Just One Catch (43 page)

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HE HAD TAKEN
the
Holiday
assignment for the same reason he accepted screenplay work. His portion of the
Catch-22
paperback sale to Dell—about thirteen thousand dollars—was gone now, and his royalties, though steady, were thinly stretched from month to month. “I started worrying about money,” he told journalist Chet Flippo in 1981. “I had my savings in bonds—about $50,000, which was all I had in the world.… I had a few very bad nights … when I felt I might have to give up my apartment, have to take the children out of private school, have to tell my children that we're moving out to Queens or Brooklyn. It was not the poverty, but the
shame,
that worried me.”

McHale's Navy
had soured him on writing original screenplays, but he discovered he was very good at rewriting movie scripts quickly because of his facility for dialogue and humor. With George Mandel, he
did
form a production company, Scapegoat, to represent various projects they started together but never brought to fruition: “The Big Squeeze,” a movie about the culture gap between 1960s teenagers and an older immigrant generation, featuring, Joe wrote, “much music … by many name entertainers—all of it good, loud, and fast,” and ending with a “chase … that involves all the principals”; “Howe and Hummel,” a musical about two shysters and lots of pretty girls; and an outline for a television series called “King Solomon's Smidjik,” an international caper comedy swirling around a magical object with the power to impart wisdom but whose use inevitably leads to chaos and mischief.

In the summer of 1963, Joe was offered five thousand dollars a week to rework a script called
Sex and the Single Girl,
distantly based on the book by Helen Gurley Brown. Like Betty Friedan, Brown, a former copywriter for a California advertising agency, championed female independence. Rather than rejecting kittenish femininity, women should use sexual allure to get what they wanted from men, Brown said. Most nascent feminists did not consider her one of them, but her book, condoning casual affairs, sold briskly, and Brown became a regular on the television talk-show circuit. Warner Bros. optioned the book for $200,000. During development, a studio executive complained to producer Saul David that the book had no plot. “I told you that a hundred thousand dollars ago,” David replied. The studio had bought a sexy title—that's all.

A veteran screenwriter, David R. Schwartz, took a shot at the script in February 1963. Joe inherited the project a few months later. Nudged by the studio, he based his script less on Brown's book than on Joseph Hoffman's
How to Make Love and Like It,
about a virgin anthropologist who writes a bestselling book on sex. He was told to “spice things up” with a car chase. The final product, starring Natalie Wood, Tony Curtis, Henry Fonda, and Lauren Bacall, was billed as “based on the book … by Helen Gurley Brown. Screenplay by David R. Schwartz and Joseph Heller. Story by Joseph Hoffman.” Along the way, coherence vanished. The film's finest scene, said the
New York Times,
had the “two young, muddled protagonists yammering about love and Freud at a zoo, tiredly watched by monkeys and baboons.” The script contained “some genuinely amusing, peppery dialogue and incidents,” but the film reinforced stereotypes about strong women who secretly wanted a man, and unfaithful men who wanted a woman to keep them in line.

“We had never experienced anything like that [summer],” Erica recalls. “[W]e relinquished [our] summer house [on Fire Island] and got on a plane [to Hollywood] … We really didn't know we were going until about two days before; in fact, we had just gotten a puppy named Brillo and had to find a place for him to spend the summer.… Audrey Chestney's parents took him—and kept him, they were all so attached to each other.… Dad stretched out the script writing so it would take us through the summer until it was time to come back to school.”

Erica's biggest thrill was meeting Eydie Gormé. “I just ran up to her like a lunatic, threw my arms around her and told her I loved her. She was probably very frightened,” she says. “I learned two words [in L.A.] I was never able to forget: ‘Charge it.' I remember tennis lessons and sitting at the pool with Ted and ordering hot fudge sundaes and charging it to ‘the bungalow.'”

The flight to California was the kids' first experience on an airplane. “I remember thinking the boats and cars I was seeing after take-off were toys,” Ted says. He recalls “swimming in Tony Curtis's pool, him getting me a Superman costume, being in a movie studio and seeing Bob Hope.… [M]y parents were astounded how expensive a room service hamburger was at the Beverly Hills Hotel.”

