Infamous Players

When Charles Bluhdorn stormed into London shortly after acquiring Paramount, one of the first producers who courted him was a shrewd young Brit named Michael Deeley. A business partner of the actor Stanley Baker, Deeley had heard from an agent friend that Bluhdorn had an avid appetite for deals, and the aptly named Deeley had an expertise in formulating them. Deeley was experiencing modest success with a low-budget film called Robbery, which Stanley Baker starred in, and hence thought it a good idea to pitch Bluhdorn on other projects that would offer low financial exposure.

No sooner had Deeley launched his presentation but Bluhdorn cut him off. Projects of this sort were of no interest to him, Bluhdorn barked, his hand gesturing dismissively. Bluhdorn had just completed a study of the film business which, he said, had demonstrated clearly that big-budget movies outgrossed low-budget ones throughout the history of the movie business. “You spend the most, you make the most,” ranted the Gulf & Western chairman. “Research proves it, but Hollywood doesn’t get the message. I’m going to run Paramount like a business,” he said.

Deeley went away a bit intimidated. His own experience in the British film industry, limited though it was, had seemed to prove the opposite of Bluhdorn’s theory. Respected filmmakers including Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz, and Lindsay Anderson had recently formed a company called Woodfall and had started to do well with movies like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Look Back in Anger, and even Tom Jones (the latter became a hit on a budget of only $1.2 million), but Bluhdorn discarded all this as a local British phenomenon.

In the coming months, Bluhdorn put his ideas into action as Deeley, along with many others in the industry, watched with a mixture of envy and astonishment. A lavish musical called Paint Your Wagon was launched by Paramount, starring Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin. Yet another semimusical, Darling Lili, starring Julie Andrews and set against the background of World War I, was also given the green light. Sean Connery and Richard Harris got the go-ahead to make an expensive film called The Molly Maguires, which focused on a union dispute in the coal mines of Pennsylvania.

Deeley was impressed. Big bucks were being spent, as Bluhdorn had promised. But Deeley was nonetheless skeptical about the results. The subjects, he felt, seemed hopelessly old-fashioned and anachronistic. Yet, if Bluhdorn wanted and favored this sort of material, he and Stanley Baker owned a musty script called Where’s Jack?, which might pass the Bluhdorn test.

Deeley, Baker, and his agent, Martin Baum, marched on Bluhdorn’s office in New York to make their pitch. The chairman was impressed, as always, to meet a movie star. Baum, the high-powered agent, told Bluhdorn that Where’s Jack? would be a “can’t miss”—its director, James Clavell, had just completed a modest hit called To Sir with Love; its coproducers, Deeley and Baker, had just finished Zulu, also a success; and its star would be Tommy Steele.

The mention of Steele would have brought most Hollywood meetings to a close. A young musical star in London, Steele was very much a local celeb—and his appeal was very British. His newest movie, Half a Sixpence, was about to be released amid negative advance reports, but Bluhdorn was in a dealmaking mood, and he gave an exuberant “yes” to the pitch.

Martin Davis, Bluhdorn’s number two, had sat in on the presentation, and he looked unhappy. Moving to his boss’s desk, Davis said, “Charlie, we’d agreed not to commit to a deal until we’d read the script.”

Deeley and Baker exchanged a befuddled glance. They’d managed to make a Paramount deal even without a star like Julie Andrews. Indeed, the only element of Bluhdorn’s favored formula they could meet was the budget: the two Brits knew that Where’s Jack? would cost far more than the typical British movie, and, indeed, far more than it deserved.

Even as Where’s Jack? rolled into production, Deeley did a Bluhdorn runaround by quietly submitting a project to me called The Italian Job. Unlike Where’s Jack?, this film had a very hip script, a tight budget, and starred a young actor who, unlike Tommy Steele, had true breakout potential. His name was Michael Caine. Neither Deeley nor I let Bluhdorn know about The Italian Job until it was well into preproduction. By that time, the reviews of Where’s Jack? deemed it disastrous, and Bluhdorn’s theory about megafilms already was proving self-destructive.

In retrospect, Bluhdorn’s “research” on movie financing had a germ of validity. It presaged the blockbuster mentality that began to overtake Hollywood in the 1980s, when films like Jaws and Star Wars opened up a whole new audience to buy not only theater tickets but also videos of favorite films. By the year 2000, the studios were reserving a major portion of their development budgets for so-called tent-pole or franchise films—mostly sequels or prequels, many based on comic book characters or video games.

But to Bluhdorn, films like the Batman series or Steven Spielberg’s science-fiction projects were far beyond his field of vision. A European by birth and an outsider by instinct, the chairman of Gulf & Western was a sucker for Hollywood glitz. To him, Hollywood musicals were box office gold, even though the studio that invented them, MGM, had effectively gone out of business by the time Bluhdorn bought Paramount. Having spent his years with businessmen who knew about automobile bumpers or zinc mining, he was hungry now to surround himself with the glamour that Hollywood represented to him.

