Hello Darlin' (13 page)

Before it closed, though, director Sidney Lumet saw a performance. Afterward, he offered
me a part in
Fail-Safe,
a movie he was about to film that was adapted from the best-selling novel about a
runaway U.S. bomber with orders to drop an A-bomb on Moscow. He had lined up, among
others, Henry Fonda, Walter Matthau, and Fritz Weaver, and he said there was a part
for me if I wanted it. I signed on then.

He asked if I had read the book. I said no, but got it, read it, and knew I’d lucked
out.

For my first movie, I could not have wished for a better experience. We rehearsed
for a month, a length of time practically unheard of on movies. I played Buck, the
Russian-speaking translator for the U.S. president, who was portrayed by Henry Fonda,
and the two of us were locked in a bomb shelter. I was the go-between, listening to
the Soviet premier on the phone and then interpreting for the president. I must have
done all right since everyone thought I really did speak Russian, though I never spoke
a word of it in the film.

Henry gave me a few pointers, the kind that only a veteran would pass on. I thought
it would be smart if my character smoked, given the tense situation. But as soon as
Sidney cut a scene, the prop man rushed over and snipped my cigarette so it would
match when filming resumed. I ended up smoking six or seven packs a day. As Henry
pointed out, even for a smoker, that was a lot of nicotine to inhale, enough to make
me sick, and I never smoked again in a film. Henry also told me not to act with my
hands, if at all possible. If you gestured with them, you had to match the move in
all the shots, and that took a lot of remembering. Sure enough, when I watched Henry,
he just sat there with his hands crossed. He was a master of simplicity.

Columbia Pictures purchased
Fail-Safe
in order to protect another film still in production, Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece
Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,
which they wanted to come out first. They stuck
Fail-Safe
on a shelf and no one saw it for two years. I felt betrayed. I was just naive. It
was sound business on the studio’s part.

D
espite the frustration, I liked making movies. If you are around the right people,
moviemaking is just the most fun an actor can possibly have. I wanted to do more.
I called up director Josh Logan, a longtime family friend, and asked if he had any
parts for me. He was about to shoot
Ensign Pulver,
the sequel to the terrific film
Mister Roberts,
and said he’d find a part for me when it began shooting in Acapulco.

Before it began, Maj and I took the kids and our Irish nanny, Peggy Ryan, and turned
our trip to Acapulco into a vacation. We started by driving across the country to
California in a Jeep station wagon. Right at the start, as we crossed into New Jersey,
we had trouble. I’d put an emergency can of tire inflator under the front passenger’s
seat. It was right above the muffler, which heated up, caused the can to explode,
and blew out the bottom of the Jeep.

It was a setback, but not enough to delay us. We kept driving across the United States
with one-hundred-degree heat radiating up off the asphalt and into the car. The hottest
stretch was between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. But before we got there, we stopped
at Yellowstone
National Park. I pitched our tent in a crowded campground and Maj started cooking
dinner inside it while Peggy watched the kids. At some point Maj felt someone leaning
against her from outside the tent. She thought it was me, said, “Cut that out, Larry,”
and threw an elbow.

Suddenly she heard an angry growl. It was a bear, not me. Curious, Maj went outside
the tent and saw five guys white as a sheet. When she saw me, I was holding a flashlight,
trembling, having seen the bear destroy our ice chest and saunter off into the woods
with a bag of marshmallows. And Peggy, who’d emigrated from Ireland and never been
south of New Jersey, had the kids, one under each arm, as she dashed into the car,
locked the door, and said Hail Marys all night.

She wouldn’t let us in.

“No, no, I got the babies,” she said. “They’re all right. You two can sleep in the
tent.”

When we got to Los Angeles, we stayed in Carroll and Nancy O’Connor’s house in Studio
City. They’d gone to Rome, where he was acting in the film
Cleopatra.
One day a friend of ours, actor John McGiver, invited us to lunch at a home he was
renting on the beach in Malibu Colony. A few days earlier, Maj had said she didn’t
think she could ever live among all the brown in L.A., but after a few hours out at
the beach, she turned to me and said, “Now if we have to stay in California, we’re
going to live in Malibu.”

