Pieces of My Heart (25 page)

When Bette died in 1989, I helped arrange the memorial service on stage 9 at Warner Bros., where she had made so many of her great pictures. There were enormous stills of her hung all around the stage, and as Roddy McDowall, James Woods, and Bob Osborne got up and spoke about Bette, a black, dark stage gradually became infused with love. By the time Angela Lansbury gave her extraordinary eulogy, we all knew that a remarkable, one-of-a-kind artist and human being was gone, but we were lucky—Bette had made the life of everybody on that stage better and richer, even if all they knew of her was what she embodied in her movies. At the end of the service, I turned out the ghost light on the stage. She was buried at Forest Lawn in Hollywood, which looks down at the Warner Bros. studio—just the way she wanted it.

I adored her—not in spite of her prickliness, but
because
of her prickliness. It was such a large part of what made her Bette Davis. She had a terrible need for love, as we all do, but she was wired in such a way that it was hard for her to ask for it. Actually, it was impossible. She could give love, but it was very hard for her to receive it, even though, outside of the opportunity to act, it was the only thing that really mattered to her. Bette’s tragedy was that she never fully received the thing she needed the most.

Arriving in London with Natalie and the girls, 1976. (
STAFF/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
)

A
fter
Colditz,
the movies I made—
The Towering Inferno
,
Midway
—tended to make TV look better and better. Five years after
It Takes a Thief
went off the air, I went back to television. Natalie was now a full-time mother, and I was more than happy to become the provider.
Switch
was another caper show, about a partnership between a con man—me—and the ex-cop who sent him to jail—Eddie Albert. The two of us had a detective agency that specialized in conning con men. CBS was interested in the show because it bracketed two actors who had both been in previously successful shows—
Green Acres
for Eddie and
It Takes a Thief
for me.

Initially, CBS offered me the cop part, but I never wanted to play any character that could conceivably yell, “Freeze! Police!!” Every other show on television was a cop show, which makes a certain amount of sense because they’re perfect for TV. There’s a criminal, there’s a good guy, there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. Anything that neatly schematic can be easily mass-produced.

But cop shows were too cut-and-dried for me, so I opted for the con man part, as well as a caper format, which requires more on the part of the writers and actors.
Switch
wasn’t a critic’s show, but the public liked it, and we ran for three years, from 1975 to 1978. It wasn’t easy, because CBS changed our time slot six times in those three years.

Eddie Albert was an interesting man who possessed what could legitimately be termed a big set of balls. Before World War II, he was a contract actor at Warner Bros. when he had an affair with Jack Warner’s wife, Ann. One time they were making love when Jack walked in and discovered them. As Jack told me, “I didn’t mind that so much; it was the fact that he didn’t stop that bothered me.” Well, that little episode got Eddie blacklisted for a while.

Then Eddie went into the service during the war and became a hero in the South Pacific. On November 21, 1943, when he was a lieutenant j.g. in the Navy, Eddie was stationed on the USS
Sheridan
when he commandeered four boats to rescue thirteen wounded Marines who were trapped on an exposed offshore reef at Betio Island in the Tarawa Atoll. He ordered three of the boats to hang back and return fire, while he took his boat in closer and loaded it up with guys who had been badly hit. Eddie had to make a couple of trips back to the
Sheridan
to get all the Marines to safety. He did all this under heavy fire.

Later, after the battle was mostly over, Eddie was in charge of body recovery when a last-stand Japanese sniper opened up on Eddie’s party. He and some other soldiers opened fire on the sniper and killed him.

Tarawa was savage; nearly 1,000 Marines died, and 2,300 were wounded. Of the 20,000 Japanese soldiers who were holed up on the island, only 17 left the island alive. For saving the lives of all those stranded Marines, Eddie earned a Bronze Star, and I think he could easily have been awarded more than that.

After the war, the times were such that even war heroes such as Eddie could get into political trouble—he was very liberal, and his magnificent wife, Margo, was even more so. But William Wyler helped bail him out by casting him in both
Carrie
and
Roman Holiday,
two totally different kinds of movies. Typically, Eddie was excellent in both.

