My Life as a Mankiewicz (16 page)

The Sweet Ride

My first feature as a screenwriter. I was barely twenty-five years old. Fox had picked up the option on my original screenplay, loved the dialogue, and had a fairly low-budget picture they wanted to make about young people living at the beach. I was a young person living at the beach. Sure sounded like perfect casting. It was based on a pretty good novel by William Murray (who later wrote several wonderful books about horse racing and the track). The problem was (with the picture too) it tried to touch all the bases at once: drama, comedy, porn, dropouts, surfing, true love, a touch of perversion, and the general malaise of 1960s young people. Frankie Avalon and Annette it definitely wasn't. My director was a Canadian, Harvey Hart, who was filming Fox's hit TV series
Peyton Place
at the time. Harvey was delightful to work with, patient and contributive to me.

The producer was Joe Pasternak, a legend for his longevity as much as the quality of his films, many of them musicals: from Deanna Durbin in the thirties to Mario Lanza, Kathryn Grayson, Fernando Lamas, and even Elvis, they seemed to be his specialty. He'd recently made a hit,
Where the Boys Are
, about young love on spring break, and seemed well suited for our film. Unfortunately, Joe had recently suffered a massive stroke and had progressive Parkinson's disease to boot. His face and hands trembled, his voice was halting and gravelly, and he shuffled rather than walked. By all rights he should have been home under a nurse's care. We shot the film on a practical location, a house on a cliff past Malibu, and I think he was physically able to visit the set only a couple of times.
The Sweet Ride
was, I believe, Joe's 105th film. It was also his last. At a later Masquers Dinner honoring him and his career I was a speaker and pointed out that producing just one screenplay of mine had put this legend out of business.

The male star was Tony Franciosa, an extremely intense and talented actor with a hair-trigger temper that always bubbled underneath an apparently cheerful surface. He'd been nominated for an Oscar for his supporting performance in
A Hatful of Rain.
Tony became a good friend and stayed down at my beach house with me from time to time. He'd been involved with several strong women in his life, among them Anna Magnani and Shelley Winters, whom he married. His temper was his worst enemy. Near the start of Don Rickles's career, everyone was flocking to see this outrageous new insult-comic who didn't mind taking on members of his audience, no matter who they were. Don was playing a club called the Slate Brothers on La Cienega Boulevard at the time, and one night Tony and Shelley Winters were in the audience. When the time came for celebrity introductions, Don pointed out Shelley Winters, the multiple Oscar-winning actress, and asked her to rise, which she did to loud applause. He then introduced the up-and-coming young star Anthony Franciosa and asked Tony to rise. As the applause died down, Don said: “Tony, could you remain standing for just a minute more? I want everyone in the room to get a look at the only guy who'd marry a broad who looked like that.” Tony's eyes flashed instantly. He vaulted two tables filled with seated customers, trying to get to Don before being tackled by a gaggle of waiters and bouncers while Rickles beat a hasty retreat. Several years later, on a TV series called
Fame Is the Name of the Game
, Tony (a true professional) was late one morning. The production manager ragged him about it. Tony asked him to stop. He didn't. Tony decked him, knocked him flat with one punch. The secret was watching the eyes. If you watched Tony's eyes, you could always tell when you were about to cross into potentially dangerous territory.

The Sweet Ride
“introduced” Jacqueline Bisset through a lucky accident (as happens so often in the movie business), and by the time the film was through shooting, before it was ever released, through a series of unforeseen circumstances, she was almost guaranteed to become a movie star. I've never seen anything happen quite like it in more than forty years since.

We couldn't get the kind of female lead we wanted for our film because the budget was so low that we simply didn't have the money for the Yvette Mimieuxs of the world. We read several “unknowns” without success. One night, Harvey Hart and I went to a screening of Stanley Donen's
Two for the Road
at Fox. At the beginning of the film, while hitchhiking his way across France, Albert Finney runs into a bus filled with British schoolgirls and is immediately smitten by a brunette with an absolutely magical look to her. She instantly contracts chicken pox and is left behind to recover while Finney “settles” for Audrey Hepburn and the story actually begins. Both Harvey Hart and I found her look as magical as Finney did in the film. We checked up on her. It turned out she was already under contract to Fox. I called Stanley Donen (whom I knew through Gene Kelly) in England and asked if she could act. His reply: “I have no idea. But she's a knockout, isn't she?”

