Mark Griffin (52 page)

With a story that seesawed between 1814 and 1969, Minnelli had an opportunity to create what Molly Haskell would describe as “a contemporary world which is set in quotation marks, and a historical one in double quotations.” Not since
Gigi
had Minnelli’s camera been this inspired. “Visually, when it’s exciting, that is all about Vince,” says John Poer. “In fact, it’s possible that he was better at the look of the film than he was with directing the cast. . . . I think he knew what the action was supposed to look like and he’d just hope that the actors got it right. It’s that old gag of hire really good talent and then stay out of the way. And I think to a great extent, he was doing that.” Or, as Lawrence Paull puts it, “My impression was that at that point, he was basically walking through it.”
⁵

Liza Minnelli recalled that there was at least one element of
On a Clear Day
that completely captivated Vincente. Before shooting began, father and daughter were sitting in a pancake house on Sunset Boulevard when Vincente suddenly had a revelation. “He said, ‘I know what it’s gotta be . . . I just know
what it’s gotta be,’” Liza recalled. “He said, ‘You’ve got to be so interested in those flashbacks that you can’t wait to get back to them.’”
⁶
Vincente’s fixation with the regression sequences would infuse those scenes with an unusual beauty and power. Reviewing the film in the
New York Times
, Vincent Canby noted that “the movie, Minnelli and Miss Streisand burst into life in the regression sequences. . . . Minnelli’s love of décor transforms the movie into very real fantasy.”
⁷

In fact,
On a Clear Day
contains one of the most sublime and wholly satisfying sequences of Minnelli’s entire career. In the Royal Pavilion’s sumptuous Banqueting Room, Melinda seduces her future husband with a strategically placed wine goblet (buried in her bosom) as her thoughts are telepathically transmitted to the tune of “Love with All the Trimmings.” The sequence succeeds not only because it’s exquisitely crafted but also because Minnelli and Streisand are painting from the same palette. Like Melinda, director and star are experts in the art of seduction; in many ways,
On a Clear Day
is something of a shared autobiography. Streisand had transformed herself from a fatherless
mieskeit
into a multimedia goddess in much the same way Melinda ascends from the Angel of Mercy Orphanage to the House of Lords, whereas for Minnelli, the story of a gifted yet unfulfilled individual with an alternate identity buried within must have seemed somewhat familiar.

With a spellbinding star at the peak of her powers and a collection of consummate talents contributing to every facet of the production, Minnelli seemed to have the makings of a four-star musical, but a funny thing happened on the way to the release print.

With the dawning of the “Age of Aquarius,” lavish road-show musicals suddenly resembled woolly mammoths. When Paramount’s two other tune-packed extravaganzas,
Paint Your Wagon
and
Darling Lili
, both tanked upon release, the studio cast a cynical eye at
Clear Day
. It wasn’t long before the executive order came down: The road-show concept was out.
Clear Day
would be dumped into general release. An overture and intermission were scrapped. Paramount then began hacking away at Minnelli’s version, excising several musical numbers. Among the casualties were Nicholson’s “Who Is There Among Us Who Knows?”; Streisand and Larry Blyden’s rooftop duet, “Wait Til We’re Sixty-Five”; and Montand’s “People Like Me,”
^ay
plus his half of “He Isn’t You/She Isn’t You,” which had been intended as a duet.

Barbra Streisand wearing one of Cecil Beaton’s eye-popping ensembles in
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
. Minnelli said of his star: “We got along beautifully. She’s very creative. . . . She realizes there are twenty ways of playing a scene and I’m inclined to think that way myself, so the great fun was finding it together.” PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST

Perhaps the most damaging cuts involved Minnelli’s favorite part of the film—Daisy’s sumptuous past-life regressions. Pamela Brown, who had appeared in
Lust for Life
, saw her substantial role as Mrs. Fitzherbert whittled into a walk-on. Scenes depicting Melinda’s marriage and her metaphysical machinations in her husband’s business were eliminated. The absence of these episodes pointed up the film’s most obvious flaw: Melinda’s story is never resolved, it just goes away. “Those flashbacks—although they were the essence of the whole story—they were also a problem that Alan never quite resolved,” says Alan Jay Lerner’s assistant, Stone Widney. “Second acts in a musical are a bitch. Sometimes you just get lucky and it falls out right. Other times, you’re pushing the story around to make something happen that is positive.”
⁸

