My Life as a Mankiewicz (23 page)

I Gambled My Way

Howard Hughes owned five Las Vegas hotels at one point. He had just taken over the Sands, and Frank Sinatra was playing there. He and Hughes did not get along. Frank went up to the casino window and said, “Give me $50,000,” and they said, “We're sorry, Mr. Sinatra. According to Mr. Hughes, we don't do that anymore.”

He said, “I don't think you understand me.”

They were scared of him, but they said, “I'm sorry, Mr. Sinatra, but we don't.”

Then the pit boss came over and said, “Frank, you can't do that.” And Frank hit him. He got in a little golf cart that was in the lobby and went right through a plate-glass window, went across the street to Caesar's Palace and signed a deal.

Eddie Fisher was a compulsive gambler. He owed a lot of money at various hotels. Eddie Torres called him one day and said, “Eddie, you owe us $250,000.”

Eddie said, “That can't be. I don't owe you $250,000.”

What the hotel bosses had done is buy up all his markers. No hotel thought they'd be paid. So they bought up all of his markers for fifty cents on the dollar and said, “You're going to be playing in the big room.” Fisher asked for how long, and Torres said, “We'll tell you when you're through.”

Cubby Broccoli took me downtown one night. Binion's Horseshoe was one of the big places downtown. Famous because it had $1 million cash in the quadruple-ply window, and it was all insured. Benny Binion, who ran it, was elderly then. He's no longer with us. They still have the world championship of poker there. Cubby, Guy Hamilton, and I had drinks with Benny. He was talking about the old days, and about the million dollars in the window. He said, “You know, I came here in the forties. I'm a fairly cheap hood. The mobsters were all killing each other over the Strip, so I came downtown to open up a place to get out of their way. I got the idea of putting the million bucks in the window. The truth was that it wasn't really a million bucks. There was a lot of paper in there. So I rented ten grand and called it a million and painted the rest of it green, and it looked great in the window. Today it's really a million dollars.

“We have a slogan that we will accept any bet up to a million dollars. Now, there's nobody in the world in 1947 who's going to bet a million dollars or anything close to it, especially downtown. We got penny ante gamblers. All the big guys are up on the Strip. So one night, this guy's shooting craps. And he's doing pretty well. He says to the pit boss, ‘I'd like to bet one million dollars.' He's coming out on the next roll of the dice that he either rolls a seven or makes his point. He put a million dollars on the pass by. The blood drained from our faces. We didn't have a million dollars. We didn't have anything like a million dollars. But it says in the fuckin' window that we accept any bet up to a million dollars. And I thought, all right, fifty-fifty, maybe the guy will crap out. And what am I going to do? I can't say I'm a liar. So I said okay.

“The guy rolls a seven, and he wins a million dollars. And I'm thinking, Okay, let me see, after I get beat up…All of a sudden, the guy says, ‘Let it ride. I'd like to go again. Another million.' I said, ‘What the hell, I didn't have the first million. Yeah, go ahead.' And that guy stayed for another hour and he lost $200,000. But for that one brief moment, my life was over. Like every gambler, he just couldn't take his million and go home.”

During
Diamonds Are Forever
, Barbara Broccoli, Cubby's daughter, was thirteen years old. Cubby was a big backgammon player because he was a big gambler. Milton Feldman fancied himself a really good backgammon player. He kept saying to Cubby, “I'll play you, Cubby, any stakes you want.” Cubby would say, “Milton, we're making a picture here. I'm the producer. And you're just the fuckin' production manager. How's it gonna look that I'm taking money from my own production manager?” But Milton would say, “You won't take money from me.”

One day Cubby said, “I'll tell you what I'll do; I'll back my thirteen-year-old daughter, Barbara, against you, and you name the stakes.” Milton wouldn't do it. And Barbara could play. Everybody in the Broccoli family knew how to play backgammon. Barbara's now producing the movies.

