Pieces of My Heart (26 page)

Olivier was always a text-oriented actor, but he had a way of transcending that. What was truly interesting was how fresh he kept his performance. He didn’t lock in a performance at all; it varied from take to take. And like most of the people I have valued in my life, he was a very warm, emotional person, although I have no doubt he could be a killer if he thought it necessary.

There’s a wonderful story about Larry and Kirk Douglas on
Spartacus
. Now, Kirk Douglas’s ego is legendary even by the standards of the movie business. On Larry’s first day on the film, Kirk came to Larry’s dressing room on location to welcome him to the picture. But Kirk made the mistake of reminding Larry that, “in film, you don’t have to do a lot.”

Kirk was producing as well as starring in a very expensive picture, so his concern was understandable, but he forgot that he was talking to Larry Olivier. It was waving a red flag in front of a very wily bull. Olivier was not only fully professional but had made nearly twenty-five movies by then, including great work for great directors: Willy Wyler, Michael Powell, and so forth, not to mention producing and directing some pretty good movies himself:
Henry V, Hamlet,
and
Richard III.

Larry innocently said, “Why don’t you do the scene for me, Kirk, so I can see your ideas?”

So Kirk gets up and does Olivier’s scene as he thinks it should be done.

“Splendid, splendid, Kirk. Could you perhaps just do it one more time for me?”

Once again, Kirk does Larry’s scene for him.

“Um, that was wonderful, Kirk. Might I ask you for just one more opportunity to study your movements?”

It was only after Kirk had done Olivier’s scene for him four separate times that he realized he was being put on.

Olivier was the least indicative actor I’ve ever worked with. “Indicating” is actor’s vocabulary for the original sin of forcing the audience to feel something. The goal is to make the audience cry, not yourself, and to do that you have to have the confidence that your emotion and your interior behavior and feelings can move somebody else. (This was Natalie’s great gift.)

When Olivier was doing
Dracula
with Frank Langella, I asked him how it was going. “A bit too much with the cloak,” he said.

That’s indicating, and the peril of costume parts is that the actor can rely on the costumes and props instead of communicating the character’s emotions to the audience. It’s also the most difficult thing an actor can do. You get up in the morning, and you’re thinking about the scene you have to do, and you keep thinking about it while you’re being made up. You tell yourself to keep the scene in perspective with the whole of the film and not to push it. And then you go on the set, and sometimes the director will say, “Act!” And that’s the thing you don’t want to do.

You do not want to
act
. You want to
be
.

The reviews for
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
weren’t that good. Tennessee Williams’s career was at a low ebb, and I think the idea of a couple of mainstream Hollywood actors coming to London and working with Olivier set people’s teeth on edge. Too bad. It’s a fine play and ours was a very good production. I remain proud of Natalie and myself for tackling it.

Larry and Natalie and I had such a splendid time together that he eventually brought his entire family to be with us on the
Splendour
. It’s impossible to know what goes on in anybody else’s marriage, but Larry’s domestic situation was far from ideal.

In a biography that she authorized, Joan Plowright was very hard on Olivier for his ego and competitiveness. On the basis of the time they spent with us, I thought she was very hard on him—she was continually snappy and pettish. Larry was ailing—he was much older than she was, he had a debilitating skin disease, and he was still working hard to put money aside for his children. But she didn’t seem to want to make any allowances for his situation.

Larry wasn’t too tired to fight back, but he seemed to have made a private emotional calculation that it wasn’t worth the trouble. It was obvious that the main reason they were still together was their children, whom he simply adored. He was determined that his son Richard would go to UCLA, as he eventually did. Larry and Joan did not have a love match by any means, and I thought that he deserved much more sympathy and consideration than he was getting.

Years later, after both Olivier and Natalie died, my dear friend Steven Goldberg gave me a beautiful German shepherd as a housewarming present for the house my wife, Jill, and I built in Aspen. The dog was two years old at the time, and we fell in love with each other immediately. For the next eleven years he was the blood of my heart, embodying joy as well as a nobility of spirit and form. I called him Larry.