The cuts to
Clear Day
were so extensive that the titles of two songs that survived, “What Did I Have That I Don’t Have?” and “Come Back to Me,” seemed to be commenting on the film’s dismemberment. In June 1970, the musical was unceremoniously dumped into theaters. “What the public saw was not the picture we envisioned,” Streisand informed the press. “I learned a very important lesson about final control.” Costar Yves Montand announced that he had learned some lessons of his own: “Streisand had the right to cut this film herself, so she cut me out so there could be more of her,” the actor grumbled to a reporter, overlooking the fact that virtually all of the excised scenes featured Streisand.
⁹

The reviews for Minnelli’s final screen musical ran the gamut. Joseph Morgenstern gave it a thumbs-down in
Newsweek
: “The movie . . . keeps regressing, back through the Technicolored mists of time, to some of the dreariest, fustiest, mustiest habits of Hollywood’s great musical-comedy era.” Stuart Byron, on the other hand, offered a glowing tribute: “Vincente Minnelli has always been the most misunderstood of great American directors, and never more so than with
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
. Here the man created an authentic masterpiece, a unique personal statement—perhaps his most personal statement—and once again he found himself treated as a mere ‘stylist.’”
¹⁰

“I suppose it’s the Barbra Streisand curse but I’ve always wondered why people don’t get it,” says Jeanine Basinger:

Only weeks after production closed on
Clear Day
, Vincente received a call from Liza informing him that Judy had died of an accidental overdose in London. She was forty-seven years old. Though deeply saddened, Vincente chose not to attend the funeral service at Frank Campbell’s in New York. He preferred to grieve privately, while vowing not to “wallow in useless tears.” “Judy would have been so contemptuous of them,” he wrote. “She didn’t carry herself as a tragic person, and we took the cue from her.”
¹²

There were other endings as well. Denise informed Vincente that their marriage was over. Two years later, the gossip columns filled everybody in: “If her California divorce from film director Vincente Minnelli goes through on schedule, Yugoslavian-born Denise Minnelli, whose parties and pigtails were the talk of Beverly Hills during her Hollywood period, will marry Prentis Cobb Hale, the multimillionaire department store tycoon in San Francisco.” The
New York Times
reported that “the dissolution hearing took ten seconds.” Like almost everything concerning Denise, her divorce from Minnelli and marriage to Prentis Cobb Hale had everybody talking. And talking.

IN THE EARLY 1970S, a writer named Joel E. Siegel (who had authored a book on
Cat People
producer Val Lewton) began working on an ambitious biography of Minnelli. Siegel’s friend Howard Mandelbaum remembers that the would-be biographer went to extraordinary lengths preparing what he hoped would be the definitive exploration of Minnelli’s life and career:

It has been suggested that Minnelli went forward with the publication of his autobiography in part because of his dwindling finances. After the divorce from Denise, some of Minnelli’s friends noticed that the house on Crescent Drive looked rather “threadbare.” Vincente had not directed a film since
On a Clear Day
in 1969, and the offers weren’t exactly pouring in. Another motivating factor may have been the fact that, although the entire world was now on a first-name basis with superstar Liza, her father seemed to be slipping below the radar. Was it possible that despite his Academy Award-winning credentials and remarkable cinematic legacy, Minnelli might be forgotten? It often seemed that Vincente’s industry had a memory as short as his own. As Bob Fosse, William Friedkin, and Peter Bogdanovich were riding high in the swinging ’70s, golden-age directors such as Minnelli, Mankiewicz, and Cukor were written off as old-fashioned and out of touch. The publication of Minnelli’s memoir might remind readers that a certain Oscar-winning auteur was still around and available to direct members of the “me” generation.

Published in 1974,
I Remember It Well
was generally well received. Gene Siskel called it “a splendid and surprisingly personal recollection.” Other readers noted that the memoir seemed to suffer from significant memory lapses, as key figures and controversial episodes from Minnelli’s life were conspicuously missing. Older brother Paul Minnelli, Uncle Frank’s suicide, and Lester Gaba—all of this was banished from the autobiography. And
throughout the text, Minnelli presented himself as exclusively heterosexual. “Read with pleasure but read with caution,” advised John Coleman in his
Washington Post
review.

The year
I Remember It Well
was published was also the year that MGM celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with the release of the spectacular documentary
That’s Entertainment!
Written, produced, and directed by Liza’s second husband-to-be, Jack Haley Jr., the movie presented clips culled from nearly a hundred of MGM’s glittering extravaganzas. Garland was glimpsed singing “Over the Rainbow.” Astaire danced on the ceiling in
Royal Wedding
. But it came as no surprise to movie buffs that many of the most memorable sequences were highlights from Minnelli productions. The ballet from
An American in Paris
was singled out as “MGM’s masterpiece” (though purists griped that an abbreviated version was included, and not the full seventeen-minute ballet). Haley’s film proved to be a sleeper smash, which spawned two sequels.