It turned out to be prophetic.

After a couple weeks, we flew to Acapulco to start
Ensign Pulver.
The movie starred Burl Ives, whose songs I’d played my entire life, Walter Matthau,
Robert Walker, and Tommy Sands. I was fortunate to be given a pretty fair role as
one of the ship’s officers. The role was about the same size as the one Josh gave
Jack Nicholson, who had already written and directed several movies. Once shooting
began, he emerged as an off-screen ringleader among the cast of up-and-comers that
included me, James Farentino, James Coco, and Peter Marshall.

It was swelteringly hot in Acapulco, nothing that I would have called paradise. The
ship’s deck was like a skillet. If you spilled water, it disappeared instantly with
a sizzle. Prior to the first day of shooting, Josh assembled the whole cast and crew
on the main deck and then delivered an address that reminded me of James Cagney talking
to the crew in
Mister Roberts.
If we ever saw him sitting alone, he said, we were not to disturb him. If he was
by himself, he explained, he was thinking about the film, lining up shots, or as he
put it, “creating,” and he did not want to be bothered.

Josh failed to mention he was taking lithium, at the time an experimental drug, which
had side effects like drowsiness and lethargy; if you took enough, it caused a comalike
stupor. On the first day of actual work, he lined up a shot, did the scene, and then
sat down on the deck to ponder the next shot. Josh, who was tanned even during the
coldest New York winter, positioned himself facing the sun, all the better to enrich
the deep, dark color of his face. He sat there for quite a while without being disturbed.
Nor did he move when lunch was called. Neither did he appear to have moved when we
returned after the break.

Finally the first assistant director went over and asked if he was all right. Not
only was Josh not all right, he was completely zonked, basically unconscious save
for some unintelligible mumbles, and so severely overbaked that his eyes were swollen
shut and his lips had puffed up to the size of pomegranates. He was loaded onto a
boat like a sack of rice, taken back to the hotel, and given a couple of days to recuperate
before he was ready to shoot again.

At least he recovered. I cannot say as much for the birds. We had a scene in which
one of the sailors, played by Tommy Sands, is on his way back home, and as his C-47
transport plane circles the boat, we were supposed to release dozens of white doves.
It was to be a loving gesture as well as a striking cinematic moment. After five days
in cages in the sun, those birds might as well have been on lithium too. When the
C-47 was overhead, their cages were opened but the birds
would not fly. Some actually got up in the rigging, but most would not budge. They
had sunstroke, dehydration, or both.

We tried again in the afternoon, but still none of them would fly. So when the plane
made a second pass, Josh had some of the crew get rifles and start shooting in the
air in the hope the noise would scare them into flight. It made sense. By this time,
though, the poor birds were so sick and weak they flew all right, but fell into the
ocean like planes running out of gas. They littered the ocean, scores of sick white
birds, fluttering and sputtering, too pooped to pop. It was the saddest, most frustrating
thing I’d ever witnessed.

No, wrong. The saddest thing was when the sharks came. They arrived in threes and
fours and started eating the birds as if they were Kentucky Fried Chicken. There was
nothing any of us could do to help. We could not dive in. We did not have nets to
scoop them out of harm’s way. Taking a boat out would not help. As we watched this
pathetic scene, the water churning with bloodstained feathers, some of the guys sobbed
while others screamed, “Save the fucking birds!”

A few days later we nearly lost Josh the same way. During lunch, he decided to go
for a swim. A ladder was let down and he dove into the ocean. He began a leisurely
freestyle alongside the boat. Then someone noticed a dark shadow tailing him. Soon
a bunch of us were watching, our mouths agape. It was a shark, at least an eight-footer,
trailing Josh like a tailgater on the freeway, taking his sweet time while riding
his bumper. All of us started to yell: “Josh, get your ass in here.”

“What? I cant hear you.”

“Get your ass on the boat.” We pointed behind him. “Shark!”

Then the shark surfaced. Josh saw it about twelve feet behind him and swam for the
boat as if trying to break an Olympic record. Once he got close enough, some guys
pulled him in, otherwise it could have easily been the last of Josh Logan.

