Pieces of My Heart (4 page)

MGM took one look at my test and gave the part to John Erickson. I don’t blame them; I was just too green. A little while later I received a wonderful letter from Zinnemann, telling me that although I wasn’t right for this particular part, I was a genuine talent and I had a wonderful career ahead of me. In the sixty years since, I have never been turned down with more class. It was completely misleading in that I thought Zinnemann’s graciousness and style were a nominal part of the movie business. It took me a couple of years to figure out that Zinnemann was one of the few people of that era who would show such kindness to a young actor. It was Fred Zinnemann who taught me that the mark of a gentleman is how he treats people he doesn’t have to be nice to.

Fade-out.

Fade-in.

Forty years later, Jill St. John and I were in London, and Fred Zinnemann was getting an award at the National Film Theater. We went over for the evening, and not only did he remember my test, but he remembered the letter! Fred Zinnemann was a great director, of course, but what is more important is that he was also a great man.

It was around the time I was testing for
Teresa
that I met Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, who was an agent at Charles Feldman’s Famous Artists before he became a producer and achieved deserved fame and fortune with the James Bond films. Cubby came up through the trenches. Before he was an agent and producer, he sold jewelry, he sold Christmas trees, he worked in a studio mailroom, and he was an assistant director at Fox.

To know Cubby was to be his friend, and it was Cubby who took me around to some of the studios. I was with Cubby when we were both thrown off the MGM lot. It seemed that Charlie Feldman had begun an affair with an actress in whom a certain MGM executive had a deep and sustaining personal interest, so Feldman and everybody who worked with him were deemed persona non grata.

Despite that faux pas, Cubby and I hit it off, and for years I was invited to his house for Christmas and New Year’s. He and his wife opened their arms to me, and when Cubby’s health began to fail, I made sure to return the favor. I visited him regularly, as a great many people did. When he died, I gave the eulogy at his funeral—a small favor for a man who had done so much for me—and many others.

After testing for
Teresa,
I went over to Fox. I had known the Zanuck kids—Susan, Richard, and Darrylin—socially, not that that would cut me any slack when it came to business. I made my test, and Darryl Zanuck looked at it the next night—Darryl always worked a late day. He ran the footage and said, “I don’t think so. Too inexperienced.”

But Helena Sorrell, the studio’s drama coach, asked him to run the test one more time. “Look at his smile,” she said. “I think I can do something with that smile.”

So Darryl ran the test again, sighed, and said, “Okay, Helena, if you say so. We’ll give him six months.” I signed a standard studio contract that started at $75 a week. I was eighteen years old, and since I was still a minor, part of my salary was withheld under the Coogan law. There were options—all on the studio’s side—every six months, with a slight salary boost with each option that was picked up. My $75 a week would become $125 a week, for instance. If you were picked up for an entire year, you were guaranteed forty weeks of salary out of fifty-two, but the studio could put you on furlough anytime it wanted, during which time you weren’t paid.

During the forty weeks you were being paid, you could be making movies, of course, but the studio could basically tell you to do anything else it wanted as well—publicity tours, testing with other actors, whatever the studio chose. Since we were being paid, nobody much minded.

The fact that I could make $75 a week caddying at Bel-Air, or selling cars, or working for my father didn’t bother me at all. Far more important than the money was the fact that the contract got me inside a movie studio. The contract didn’t arrive quite within the year my father had given me, but it was close enough so that I didn’t have to go back to being the back half of “Robert J. Wagner and Son,” which was all I cared about.

Twelve years later, Fox was paying me $5,000 a week.

Susan Hayward helping a very eager and very inexperienced actor through his paces in
With a Song in My Heart
. (
WITH A SONG IN MY HEART
© 1952 TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX
)

T
wentieth Century Fox was a studio by, for, and about Darryl Francis Zanuck. It had been formed in 1935 when Zanuck and his friend and business associate Joseph Schenck merged their Twentieth Century productions with the moribund Fox organization. Before that, Darryl had been head of production at Warner Bros. until he realized it was primarily a family business and somebody named Zanuck could never be a member of the family.