Bob Evans did not share this obsession. As much as he himself reveled in the legends of Old Hollywood, Evans believed that musicals now represented an expensive anachronism. The mood of the audience was shifting, and while no one was smart enough to predict the direction of this shift, this was not a moment to try to re-create the past.

Four months after moving into his new job, however, Evans got a tip from an old friend, an agent named Charlie Feldman. Columbia Pictures was having trouble securing the financing for Funny Girl, a filmed version of the runaway Broadway hit. Its producer, the mercurial Ray Stark, had a brief window of time in which he could take the project to another studio. “This is your chance to steal a hot project,” Feldman advised. Evans immediately snapped to attention: Securing Funny Girl would give Bluhdorn the musical that he craved; at the same time, Funny Girl’s brash young star, Barbra Streisand, was the celebrity of the moment. Young audiences would respond to her.

Several problems confronted him, however. First, Evans would have to elicit Bluhdorn’s green light, and there was only a forty-eight-hour window during which the project could be wrested from Columbia.

The other problem was Ray Stark, the producer who had discovered Streisand and was locked into Funny Girl. Charlie Bluhdorn felt Stark had suckered him into financing the disastrous venture Is Paris Burning? Hollywood had laughed at him for impulsively funding a movie no one else wanted. Stark had exploited Charlie’s virginity in the film world.

Evans knew he had to play his hand carefully with his boss, to choose the right moment, stressing the musical angle first then sliding into the Stark problem. On a project of this size, he would need not only Bluhdorn’s acquiescence but also his enthusiasm.

“Charlie takes a bath every Sunday afternoon—that’s the only time he turns off the phones,” Evans told me. “I have got to nail him just before his bath so he can think about it in a relaxed setting.”

I was present at Evans’s house that Sunday as he placed his call. He talked for several minutes, spelling out the various elements. When he put down the receiver, he drew a deep breath.

“OK, I think it went well,” Evans told me. “Charlie was talking in his Sunday voice. He wasn’t yelling. I think he will go for it. He said he wanted the afternoon to think it over.”

What neither of us knew was that Bluhdorn decided to forgo his ritual bath that afternoon. Having been criticized for acting hastily on Is Paris Burning?, the chairman opted to do some crash homework. One by one, he started phoning Paramount offices around the world—subdistributors and marketing specialists—soliciting their opinions on a Streisand musical. The “troops” were startled to hear from him.

Later that evening, Bluhdorn called Evans back with the upshot of his impromptu survey. “They don’t like her,” Bluhdorn announced. “They don’t like her in London or Johannesburg or Hong Kong or Rio. Maybe with Shirley MacLaine, they would like Funny Girl, but not with the Jewess.”

The word “Jewess” did not resonate pleasantly with Evans, especially given Bluhdorn’s guttural German accent, but he was not going to get drawn into a fight over ethnicity. A bigger principle was at stake. Paramount’s distributors, he felt, had hardly distinguished themselves in selling the studio’s pictures around the world. Would they now be given a veto over future movies?

The argument raged for roughly twenty minutes over the telephone before Bluhdorn angrily brought it to a close. “You’ve been in your job for four months, not four years,” he shouted. “I’m not going to go against the advice of all my distributors. They don’t want a Streisand movie and that’s the end of it.”

Evans understood that he had lost that battle, but what he could not know was the ultimate price the studio would pay. Ray Stark would soon manage to put his financing back together and get his musical into production at Columbia, where it would become a major hit. Its success left Bluhdorn feeling frustrated and out-maneuvered. He had lost his chance for a hit musical, but that only re-doubled his determination. “The audience wants musicals,” he reiterated to me during one of his visits to the studio. “I know what the audience wants.”

Determined to sign a musical star who was bigger than Streisand, Bluhdorn was an easy target when a well-known filmmaker named Blake Edwards flew to New York to pitch his movie titled Darling Lili. It was a romantic comedy set during the Great War, and Edwards admitted the screenplay was still a work-in-progress. But his wife, Julie Andrews, would star in it, several songs would be added, and it would, he promised, become a worldwide hit.

What Edwards chose not to mention was that the script had already been seen by several studios, including ours. To my taste, the script was neither funny nor romantic. I didn’t get it and had told Edwards’s agent my opinion.

Then there was also the matter of the budget. A final estimate, Edwards said, would await completion of a rewrite and the addition of the songs. Ireland would be an ideal location—its prices were reasonable and it was far removed from distractions, he added.

