Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God (12 page)

“We shot it entirely on location in Venezuela up the Orinoco River, one of the toughest locations any film crew has ever had to cope with. You fall into the river and you don’t know what’ll get you first — sharks up from the Gulf, barracuda, alligators, piranha or, worst of all, a tiny, tiny catfish, almost invisible to the naked eye, which simply adores swimming up the human urethra — male or female, makes no difference. Once lodged in the kidney it eats away merrily and the invaded dies a lingering and exquisitely painful death.

“The immense silence, the Stone Age people, the awesome expanse of forest, simply took over. It invaded our senses. It dominated us. The silence — the silence of life within death — put a dome over the production and nobody who had experienced the location would ever have countenanced any kind of scoring to accompany the images Peter Yates captured. The script was shot as written. It was, from the outset, a very lean and sparing script and Peter [Yates] elected to use a great number of long shots, once more to distance the people, to set them against an alien landscape, and to emphasize how small they were on the scale of existence.”

It was a gamble for its mercurial star. “Peter O’Toole was going through a thing at the time where he wanted to play a character that was totally unexplained, and totally unsympathetic, and totally oblique,” Silliphant told interviewer Reed Farrell. “He didn’t want to justify or explain anything; he wanted the character to be what it was and not have any explanations. Well, I went along with that to a point, but if you so divorce yourself from your viewing audience that they really don’t care, then the whole picture goes out the window. On top of that, he insisted on using a very heavy Irish brogue. And, unless you are an Irishman, and I mean from the same country, it was very hard to understand him. Even having written the dialogue, I couldn’t understand a word he said. It could have been a fantastic film. The action was there.” 
[132]

When
Murphy
sank with barely a ripple, Silliphant decided to initiate projects rather than wait for things to come to him. He became a hyphenate. He had used his clout to produce as well as to write
Route 66,
but it was really Bert Leonard and production manager Sam Manners who handled the day-to-day functioning of that series. Now he wanted to be in at the ground floor. He first tried a relationship with the flamboyant independent mogul Joseph E. Levine that produced nothing but emotional distress. Then he found
A Walk in the Spring Rain
(1979). Adapting Rachel Maddux’s novel about an academic and his wife whose marriage is challenged by an opportunistic love affair, Silliphant set up Pingree Productions, named after his childhood address. The film’s idyllic title belies a tale of violent emotions. Fritz Weaver starred as the professor whose sabbatical takes him and his wife, Ingrid Bergman, to the Smoky Mountain locale where he intends to write his book. Bergman soon draws the attention of a local man, Anthony Quinn, and the two of them have an affair, with horrific fallout. But it was the subplot of their daughter, Katharine Crawford, and her relationship with her mother, that captured Silliphant’s interest.

“I was drawn to
A Walk in the Spring Rain
by my disappointment with my daughter,” 
[133]
he confessed. “For reasons I have never been able to resolve with her, once I divorced her mother she kept our relationship in the past, back in her little-girl period. This is what many parents do with their children, feeling disappointment when the child becomes a teenager, intent on his or her own life, but the parent keeps trying to recapture the vanishing childhood and creates friction with the child struggling to emerge into youth. With my daughter, the roles became reversed and she kept trying to relate to me in past terms, rather than in terms of the reality of my now liberated new life. So when I read Rachel’s novella,
A Walk in the Spring Rain,
I jumped on it because here was a story of a selfish daughter who expected her mother to assume certain responsibilities simply because she was her mother. It has always struck me that these familial relationships should be based on love and caring and letting go, not on obligation.”

Silliphant found his own counterpart in the character played by Weaver, the professor who has to face a blank page, both in the typewriter and in himself (although Silliphant claimed he never suffered from writer’s block). However estranged he may have felt from Dayle, by this time his first son, Stirling Garff, had succeeded in reestablishing contact. His first wife, Iris, had married Jim Rasmussen and the boy had taken his stepfather’s surname. He had also kept up with Ethel Silliphant in the years after she and Lee had divorced. 
[134]

“When I was much younger,” Stirling Rasmussen recalled, “I did visit Ethel fairly regularly, staying at her and Fred’s [Wellershaus] house overnight. I remember a sleeping porch they had on the second floor and the sounds of late night trains moving through Southern California in the area of their house.” Iris had never bad-mouthed Silliphant, focusing her disdain on Hollywood, but when Stirling Garff hit twenty-four he felt it was time to seek out his father. They got together several times in the 1960s, and he reported that it was as if no time had passed between them. One visit took place during
A Walk in the Spring Rain.