In 1933 Darryl went independent with Twentieth Century, which released through United Artists and had a great success. But Twentieth Century had to rent studio facilities, which cost a lot of money, so when the Fox organization became available, acquiring it solved both companies’ problems: Darryl got a first-rate studio complex, and Fox got a production head who understood how to make movies people wanted to see.

Physically, Darryl was a small man, and like many small men, he was commanding and very competitive. He had to be good at everything he did, so when Darryl played polo or croquet, it was always at a very high level. Luckily, he also had a very good sense of humor and was fond of practical jokes, a trait I understand he picked up from Douglas Fairbanks Sr., who had mentored him when he was a young man.

Zanuck staffed his studio with top-notch people throughout the departments. The head of publicity was a wonderful man named Harry Brand, who looked just like what you’d imagine a studio publicity chief would look like. Harry usually wore a fedora and was, as they say, heavily connected. He had an in with every police department in California, knew everything that was going on, and could fix anything that needed to be fixed.

In due time, Harry would fix a couple of things for me. Once, I was going into an electrical supply store in Westwood when a guy picked a fight with me. He pushed me, and I foolishly responded by ramming his head into the grille of my car. Technically, this was a felony assault.

Harry took care of it.

Then there were a couple of incidents involving women playing the old badger game. One go-round in a hotel room and they promptly screamed, “I’m pregnant!” even though it was never true.

Harry took care of it.

Zanuck was an incredibly dynamic man who could be seen going up the studio street to the studio café every day for lunch. He would be swinging his polo mallet and behind him would be a retinue of producers, editors, and his French teacher. A few years before I got there, his right-hand man had been William Goetz, Louis B. Mayer’s son-in-law, who brought with him an investment in the studio from Mayer. Darryl took the money, but he never respected Goetz.

When Darryl went into the service during World War II, he handed management of the studio over to Goetz. While Darryl was gone, Goetz never missed a chance to run him down verbally. Darryl heard about this, of course, and when Darryl returned, he and Goetz got into an argument—all the moguls were tremendously competitive and regularly engaged in knockdown, drag-out fights with each other. Darryl finally told Goetz he could hire a valet to do his job. Goetz was offended and left the studio to found International Pictures, which later merged with Universal.

For a replacement, Darryl hired Lou Schreiber, who had been Al Jolson’s valet. He hadn’t been kidding: he literally hired a valet, and nothing much changed around the Fox lot.

I soon heard about Darryl’s idiosyncrasies. Every day at four o’clock the atmosphere around the front office became noticeably hushed as Darryl was serviced by one of the contract girls. Darryl was notorious for his proclivities with women, and he had a bad habit of becoming obsessed by his mistresses; he couldn’t take sex lightly and always had to try to elevate his girls to a level where they would be more than glorified call girls, worthy of Darryl F. Zanuck. Not all of them were anywhere near as interested in a starring career as Darryl was—his ego was more involved than theirs was.

I knew Darryl’s children, and they always seemed to adore him. But Darryl was not the sort of man to play catch with his kids—none of those men were. Their identity consisted of their careers and their responsibilities. Think about those responsibilities for a moment: matching up stories—thirty a year!—with the right writers, the right actors, and the right directors; placating stockholders; and wondering if television was going to obliterate the movie business and trying to make pictures accordingly. Darryl really only saw the kids on the weekends, and there wasn’t a lot of weekend—Darryl worked a six-day week.

When I drove onto the Fox lot as a contract player, I made sure not to have any airs about me. I wasn’t trying to be something I wasn’t. I was very anxious to find out why some people became stars and other people didn’t; I wanted to learn what to wear, how to act, what kind of image to project. I was very analytical about it. I was there every morning whether I was working or not, eager and ready to learn. My life was finally opening before me, and I was smart enough to know it.