Sean Connery: Actor, Unselfish Actor

Sean Connery was just absolutely delighted with and complimentary of the script I'd rewritten. I met with Sean the first night that he was back in Las Vegas. Sean is a very complicated man; he doesn't suffer fools gladly. Sean's passions in life are first golf, there's no question, then a split between women and drinking, and then acting. But he is a single-minded kind of fellow. He made an extraordinary deal—nobody's really had a deal like this. He got $1.2 million to come back. That was huge. Elizabeth Taylor had gotten a million bucks for
Cleopatra
, but nobody had gotten a million dollars outside of that. Also, he wanted to make films. So United Artists gave him $1.2 million, plus he could make any two films he wanted up to a budget of $2 million. He made a film called
The Offence
in which he played a detective. It was a great film with Ian Bannen, directed by Sidney Lumet, who made another memorable film with Sean called
The Hill.
He did four or five films with Sidney. He just loved Sidney—he worked fast, and Sean liked to work fast too. Sidney was all about a lot of rehearsal, and then, when the gun sounds, off you go.

Sean gave away more than half the $1.2 million to a Scottish educational trust that he founded for Scottish painters, poets, writers, and actors. It was $800,000 he put in. This is in 1970. Twenty-five thousand dollars tax free, which was very good in those days if you were a poet. Twenty-five thousand dollars tax free in Scotland—my God, it's like getting $100,000. Sean said, “But, they have to stay in Scotland. I'm not paying for some young Scottish poet to live in fuckin' Paris.” He was such a passionate nationalist. It stopped him from being knighted for a long time, because there was a Scottish separatist party. He was knighted after Roger Moore and Michael Caine because of the Scottish problem. The proudest moment in his life was when the queen opened Scottish Parliament, and walking down High Street in Edinburgh was the queen, and walking next to her was Sean Connery in his kilt.

During
Diamonds Are Forever
, the consummate Vegas entertainer at the time—I know there were Elvis and Frank—was Tom Jones. He was playing at Caesar's Palace in the big room. Tom Jones did a wonderful thing. It was Oscar time, and we were shooting up there. He flew up every British nominee for a special show. Of course, everybody from the Bond movie was invited because it was a Bond movie and we were in Vegas. Jill St. John and Sean Connery were keeping company at the time, and Sean didn't want to walk in with all the lights on. Sean was probably the biggest movie star in the world at the time, being James Bond. So he said to me, “Boyo, why don't you go with Jill, and I'll join you before the show starts.” (He always called me “boyo” because I was so much younger, and I guess that's a Scottish expression.)

I said, “Great.” I went to the gift shop at the Riviera and bought Jill what looked like a twenty-karat diamond ring. It was fake. It cost $4.25, but when she put it on her finger, people would say, “Wow, look at that ring” because it's Jill St. John.

Tom Jones was great. That was the era when women would run down and throw their room keys and underwear on the stage. That was not staged, it was real. It was this mania. Now, Sean slipped in after the second number. I couldn't believe it: he was wearing Farmer John overalls with a shirt, and not wearing his toupee. Sean lost most of his hair very early. He wasn't bald, but it was a pronounced receding hairline. In Bond, he always wore a toupee, but he didn't in other parts. He never walked around with a toupee on. Tom Jones was introducing people. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, I'm about to lose all of my fans, because sitting in the audience tonight, I don't know exactly where but I'm told he's here, is Double-O Seven himself, James Bond, Mr. Sean Connery.” And then the place went nuts. A light came on in the booth, and Sean stood up, and we heard all these people say, “Look, Ethel, he doesn't have any hair.” I just loved him for it. He could have whapped it on, but that's the way Sean was. I had a great respect for him because of that. Sean would say, “We're going to make a movie like
The Hill?
Fuck it, I'm not wearing a toupee. This is what I look like.” I don't know many actors who would have done that. Another actor would have said, “Look, I don't mind walking around without my hair during the day, but if I'm appearing in front of all these people, I should put the toupee on.” But not Sean; fuck 'em.

Everybody talks about the good old days. Las Vegas was a different town. When you look at
Diamonds Are Forever
now, when Sean swings his red Mustang out onto the Strip, you can see desert in the distance, which is now all condos and skyscrapers. Then, there were eight, nine hotels there. There was a downtown. But if you wanted to bet on the dogs, you'd go downtown. People on the Strip were larger than life. Women wore mink coats. Men wore suits.