With Larry Olivier on board the
Splendour
. (
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
)

S
hortly after
Switch
went off the air, I was given the script for a television pilot that had been sitting on the shelf in Leonard Goldberg’s office. It was written by Sidney Sheldon; it was called “Double Twist,” and they wanted me to consider it for a series.

I read it, and I thought it was a lot like the Matt Helm movies that Dean Martin had been making a few years before. It was modern and, I thought, very tacky. The central character would push a button, a bed would come down out of a wall, a girl would fall on it—that sort of thing. I’ve never been interested in acting in shows I wouldn’t want to watch, so I said I’d pass.

“What would it take to get you to reconsider?” they asked me.

I thought about it and said that I’d be interested in doing a show that would provide the audience with the same sort of feeling I always got watching the Thin Man movies with William Powell and Myrna Loy. What was special about those movies wasn’t the plots, which nobody ever remembers, but the pure pleasure those two people got out of spending time with each other and the way they managed to communicate that pleasure to the audience.

For me, Nick and Nora Charles as played by William Powell and Myrna Loy constituted the ideal marriage: sure they loved each other, but every bit as important, they
liked
each other. They had fun, and their love for each other didn’t preclude a little flirting with other people. It was actually one of the most realistic relationships offered by the movies of that period. That Powell and Loy weren’t actually married, or even romantically involved, but were just amiable friends could have been the key to the relationship, not to mention part of the mystery of the movies.

At my suggestion, Leonard and Aaron gave the rewrite to Tom Mankiewicz. When Tom came out to see me in Hawaii, where I was shooting a miniseries called
Pearl,
he asked, “If you like what I write, can I direct the pilot?” Tom’s rewrite was entitled
Hart to Hart,
and both the network and I liked it a great deal.

As it moved toward production, Aaron Spelling and Leonard wanted Natalie to play Jennifer Hart. Their thinking was the sales line: “Wagner and Wood in
Hart to Hart.
” Both Natalie and I thought it was a terrible idea, mainly because we had young children, and a one-hour show means long days, not to mention nights. A lot of the time you get up at six in the morning and quit at nine at night. We would both be working all the time, and the girls would be raised by third parties. Also, I had a hunch that it was best to keep our private life separate from our working lives. The proposal was a nonstarter.

When Natalie turned it down, Aaron and Leonard asked me to consider Lindsay Wagner, who they and the network were very high on. This time they were thinking of the sales line “Wagner and Wagner in
Hart to Hart
.” But I had my own idea for a costar. I had worked with Stefanie Powers on episodes of both
It Takes a Thief
and
Switch
, and I knew from our brief association on those shows that we had great chemistry together. Chemistry was the crucial element of the show, and chemistry can’t be faked.

The network was leery; they pointed out that Stefanie had been on
The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.,
which had been a single-season flop years before, and that she had no track record with comedy. I got a lot of resistance, but Tom Mankiewicz agreed with me, and we just kept saying, “Stefanie Powers…Stefanie Powers.” Tom and I were both determined to have Stefanie in the show, and Aaron and Leonard finally agreed.

For the part of Max, I thought of casting Sugar Ray Robinson, which would have been a very interesting dynamic and would have opened up the possibility of Max’s physicality saving Jonathan and Jennifer’s bacon. But one day when Tom Mankiewicz was in the Fox commissary and ran into Lionel Stander, he called me up and said, “I’ve got Max right here!” I had worked with Lionel on an episode of
It Takes a Thief
and thought he was a terrific actor, so I wasn’t hard to convince.