I now had my own apartment, at 1298 Devon, off Beverly Glen between Wilshire and Santa Monica. It was a terrific little one-bedroom apartment that I decorated myself and, even better, was paying for myself: $125 a month.

Helena Sorrell began working with me. She would choose scenes, mostly from movies, not plays, because the scenes were shorter, thus easier. After a while we’d get the scene on its feet with an actress and rehearse the material, and we’d end up using it for a test. I was always testing with somebody or another, for some part or another. I tested with everybody and for anything. With actresses, with actors, for westerns, for gangster pictures, you name it. Sometimes I was in a test with another young actor the studio was interested in, so all you could see was the back of my head, but I didn’t care. I was in the movies.

I had motivation in front of me and in back of me. It wasn’t just that I wanted to be a movie star; I didn’t want to have to go back to my father with my tail between my legs. Because I wanted it so badly, I was pretty nervous and carried a lot of anxiety. I got to know the writers, I got to know the directors, and I made it my business to know which scripts were moving toward production and which were moving toward the shelf. Aside from all this, I could fit into the old wardrobes of Tyrone Power and Mark Stevens, which helped.

Helena regarded me as her personal project, and she used every trick in her book to get me up to speed. For a long time my voice was a problem—it was too high-pitched and I knew it, so I would throw lines away or mumble. Helena had to pretend to be hard of hearing to get me to speak up. For extra voice coaching, I went to see Gertrude Fogler at MGM. Gertrude had been at MGM for the twenty years since talkies arrived and, beginning with John Gilbert, had worked with practically every actor on the lot. She was an excellent voice teacher, which was good—I was paying for her lessons myself.

When I wasn’t working with Helena or Gertrude, I was in the wardrobe department, the sound department, the camera department, the set department. I was on the stages, watching people act. Hell, I even watched the studio cops. My basic attitude was that anything they asked me to do wasn’t a job but an opportunity. I was working in a movie studio, and I was determined to find out how all those gears meshed.

I had enthusiasm and a lot of admiration for the people at Fox, and I made sure that everybody knew it. I was amazed at how a movie came together, and to be completely honest, that amazement has never left me. I’ve made eighty movies and hundreds of hours of television, and I sit in a theater to watch a movie and I’m still thrilled.

Shortly after I was signed at Fox, the process of casting the two leads for
Teresa
became a story. Edwin Schallert had been the lead movie critic for the
Los Angeles Times
since the silent days, and MGM showed him a batch of the tests for
Teresa
. He came out with a story headlined “Robert Wagner a Dark Horse for ‘Teresa’ Part.” Evidently, Schallert thought I was a lot better than MGM did.

Of course, the people at Fox found this very disturbing, as I had just been signed by them, and here I was almost getting a part at MGM. But it had a very positive effect, because the news that Fred Zinnemann had thought enough of me to direct my test got me in to see Lewis Milestone, another very fine director, who was putting a picture together called
Halls of Montezuma
—the first time I got billing in a movie.

I played a private, which was appropriate. When I met Milly—Milestone’s nickname—I was very wide-eyed. “You made
All Quiet on the Western Front
!” I said. “That was a long time ago!” He wasn’t too thrilled and said, “It wasn’t that long ago.” Actually, the movie had been made only twenty years before, but I was only twenty myself, so I pled ignorance.

The script was about the Marines in the Pacific campaign of World War II, and it wasn’t much, but the cast was truly excellent: Richard Widmark, Jack Palance, Karl Malden, Marty Milner, Neville Brand, Richard Boone, and Jack Webb. Widmark was a terrific guy—years later I bought some land from him, so we had adjacent ranches where we raised horses—while Karl and I began a friendship that has lasted for nearly sixty years. Years later, Marty Milner and I went to see Milly on one of his birthdays, and he told us he should have been smarter about his contract and gotten 10 percent of the cast’s future income—he would never have had to worry about money again.