In the downtown Vegas car chase, Bond's in the red Mustang, and he's being followed by a sheriff in a police car. Ford gave us all the cars for the car chase. In return, Bond had to drive the red Mustang convertible. Mustang sales went crazy after that car chase. Bond goes down a narrow alleyway in his car, and there is a tiny, tiny opening. He says to Jill St. John, “Quick, lean this way,” and the car goes up on two wheels and goes through sideways, and the police car crashes. We shot the car coming out of the alley in Vegas. When it came time to shoot it going in the alley, that was on the back lot. Everett Creech, who did most of the car stunts, could get the car up on two wheels, but he couldn't aim it. So he cracked up a couple of cars just trying to get through that space. He said, “There's a guy I know down south who can do this. His name is Joie Chitwood.”

We called him. “Everett Creech says you can get a car up on two wheels and aim it.”

He said, “I sure can. How much are you going to pay me?”

“Five thousand dollars.”

“I'm on my way to the airport.”

He finally got there, but it was three days later. We were shooting other stuff and people forgot how the car came out of the alley. This was the script supervisor's fault. The car came out in Vegas with Sean down and Jill up. When we did the entrance, Sean was up and Jill was down. Now, it's impossible to go in one way and come out another way in this tiny space. It's physically impossible. Joie Chitwood was already on the plane back to Louisiana, and we said, “Oh, fuck, he came in the wrong way.” The script supervisor got chewed out, because that's their job, to say, “He's going in the wrong way. He should be going in that way.” It's about as lame as you could get. Part of it is also Bond in a suspension of disbelief in the first place because you're having fun and the car chase is fun. But if you did that in
Serpico
, everybody would notice and say, “You can't do that.”

The picture was a delight. Suddenly, I was in the big time. The score was going to be by John Barry, who became a friend. The picture was designed by Ken Adam, one of the legendary production designers. Everything was first cabin. It wasn't like you were doing your little surfing movie. Suddenly, you're working with world-class people, not the least of which was Sean Connery. This has only happened to me a few more times in my life. Sean asked for a meeting with me right away, and went through the script. Most of his suggestions or questions were about other people's parts. I've never met such an unselfish actor. Most of the time, when you go through a script with an actor, 100 percent of it is about him or her. “Do I have to do this? Do I have to do that?” Then, there's the next scene in which twenty-seven people die, but if they're not in it, they don't care. Sean would say, “Now, here when he turns around, why does he do that? How can we make that a little clearer?” That really surprised me a lot.

Regarding his Scots accent, there's a scene in the beginning when he first meets Jill St. John and she keeps changing her hair color as she's going in and out of her room. She came in with red hair, which Jill had, and Sean said, “I don't care too much for redheads. Terrible tempers.”

Guy Hamilton, who was very much a to-the-manor-born guy, said, “Sean, could we try to cut down on the rolling r?”

In the next take, Sean said, “Don't care too much for redheads. Terrible tempers. Oh, I can't do it!” And that was an interesting thing, because Ian Fleming wrote James Bond as being very English. It was the gunmetal cigarette case and the blend of Virginia tobaccos. Almost a snob thing. The ideal casting for Bond would have been a young, more muscular David Niven. Bond was terribly English. When they cast Sean, Fleming, in the beginning, called him “that Scots lorry driver.” And then, of course, Sean completely won him over and was James Bond. The last book Fleming wrote was
The Man with the Golden Gun.
In that book, Bond retires. Fleming gave him Scottish ancestry, and he goes back to Scotland to retire. That's how much Fleming loved Connery.

Roger Moore was the original choice for Bond, but he was unavailable because he was doing a series called
The Saint
, which was a huge hit in

England and the United States. Roger got three cracks at the apple, because when Sean decided to quit after his fifth one,
You Only Live Twice
, the producers went back to Roger again, but he was doing a television series that nobody remembers with Tony Curtis called
The Persuaders.
He was unavailable. After
Diamonds Are Forever
, third time's a charm. Harry Saltzman wanted Burt Reynolds, who was a star at the time. Cubby had a big thing about Bond being tall. He said, “I've stood next to Burt Reynolds, Harry, and he's a shrimp.”

Harry said, “He's not a shrimp!”

Cubby said, “And the other thing, over my dead body is Bond going to be anything but British. He's not going to be American.”