The Garner Files: A Memoir (13 page)

But the greatest accolade came prior to the picture’s release: Just before
The Great Escape
opened in movie theaters, Sturges took a print to London and screened it for a group of survivors, and they loved it. Sturges said he felt vindicated by their approval, and that he was glad he’d been true to what he called the “nobility and the honor” of the brave men of Stalag Luft III.

E
arly in 1963, the producer Martin Ransohoff signed William Wyler to direct and William Holden to star as Lieutenant Commander Charles Madison in an MGM feature about a cowardly US Naval officer. After a few weeks, Wyler backed out of the picture. I’m not sure why. I’d heard that MGM wouldn’t pay him what he wanted, but the real reason may have been that the script was just too radical for the man who had directed two great World War II pictures,
Mrs. Miniver
and
The Best Years of Our Lives
.

I was already cast as Lieutenant Commander Paul “Bus” Cummings when Marty Ransohoff asked whether I would play Charlie Madison if Holden dropped out. “Oh, you bet!” I said. I knew it was a hell of an actor’s part. It was a different kind of role than I’d been doing, with a brilliant script by Paddy Chayefsky from William Bradford Huie’s novel. A lot of drama and a lot of humor. The only possible drawback: it required me to deliver long, dense speeches.

Bill Holden was having trouble with the IRS, something about doing his banking in Hong Kong, and there’d been some publicity about it. A columnist accused him of being unpatriotic. On top of that, Holden kept making one demand after another, and Marty Ransohoff got fed up. He provoked an argument with Holden’s agent, Charles Feldman, and offered him $200,000 to get out of the picture. Feldman grabbed it. I don’t think he wanted his client doing an antiwar picture at a time when he was being skewered in the press as un-American.

A long line of directors had turned the picture down before Marty reluctantly offered it to Arthur Hiller. Marty didn’t think Arthur was ready for it because he was still young and hadn’t tackled anything so meaty. As it turned out, Marty needn’t have worried.

By then color had become the standard, but Arthur wanted to shoot the picture in black and white because he thought it would be more realistic. MGM balked—they were afraid people would think it was an old movie. But Arthur fought for it and the studio finally gave in.

I’d worked with Arthur on
The Wheeler Dealers
and we got along fine. He has a gentle demeanor but knows what he wants, and for me that’s the first quality of a good director. I’m not looking for a pat on the back; I just want to know if I’m on the right path. Arthur gave me a valuable bit of direction early on. He told me I was trying too hard to protect the writing, that I was delivering each line as if it were the most important in the movie. He explained that you can’t do that because it turns everything into a monotone. You have to have ups
and downs. “Just play the character,” he said, “and don’t try to peak on every line.”

He was right.

I’d worked with James Coburn in
The Great Escape.
He was a good guy and a terrific actor. When I recommended that Jimmy take over the Bus Cummings part, Marty Ransohoff and his assistant, John Calley, agreed. It turned out to be a great choice.

A
rthur Hiller once said that Paddy Chayefsky was the only genius he’d ever worked with. Same here. He saw the insanity of life and described it with wit and compassion. I’ve never had finer words to say on a movie screen.

His given name was Sidney. He got “Paddy” in the army, when an officer woke him at four o’clock one Sunday morning for KP. Sidney asked to be excused so he could go to mass.

“Mass?” the officer said, “I thought you were Jewish!”

“Yeah, but my mother’s Irish,” Sidney lied.

“Okay, Paddy, go back to sleep,” the officer said, and the name stuck.

Paddy was an intense man, short and stocky and bristling with energy. He had an irreverent sense of humor and an explosive temper. And he was the most articulate person I’ve ever known. His dialogue is like fireworks, it
crackles
. Paddy once said that he collected words “the way other people collect postage stamps.” He was fascinated by the English language and he delighted in the sound of it. I don’t think this exchange could have been written by anyone else:

EMILY:
That’s a piquant thing to say, wouldn’t you agree?

CHARLIE:
Yes, I think I’d call that piquant.

Some people complain that Paddy’s scripts are too “talky.” To me that’s like saying Van Gogh’s paintings have too much color. To this
day Paddy’s the only screenwriter to have won three solo Oscars, for
Marty,
The Hospital,
and
Network
. He died of cancer in 1981 at the age of fifty-eight. Imagine what he could have done with another twenty years.