When Charlie Bluhdorn laid out the project to Evans and me he did so in near ecstatic terms, and was visibly exasperated by our cool response. To him, the equation for success was self-evident. Julie Andrews meant Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. Blake Edwards was the man who gave us Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And Edwards and Julie had recently been married; this movie represented their first time working together. It was a sort of wedding present to his wife. How could it go wrong?

Much later, Charlie Bluhdorn gave me a more personal insight as to why he was drawn to Darling Lili. “Yvette told me her big ambition was to have dinner with Julie Andrews,” he confided. Bluhdorn’s rather stately and steely French-born wife, Yvette, was not a movie buff and normally kept her distance from her husband’s frenzied business activities, but she venerated Andrews’s work on the stage. To both Bluhdorns, Julie Andrews represented the ultimate superstar, and Yvette’s demands would have to be honored.

As things turned out, Paramount’s flirtation with Julie Andrews and her husband would turn out to be a costly one. And Yvette never even got to have dinner with Julie. Almost immediately after getting into business together, Charlie Bluhdorn and Blake Edwards were at each other’s throat.

As I traveled between Paramount’s New York and Hollywood offices during the weeks when Darling Lili was coming together, I felt that I was working for two completely different companies. Bluhdorn had mesmerized the troops in New York into believing that the studio had finally found a superstar vehicle that would bring revenues and celebrity to the company. The marketing and distribution teams had apparently bought into it.

The attitude toward Darling Lili at the studio was the mirror opposite. “Evans won’t even listen when I raise the subject of cost. He walks out of the room. And the room is his own office,” complained Jack Ballard, who had recently become Paramount’s head of physical production.

As Ballard started reeling off his list of “hot buttons” on the project, I sensed that this tough, dome-headed production executive was close to desperation. This was a movie with complex song-and-dance numbers that would be staged on location in Europe. There would also be aerial dogfights featuring vintage aircraft. And it all would take place during World War I, which meant period wardrobe for vast numbers of extras.

And if shooting began to lag, what controls could the studio exercise? With a husband directing his wife, the studio would have no points of leverage, Ballard pointed out. And the couple had even chosen their own producer—another relative—so there would be no ranking studio representative on the picture.

When Edwards’s team finally submitted a budget, it totaled a mere $12 million, well below studio estimates, Ballard said. (In point of fact, the final budget would total three times Edwards’s estimate.)

I understood Ballard’s anxiety. No matter what warnings he would send forth, he’d still take the heat when the cost overruns starting coming in. If Darling Lili became a mess, it would ultimately be Ballard’s mess. Those were the studio ground rules—he understood them all too well.

While I empathized with Ballard’s panic, my problems with Darling Lili went beyond its production issues. Even when I described the story to my staff, I had trouble keeping a straight face.

Julie Andrews would play a German spy whose assigned mission was to seduce an American squadron commander. And the perfect actor for this role, Edwards had decided, was none other than Rock Hudson.

I found myself gasping over his casting epiphany. Where was the chemistry? Julie Andrews had been superbly effective as a governess in Mary Poppins, but her on-screen efforts at romance had never clicked. As an accomplished stage actress, she always seemed to keep a distance between her and the audience.

As for Rock Hudson, there were suspicions about his sexuality even in the late sixties. He never denied that he was gay, but he also went along with the official studio propaganda that he was dating various young actresses. I once found myself sitting next to him on a Pacific Southwest Airlines flight to San Francisco, and he cheerfully confided that he was going to “the baths.” At the time, I wasn’t even sure what “the baths” connoted. But, again, while Hudson was a friendly and scrupulously polite man, his “sex scenes” on camera registered zero on the passion index.

Within the first two weeks of principal photography, the predictable production problems began to loom. Edwards and Andrews arrived in Paris to shoot an elaborate scene at a railway station only to discover the city ablaze in rioting. Paris, like many U.S. cities, was caught up in sixties antiwar insurrection. The company quietly shifted to Brussels, where the scenes were shot at double the cost.

The next move was supposed to be to Ireland, but because of a production mix-up, no accommodations for director and star had been prearranged. Edwards’s producer charged that the Paramount production team was getting in their way. The Paramount folks responded that no one was running the show on Edwards’s side. Edwards himself was technically the producer, but his uncle, a gentle white-maned man named Owen Crump, was supposed to fulfill these duties. He in turn looked to a neophyte thirty-year-old associate producer named Ken Wales to hammer out the production details.

Wales knew he owed his career to his boss, Edwards, a man with expensive tastes. Panicked that no accommodations had been negotiated, he leased a thousand-acre estate that had long been the residence of one of Ireland’s wealthiest families. The sumptuous mansion was so vast it had a pipe organ in its grand salon.

When Julie Andrews saw it, she was ecstatic. There were even horses available for her to ride over the vast rolling acreage, and there were myriad rooms for guests.

