I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This: And Other Things That Strike Me as Funny (17 page)

It was something of a dilemma. I found myself committed to a movie that was totally different than the one I agreed to, but that alone wasn’t a legitimate out for a rookie actor. There was no clause in my contract stating that I would be allowed to approve any changes, and I didn’t dare protest too hard for fear of Blanke assigning me to shoeshine duty. So I concluded that the only graceful exit was to find a way of getting killed.

On a daily basis, I would pester Don Siegel with suggestions for my premature demise. I was aiming for just the right amount of verisimilitude.

“Now, Don, in this particular scene I see that a tank is coming over the hill,” I said one day. “Maybe—and I’m just offering this up because it could be funny—but maybe I could roll under the tank and get killed.”

Siegel’s reply: “Bob, you’re on the movie until the end.”

Frankly I didn’t see why he needed me. It seemed to me that once I had delivered my onesided telephone conversations, I could be eliminated at any point without hurting the movie. He had actors like Steve McQueen, Fess Parker, and Jim Coburn, who were much more convincing in battle scenes than me. Far more important members of the squad had been killed, like Harry Guardino. My gosh, Guardino had been in
King of Kings
as Barabbas, the notorious robber whom Pontius Pilate proposed to condemn to death instead of Jesus, and he had costarred in
Houseboat
alongside Cary Grant and Sophia Loren. Surely if Siegel didn’t need Guardino until the last frame of the film, then he didn’t need Newhart.

Taking a different tack, I tried again. Early in the movie, when Driscoll picks up a rifle for the first time, he accidentally pulls the trigger and nearly shoots one of his fellow squad members. After being taught how to point and shoot, Driscoll is nicknamed “dead eye” for his inability to hit the intended target. In keeping with the film’s integrity, I came up with an idea.

“Perhaps,” I proposed to Siegel, “it’s late at night … The squad is advancing … A firefight ensues … and Driscoll accidentally puts a slug in someone’s rear. Then the guy, thinking that a Nazi has shot him, turns around and shoots Driscoll dead.”

This was met with an icy stare and a “you’re in the movie until the end.”

“How about an unfortunate landmine accident? A faulty grenade? Electrocution from the radio wire … Sir?”

“Newhart, you’re in ’till the end,” Siegel emphasized.

Fortunately for me, though not for Siegel, the end came sooner than any of us expected. I later read that Blanke had a saying: “You should think of each shot as you make it as the most important one in the film.” That couldn’t have been closer to the truth than on
Hell Is for Heroes.
In an effort to contain the film, whose budget had climbed from $900,000 to $1,900,000, Paramount stopped sending raw film stock to the set. The studio brass laid down the law: When the film stock ran out, the movie was over.

It shows in the finished film. In the final scene, McQueen blows up the German pillbox and himself, and the movie ends on this mundane note. No further explanation is given. Perhaps therein lies the genius of the movie. In later years,
Hell Is for Heroes
developed a cult following. It has been shown on TV far more than other more accomplished war movies with tidy conclusions. I guess audiences like the incomplete ending because it allows them to make up what they believe happened. I’ll tell you what happened to Driscoll: The day the film stock ran out, he got on a real life phone and had a two-sided conversation with his agent and booked some lucrative club dates.

Apparently I was so good in my first military comedy that Mike Nichols cast me as the character Major Major in his big-screen version of
Catch-22
. Though I felt a little like I was becoming the John Wayne of comedians, I was honored that Mike wanted to work with me. After all, he had just made
The Graduate
.

Catch-22
turned out better than
Hell Is for Heroes
, but its thunder was stolen by Robert Altman’s
MASH,
which came out first. Looking back, this is one of those movies where they should have released
The Making of Catch-22.

A great amount of detail went into the movie. In particular, I remember the wardrobe guy coming up to me and telling me they wore two kinds of shoes. “Today, I am going to have you wear these,” he said, holding up a brown pair. “But they also wore these,” he added, holding up a less brown pair.