After that, I was a Navy underwater demolition swimmer in
The Frogmen,
Claudette Colbert’s junior executive son-in-law in
Let’s Make It Legal,
a doomed Marine in John Ford’s
What Price Glory?
and the inventor of the Sousaphone in
Stars and Stripes Forever
. These were all small supporting parts, but they were all well-chosen supporting parts—showy, with highly dramatic or emotional moments attached to each character.

Let’s Make It Legal
was one of the early films of Marilyn Monroe, but she wasn’t the problem. I was. I was so green that I had to do forty-nine takes of one shot—a number I’ve never forgotten. Not all of it was my fault—Claudette Colbert went up a couple of times, the camera broke down, and the dialogue got changed—but most of it was my fault. Forty-nine takes. Jesus!

Claudette Colbert could have blown me right out of the water for being such an amateur, or she could have insisted that I be replaced, but she didn’t. I found her a very caring, giving woman, with a lot of guts and a very special aura around her—a great star. Over forty years later she came to see me when I did
Love Letters
in the theater, and I felt honored by her presence.

It would be fair to say that I wasn’t very good in this period, but I was diligent. I was also cooperative and I had enthusiasm, which is probably all that made me bearable to some of the pros I was working with. Now, when I look back at some of those early performances, I cringe a little and silently thank the public and the other actors for their patience.

Technically,
Let’s Make It Legal
wasn’t the only time I worked with Marilyn. She had tested with me for several parts that she got, and I think I was in the test that got her a contract at Fox. I adored her. At this point in her career she wasn’t troublesome at all. She knew her lines cold, was terribly sweet and eager to please, and I loved her. My God, we were so young! I took her out a couple of times, but nothing happened. There were a lot of people in line before me, if you get my drift. It was a tricky situation, but she was a darling, and I thought the world of her.

Then Darryl sent me the script for a movie called
With a Song in My Heart,
a Susan Hayward picture about the singer Jane Froman, who had been terribly hurt in a plane crash but revived her career anyway. I had precisely two scenes and a couple of lines of dialogue. In the first scene, I meet Froman in a nightclub, and she brings me up on the little mobile stage she used after her accident and sings two songs to me: “Embraceable You” and “Tea for Two.” My response, as indicated by the script, was to smile and look bashful. Well, that was certainly in my skill set.

The second scene took place after I’d gone off to war and become a victim of shell shock. Although my character hasn’t said ten words since he got hurt, I manage to tell Hayward/Froman I’d like to hear her sing “I’ll Walk Alone.” Bingo! I’m cured.

I’m embarrassed to say that I read the script and didn’t see it. “This isn’t very much,” I told Darryl. And with great patience, he told me, “This will be the biggest break you will have had in your career. You will be on the screen for three minutes. When people come out of the theater, they will want to know who you are.”

That was the last time I questioned Darryl Zanuck’s judgment about the movies. I was too young to realize that Darryl was placing me, sculpting moments for me that would compel the audience’s attention. He was taking very good care of me.

When we shot my scenes for
With a Song in My Heart,
Walter Lang directed me almost exactly as he would have directed Rin-Tin-Tin. Let me explain: Dogs have only a couple of expressions—if you’re making a movie and you want a dog to look intense and his ears to spring up, you show him a cat. Well, Walter wanted me to cry, and he didn’t want me to fake it, so when he directed the scene, he was crying. And even if the dramatic construction of the movie was slightly corny, that moment—what passed between Susan and Walter and myself—was absolutely true.

When Susan was playing to me, I responded automatically. I didn’t have the craft to produce tears on my own, and Susan realized it. She was completely focused on me, giving me what I needed to give her back an emotional reaction. And when she sang “I’ll Walk Alone,” I cried. It was as if I were a child actor, which, in a very real sense, I was. And after the scene was over, it was Susan who fell apart. She was sensational in the picture, and Watson Webb, who would become a good friend, edited my scenes beautifully.