“I went on location in Tennessee,” Rasmussen said, “with Anthony Quinn and Ingrid Bergman. [Silliphant] had imported a bartender from Trader Vic’s and, after shooting, each day, the director and my dad and Anthony Quinn and Ingrid Bergman would do drinks. I remember I walked in — I was pretty decent looking at the time — and I put my arms up and said, ‘discover me.’ They looked at me and started laughing.

“Another experience was an evening party that Anthony Quinn was giving. A younger (as in my age) actor who was in the film, Tom Fielding, wanted the two of us to head into Gatlinburg for some action. He hadn’t been invited to the party, so I thought it was a good plan. My dad made it quite clear to me that my evening would be spent in the company of Quinn and Ingrid Bergman.” 
[135]

When the film was soft at the box office, Silliphant took it personally. “It is disappointing when you know you’ve succeeded in
your
work,” he reported in hindsight. “There were some scripts I had done that had gone to camera where I knew that I hadn’t finished my work, where I hadn’t licked the script. One of those was a sweet, tender little film, which was totally ignored at the box office called A
Walk in the Spring Rain.
I liked it, but it was never quite what we intended. It just didn’t have energy, it didn’t take off: the two people weren’t quite believable. I felt it was time for a love story between two people who were over forty. Because, when you’re past forty, you do still continue to have interest in such matters, although, to see films, you’d never believe it — everybody is nineteen or twenty. I thought I was going to fix that for the world. I was going show how that worked. And I didn’t. I just demonstrated again that there are no love stories unless you’re nineteen.” 
[136]

Despite this, Silliphant maintained a cordial correspondence with Ingrid Bergman for years following their work together and, of course, his first son was back in his life again. His writer’s relationship with himself as producer was more tentative: “I always functioned as producer,” he insisted, “thereby cutting down any outside input to its least damaging components — the collaboration between writer-producer and director — a streamlined working partnership, which I enjoyed in almost all of my TV work.” But he also expressed his doubts in a
Newsweek
interview once the film’s disappointing returns were apparent: “The great frustration of my professional life is that anything I originate never [succeeds]. I understand better than anyone else the failure to achieve power.” 
[137]
He would remain of two minds on producing: he recognized the choices it gave him as a writer, but lamented the way it siphoned his time from doing the work he preferred.

The same year that saw
A Walk in the Spring Rain
saw the release of a personal project of another kind,
The Liberation of L.B. Jones.
 
[138]
Not only did it become the final work of the venerable director William Wyler, it began a lifelong friendship with Jesse Hill Ford, the author of the novel on which the film was based. The film was disappointing, the experience was not. 
[139]
Silliphant was paid $200,000 for his adapting duties and co-produced with Ronald Lubin. 
[140]
“Once I had completed my script and Mr. Wyler wanted a writer in residence — something I was unable to do for him because of other commitments — I suggested that Jesse Hill Ford be brought in to cross the Ts and dot the Is for Mr. Wyler. Nor did I have any presence on the location, though Jesse quite faithfully did. Jesse and Willy took to each other instantly, and Jesse hung in throughout the shoot, making the changes Willy requested. As a result, I submitted a request for joint film credit to the Writers Guild, not only because I felt Jesse deserved it but because, with me at his elbow, he did a lot of work during the shoot and added those delicious bits of southern largesse, which I found so fulsome and overly dramatic.” Both men are credited.

Unfortunately, Wyler (sixty-seven, but with flagging energy) was not up to the standards he had set in earlier years with
Wuthering Heights
(1939),
The Little Foxes
(1941),
The Best Years of Our Lives
(1946),
and Ben-Hur
(1959).
LBJ
was sluggish and unfocused.