That day I was filming an important scene. Major Major was pacing in his office, giving a speech. There was a picture on the wall behind me, and each time I passed by it would change. The first time I walked by it was Stalin. When I crossed back, it had changed to Roosevelt. More pacing and it became Churchill. The rotating picture was meant to enhance the surreal aspect of the movie.

The scene was filmed as one long, master shot with no close-ups. After the first take, Mike asked (as he always did) if I was happy with it. “Yes,” I told him. Then Mike said (as he always did after any actor told him they were pleased), “Let’s just do one where you do whatever you want.” I said (as I always did), “That’s kind of what I wanted.” Mike was fine, so we moved on.

As I walked away from the set, I saw the wardrobe guy walking over to me. I excepted him to say something like, “I’ve been in the movie business thirty-five years. I’ve worked with Gable and Lombard, and that is the single funniest scene I have ever seen.” Instead, he said to me, “Did Mike say anything about the shoes?” To him, it was a scene about shoes.

Catch-22
was set in Sardinia, Italy. However, most of it was shot in Guaymas, Mexico, which doesn’t look a lot like Sardinia. They did do some filming in Rome, but I wasn’t involved in that part.

The scheduling wasn’t all that precise. Undoubtedly, the schedule wasn’t helped by the flying sequences. The crew would line up these authentic B-26s, and they’d all take off and fly in formation. If Mike didn’t like the shot, he’d cut the scene. The crew would radio the pilots, and the planes would circle, land, and start over again. It took half a day to reset the planes.

In any event, at one point during filming, Norm Fell, who played my aide, and I ended up with ten days off. We decided to take our furlough back home in Los Angeles.

The cast was staying in a hotel called the Playa de Cortez, and my room had a nice view of the sea. I didn’t want to lose it, so I decided to keep my room during my break from filming. Norm planned to check out, but he had some laundry coming back and asked to put it in my room. I told him that was fine so he flagged down the maid.

“Señor and myself are flying to Los Angeles,” he said slowly to the maid while making a flying gesture with his hand. “I have some laundry”—he grabbed his shirt— “coming back, but I’m giving up my room.” He rapidly opened and closed the door and pointed into my room. “But señor”—he pointed to me—“is keeping his room, so when my laundry”—again, he grabbed his shirt—“comes back, would you put it in his room?”

The maid looked at him and, in perfect English, said, “When your laundry comes back, you want me to put it in his room.”

After our ten-day break, Norm and I flew back to Hermosillo through Tucson. We were flying with Martin Balsam, who had just been hired to play Col. Cathcart.

The colonel had been a hard part to cast. George C. Scott had supposedly turned down the role because he felt it was too close to the character he played in
Dr. Strangelove
. Stacy Keach was hired and then fired by Mike Nichols. No one quite knew why, but a shiver went through the cast. Each day, we’d wonder, “Did Mike seem funny toward me today or was it just my imagination?”

Making small talk with Marty, I asked him if he had read the script.

“I’m halfway through it,” he said, which nicely summed up the entire movie.

On the flight, Norm and I were wondering if anything had happened while we were gone. The atmosphere on location was so surreal that nothing ever seemed to happen. I told Norm that I was sure we’d hear right away of any firings, misdeeds, or other assorted chaos.

When we arrived on the set, we both asked around for news. One crew member told us that it rained one day, forcing them to shoot inside. That was about it, and we thought nothing of the lack of stories. It was the kind of place where no news is no news.

Two weeks later, a group of us were standing around waiting to be called to the set. Jack Gilford announced that he was going into town that afternoon and asked if anyone wanted him to pick up any sundries. Tony Perkins off-handedly volunteered to go with Jack.

“I haven’t been in Guaymas since the elephant’s funeral,” Tony said.

I stopped him right there. “I know that elephants are not indigenous to Mexico because I’ve read a lot,” I said. “What are you talking about?”