For his birthday, Maj and I gave him a half dozen baby chickens, which he raised in
his hotel penthouse till nearly the end of filming, when the hotel’s manager pressured
him to put them on a farm. Another
afternoon, while in a lithium-induced daze, he stood on the roof and tossed plate
after plate into the swimming area, ten floors below. The day before, we had showed
him how to play Frisbee, which he could not throw to save his life. But he was murderous
with those plates. The hotel manager, having noted we were friends, asked me to go
to the roof and calm him down before he caused some serious damage.

*   *   *

If anyone actually came close to dying, it was the first assistant director, when
he tried to chintz us out of a decent dinner. About eighty of us were being ferried
back from the ship after a long, hot day when this AD declared that by the rules of
the Screen Actors Guild he could serve us leftover box lunches for dinner. The lunches
consisted of inedible bean paste sandwiches. Maybe he saw the homicidal looks the
crew gave him, or heard somebody mutter something about shark bait, but he reluctantly
added that any of us who did not want to eat the box lunch could stay on the dock
until they brought us a proper supper.

Well, along with Jack and Peter Marshall, I had been bringing my own lunch, so we
weren’t particularly hungry. The three of us glanced at one another. This was a no-brainer.

“We’re staying on the dock,” Jack said.

It was as close to a mutiny as you could get on a movie set. The other guys opted
to go back to the hotel, leaving just the three of us on the dock. We ordered lobster
from the food stands and got shit-faced on beer and tequila. Finally, about three
hours later, the first assistant director returned in a car and found the three of
us holding one another up at one of the food stands. Because of us, he was having
to pay meal penalties to about a hundred actors, at a cost of several thousand dollars.
He was pissed.

“I want you idiots to get in the car and go to the hotel,” he said. “You’ve cost us
a shitload of money.”

Back at the hotel, he continued to rant, promising none of us would ever work for
Warner Bros, again.

“And if I can help it,” he added, “you’ll all be out of the business.”

“Fat fucking chance,” Jack said as we turned back to the bar and toasted the end of
our careers.

*   *   *

I did not need much of an excuse to toast anything. On that movie, I was seduced by
the carefree, party-time atmosphere of being in the tropics. I had never been anywhere
like Acapulco, where holding a piña colada, mai tai, daiquiri, or some other alcoholic
fruity concoction with a spear of pineapple and a cute umbrella on top just felt natural.
I had found paradise. Everyone down there had their pleasure. For me, it was booze.
My pal Bobby Walker did tai chi. I remember asking him about the weird movements he
was doing on his balcony, something I’d never seen before, and soon I was hooked on
that too. Josh had his own thing. Others had their vices. I didn’t pay much attention
to any of it until Jack made a comment to me.

“Hag, you drink too much,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s a problem.”

“Neither do I. I just think you ought to try something else.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“A little grass. I’ll go out and get some.”

“Marijuana?” I said. “I can’t do that.”

Jack, who could tell I was ignorant and frightened of pot, accepted my answer and
went his own way. A few days later, he came up to my room with a newspaper folded
under his arm. When I told him Maj was down at the pool, he flashed a devilish grin
and set the paper down on the coffee table. I asked what was in it. He said, “Acapulco
gold.” Whoa, not in my room, I said, then suggested we go up to his room. A few other
guys joined us, and then Jack got to work, sounding like a Vegas dealer as he said,
“Well, let’s roll it up.”

At first I did not feel anything. About an hour later, after smoking more, I asked
when the stuff started to take effect.

“Hag, you just asked me that,” Jack said.

“Huh?”

“You just asked me that for about the twelfth time.”

“I did?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, when does it start taking effect?”

“Now.”

“No shit.”

“What do you think?”

“I think I’d rather have a martini.”

Then the fun started. I went downstairs to see Maj, who was swimming laps in the hotel
pool, which was extremely large and deep, something like fifteen feet. I had absolutely
no idea that I was extremely high as I jumped in the pool, grabbed Maj, and told her
to swim with me to the bottom. Once down there, I started to take off her bikini top,
something she resisted while at the same time trying to get me to understand she was
running out of air and needed to surface quickly. But when you are as high as I was,
time does not mean anything.