After we did the pilot for
Hart to Hart,
which featured Jill St. John and Roddy McDowall, Natalie and I went to Paris for a couple of weeks of pure vacation. While we were there, we ran into Mart Crowley, who wasn’t doing much of anything.
Hart to Hart
had been quickly sold to ABC, and we were going to be shooting in a couple of months. The first scripts had arrived and weren’t anything to brag about, so Natalie told Mart we needed him to come back to L.A. and rewrite the scripts. Natalie had always been Mart’s good luck charm; she had paid for the first six months of therapy that led to Mart writing
The Boys in the Band
. Thankfully, Mart agreed to come back to America and go to work for me. With Mart and Tom Mankiewicz both working on the show, we had both a creative and a family nucleus.

Hart to Hart
went on the air in August 1979, and Natalie made an unbilled guest appearance in the pilot. It was a scene in a movie studio, and in a delightful little in-joke, she was costumed to look like Vivien Leigh in
Gone with the Wind.
She even threw a line at Lionel Stander. Actually, she wasn’t unbilled; she was listed in the credits as “Natasha Gurdin”—her real name.

From the beginning, the show jelled. After a couple of months on Saturday nights, ABC moved us to Tuesday nights, where we stayed for the rest of our five-year run. Stefanie proved to be a tremendous contributor to the show and a total pro—we meshed immediately. And then there was Lionel Stander.

During the un-American activities madness of the late ’40s and early ’50s, Lionel had distinguished himself by appearing in front of the House committee and basically telling them to go fuck themselves. Not only did he not inform on anybody, but he didn’t equivocate, didn’t take the Fifth Amendment, and didn’t pretend not to remember anything. As far as Lionel was concerned, his politics were nobody’s damn business, period. Then this immensely composed, self-sufficient man went to Europe and worked as a stockbroker on those occasions when acting jobs got scarce.

Twenty-five years later, he hadn’t changed. He was a very tough-minded man and firm in his convictions, which remained proudly left-wing. He was very bright, loved to talk politics, and was the most amazing actor I ever worked with in that he never, ever missed a line. Well, he did blow a line one time. The scene had him exiting an airplane, and he stumbled over his line, and everybody was so shocked that we put this perfectly innocuous flub on the outtake reel.

Hart to Hart
didn’t succeed because of the plots. Television is all about characters you either have affection for or are fascinated by, and our show succeeded because of the relationship between Stefanie and myself and because it was a stealth
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
show. Jonathan and Jennifer Hart were rich and successful, never stopped adoring each other, and got to roam the world solving mysteries that baffled less enlightened souls like, for instance, the police. Who wouldn’t want to live that life? It was straight wish fulfillment, and I am continuously pleased by the number of women who tell me that Jonathan and Jennifer Hart embodied their ideal of the perfect marriage.

Just about the time I started work on
Hart to Hart,
Natalie did a pretty good comedy with George Segal called
The Last Married Couple in America.
After Natalie finished her movie, we took off for Russia. NBC was televising the 1980 Moscow Olympics, and Bill Storke was producing a documentary about the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, to be shown in conjunction with the network’s coverage of the sporting events. Bill asked Natalie and Peter Ustinov to host the show. Natalie had always wanted to visit the land of her ancestors, and Bill would be there to shepherd us through, so she leaped at the chance. I thought it was a great idea as well, so we made the trip as a couple.

This was pre-
glasnost,
so the country and its greatest museum were far less accessible than they are now; there was a real sense of discovery in getting a close-up view of an unparalleled collection of art. Unfortunately, Russia itself proved to be a disappointment. We properly assumed our hotel room was bugged, so we either didn’t speak or talked in a code we worked out. We also had trouble getting long-distance calls through to check on the girls, which raised our anxiety level. Moreover, it was obvious that the calls we did get through were tapped.

Finally, Natalie put a call through to the Minister of Culture in Moscow and told him that she was about to leave the country unless the wiretaps on our phone were lifted. End of problem.

Natalie was recognized occasionally on the streets, and the people were delighted that she spoke Russian like a native, although it seemed like the only films of hers that had been distributed in Russia were
Rebel Without a Cause
and
West Side Story
.

