Peter Bart Read online
Table of Contents
Title Page
Prologue
Introduction
Acknowledgements
CHAPTER 1 - Taking the Leap
CHAPTER 2 - The Tenuous Team
CHAPTER 3 - The Salon
CHAPTER 4 - The Boss’s Bombs
CHAPTER 5 - Lovers
CHAPTER 6 - Modus Sexualis
CHAPTER 7 - The Bad Guys
CHAPTER 8 - Breaking the Mold
CHAPTER 9 - Hard Lessons
CHAPTER 10 - Rising Stars
CHAPTER 11 - Unholy Alliances
CHAPTER 12 - The Outlaws
CHAPTER 13 - The Glitz Machine
CHAPTER 14 - Reckoning
PARAMOUNT SLATE OF FILMS
Index
Copyright Page
Prologue
The projection room was dark except for the surreal images dancing across the screen. There were twenty plush seats, but I was the room’s only occupant. The voices of the two actors on the screen resonated in the empty room as they enacted their scene over and over again but their performances were utterly robotic, as though they were channeling lines that were completely alien to their inner thoughts.
I was watching rushes, or dailies, as they are called, and I was alone because none of my colleagues were willing to share this ordeal. I was the most junior member of the executive staff and hence was delegated this dubious responsibility. The scene I was reviewing had been shot two days earlier and would ultimately become a key moment in a lavishly expensive movie titled Darling Lili.
It starred Julie Andrews and Rock Hudson, playing lovers brought together in France amid the rigors of World War I. And that, indeed, was the problem that I was observing—Andrews and Hudson as lovers. According to the script, Andrews, a spy, was assigned to seduce Hudson, an American war hero, to elicit important war secrets, but their supposedly steamy love scene had as much fizzle as day-old beer.
Julie Andrews, totally believable as the faithful governess in Mary Poppins, was never a threat to Marilyn Monroe as a sex goddess. As for Hudson, his predilection for men was becoming widely suspected in Hollywood. Their mutual disinterest, if not distaste, was abundantly visible in take after take as they embraced and kissed and then, when the director yelled “cut,” they wiped their lips and breathed a sigh of relief. The director, Blake Edwards, was Andrews’s husband, and he obviously empathized with his wife’s dilemma, but still, the scene was an important one, and a semblance of passion had to be generated, irrespective of how many takes it would require.
I watched five takes and could not cope with any more. As I exited, I noticed the door to the projection booth was ajar. “Those two really have the ‘hots’ for each other,” called out the projectionist, his tone heavy with sarcasm.
I smiled, but I also found myself wincing. What was I doing here? How did I reach the point in my alleged career when I was witnessing two stars feign passion—actors who clearly wanted nothing to do with each other?
Had my life become this surreal?
I would find myself asking that question again some four years later at perhaps the defining moment of my Paramount odyssey. After a tortured period of preproduction, The Godfather was about to start shooting in New York. The fortunes of the fabled studio rested in the hands of Francis Coppola and his balky star, Marlon Brando. The corporate apparatchiks at Paramount’s parent company, Gulf & Western, were openly skeptical about the project. Their nervousness was shared by representatives of New York’s Italian community who believed that the movie would reflect badly on them, and they were making their feelings felt in a variety of ways. A bomb threat forced the evacuation of the Gulf & Western headquarters building on 58th Street. Robert Evans received a threatening phone call. A committee from an Italian-American group demanded to read the script, and members of one of the prominent Mafia families sent out word that they wanted to be involved in the casting process.
Charles Bluhdorn, the chairman of the G & W conglomerate, was in a frenzy of anxiety, and Evans shared his agitation because he was receiving admonitions of caution from his new best friend, Henry Kissinger, the top adviser to President Nixon. Ponderous and reserved, Kissinger had become a fairly regular visitor to Evans’s house, and Evans was seeing to it that his evenings were spent in the company of beautiful women. Kissinger had been on edge about the impact of column items identifying him with Evans, but now, as word of Mafia pressures leaked to the press, his concerns took on an added dimension.
The rumblings about The Godfather worried Charles Bluhdorn for still another reason. Even as his company was producing a movie about the Mafia, he was in negotiation with financiers who had close ties to the mob community—ties that were more obvious, if not to Bluhdorn, to government investigators.
So this was, in a sense, a perfect storm. The studio was exposing the Mafia at the very time when its corporate parents were engaged in dealings with them. And meanwhile, the top power player in the Nixon administration was partying at the home of the chief of production.
Again I wondered, how did I get to this place?
Introduction
This book is about the interplay of triumph and failure.
In the years between 1967 and 1975, the motion pictures flowing from the Paramount studio were arguably among the most distinguished, and idiosyncratic, of any that emerged from any company in the recent history of the movie industry.
Yet during the same period, Paramount was surely the most eccentric studio in the annals of Hollywood—an assessment based on runaway budgets, chaotic distribution, management infighting, an absence of strategy, and the recurring presence of criminal influences over company policy.
I played an integral role in both the success and the chaos. This is my story of how I got there.
