Mark Griffin (34 page)

Meanwhile, the search for the perfect Rima continued.
Life
magazine, on orders from MGM’s powerful publicity chief, Howard Strickling, pushed for demure, Italian-born Pier Angeli in the role: “She is a strong contender but hasn’t been promised anything. Our idea is to have her audition for the part for
Life
’s camera and let her show why she ought to have it. . . . Pier
feels she was born for the role and says she’d wear brown trunks, bra of flowers and wear her hair long and wild as she flies through the forest.”
⁴

In October, Minnelli prepared to shoot one of the most elaborate screen tests in Hollywood history on MGM’s Stage 15. Pier Angeli (minus bra of flowers) would try Rima on for size, and handsome newcomer Edmund Purdom would play the lovelorn fugitive. As though he were mounting a full-fledged feature, Vincente ordered up a lush jungle paradise complete with an artificial lagoon. Branches left over from
Brigadoon
were strewn with cobwebs. No less than Joseph Ruttenberg would photograph the mini-spectacle. It took two weeks and $130,000 to shoot.

Although all eyes were on Angeli, Minnelli noted that the proceedings were “as much a test of us—to see how we would approach the picture.”
⁵
After viewing the footage, Arthur Freed concluded that there was no sense in proceeding any further, as nothing about the test was persuasive. Pier Angeli was not entirely convincing as Rima, but then again, what actress would be? Once again, plans to bring
Green Mansions
to the screen were scrapped. In 1959, Hudson’s tale would finally reach the screen, with Audrey Hepburn (as believable as anyone could be as the Bird Girl) and a miscast Anthony Perkins as the rugged revolutionary. The movie, directed by Hepburn’s then husband, Mel Ferrer, was both a commercial and critical disappointment. The film’s failure proved Freed right.
Green Mansions
belonged on a book shelf, not the silver screen.

“THE TROUBLE ABOUT THE LIVING-ROOM DRAPES . . .” ignites an interoffice Armageddon in William Gibson’s engrossing 1954 debut novel
The Cobweb
. The novel is set at the Castle House Clinic for Nervous Disorders, a psychiatric care facility that Gibson patterned after the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts (where Judy Garland had once received treatment). The self-absorbed wife of the head doctor purchases drapes for the clinic’s common room, and this seemingly insignificant act sparks several simmering rivalries among the staffers, who make the patients look perfectly sane by comparison.

For a decor-obsessed director like Minnelli, being handed a story in which interior furnishings play a pivotal role must have seemed like a gift from the cinematic gods. “
The Cobweb
was a psychological story that appealed to me greatly,” Vincente said. “The thing that attracted me was that it wasn’t about the inmates, although the inmates happen to be strange. It was about the doctors and the foul-ups in their lives. . . . It was so rich in possibilities that I volunteered to direct.”
⁶
Although he didn’t say so, Minnelli may have also
responded to the material for another reason. With an institutionalized brother and an ex-wife who had been attended by several psychiatrists, he must have realized that
The Cobweb
hit awfully close to home.

Minnelli and producer John Houseman weren’t satisfied with screenwriter John (
The Wild One
) Paxton’s initial attempts at adapting
The Cobweb
. Motion Picture Production Code restrictions had forced Paxton to either eliminate or tone down some of the novel’s more daring themes (homosexuality and adultery being the obligatory offenders), but that wasn’t the only problem; it seemed as though any sense of drama had been lost in translation.

“They were having trouble with the script and I could smell it,” says William Gibson:

Though he may have been the author of the original novel, Gibson was untested as a screenwriter. Fortunately, he would prove to be a gifted dramatist, as his later plays,
The Miracle Worker
and
Two for the Seesaw
, demonstrated. In his hands, a revamped version of
The Cobweb
might amount to something.