I originally met Eddie and Margo through Richard and Mary Sale, who were good friends of theirs. Eddie was a complete actor. He loved the theater, he loved to act, and he could play drama or comedy with equal facility. He was a fierce environmentalist long before it was fashionable. As a matter of fact, Eddie was crucial in preserving the pelican population; the use of DDT was weakening the shells of pelicans in their nests, and the pelican population was cratering. Eddie threw himself into the fight to ban DDT. As soon as the chemical was restricted, the pelican population began coming back. To this day, whenever I see a pelican fly by on the Coast Highway, I thank Eddie Albert, and so should everybody else.

In almost all respects, he was an admirable man.

But with his life experiences, Eddie wasn’t fazed by things like stealing scenes, and he could be a bit devious and scratchy at times—about his character, his wardrobe, everything. Basically, he wanted to play both his part and mine, and sometimes he stole scenes for the hell of it. In his heart of hearts, he would have been very happy if
Switch
had been called
The Eddie Albert Show
. That said, I’ve always had affection for a theatrical rogue, and Eddie and I got along fine, mostly because if Eddie was going to steal scenes, so was I. Game on! For three years, we had a very pleasant competition.

Eddie was one of those veterans who didn’t talk much about the terrible things he had seen in the war, but thirty years afterward, just about the time we were working together, he had lunch with an admiral who had also been through the battle at Tarawa. When he got back to his hotel, he began shaking and collapsed into a terrible crying jag that went on for an hour. He had carried post-traumatic stress around for decades.

Switch
was created by Glen Larson, and we had a great cast and crew. Universal was going to drop Sharon Gless from its contract list, but I met her and liked her. She never even auditioned for the show; I just thought she was perfect and hired her. Plus, we had Charlie Callas around for comic relief, and he was sensational. The chemistry was good, and the only real problem we had was that we went on the air before we had enough scripts, so the entire first year it was run-and-gun production and there was no time to get better writing.

In television, the most important component besides concept and casting chemistry is preparation—once the locomotive leaves the station, it never really stops until it reaches the end of the line, or the end of the season. That was a problem in the beginning for
Switch
. Because it was a show about con men, the writers were too focused on angles and gimmicks, and I was constantly pushing them for more characterization.

W
hile I was working, our family kept growing. Along with Courtney there was Willie Mae Worthen, who started out as a housekeeper and quickly became part of our inner circle. Willie Mae was always there for the children, and she’s still there for them whenever they need her today, because she still lives with us.

One thing our remarriage gave us was a renewed appreciation of how much we loved the ocean. After Natalie and I divorced, I had spent very little time on the water, and neither had she. When she wanted to get out on the water, she’d charter a boat. We’d forgotten how important it was to our relationship, how the water nurtured and calmed us. Now that we had children, it was something we wanted as a continuing part of their lives as well.

It was during the run of
Switch
that Natalie and I bought our long-dreamt-of boat. She was sixty feet long and slept eight, and Natalie did the interior in early American. We called her the
Splendour,
after
Splendor in the Grass,
but with the English spelling to differentiate between then and now. There was also a motorized dinghy attached to the side that we called
Valiant,
in honor of the most embarrassing of my own movies.

From the beginning, the
Splendour
was less a yacht than a houseboat. Although Natalie didn’t particularly enjoy cooking at home, she enjoyed making
huevos rancheros
in the galley of the
Splendour
. It was a place for family and friends, and we were always loading it up with Tom Mankiewicz or Mart Crowley and some very special guest stars to cruise to Catalina or some of the other islands in the Santa Barbara chain. Some of the happiest days of our marriage took place on the
Splendour
because Natalie always enjoyed being on the water, although she was very nervous about being in it.

Elia Kazan came on the boat, and to my surprise I found that he loved to fish and was a terrific first mate. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised; on Gadge’s farm in Connecticut, he enjoyed nothing more than climbing on his tractor and working the land. Gadge was very much of the earth and, as I discovered, of the water as well.

I think Gadge’s great gifts as a director derived from his curiosity and openness. He would talk to anybody, ask them, “What do
you
think?” and mean it. He took time with people, and because he was Elia Kazan, his attention really meant something. Personally, Gadge was always nudging me to focus my career on comedy; he thought my instincts for comedy were excellent.