Joe took Ted to a Hollywood studio to watch a TV show being filmed—
Arrest and Trial,
starring Ben Gazzara. “They were about to film a scene and my father told me not to make a noise.… I was so scared, I thought everyone could hear my heartbeat and hear me swallowing. I think I held my breath,” Ted says.

Briefly, Joe met Natalie Wood. She hated the movie and agreed to act in it only because she was contractually obligated. Watching her on the set, Joe felt she “had a natural flair for comedy, something she dismissed” to be taken seriously as an actress. Tony Curtis signed on because he “needed the money to settle a divorce,” Joe said. “That's what I like best about the movie industry: the art and idealism.”

When producer Charles K. Feldman released
Casino Royale
in 1967, the film's publicity slogan was “
Casino Royale
is too much for one James Bond!”—a cover for chaos. David Niven, Peter Sellers, and Woody Allen all played Bond in what was supposed to be a spoof of the spy genre. In fact, it was a grab bag of scenes directed by five different men, hired willy-nilly by Feldman, all working without communication, a clear budget, or a coherent script. Though Joe is not credited on the film, he worked on a draft of the screenplay (with George Mandel), as did a host of others, including Terry Southern, Ben Hecht, Billy Wilder, and Woody Allen. Allen “told me that he and I both did a version of the same scene,” Joe said. Joe took the job because it “was tempting, and it came at a good time, as I was between novels, where I had been for five years, and where I would have liked to remain for at least four or five years more,” he said. “[I figured the] work would be easy—there was no danger of failing, since somebody else had already done that.”

During the filming, Sellers's marriage to Britt Ekland was crumbling. He behaved erratically, threw tantrums, and eventually walked off the set. Leo Jaffe, Columbia Picture's executive vice president, didn't seem to notice. One day, he mistook Allen for Sellers. “When you put glasses on them, they do sort of look alike,” he explained. Nothing fazed Feldman. He was determined to make the biggest, most dazzling screen comedy in history, featuring the world's loveliest women. “No background dogs in my picture!” he told his crew. “Get only real beauties.” The film showcased Ursula Andress, Joanna Pettet, and Jacqueline Bisset. Like many of the writers and directors, Joe wanted his name removed from the credits. In the end, the movie's anarchic silliness distilled some of 1967's psychedelic spirit; the film grossed $17.2 million dollars at the U.S. box office.

Dirty Dingus Magee,
credited to Joseph Heller, along with Tom and Frank Waldman, released in 1970, and based on the novel
The Ballad of Dingus Magee,
by David Markson, is, according to one critic, “ninety minute[s] … of what appears to be Frank [Sinatra] having a mid-life crisis.” Markson agreed, calling it the “worst movie you ever saw.” He knew Joe. Both were friends of Alice Denham. Markson wrote the novel, a half-serious, half-satirical Western, “sort of on impulse,” he said. “It's intricate and carefully plotted.… I had a bunch of rejections because everybody said there was no such thing as a satirical Western. Then a movie came out called
Cat Ballou
[starring Jane Fonda]. That suddenly made it interesting for the Hollywood types. So when
Dingus
was published, they jumped in and bought it. I got $100,000, and that was 1966.” The lead was meant for a nineteen-year-old actor. Sinatra was fifty-five at the time. It was the last film role he would take for a decade. Bret Wheadon, author of
Sinatra: The Complete Guide,
wrote that the movie conveyed “denigrating attitudes toward women, Native Americans, and anyone else … in [the] film's sights.… Truly a low point in the careers of Sinatra and writer Joseph Heller.”

In a talk at the Poetry Center of the Ninety-second Street Y on December 7, 1970, Joe said, “I've had some experiences with motion pictures, all of which I have to apologize for. The latest one is something called
Dirty Dingus Magee.
I think I've gotten more [bad] notices … than Frank Sinatra. But that was just a youthful indiscretion, and we all commit those.”

Shortly before his return to Corsica, Joe lunched with Al Brodax in Manhattan's Palm Restaurant. The men had met through Mel Brooks. Brodax told Joe, “You owe me.”

“What for?” Joe asked.

“Pietrasanta.”

“The bridge, the bridge!” Joe said.

He had once told Brodax about the Pietrasanta mission, and confessed he didn't know if he'd hit his target. Brodax said he had just visited the town—“I was in the neighborhood”—and nosed around.

