’ll stop.”

“Go ahead,” said Cohn.

I began to read.

The screenplay had an arresting opening, written by Bob. It was in the form of a Washington travelogue in which the juxtaposition of frantic film of current Washington life and the standard quiet recital of its beauties made for a comic effect.

Almost at once, I noticed a few smiles. At one point, there was a little laugh, then a big laugh led by Cohn. I reached the end of the opening and was about to begin on the body of the script when Cohn held up a hand and said, “Hold it.”

I was annoyed, looked at him and said, “I thought we agreed—”

“I’ll take it,” said Cohn.

“What?”

“You heard me. I’ll take it. I’m no dummy. I know pictures. Any picture starts like that, I’ll take it.”

“But you don’t even know the story.”

“Sure, I do.”

“How?”

“You told it to me on the telephone.”

“I did?”

“You told me all I got to know.”

He rose. “This is great. Tell Ross to come in here and we’ll fix it up. And I’ll tell you another thing. I don’t take nothin’ for nothin’. I’ll make a deal with him. Some kind of a deal. It’s going to be a swell picture.”

We shook hands again and I was out on Seventh Avenue before I knew it, without the script, looking for a telephone to convey the news to Jean.

The picture was beautifully made by George Stevens not long afterward. Starring Jean, Joel McCrea, and Charles Coburn, it proved to be Columbia’s greatest success that year.

True to his word, Cohn changed the title to
The More the Merrier
. Untrue to his word, he never reimbursed Jean Arthur for any part of the twenty-five thousand she paid to Russell. My own part in it remained anonymous because I was still under contract at RKO. No matter. It was a joyous affair all around.

Moreover, it taught me the trick of selling Harry Cohn screenplays. From that day forward, I made it a point to read scripts to Cohn, a move he accepted cheerfully. He did not always buy what I read him, but always gave me a fair chance.

One of the scripts I read aloud to Harry and his wife, Joan, during an evening at his home was
The Marrying Kind
, which I had written in collaboration with my wife. After dinner, the reading went extremely well, with both Mr. and Mrs. Cohn offering congratulatory punctuation from time to time. Less welcome was another sort of punctuation the evening offered. This came in the form of telephone calls from Cohn’s broker, his bookie, two or three agents, and several mystery guests.

It made for a rocky evening, but at the end, Cohn accepted the material.

Interruption and distraction are the two principal enemies of creativity. The monstrous telephone is a symbol of both.

For Harry Cohn, the telephone was an indispensable organ. He could not have lived through a day without the telephone; it was part of his anatomy. Seeing him in frenetic telephone action one afternoon, the truth of the matter came clear.
He
was the interrupter.
He
was the distractor.

I scarcely ever saw him without a telephone at his side. In his office, in the dining room. He had telephones in his bathrooms, at the pool, in the steam room. Telephones in automobiles came after Cohn’s day, otherwise he would have had two or three in every car.

The Columbia switchboard at the studio on Gower Street stayed open twenty-four hours a day, as did the switchboard in the New York office. Thus, Cohn needed only to lift the instrument in order to be connected by direct wire to the nerve center of his life and work. If he needed suddenly to know the name of a picture, a writer, an actor, a theatre, all he had to do was pick up the phone.

How was a picture of his doing in Dayton? How was someone else’s doing in Detroit? How did that play open last night out of town? Is it true that Twentieth is bidding for that musical?

For those who worked with him or for him or under him, it was a nuisance. He would suddenly reach for the telephone and call New York or Denver, London or Mexico City, and spend five minutes talking about something totally unrelated to the subject at hand. By the time he had finished his telephone call and said, “Go ahead, what were you saying?” you had usually forgotten.

It spoiled most luncheons. I never had a one-hour meal with him that did not contain at least half a dozen telephone calls, incoming and outgoing.

The practice continued in his home in Beverly Hills. You would be asked to dinner and there on the table, in the formal dining room, would be the telephone. During dinner, Cohn would take only important calls, but would make outgoing calls at whim.

Cole Porter arrived in Hollywood and Cohn asked if he could give a formal dinner party for him. Cole accepted.

The evening arrived. When dinner was announced, we trouped into the dining room, beautifully candlelit, the silver reflecting the light, a gold service on the table, flowers, china, and glass I had never seen before. An impressive sight.