One of my proudest moments happened at a preview of the picture in Beverly Hills. Paddy said, “Let’s take a walk.” As we strolled around the block, he told me he was pleased with my performance. It thrilled me to hear that from a writer, especially one I respected so much. It felt like I’d won an Oscar.

Set in London in the weeks before D-Day,
The Americanization of Emily
is the story of Charlie Madison, who, as the opening credits explain, is a “dog robber,” the personal attendant of a general or admiral whose job it is to keep his man “well-clothed, well-fed, and well-loved during the battle.” Charlie is an admitted coward who likes his job because it keeps him out of combat. When he meets Emily Barham, a driver in the local motor pool who has lost her father, brother, and husband in the war, she despises him at first.

The meaning of the title is revealed in an exchange between Emily and Charlie early in the picture: “I don’t want oranges, or eggs, or soap flakes, either. Don’t show me how profitable it would be to fall in love with you, Charlie. Don’t Americanize me!” Emily isn’t just talking about little wartime luxuries, but also about Charlie’s cynicism and cowardice. Despite her grief, she’s still patriotic. It takes Charlie’s supposed death to finally Americanize her, to make her abandon her conventional view of war.

W
hen we began shooting, Julie Andrews had just completed her first film,
Mary Poppins,
but it hadn’t been released. She was nervous at first, and so was I. We’d met seven years earlier when we were both on Broadway. I was playing a judge in
The Caine Mutiny Court Martial
and Julie was starring in the hit musical
The Boy Friend.
Later
I saw her as Eliza Doolittle opposite Rex Harrison in
My Fair Lady
and, like the rest of the world, I was bowled over by her talent.

Julie was just wonderful as Emily. She stepped out of the Broadway mold to play a complex character convincingly: an outwardly priggish but inwardly passionate war widow. Though Julie wasn’t nominated for the role, it showed her range as a performer, which may have helped her win the Oscar for
Mary Poppins
when Academy voters realized that she could play a serious character without having to sing.

Julie and I have made three films together (
Victor/Victoria
in 1982 and
One Special Night
in 1999 are the other two). She’s always been a joy to work with. She’s a team player who cares about her colleagues and coworkers: in 1996, Julie turned down a Tony nomination for the Broadway version of
Victor/Victoria
because no one else in the production had been nominated, including the director, her husband Blake Edwards. Julie explained that she preferred to stand with the “egregiously overlooked.” That’s Julie.

T
here was a lot of pressure about the script. The Motion Picture Association of America’s production code office was afraid of it. They thought it put US servicemen in a bad light and they worried about a box-office backlash that would sink
The Americanization of Emily
and maybe even taint other films. They thought the movie was just too extreme for the American public.

Well, we weren’t a bunch of wide-eyed pacifists; we knew what we were talking about. I’d certainly experienced the stresses of combat. (I am, by constitution, a coward, so you could say it was typecasting.) Paddy had been wounded by a land mine while on a patrol as an infantryman in Belgium during World War II. He stepped out of line to relieve himself, went into the woods, dropped his pants, and sat down on a mine. The wounds were serious, but Paddy used to
roar when he told the story. Arthur Hiller had been a navigator in the Royal Canadian Air Force and Jimmy Coburn a radio operator in the US Army. Melvyn Douglas, who played Admiral Jessup, had served in
both
world wars. We’d all witnessed the kind of snafus, inter-service rivalries, and insanity portrayed in the film that cost people their lives.

In those days, censorship was unpredictable. We couldn’t use the F-word—that’s why a British officer berates two enlisted men by calling them “featherheaded.” We thought there might be a problem with the censors because of Jimmy Coburn’s character. Every time you see him, he’s got another girl in bed, including Judy Carne, who has a ten-second nude scene. But nobody complained about it, except maybe Burt Reynolds, who was married to Judy at the time.

We had zero cooperation from the US Navy, which usually pulls out all the stops for war movies. So long as the movies are gung-ho. The navy brass knew we were making an antiwar movie and they didn’t want anything to do with it. (When Marty Ransohoff made
Ice Station Zebra
a few years later, the navy remembered
The Americanization of Emily
and refused to cooperate. They gave in only after he convinced them that
Ice Station Zebra
was pro-navy.)