“Oh, that’s right,” Tony said very plainly. “You guys were away. The circus was coming through town, and they had a flatbed truck with an elephant chained to it. The truck went around a curve too fast, the elephant leaned off the edge, and a Greyhound bus hit him and killed him.”

Tony shook his head in sadness. “They had a funeral for the elephant. There was nothing to do so everybody attended the funeral.”

Leaving
Catch-22
was almost as difficult as getting off of
Hell Is for Heroes
. Dick Benjamin, Paula Prentiss, and I were riding in a car to Hermosillo to catch a flight back to Los Angeles. We had been on location for two months straight and couldn’t wait to get back to a choice of restaurants, the possibility of an earthquake, and gridlocked traffic.

Suddenly a helicopter buzzed overhead and then started circling low in front of us, clearly indicating that we should pull over. It either meant that Dick or I had to return to the set, or that we were being held up by some very wealthy bandits. Turned out, it was the former.

I should’ve followed Art Garfunkel’s lead. After shooting his scene, Art explained to Mike Nichols that he needed to be back in New York for an important obligation. Probably a concert in Central Park with Paul Simon. He asked Mike for a specific date that he could leave, so he could notify the folks in New York.

Mike explained that he needed to check the film before he could release Art to make sure he had the scene. The film would be sent out that day, but being that it was a Friday, the editors wouldn’t look at it until Monday. They would develop it on Tuesday and cut it on Wednesday, meaning that it would be flown back on Thursday. This timeline meant that Mike would watch it at the end of the shoot on Friday.

Upon hearing that he was required to hang around for another week, Art returned to the hotel, packed his bags, and called a cab. When the cab arrived, he instructed the driver to take him to the airport in Tucson, which was 200 miles away. Art volunteered to pay the fare both ways. The Mexican cab driver smiled and hit the road for what would be his last fare before retiring in the lap of luxury.

We never saw him again.

But serving under Pirosh and Nichols was better than working for Alex Segal, who directed a terrible movie made for television that I starred in with Jill St. John and Jean Simmons called
Decisions! Decisions!
You see, I learned from Johnny that if you are going down, you take everyone with you.

On the first day of shooting, Segal and I were walking and talking about the script. The people who put up the money were Hollywood neophytes who had made their money somewhere else and decided that it would be fun to make a TV movie. They were very nice people, as they always are. “Look who they got as an assistant director,” Segal said. “This guy has been after me for a long time.”

It wasn’t long before I became the target of Segal’s paranoia. A couple days after Ginnie and I spent a pleasant evening at his house, we were shooting a scene in which I was in bed wearing a full-body cast. Following Segal’s detailed instructions, the prop masters spent an hour putting me in the cast and hoisting me onto the hospital bed.

The moment they finished this process, Segal barked: “Okay, everyone … let’s take lunch.”

I don’t go through an Actors Studio process of finding a character. In the Actors Studio, they teach what’s known as method acting. They instruct you to build a history of your character going back to its childhood. Someone took his rubber ducky away from him in the bathtub when he was five, therefore he’s homicidal. Or if you are going to play a garbage collector, you volunteer to ride around with your local waste management crew. If a script is given to me that is humorous, I find where the joke is and I figure out how to get there.

The closest I came to method technique was using the traits of some of my friends from the routines that I created. The submarine commander became the basis for several jobs I held on the big screen because he was the perfect representation of the “Peter Principle” (you rise to your level of incompetence), as well as the ultimate bureaucrat who just wants his one final mission to go right so he can retire.

In the movie
In & Out
, I played a high school principal who was very close to the submarine commander. The principal’s entire professional life had been very simple and unexciting. As his name, Tom Halliwell, conveyed, he had been principal for years and all had gone well. He was nearing a smooth and easy retirement, and then all of a sudden along comes this shocking question about a popular, veteran teacher: Is he gay or isn’t he?