I looked over at Cohn’s place at the head of the table and was pleased to see that there was no telephone. When I found my place, however, I looked again. There it was. I had not seen it at first because for this occasion, a formal dinner, the black telephone had been replaced by a white one.

Under the influence of Somerset Maugham and the accounts of his Spartan working discipline, my wife and I were attempting to follow his good example.

Despite the fact that that we were theatre-oriented people, accustomed to late nights and late risings, we changed all that—rose at seven, got to work by eight, worked until noon, and then got ready for lunch. After lunch, we would drive down to our offices, then located in the St. James Theatre building on West Forty-fourth Street.

One afternoon, as we were driving down, I noticed that Ruth was uncharacteristically depressed. I tired to cheer her up using a few proven methods, but on this day, they all
failed. Was it that her morning’s work had not gone well? Or could it be that she was not looking forward to the rest of the day? Or was it something more important? As we traversed Columbus Circle, I noticed an enormous sign which was blank except for a square of rental information on its corner.

“You know what I’m going to do?” I said brightly. “I’m going to rent that sign and have ‘RUTH GORDON’ painted on it in the biggest letters it will hold. How would you like that?”

Not a sound. Apparently, she had not even heard. We continued down to the office. An hour later, Ruth told me she was going out to walk.

I was still thinking of that sign on Columbus Circle and began to wonder what it would actually cost. I had no idea, and phoned the rental agency to inquire.

To my surprise, it turned out to be about $200 a month. I had thought it was going to be ten times that. I then found out what it would cost to have it painted. This, too, was within practical limits. I became giddy as I felt myself moving toward the fruition of this nutty idea. By evening, I thought better of it.

The look on my wife’s face when I described what I had been planning to do as a surprise told me I had made the correct decision in abandoning it. But the notion stayed in my head and without meaning to do so, I began to plot a fiction involving such an act.

What if there were an attractive, but discouraged young man who has been beaten down by the city? He had come to New York a year earlier, confident he would make good somehow, that he would make a name for himself, that he would get there. It has all gone wrong and he has just about decided to take what is left of his savings and go back home. He walks around Central Park, dejected. At Columbus Circle, he looks up and sees that empty sign. He decides upon one final satisfying gesture. He rents the sign and has his name emblazoned upon it. One thing leads to another, and in the way of our world, he becomes a celebrity, one of those who is famous for being a celebrity.
Now
where? Perhaps he runs for office. Maybe gets elected and so on and so on. I played with the idea for a few weeks and finally had, in my head, what I thought was a solid story.

We were asked to come up to Boston to see a friend’s play. On the way up, I told Ruth my story. She listened carefully, intently, then said, “It’s good but it’s wrong.”

“What do you mean, wrong?”

“Wrong sex,” she said. “Think how much better that story would be if a
girl
did it. A girl makes it whimsical and special and audacious. If a man does it, he’s just being pushy or dumb.”

“I don’t agree with you,” I said.

“All right. But it feels like Judy Holliday to me.”

“Fine,” I said, “but it’s going to be Danny Kaye.”

A few days after we returned from Boston, I decided I was ready to turn my story into a screenplay. I began to write and even now I cannot explain how it was that my young man turned into a young woman, that Danny Kaye changed his name to Judy Holliday, and
A Name for Himself
became
A Name for Herself
.

When it was finished, I handed it to Ruth and said, “I’ve done that movie about the fellow who puts his name up on the sign in Columbus Circle.”

“Good,” she said.

When she had read it, she said, “I like it very much. Who do you see as the fellow?”

“Judy Holliday,” I replied.

“Yes,” she said. “He’d be very good.”

We went to Hollywood to present it to Harry Cohn. We assembled in the library of his home on Crescent Drive: Harry with his cigar, Joan with her knitting, my wife with her confidence, and me with my nerves.

I began with a speech. “Now, listen, Harry. We’ve been doing this for a long time and it’s all been working fine. But the last time—on
The Marrying Kind
—you gave me a hard time.”

“What hard time? It was a hell of a picture,” he said.

“I don’t mean that,” I said. “I mean that while I was reading—trying to read—that phone kept going.”

Cohn looked at me, all injured innocence.

“If the phone rings, that’s my fault? Did I make it ring? If somebody calls me, that’s my crime?”

“No,” I said, “but this is important to me and maybe to you, so why can’t you shut the phone off and have somebody—”