While Gibson went to work overhauling the screenplay,
^an
Minnelli and Houseman turned their attention to casting. Houseman suggested using Warner Brothers’ smoldering new star, James Dean, in the role of Stevie Holte, an antisocial though artistically gifted patient contemptuous of authority figures. “I would hear a sharp roar of his motorcycle outside the Thalberg Building,” Houseman recalled of the visits he received from Hollywood’s resident hell-raiser, James Dean. “He would sit on the floor of my office and we would chat for hours. I took him over to Minnelli, who was delighted by him and began to develop our boy’s sequence with James Dean in mind.”
⁸

Without question, Dean would have been ideal casting. The young renegade came equipped with an unnerving intensity and a sexual ambiguity—qualities that were perfect for such a conflicted character. “Jimmy Dean had a lot of color and Houseman was absolutely right to be thinking in that direction,” Gibson says.
⁹

But a James Dean performance in a Vincente Minnelli production was not to be. “Suddenly we ran into trouble—typical Hollywood trouble,” Houseman recalled. “Dean had a contract with Warner Brothers at a modest salary, which following his success in
East of Eden
, he and his agent were trying to raise. He had the right to make one outside film—which would be ours. His agent’s strategy was to use the salary we would pay Jimmy for
The Cobweb
as the basis for his revised salary at Warner’s.”
¹⁰
Once executives at MGM and Warner Brothers got wind of Dean’s scheme, however, Minnelli’s movie was out one death-defying thrill-seeker.

After searching for a suitable replacement, Minnelli and Houseman settled on twenty-four-year-old John Kerr, who had garnered good notices playing a similarly tormented character in Elia Kazan’s acclaimed stage production of
Tea and Sympathy
. In the shift from Dean to Kerr, one crucial element was forfeited. Whereas the rebel from Fairmount, Indiana, had sex appeal in spades, Kerr was the very image of the clean-cut Ivy Leaguer—and about as alluring as balsa wood.

In terms of the film’s other pivotal players, MGM first announced the photogenic trio of Robert Taylor, Grace Kelly, and Lana Turner as the stars of
The Cobweb
. As script revisions dragged on, however, the studio realized that replacements would have to be found. Ultimately, Richard Widmark, Lauren Bacall, and Gloria Grahame—three of the busiest actors of the Eisenhower era—would star as the clinic manager, his burgeoning love interest, and his love-starved wife, respectively. But it was the casting of the boozy, philandering Dr. Douglas Devenal that was the cause of a major rift between director and producer. “I thought Charles Boyer would be an offbeat choice but John didn’t see it,” Minnelli noted. Houseman countered: “[Boyer’s] sophisticated, accented charm seemed to me to give a false twist to the entire plot. . . . I gave in—and bitterly regretted it.”
¹¹
For the role of the asylum’s waspish administrator Victoria Inch, Minnelli and Houseman hit the bull’s eye, casting silent-screen legend Lillian Gish.

In Gibson’s novel, the character known only as “Capp” is flamboyantly gay, but as Vincente noted, “at that time you couldn’t do homosexuals and Oscar [Levant] had called and wanted to be in the picture, so I patterned the character after Oscar himself [with the] same kind of hang-ups that he
had. And he was awfully good in that.”
¹²
Even so, Capp on screen wasn’t nearly as interesting as Capp on the page.

The Cobweb
: The love-starved Karen McIver (Gloria Grahame) seems to have more on her mind than changing the drapes. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST

Minnelli began shooting
The Cobweb
in December 1954. William Gibson recalled:

Lauren Bacall found this out the hard way:

On the first day of principal photography, Houseman invited Gibson to come and observe:

The scene Gibson witnessed would wind up on the cutting-room floor along with a sizable chunk of the movie. Vincente’s original cut of
The Cobweb
ran two and a half hours, unusually long for a Metro release. Minnelli and Houseman clashed bitterly over excisions that Houseman felt were necessary in order to bring the picture in at a manageable length. “Our worst time was during the editing of the film, which came out far too long—by artistic and commercial standards,” Houseman remembered. “Yet Vincente obstinately refused to lose anything—even after the previews. . . . When I ran it for him after hacking close to half an hour out of the film, including entire scenes he had shot with loving care, he made a violent, lachrymose scene in the projection room, accusing me of insensitivity and treachery. I offered to let him recut the film, but he refused.”
¹⁶
It was an unpleasant
scene that Minnelli would find himself replaying frequently throughout the latter half of his career.