According to Brodax, “Joe leaped to his feet” and asked, “And the bridge?”

“Direct hit … no question … gone … you blew that mother to smithereens.”

“Joe dance[d] in small … circles and stomp[ed] his feet,” Brodax said. “He howl[ed] in shameless joy.… ‘No shit, Brodax …
I leveled the motherfucker!
'”

He had eased Joe's mind; in return, he wanted Joe to write a screen treatment for an animated Beatles film.

Many details in
Up Periscope Yellow,
Brodax's account of the making of
Yellow Submarine,
have been questioned by those involved in the film's production, and Brodax admits to stretching the truth when it suits him. But with the exception of overwriting, his anecdote about Joe rings true. “Time with Joe [was] always a joy,” he wrote. “We share[d] lots of things … Brooklyn-born, Jewish-bred, war-torn slightly, but only slightly.”

Brodax, working for King Features in New York, had produced a Saturday-morning Beatles cartoon show, which ran on American television beginning in 1964. The Beatles loathed it. They resisted his notion that an animated film could be built around their novelty tune, “Yellow Submarine.” Still, Brodax pushed ahead, approaching several writers (the Beatles were legally bound to make one more film for United Artists after
A Hard Day's Night
and
Help!
).

Lee Minoff, a young playwright, claimed he wrote the first script. He recalled meeting Paul McCartney in London. “[A] little kid,” Minoff said. At the time, McCartney was “twenty-one, twenty-three [at the] oldest.… We had some brief conversations [about the proposed movie] which Brodax sort of led. The only thing that seemed to come out of the meeting was Paul McCartney talked about a monster. He wanted a monster in it. Monsters are good.”

Meanwhile, Brodax cast about for other writers. He told David Picker, a vice president in charge of production at United Artists, that he knew Joe Heller. “Heller's … very much the flavor of the sixties, a hell of a possibility if you can nail him,” Picker said. Thus the meeting at the Palm.

In Brodax's account, Joe ordered a second brandy and considered the offer. “You're talking Lennon, McCartney … something with them …
The Beatles
?” Then he pulled out his credit card. “What the hell, the bridge is down, and the Beatles, they're up!… What a gift, dinner is on Heller. Sonofabitch, Brodax!” As he left the restaurant, he gave Brodax a “poignan[t]” bear hug.

“I [had] told [Joe] what he was desperate to hear,” Brodax wrote. In fact, the people of Pietrasanta informed him the American bombs were “so far off” their targets, “they could hear [them] but … couldn't see them.”

As for
Yellow Submarine
: “With Heller in [his] pocket,” Brodax felt he had a hit on his hands. Once Joe finished the script, Brodax bound the “all-important Heller treatment” in a green cover and flew to London “with a stack of [other] scripts … each one with a different color cover.” He presented the range of options to the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, certain he would “buy Heller.” At the time, Epstein's behavior was increasingly bizarre—within a year, he would die of a drug overdose. At the meeting, Epstein “picked up the first treatment and said, ‘I don't like this—it's purple,' and threw it on the floor,” Brodax said. “The next one—‘I don't like this, it's orange.' Then he gets to one in a green cover, which was written by Joseph Heller, and that one he throws away, too. So I said, ‘Brian, that's by Joe Heller.' He said, ‘I don't care who it's by, I don't like green.'” So ended Joe's flirtation with the Beatles.

In New York, Joe had told Brodax he saw a “connection between his Yossarian and [John] Lennon”: “They share a dislike for bureaucratic institutions.”

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MANY WHO LIVED
through the 1960s recall moments on which they believe the decade's movements hinged. One such instance, often cited by writers, occurred in August 1964, when Bob Dylan offered marijuana to the Beatles in their room at the Delmonico Hotel. John Lennon used one word to tap the evening's importance: “Surrealism.” The awareness of growing cultural power shared by the five young men in that room; the willingness to play with mind-flexing “organics”; the spark of Dylan's influence on Lennon's songwriting, leading to more personal reflection as well as sharp political statements—and greater ambitiousness in rock music, generally; the meshing of music, poetry, politics, and celebrity to an unprecedented degree: It was, says writer Bob Spitz, a “cultural milestone … [and] nothing would ever be the same again.”