We both noticed that Russian women start out exotically beautiful, but something happens as they approach middle age—everything falls, including their spirits. They get dumpy. Natalie thought that on some level they gave up as they realized that their dreams wouldn’t be realized. For Natalie, the biggest disappointment was the food; the service in the restaurants was terrible no matter how much I tipped them, and Natalie much preferred Mud’s version of Russian dishes to the actual Russian dishes. After three weeks, we headed back to America. She was very glad she did the show, but she never had any interest in going back to Russia.

F
or my fiftieth birthday—if you’re keeping score, the date was February 10, 1980—Natalie threw a surprise party for me at the Bistro in Beverly Hills. She had told me it was just going to be a small dinner with a few friends, but the few friends turned out to include dozens of the people I loved most: Mother Mitchum, Gene Kelly, Stefanie Powers, Suzanne Pleshette, Claire Trevor, Esther Williams, Fernando Lamas, and Henry Fonda. As if all that wasn’t enough, she also gave me a silver-gray Mercedes-Benz. She had spent weeks organizing the party, and I was totally stunned. It was typical of the kind of grand, loving gesture that was her special province.

I
n November 1980, Natalie’s father died. Nick had been an alcoholic for years and endured cardiac trouble for the last fifteen years of his life. It wasn’t a surprise, but it was still a shock. You always think you’re ready when a parent dies after a lingering illness, but you never are.

With Nick’s death, Mud became more of a part of our lives, which created problems. In addition to being paranoid, Mud had a Machiavellian side left over from her days as a stage mother that she couldn’t shut off, even when it was completely inappropriate. Despite her limited access to the children, she encouraged the girls to think about becoming child actresses, an idea neither Natalie nor I were in favor of, and she started intrigues in which she would play off one granddaughter against another, or—worse—against us.

It was maddening to have your parental authority undermined, not to mention counterproductive, and Natalie ended up by further restricting Mud’s access to her granddaughters.

At the end of 1980, we had our usual New Year’s Eve party. We’d given parties the first time we were married, of course, but the second time around the parties were easier and always wonderful times. The Canon Drive house was perfect for entertaining, both because of the house and because of the back garden. The parties were formal in the sense that they were black-tie affairs that recalled the old days of the balls and parties of the Hollywood I’d known as a young man. But they were informal in mood because only close friends were invited: Tom Mankiewicz, Mart Crowley, Howard Jeffrey, Guy McElwaine, George Segal, John and Linda Foreman, Greg and Veronique Peck, Gil Cates and his wife. Solid people.

In other words, there was no professional component to the parties, and no press photographs were ever taken. The guests would arrive, and then Natalie would come down the staircase, everybody would turn to her, and that’s when the laughter began. There was always a sit-down dinner with live music, usually with my friend Jimmy Rowles, the great jazz pianist. Near midnight, we’d turn on the TV and watch the ball on Times Square come down. And after the New Year had come in, the party would continue for a long time.

For me, the key moment of the evening was always when Natalie and I toasted each other. That night, I told her, “I love you, my darling Natalie. You take my breath away.”

A
fter Natalie gave birth to Courtney on March 9, 1974, she was basically a homebody. My career was back on the upswing, so I was perfectly happy to spend most of my time working while Natalie spent her time with the kids. But after a while, she started to get restless, partially, she thought, because it seemed like the kids needed her less.

But that wasn’t the real reason. Ultimately, acting was Natalie’s identity. Beyond that, it was her security; if she wasn’t interested in working, fine, but if she wanted to be working and wasn’t, there was a sense of discontent. Although she was terribly proud of her girls, she had an underlying sense that acting was her real accomplishment—it was what she did best. Actually, she had great skills in both areas, but because actors discover their identity while they’re still very young, it’s not easily replaced with something else. As an actor myself, I understood.

When the restlessness hit, it became a question of what was going to come off the plate to make room for working. Her primary devotion was to Natasha, Katie, Courtney, and me. Altering that equation could build up guilt factors, especially if she wasn’t as devoted to the project as she was to her family. In which case, the logical question was, “Then why do it?”