“True, Mr. Wyler was nearing the end of his brilliant career — and the end of his life span — but Willy cared passionately about this film. I guess my passion for [it] is based on the fact that the picture was uncompromising. It offered no solutions, no hope — it simply said this is what happens when two sides hate each other. I value the film because, in the period when it was made, it was decades ahead of all the other ‘safe Hollywood black-white themes.’ It was far closer to the subtexts in Spike Lee’s
Malcolm X.
In short, closer to the truth. We dared to say that racial hatreds run
deep
in America — for that matter, all over the world. We scorned the happy ending — the ray of hope. This is why, to me,
LBJ
is one of the works of which I am the most satisfied. It is sans bullshit.

“Why this personal favoritism? It may, I confess, have to do more with the issues involved than the work itself. When I wrote
The Liberation of L.B. Jones
I was up to my gills with the prevailing wisdom that race relations in the USA were now okay. It was painfully clear to me that this was a dangerous profession of amelioration when, in fact, the only thing that had changed, deep down, in the white hearts of my countrymen, was their delusion that they had at last accepted any person of a different skin color or ethnic background as a fellow human being. So I wrote
LBJ
out of the sense of personal fury I felt about the inhumanity of races, of classes, or religions opposed to each other, out of my anger toward the ideologies toward those burdened with convictions and beliefs and never-to-be-reversed attitudes toward their fellow men, woman and children. For
LBJ,
in its own dark heart, is saying only one thing: fuck all of you, all you white bastards, all you black bastards, fuck you for hating each other, for hating yourselves! The film is unremitting, inexorable, without pity or compromise or solution. It simply states that hatred prevails. Hatred is Boss. Hatred is good. Hatred
works
!

“
LBJ
turned out to be a hard film to watch because the viewer can’t really find anybody to identify with — which was my savage intent. Fuck the viewer, I felt. Just tell it as it is — there’s no hope, no progress, no advance possible.

“The film caused riots in many theaters where it was shown. It was not a film which whites and blacks could view shoulder to shoulder. It went directly to the heart of human savagery — and offered no solution. Which was exactly my intention.”

The violence that Silliphant scripted in
LBJ
came tragically home to roost. On February 12, 1969, his and Ednamarie’s eighteen-year-old son, Loren, was shot to death outside the boy’s residence at 1764 North Sycamore Avenue in Hollywood, just after midnight. Loren, who had gone through psychological rehab in the east a few years earlier, had just moved into an apartment in Hollywood not far from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. He and his uncle Robert (Lee’s son by his third wife, Virginia) were having some friends over when a disturbance broke out in the hallway of the four-story building. A man named Chester Allen Johnson (twenty-two) had pulled someone out of a nearby unit and was beating him with a Lugar, demanding hard drugs.

“Loren was a gutsy guy,” recalled Robert’s brother, Allan. “He had a lot of self-confidence and he thought he could just convince the guy without kowtowing to him, by not expressing fear of the Lugar: ‘Look, we don’t have it, we don’t know anybody, we can’t get it for you any more than anybody else on the street, if you want some pot we’ll give you some pot.’ That kind of thing.” It did no good; Johnson — who later claimed that he was so strung out on pills that he didn’t know what happened — shot Loren point blank in the chest.

“My brother [Robert, who also had psychological problems] was the only person that had the balls to go out on a ledge and get around and go for help because Loren was bleeding to death on the floor,” Allan said. “So even though he was schizophrenic, he was able to make that choice.” 
[141]
Johnson and his girlfriend, Terry Jean Phelps, fled. Loren died at 3:04 a.m. the next morning.

Silliphant was on the road at the time with author Harold Robbins, whose novel,
The Inheritors,
he was adapting for producer Joseph E. Levine. He heard the news, not from the Los Angeles Police Department, but from Robbins’s bodyguard, who awakened him in his hotel room and told him to turn on the television. The men sat on the bed and cried as they watched the coverage that began, “The son of Oscar-winning screenwriter Stirling Silliphant was murdered tonight…”