But so many people hated Gadge because he named names during the red scare period in the early ’50s. I was with him in New York when people would walk up and literally spit at his feet. Then they would cross the street. And Gadge would just go on, as if what just happened hadn’t happened. He must have had some bitterness about this—some of the people who were the most hostile wouldn’t have had careers without him—but he never expressed it. He held it in.

N
atalie and I were very attentive with each other. It came easily for us. She would write me notes on the anniversaries of our marriages or on my birthday. On my birthday in 1974, she wrote me, “This is always my happiest day, too—because of you. I love you.” That same year, on December 28, the date of our first marriage, it was: “This was the happiest day of my life in 1957—but I didn’t know you’d make me doubly happy in July of 1971.”

On my birthday in 1975, we planted a fig tree in the garden, and she wrote me, “This fig may look bare now, but soon it will bear fruit—as we have. I love you with all my heart and I hope this tree grows as beautifully as my love for you does every single day.” On Easter 1975, she wrote me, “Dearest, here’s to smooth sailing for us from now on! I love you with all my heart and it belongs only to you.” On Easter 1976, she wrote, “I love you more than love.”

W
ithout question, doing
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
with Laurence Olivier and Natalie was my professional high point. To work with Olivier, to see how he approached acting, and to observe his competitiveness, his refusal to be defeated by illness, age, or any other actor, was a pure privilege.

I first met him through Spencer Tracy, who had been friends with Larry for years. When Olivier came to America to make William Wyler’s
Carrie,
he worked with Spence on his accent to get the rhythm of midwestern speech. When Spence introduced us, I immediately took to Olivier, who was crazy about Natalie as an actress and as a woman.

My old friend Bill Storke created a series of specials called “Laurence Olivier’s Tribute to the American Theater,” and in the spring of 1976 we traveled to London and rehearsed for four weeks on
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
with Tennessee Williams in attendance. When Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor did the movie version with Richard Brooks, they couldn’t mention homosexuality or cancer, without which the story doesn’t make an awful lot of sense, but we went back to the original script.

It was a painstaking production; we had two weeks of costume tests before we started the month of rehearsals. Then we took nine days to tape it, working in complete scenes in front of four cameras. We were so prepared that we could have played that production on any stage in the world.

There were no private lessons with Olivier. He worked in hints. He told me to take my time, that I could sustain a moment. Maureen Stapleton was cast as Big Momma, but she would not fly. If it moved, she was nervous about getting on it. She was supposed to be in England with us to rehearse, but she had taken the
Queen Mary
and the ship had gotten held up by bad weather. She didn’t make it to rehearsal until three days after we had started.

Now, I had memorized the entire play before we started rehearsing. I had borrowed an office at William Morris in Beverly Hills and hired an acting coach to work with me. I wanted to be set, I wanted to be confident, and I also wanted to be free to watch Olivier work and not have to worry about my lines. So I was off the book when we started to rehearse.

Larry was using his script. He would say to himself, “Let’s see, I move here, then I go over there,” and I would be standing there, without my script, cueing him. It was Maureen’s first day at rehearsal, and she watched us working for a while, then took me aside during a break.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“We’re rehearsing, Maureen.”

“Where’s your script?”

“I learned the play. I don’t need it.”

“That doesn’t matter. Take your script with you when you go out there.”

“But Maureen, I don’t need it, I…”

“Take it from a smart old Irish cunt, pick up your script. Don’t be a smart ass.”

I actually wasn’t trying to be a smart ass, but Maureen was adamant, so I did what she told me to do. Looking back, she was right; her point was well taken.

Tennessee Williams was working with Larry on the third act—always the problem with that particular play. Tennessee and Larry trimmed it down and did some polishing. I had met Tennessee years before, when I was shooting some scenes for
The Frogmen
in Key West. He made it quite obvious that I was his type, and I had to gently disabuse him of that particular notion. Tennessee was always a very vulnerable man, but when we were working on
Cat
he was an open wound, noticeably frightened of the critics and what they might say. He was not in good shape, and he was particularly upset with a ridiculous English quarantine regulation that had kept his beloved bulldog from accompanying him to England. As partial compensation, his friend Maria St. Just was always nearby, hovering and holding his hand.