Without support from the navy, we had to improvise. We used the same damn landing craft over and over. Arthur shot it every which way. We couldn’t get right-hand drive British army trucks, so Arthur had to have them mocked up and he “cheated” the shots where they appeared.

After ten days’ filming in London, we came back to LA. The MGM lot in Culver City was already booked, so we shot the rest of the picture at the Selznick Studio in Century City. We also used the Santa Monica Airport, where we created our own rain—a
lot
of rain—and we went up to a beach near Oxnard aptly called Hollywood-by-the-Sea for the invasion sequence.

A
dmiral Jessup is determined that “the first dead man on Omaha Beach must be a sailor” because he feels the army is getting all the glory and too big a share of congressional appropriations. He wants a record of the event, so he orders Charlie to accompany the first wave with a camera crew. It’s nothing but a public relations stunt to help Jessup persuade Congress to create a “tomb of the unknown sailor.” Charlie begs to be excused, then refuses to go. But Jessup is adamant, threatening to have Charlie “brigged” if he disobeys the order, and Charlie soon finds himself in a landing craft heading into Omaha Beach. When the door opens, Charlie refuses to move, but Bus is right behind him with a .45 and he shoots Charlie in the leg, just to kind of encourage him.

The beach scene runs only a couple of minutes on the screen, but it took a week to shoot and cost a quarter of a million dollars, a big chunk of the movie’s budget. With all the explosions, it had to be choreographed just right or we could have been seriously injured or killed. There’s a moment of unintentional realism in the scene. If you look closely when I stumble onto a land mine and get blown into the air, you’ll see me do a little bounce when I hit the ground. That’s because I cracked two ribs on the point of the metal canteen on my web belt. (The movie gods were getting even for what I’d done to Doris Day on the set of
Move Over, Darling
. In one scene, she was standing on a bed and I reached up, grabbed her by the waist, and carried her off. In the process, I broke two of her ribs. I didn’t know it until one of the assistant directors told me the next day, because Doris never complained.)

O
n Friday, November 22, 1963, while we were shooting the party scene, someone came in and said that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. We all gathered around a radio. Everyone was stunned. Some were crying. We quit work and didn’t come back for
several days. It was Arthur Hiller’s birthday that day, but we never celebrated it.

P
addy Chayefsky broke a lot of rules, including the old Hollywood taboo against trying to make “message” pictures. (Sam Goldwyn warned screenwriters: “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.”) Paddy’s movies and plays are
full
of messages. I think his message here is that sentimentality is as much a cause of war as greed or racism or religious hatred. A lot of antiwar movies are preachy, but not this one. As Charlie says, “I’m not sentimental about war. I see nothing noble in widows.” But the picture isn’t really antiwar. It allows that sometimes war is necessary, like when you have to defend yourself from an invader. But don’t make war seem so wonderful that kids want to make “the ultimate sacrifice” when they grow up. If we ever want to end war, we have to stop building shrines to dead soldiers—they just perpetuate the carnage. The most patriotic thing we can do is be yellow for our country. As Charlie Madison says:

War isn’t hell at all. It’s man at his best; the highest morality he’s capable of. It’s not war that’s insane, you see. It’s the morality of it. It’s not greed or ambition that makes war: it’s goodness. Wars are always fought for the best of reasons: for liberation or manifest destiny. Always against tyranny and always in the interest of humanity. So far this war, we’ve managed to butcher some ten million humans in the interest of humanity. Next war it seems we’ll have to destroy all of man in order to preserve his damn dignity. It’s not war that’s unnatural to us, it’s virtue. As long as valor remains a virtue, we shall have soldiers. So, I preach cowardice. Through cowardice, we shall all be saved.

In a long scene with Emily and her mother, played by Joyce Grenfell, Charlie gets up on a soapbox to make his point about cowards saving the world. We’re having tea in the backyard—sorry,
the “garden”—and I just talk and talk. Joyce would ask me a question and I’d do two pages and then Julie would say, “Isn’t that wonderful,” and I’d do two or three more. I think the whole speech was eleven or twelve pages. It says, in part: