American Prince (24 page)

In the end it turned out that we all had misunderstood Marilyn. We knew that she was a powerful woman and a consummate actress, but we didn’t realize that her way of finding out who she was came from acting. In her early career, her films were flimsy, poorly written affairs, so of course she had trouble getting a handle on the material. But in
Some Like It Hot
the material was beautifully written, and she absolutely shone.

After the scene in which Marilyn and I were kissing, some of the crew and I stood around to watch the rushes, and afterward they wanted to know what it was like to kiss her. I figured a question that stupid deserved a stupid answer, so I flippantly responded by saying, “Kissing Marilyn is like kissing Hitler.” I was right—it
was
a stupid answer. What I should have said was, “What do you think kissing her is like, birdbrain?” Or I could have had the good sense to just say nothing. But my thoughtless comment became public knowledge, and the story still makes the rounds. So let me use this book to set the record straight once and for all: I
hated
Hitler. This is the kid who threw condom-bombs on the pro-Nazi parades, remember? I loved Marilyn Mon roe. And she was a terrific kisser.

After
Some Like It Hot
wrapped, I saw Marilyn again at Peter Lawford’s house at the beach. A lot of her friends were there. We talked for a minute, but somehow working with her on
Some Like It Hot
had brought a sense of completion to my feelings for her. The more we talked, the more I realized another love affair had bitten the dust. It seemed like working with me had changed things for her too, or maybe it just represented the natural end of something we’d shared. When I saw her at Peter’s party, she was really out of it. She looked like death warmed over, which saddened me, but I knew there was nothing I could do about it.

When I was invited to attend the Moscow International Film Festival, the government liaison for the event asked me to bring a copy of
Some Like It Hot
with me so they could show it at the festival. The studio arranged for all the clearances, so I embarked on the long flights from California to London to Moscow. At the festival, a giant screen had been set up at one end of a huge gymnasium, and on one unforgettable night the bleachers were packed with people watching
Some Like It Hot
without benefit of subtitles. Fortunately for some, a translator stood by the screen with a microphone, translating the dialogue as the movie went along. At the end of the movie, when Joe E. Brown learns that Jack is a man and says, “Nobody’s perfect,” the gymnasium exploded with laughter. You know a joke is good when it translates into another language without losing any of its punch.

I had never thought it was that amusing for guys to dress up like women. I had seen pictures of Eddie Cantor dressed as a ballerina, and I didn’t find that very funny. But when
Some Like It Hot
was finished, I was overwhelmed by how good it was. The dialogue, the photography, Marilyn’s character, Jack’s character, and the way my role turned out: I was very pleased with all of it. At times during the making of the film I had felt discouraged by the thought that Jack and Marilyn had the most interesting parts, and that I was just playing the straight man for the two of them. It felt good to see my own work holding its own with all the wonderful acting in that movie.

In the end, Jack Lemmon got an Oscar nomination for his acting in
Some Like It Hot,
which was richly deserved, but my heart ached that I didn’t get nominated too. I loved the overwhelming reaction my role generated from my fans; don’t get me wrong, that was very important to me. But all of us who work in the movie business long for the special recognition from our peers that comes with an Academy Award. Nothing. Nothing?

The End of a Marriage

A
fter I completed
Some Like It Hot,
Universal asked me what I wanted to do next. By this point in my career I had some leverage, so I said, “I want to make a submarine picture with Cary Grant.” After all, Cary Grant’s role as a submarine captain in
Destination Tokyo
had inspired me while I was in the submarine service. Cary agreed, with the proviso that after seven years he would own the movie. The studio bought in too, and so it was that
Operation Petticoat
came into being.

The movie, directed by Blake Edwards, was the story of a submarine that had been sunk in the Philippines at the beginning of World War II. It was raised from the bottom and ordered to make its way to Australia to be refitted for combat. On one Philippine island the sub picks up a bunch of nurses. On another island the sub is painted pink, in the absence of either enough red or enough white paint to cover the entire hull. Cary plays the sub commander, and I play his supply officer, a con man who will go to any lengths to keep the ship running. The nurses create a lot of trouble for the crew, of course. In one scene, Cary is at the conning tower getting ready to fire the sub’s only torpedo at a Japanese ship while Joan O’Brien, playing one of the nurses, is talking to him about the value of taking vitamins. She bumps into him just as he says, “Fire one,” and the torpedo runs across Tokyo Bay and blows up a truck on the shore.

Cary’s character eventually ends up with Joan, and I end up with Dina Merrill. This was the third movie Blake Edwards and I made together, and by this time we were great friends. He and his wife spent many an evening with Janet and me. Blake and I were about the same age, and we were both very caught up in our manhood; one drunken night we went so far as to see whose dick was too big to fit through the hole of a 45 rpm record. As best I can remember, neither of us won that contest, but another time Blake and I asked a girl we had both dated which one of us was better in bed. She re plied, “I’ll never tell,” which was smart of her, and good for our friendship.

A year after Blake made
Operation Petticoat,
he started casting for the movie
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
After I read the script, I felt I was perfect for the lead. I called Blake, and he invited me over to his office at the studio. I told him how much I wanted the part, and he danced around the issue for a while. Finally he told me, “I’ll do what I can,” but whatever he did turned out not to count for much. After that meeting I never heard from Blake again. George Peppard, a wonderful guy, got the part. But, sadly, the silence from Blake hurt me a lot.

There were other important parts I didn’t get. Audrey Hepburn made a picture called
Two for the Road
that I would have loved to be in, but Albert Finney got the lead I was hoping for. I was pretty sure Audrey liked me, but later I heard that when my name did come up, Audrey’s husband, Mel Ferrer—who made those decisions for her—didn’t want me in the picture. That’s how Hollywood works; it’s all about relationships. They can make you, and they can break you. If you’re around long enough, they’ll do both.

My next movie was
Who Was That Lady?
with Dean Martin and Janet. Its plot was so ridiculous that even Bob Hope turned it down. In it, Dean plays a television producer, and I play a college professor whose wife catches him kissing one of his students. I call my friend Dean to help me keep my wife, played by Janet. Janet and I were terrific in the film, but by this time our marriage didn’t have much life left in it. We’d been faking it for years now. We had two beautiful little daughters, Kelly and Jamie, but the relationship between Janet and me was miserable. We fought all the time. We had lots of reasons for disagreements, but having Janet’s father handling her business affairs was a constant thorn in my side.

Truth be told, Janet and I still lived under the same roof, but that was about the extent of it. In the evening, she went out with her friends, and I went out with mine. I’d go to parties with my buddies, or go visit Hef in Los Angeles. Sometimes I’d fool around with one of Hef’s bunnies, but by now I no longer had feelings of guilt about my extramarital escapades. Quite the opposite; I knew these short-lived pairings actually made it easier to stay in my marriage. I could pay attention to someone other than my wife, who clearly didn’t love me anymore.

When Lew Wasserman was still at MCA, he represented both Janet and me, and he also represented Alfred Hitchcock, a favorite client of Lew’s. Lew got Janet her role in
Psycho,
where Anthony Perkins stabs her to death in the shower. It was a small part, but it became the part for which she’ll always be remembered. It was a horrific scene, but what made it presentable was the stylized way Hitchcock shot it and edited it. I was very happy for Janet, because I was sure that all the attention she was getting for
Psycho
was going to result in her getting a lot of other movies.

After
Psycho
came out, all the press wanted to talk about was the murder scene. Janet had never enjoyed media attention, and when the pressure of this new celebrity began to get to her, she started to drink a lot. And when Janet had a few drinks in her, she became a different person: belligerent, accusatory, and down right nasty. I didn’t want to provoke her rages, so I started staying away more and more. Eventually I decided I needed another life, but I had no idea where I was going to find one.

•                           •                           •

M
y next film
was called
The Rat Race,
in which I costarred with Debbie Reynolds. It’s the story of a musician and a dance-hall hostess who share an apartment. What I remember most about that movie was the sparks that flew between Debbie and me, and I don’t mean the angry kind that I was seeing at home. Up to that point few of my leading ladies had been able to deny me. Debbie was one of the exceptions. We snuggled together quite nicely during the kissing scenes, and I spent a lot of time hanging out with her in her dressing room. In order for the sparks to turn into a full bonfire, however, Debbie and I needed a lot more time than we had on the set. Debbie had been in show business since she was a kid, and as a result she had a hard shell that was tough to crack.

My next film after that was
Spartacus,
which was made by Universal, believe it or not. The only reason the studio went for it was that Kirk Douglas, who starred in the film, also produced the picture and offered it to Universal as a package. The studio never would have paid Kirk what he was asking in those days, but the package deal gave Universal a chance to get him cheap. In the movie, Kirk plays Spartacus, who leads a slave revolt. Laurence Olivier plays the Roman general out to stop him. I play a slave purchased by the general, and after the general tries to seduce me, I run away and join Spartacus.

The screenwriter for the film was Dalton Trumbo, one of the writers who’d been blacklisted during the 1950s for supposedly being a Communist sympathizer. Trumbo had been writing under a pseudonym for the past ten years, but Kirk wanted him to get full credit for writing
Spartacus,
and as the producer, he made sure it happened. Trumbo was named in the credits as the writer, a brave move on Kirk’s part, and a historic decision that broke the power of the blacklist.

When I first read the
Spartacus
script, I didn’t think it was anything special; it read like an adventure movie in the mold of
Ben-Hur.
But I was under contract to Universal, and I owed them a picture. Universal told me that I would only have to be on the picture for twelve days, but the exec who told me this didn’t know director Stanley Kubrick—or Kirk—very well. I didn’t wrap up this movie for four and a half months!

Anthony Mann was the original director of
Spartacus.
When Mann began filming, Kirk didn’t like what he saw in the rushes. He wanted sharper performances from his all-star cast. I hadn’t started shooting my scenes yet, but I was told that Kirk and Anthony were bickering a lot. Not long after, Kirk fired him and hired Stanley Kubrick to replace him. Kirk had done a World War I movie with Kubrick called
Paths of Glory,
so they knew they could work together. That was an understatement. In fact, they understood each other so well that when I listened to them working out how they wanted to shoot a scene, I had no idea what they were talking about. They talked in shorthand and literally finished each other’s sentences.

Stanley Kubrick told me that ever since he’d been a little kid he had loved taking pictures with his black-and-white Brownie camera. As a director he had an artist’s genius for putting his own imprint on a film, regardless of its content. He was like Elvis in that way. Stanley was also a perfectionist. He would shoot scenes, and then after shooting later scenes he’d go back and reshoot the earlier ones so that everything fit together flawlessly. The studio didn’t like that because it drove up costs, but Stanley didn’t care.

One evening Kirk and I were doing a shot in which we were sitting and talking before a big battle. Behind us were a bunch of men being crucified. Kubrick had orchestrated a complex system for how he wanted those actors to moan and groan in between the lines of the conversation Kirk and I were having. Each crucified actor had a certain sound he was supposed to make on cue: the first guy was supposed to say “oooh,” and the second guy was supposed to say “ugh,” and the third guy was supposed to say “aaaah,” and so on. Their cue was a flag that Stanley waved at them.

So Stanley said, “Roll ’em,” and Kirk and I started doing our scene. Stanley started waving his flag, and the guys on the crosses started moaning and groaning.

I said, “Why is life like a pomegranate?”
Ooooh!

“Well,”
Ugh!
“a pomegranate, like life, can be eaten.”
Aaaah!

Marshall Green, the assistant director, was in charge of making sure the moaning and groaning was happening properly. At one point Stanley looked up and noticed that one actor farther up the hill wasn’t moving, or saying anything, and he pointed the guy out to Marshall. Stanley said, “Marshall, didn’t we assign him anything?”

“Yeah, I assigned everybody a sound,” Marshall said.

“Then how come this guy isn’t doing anything?”

“Well, maybe he’s not paying attention,” Marshall said. “You want to do it again?”

“Before we shoot any more, why don’t you go up there and find out what’s wrong with him?”

So Marshall walked up the hill, finally stopped, and looked up at the guy on his cross. From where I was sitting, I could faintly hear Marshall’s voice as he yelled up at the guy: “What’s going on?” The guy didn’t say anything, so Marshall said, “Look, if you’ve got to pee in your pants, pee in your pants. Don’t worry. It’s only wardrobe.” Then Marshall stopped. He stood still and looked up at the guy for a few seconds, and then he turned around and slowly walked back down the hill to where Kubrick was waiting for him.

Kubrick looked at Marshall, and Marshall said, “It’s a fucking dummy—a mannequin.” Kirk and I laughed so hard that we almost peed in our pants.

Stanley Kubrick was constantly in conflict with Russ Metty, Universal’s top cameraman. Kubrick was a newcomer, and Metty was a veteran of some twenty-five years. For one scene that we shot in a tent, Stanley said he thought the lighting was too dark, but Russ thought there was plenty of lighting. Standing next to Russ’s chair was a light on a wheeled pole, so without getting up, Russ kicked the light toward the actors. The light rolled into the shot, and Russ yelled, “Now I’m ready.” Stanley had his hands full with Russ, but somehow he kept the film moving forward.

One of the highlights of making
Spartacus
was acting with Larry Olivier. This was the first time we had acted together in a movie. I loved Larry. He was a total character. He would sit and watch everything like a hawk. When things got crazy, as they often did, I would glance over at Larry, and the look on his face seemed to say,
I know what I’m doing. I know you do, too. Don’t take the rest of it seriously.
The film’s editors cut the one scene we did together, the famous hot-tub scene where he tries to seduce me with his “oysters and snails” line, but the scene was restored when the movie was reissued in 1991.

One unusually powerful scene in the movie takes place near the end, when Spartacus and I are forced to fight to the death. Spartacus defeats me, and I say to him, “I love you, Spartacus, as I loved my own father.” He says, “I love you like the son I’ll never see,” and plunges his sword into my heart. The next morning the Romans crucify him, but before he dies, his wife comes and shows him his baby son, and she vows that their infant will grow up as a free man.

I had no idea that
Spartacus
would have such power. I had thought this was going to be just one more sand-and-tits movie with a Roman twist, but I didn’t take into account the level of talent involved in every aspect of the picture. (Even Russ Metty fought through his drunken stupor to do an amazing job!) When the picture came out, I got as many raves as anyone, even though I had a small part.