As I relate my various studio imbroglios on the following pages, I describe and allude to many films, some of them memorable, others eminently forgettable. In either case I want to make it clear that I did not write or direct or produce any of these films. The movie business has more than its share of credit grabbers, and I do not aspire to membership in that fraternity. I am proud to have been present at the creation of films like The Godfather or Rosemary’s Baby, but I do not claim responsibility for their success. My role was that of advocate and promulgator. I was part of the process, but I was not the final process. I often advanced the relationships and propelled the deals, but I did not sign the checks. I was neither the filmmaker nor the CEO, but I was lucky to be there at a moment of great achievement and great confusion, and I managed to contribute to both.
Most relevant to this book, I was an experienced observer. And I hope my observations will contribute to a greater understanding of that time, and of the unique characters who populated it.
Acknowledgments
This book would not have happened without the prodding and encouragement of Harvey Weinstein, without the enduring loyalty and friendship of Robert Evans, and without the love and resourcefulness, both editorial, and technological, of my wife, Phyllis.
CHAPTER 1
Taking the Leap
In 1967 at age thirty-five, being of sound mind and body, I accepted a job as an executive of a film studio. At that moment I believed my new position at Paramount Pictures would be a great adventure. If indeed it turned out to be a nightmare rather than an adventure, my tenure at the very least would provide the basis for a first-person account of my trip to the dark side. At the time, I was a staff reporter for the New York Times, so the alternative seemed perfectly practical. A career misstep could at least result in a compelling book. It never occurred to me that the book would finally emerge four decades later.
In fact, t
he Paramount experience was to last for eight years and prove to be both adventure and nightmare. During my studio odyssey some of the seminal films of the era would emerge from the studio slate—movies that would help define the nation’s pop culture.
Yet I learned to accept the perverse fact that, while the films embodied boldness and vision, the studio culture that fostered them represented a mix of greed and corporate nihilism. The filmmakers who shaped The Godfather, Rosemary’s Baby, Love Story, Harold and Maude, and Goodbye, Columbus learned to feed off the studio as a black hole of conflict and corruption. The darkness helped bring forth the light.
The movies of the sixties and seventies have been scrupulously and skillfully analyzed by critics, but my aim in this book is to provide some insight into the players and processes of this robust moment of film history. My purpose is neither to sentimentalize this period nor to expose its confusion and venality, but rather to provide a glimpse of the realities that existed behind the tattered corporate curtain.
While Hollywood has always been buffeted by conflicting forces, the studios of this decade were peopled by a bizarre mix of creators and exploiters, some intent on redefining the aesthetic of cinema, others intent solely on personal enrichment.
The machinery of filmmaking had broken down, the dream factories were impoverished, and shrewd operators realized that where there was desperation there was also great opportunity.
Enterprising young filmmakers had also discovered that, where they were once confronted by closed doors, they were now being courted by studio executives. Similarly, financial players, some with criminal ties, found Hollywood to be suddenly open to funding schemes, no matter how esoteric. Indeed, not since the era of the Great Depression had the underworld so successfully infiltrated mainstream Hollywood or exercised such influence on the films being made and the people making them. Ironically, at the very time that The Godfather was portraying how the mob was embracing capitalism, the Mafia was also embracing Hollywood.
And as all this became apparent to me, I found myself wondering, how in hell did I find myself in this battle zone? What had impelled me to wander in?
The answer: a lethal mixture of ambition and curiosity, with a good measure of cultural wanderlust thrown in. Plus, my voyage would not be a lonely one. My friend, Bob Evans, was journeying with me, and we shared the foreboding that the odds might be stacked against us.
At the time I embarked on my Paramount journey I was content with the progress of my reporting career. I had worked my way through reporting stints on the Wall Street Journal and the Chicago Sun-Times before scoring my job on the Times, which in my mind represented the zenith of the newspaper business. My metabolism seemed perfectly attuned to the rhythms of newspaper work and to the noise of the newsroom (reporters still yelled “Copy!” in those days as the typewriters hummed).
From the first moment I walked into the Times newsroom, I felt a surge of exhilaration. This was, indeed, my playing field. And I knew instinctively that I could make it work for me.
The Times I joined was a rather genteel, WASPy environment led by men whom I looked on as journalist-statesmen—Turner Catledge, Clifton Daniel, Frank Adams, and Claude Sitton. Daniel, the managing editor, was suave and silver-haired and wore immaculately tailored dark blue suits made for him in London. He addressed me always as “Mr. Bart” and our dialogues were more akin to those of student and headmaster.
For four years my beat on the Times consisted of writing six columns a week that bore the title “Advertising.” The assignment appealed to me because I had the freedom to select my own stories, on topics that extended well beyond the normal intrigues of ad agencies.
The media business is exhaustively covered in today’s Times, but that was not case in the midsixties, which meant that my column was free to explore the foibles of magazines (the Saturday Evening Post was declining into oblivion), network television (CBS under Jim Aubrey and Mike Dann was dominating the ratings with the help of Jackie Gleason and Lucille Ball), and other strands of the pop culture. The ad agencies themselves were undergoing a mini-revolution, with the old school agencies like Ted Bates and BBD & O under assault from imaginative new players like Doyle Dane Bernbach and a rejuvenated Young & Rubicam. This was the moment of the brilliant Volkswagen campaign that shouted “Lemon!” and exhorted buyers to “Think small.”