We flew Jackie over, tested her, and found her to be more than acceptable for the part. Outside of being wildly attractive, she was also fun and hard working. I've known her on and off ever since and worked with her again some ten years later while doing a rewrite on
The Deep
in the Caribbean. At first Fox was worried that because of her given name and especially the spelling of her last name, the American audience would think she was French. This resulted in a classy move on the part of the Fox publicity department. In promotional materials to the press (but not on the poster, thank God) it said: “Introducing Jacqueline Bisset—rhymes with Kiss It.”

While we were shooting, Frank Sinatra was at Fox and had a problem: Mia Farrow was meant to play his wife in a film called
The Detective.
But she was shooting
Rosemary's Baby
, which was going wildly over schedule and seemed like it would never end. Someone told Frank about this gorgeous English girl who was shooting a surfing movie at the studio. He looked at some rushes and hired her. Some weeks later (we were still shooting), Peter Yates was looking for a young woman to play Steve McQueen's girlfriend in his new film,
Bullitt.
He was told about Jackie, saw the rushes, and hired her as well. So before
The Sweet Ride
had ever been released, Jackie was already cast opposite Frank Sinatra and Steve McQueen in her next two films. Not a bad way to break into Hollywood. As I said, I've never heard of anything quite like it before or since.

One interesting postscript to Jackie. These days, I teach a course in filmmaking to graduate students and use
Two for the Road
to illustrate inventive ways of flashing forward and backward, the film taking place simultaneously in five different time periods of a marriage. Every time I see Jackie and hear her voice at the start I realize she's been “looped” by another actress. That's not her real voice. I guess Stanley didn't even trust her with five or six lines.

The film opened to decidedly mixed reviews. As I mentioned earlier, it tried to touch all the bases at once and wound up confusing the audience no matter what kind of film they expected to see. A good lesson for the future. At any rate, I had my first feature under my belt and guess what? Now I was headed for Broadway.

Georgy!

In 1947, when asked whether he believed the rumor that Hitler was still alive and living in South America, George S. Kaufman replied: “I have no idea. But if Hitler is still alive, I hope he's out of town with a musical.”

Looking back, I'm still somewhat hazy about the details of how
Georgy!
came together. Columbia Studios wanted to do a Broadway musical of their surprise hit movie
Georgy Girl.
Not a bad idea. I'd written Emmy-winning musical specials, had a feature under my belt, and was as young as the untried composer, George Fischoff, and the lyricist, Carole Bayer, later Carole Bayer Sager, a major talent who collaborated with so many different and wonderful composers from Peter Allen to Burt Bacharach (also one of her husbands). There were two “pros” involved as well. Fred Coe, the producer, had a string of stage hits from
Two for the Seesaw, The Miracle Worker
, and
Wait Until Dark
to
A Thousand Clowns.
And the director would be my friend Peter Hunt, with whom I'd worked at the Williamstown Summer Theater. Peter had just won the Tony for directing
1776
, his first Broadway show. The cast was talented, if unknown. Georgy was played by a wonderful, tiny, and charming girl, Dilys Watling, who wound up being nominated for the Best Musical Actress Tony along with Katharine Hepburn (good luck with that, Dilys). John Castle, an excellent and versatile British stage and film actor, took the male lead, Joss. The secondary female lead was played by Melissa Hart, who'd done mainly television but was also Tony nominated for Best Supporting Musical Actress.

We opened in Boston to encouraging audience reaction and somewhat less encouraging reviews. All of the out-of-town clichés in the Busby Berkeley musical films turned out to be true: songs were replaced, scenes were rewritten, new choreography inserted, and everyone who was invited up to see the show knew exactly how to “fix” it. The first act is great—the second needs a lot of work. Or: all your problems are in the first act—the second just flies by, leave it alone. Or: her wardrobe. They just don't relate to her in those mousy colors. She practically disappears. And so on, and so on. Then we went down to our last stop before New York, the Schubert Theater in New Haven, the city where I'd been to Yale and where at the time I'd watched so many shows pass through on their way to New York and Broadway.

I was happy as a clam. I liked the show a lot. Sure, it needed some nips and tucks, but those would come. I was having an affair with one of the dancers. She was delightful and supportive, and her legs went on forever. I ran into André Previn (whom I knew from L.A.) one day. He'd written the music for
Coco
, a musical starring Katharine Hepburn that was following us into the Schubert. He'd seen our show the night before and was jealous of the wonderful shape we were in.

Unfortunately, Fred Coe's outlook wasn't quite as rosy. Fred drank heavily and had a curious warning sign when he did: for some reason he never wore stays in his shirt collars and the more he drank, the more the lapels seemed to rise, almost involuntarily. If Fred approached you with a vertical “Captain Hornblower” collar, you knew you were in for a broadside. Either the new song stunk or the set (by the multiple Tony-winning design legend Jo Mielziner) was “a goddamn erector set,” or—worst of all—why didn't my Tony-winning writer friend Peter Stone come aboard to “punch up” the book? Before I could object, Peter had already been invited up (without anyone consulting me). I was in no position to argue. He and I were friends. We had a great relationship. There was never even a suggestion he would seek any form of credit—this was between us—and some of the gags he added did get laughs. But this one-time experience was so professionally deflating for me. Indeed, I have never been rewritten by anyone before or since for the rest of my entire career.

Our tiny musical with no stars opened in the cavernous Winter Garden Theater, at least twice the size of the house we should have played. But
Mame
was closing there after a run of six or seven years, and it was the only theater available. Opening night I followed the tradition of the time and reserved a table at Sardi's to wait for the reviews. My date was my friend and sometimes girlfriend Carol Lynley. At first, only one or two acquaintances joined us, and somewhat reluctantly. Then—the
Daily News
hit the stands. The review was a rave! Suddenly, my table started filling up. Extra chairs were added. Everyone ordered drinks, especially champagne. I remember David Frost (very popular at the time) suddenly appearing magically in the seat next to me, effusive and congratulatory. The
Mirror
and the
Herald Tribune
were next—both were positive. My table was now “action central.” Then—dum de dum-dum—came the
New York Times
, the one review that could make or break a show like ours with no stars and a tiny advance sale. Clive Barnes killed us. He wasn't too tough on the actors or the book, but the last line of his review said: “I left the theater humming the title song from the movie.” That was more than enough to kill us, just that one last line.

Suddenly, Carol and I were once again alone at the table. Gee. Where the hell had David Frost gone? The check arrived. I looked down at it and gulped. It was more than $1,000 (this was in 1969). God, they'd all ordered expensive champagne. You know, you don't get a fee up front to write a Broadway show—just a piece of what it grosses. I'd been living off what little capital I had for months. Reluctantly, I pulled out my American Express card. And then came divine intervention in the form of a human hand—the hand of Vincent Sardi, who had clearly seen everything that had been going on at my table. He plucked the check out of my hand and smiled: “Thank you for your contribution to the theater, Mr. Mankiewicz. Please come back to us again soon.” It was as classy a gesture as I've ever received in my life.

I returned to my beach house in a deep depression. I didn't call people or answer the phone. I was almost broke. My last two projects had been a perverted surfing movie and a flop Broadway show. After a couple of days there was a knock on my door. It was dear Natalie Wood. “You're going to have to come out sometime, Mank. Did you ever see
The Burning Hills
with me and Tab Hunter? I had to go out to lunch the day after it opened.”

I started to feel better. My phone rang. It was my agent, Malcolm Stuart. “How'd you like to write the next James Bond film, Mank?”

“Please don't fuck with me, Malcolm, I'm not in the mood.”

“I'm serious. It's far from a sure thing, but Cubby Broccoli (the producer) wants to see you at his house tomorrow afternoon. I swear.”

Unbeknownst to me, a series of circumstances had been set in motion by people I didn't even know that was about to radically change my life and career. Somewhere in the Great Beyond, “Pop” must have been smiling to himself. I was about to become (in show business terms, anyway) “somebody.”