Though a corner of my brain told me that my journalistic aims should focus on Washington or a foreign assignment, I loved both the pace and autonomy of my media beat. I was married, had a young daughter, and had lucked into a small but bright one-bedroom apartment tucked into an elegant town house on East 82nd Street just off Madison Avenue. I was also churning out a steady stream of freelance articles for Harper’s, Esquire, and the old Saturday Review—so many pieces, in fact, that Clifton Daniel admonished me that the New York Times Magazine had first call on my services.
Shortly after the reprimand, Daniel summoned me for a further meeting. While the Times liked my work on the column, the editors had decided I was ready for a new beat, he said. The reporters stationed both in Los Angeles and San Francisco were close to retirement age, Daniel said, and the Times felt that there were compelling stories in California that might be probed by a younger journalist.
As we talked, I became aware of the intriguing subtext to his remarks. The traditional attitude of the Times was that New York was the center of the universe both in terms of economic power and pop culture, but now a new “scene” was emerging on the West Coast. The components of that scene, however, remained opaque to the Times.
In short, the Times was worried that it was losing touch with the crosscurrents of midsixties America, both culturally and politically. Our tastes and proclivities were increasingly difficult to read. Vietnam and the civil rights movement had preempted the political agenda. In entertainment, even as Julie Andrews was winning an Oscar for Mary Poppins, the Jefferson Airplane was making its debut at the Matrix in San Francisco and the Beatles were opening at Shea Stadium. Hollywood was still banking on Elvis Presley movies and chestnuts like Anne of a Thousand Days, but audiences were favoring Bonnie and Clyde and Who’s A fraid of Virginia Woolf?
The bottom line: Would I move to Los Angeles, to become one of the Times’ missionaries to the brave new world?
I replied that I needed to think it over. Though I had covered stories throughout the South for the Wall Street Journal, and had reported on murder and mayhem for the Sun-Times in Chicago, I had never been to California, nor had ever contemplated it. I was a New Yorker; I had grown up a city kid, albeit a rather privileged city kid with a second home on Martha’s Vineyard. My parents had seen to it that I attended private school. My schoolboy friends were expected to go on to top colleges, but also feasted on the energy of the city.
My school days were spent in a 225-year-old structure called Friends Seminary. Amid all the Sturm und Drang of the city, this creaky, brick edifice on Rutherford Place on the Lower East Side seemed to possess its own serenity. Choosing a college to me was a no-brainer: I chose Swarthmore, eager to continue within the Quaker enclave.
Hence, New York represented many environments to me. I relished the energy and yet also knew where to find the pockets of peace. Would I trade in all this for California?
My initial instinct was to deliver a polite “no” to my courtly managing editor, mindful that Times editors do not like to hear that word. I described my dilemma one day to another young reporter on the paper, David Halberstam. We were both standing at the urinal in the men’s room when I queried: “What happens when you give Clifton Daniel a ‘no’?” Halberstam, then a droll, if somber-looking, young man, replied, “You probably end up holding a very small piece of what you’re presently holding.”
He was being funny, but he was also right. I realized I would be an idiot not to take the Times up on its offer. I would be writing about the world of surfers and rockers, about Governor Earl Warren and the Beach Boys and a young senator named Richard Nixon. And maybe I�
��d even sneak in an occasional piece about the radical changes taking place in Hollywood, though my national news editor, Claude Sitton, made it clear that Hollywood would not be a prime target. While the Times had had a full-time Hollywood correspondent for many years, the decision had been made to discontinue that beat. There were more important things to focus on in the fastchanging cauldron of California.
From the moment we unpacked, my wife and I both found ourselves enjoying that cauldron. New Yorkers were expected to complain that they missed the theater and hated the driving. But we liked our new cars (provided by the Times) as well as our rented house nestled near the rolling UCLA campus. We knew we were supposed to resent the smog; instead we basked in the sunshine.
Within days of settling in, however, our illusions about sunny Southern California were shattered with one phone call.
The voice from the national news desk sounded at once confused and a bit panicked: “There’s an early report on the wires that race riots have broken out. They’re setting fires. Do you see anything?”
“I live near the UCLA campus,” I said. “All I see are palm trees. Are you sure this is about LA?”
“Some place called Watts.”
I was stunned; I’d been staring at the map during my initial days in Los Angeles, but there was no sign of Watts.
Within hours I was to learn all about Watts and its riots, which had swept through downtown Los Angeles and were soon headed west. Within the next few days my car was to sustain three bullet holes and I was to be pinned down by gunfire on streets that in no way represented my image of Southern California.
In my initial weeks in Los Angeles I was realizing every young reporter’s dream—big stories on page one. And once the Watts riots showed signs of subsiding, I was on a plane to San Francisco to report on that city’s racial upheaval.