Though the accommodations were felicitous, production delays continued to mount. A small theater in Dublin had been booked for the dance numbers, but its stage was too small to hold Edwards’s grand numbers. The initial scenes of an aerial dogfight went well, but suddenly the sun came out, the clouds disappeared, and Edwards and his cameraman, Russell Harlan, were cursing that they were stuck with a placid Southern California sky that didn’t match the first setups.

Then there was the inevitable Julie-and-Rock problem. The script called for an avid Julie Andrews to arouse passion in the stolid, dedicated American squadron leader, but, despite repeated takes and varied camera angles, the relationship between the two performers remained tepid.

Bob Evans was so irritated by the movie that after the first couple of days he abjured the ritual of dailies completely, and the rest of the executive staff followed suit. One day Jack Ballard joined me in the screening room, and he burst out laughing in the midst of a love scene. “I may never make love again,” Ballard blurted.

I found myself in Evans’s office later that day and, while I knew he hated Darling Lili stories, I could not restrain myself. “I was at a party last night when naked people were spilling out of the hot tub,” I said. “Everyone in this town seems to be fucking everyone else, and we’re making maybe the unsexiest movie in the history of Hollywood.”

The other individual in our company who was not watching dailies was Charlie Bluhdorn, but he had been briefed about the production delays, and his famous temper was steadily rising. Two or three times a day he would call Evans or Ballard to vent his frustration. “If you think you can control Blake Edwards, why don’t you go see him in person?” Evans finally demanded one day. He knew Bluhdorn hated confronting artists; but one morning Evans got a call from his boss in mid-flight, headed for Rome. On impulse Bluhdorn had diverted to Ireland. The time had come for a confrontation.

When Ken Wales got the call, he all but dropped the phone. This would be the worst possible moment for a Bluhdorn visit. Edwards had shot almost nothing for four days waiting for the clouds to return. The crew was playing soccer on the front lawn. Edwards’s daughter had broken her collarbone after falling from a horse, and Edwards was spending time with her while Julie was riding in the countryside with friends.

I’d actually been planning a visit to the set in Ireland. I knew Bluhdorn’s visit would last only a few hours, but perhaps if I were on hand the following day I could comfort the survivors.

It was midafternoon when Charlie Bluhdorn arrived on the set of Darling Lili outside Dublin. He saw the crew kicking around a soccer ball. He saw the cameras standing idle. He saw no sign of his director—indeed no one was at hand except a stumbling Wales, trying to make excuses.

Sensing a major confrontation, Bluhdorn phoned his assistant in New York, instructing her to book a suite at the best hotel in Dublin she could find. She came back on the line to report that Darling Lili had booked every room and, further, that Rock Hudson had reserved the grand ballroom that evening for a major party.

Bluhdorn jumped back into his limousine and demanded to be taken to the Blake-and-Julie estate. When he approached the baronial spread, his anger became a full-fledged tantrum. Emerging from his limo, Bluhdorn encountered Owen Crump, and he didn’t stop to shake hands. “Why the fuck is everyone standing around?” he roared. “Why are you living in the fanciest castle in Ireland when you are causing my company to go BROKE?”

His tirade went on for fifteen minutes and continued as Blake Edwards joined them. There were no questions asked. Bluhdorn was not interested in hearing any apologies or explanations. His message was clear and bellicose: start shooting some scenes or the movie gets shut down.

When I arrived on the set a day later, Edwards and his wife were shuttered in their mansion. Crump and Wales were still in shock, seeking sympathy and reassurance, neither of which I could offer them.

“Bluhdorn can’t fire Blake—Julie would walk,” Crump said. “And he can’t shut down the movie because too many millions have already been spent.”

The two men were not being defiant, I realized, but merely helpless. They were employees of a star director and his superstar wife. Bluhdorn might now be outraged at his impotence, but he had approved a deal in which the studio had no controls. My sympathy was more with them than with Bluhdorn.

We had a very alcoholic dinner together. Toward the end, Edwards himself materialized, looking pale and agonized, and started explaining his dilemma. “I’ve got a movie here that I don’t know how to shoot,” he said. “The goddamn sky—it doesn’t match. I could move the company to South Africa. The clouds are great there and dependable.”

When I next encountered Charlie Bluhdorn in New York, he seemed uncharacteristically subdued. He’d taken a beating from his board of directors. Gulf & Western shares were foundering, but there were ways of “finessing” the Darling Lili numbers, Bluhdorn assured me. He did not go into details. It was only a couple of years later that I learned of Bluhdorn’s scheme of shifting the rights—and hence the losses—from Gulf & Western to phantom companies. Suddenly they were not Paramount mistakes; they were the problems of another corporate entity entirely.

These were dangerous financial maneuvers, and Bluhdorn knew it, but he was desperate to save his Paramount investment not only from the fiasco of Darling Lili but also from the looming nightmare presented by his other would-be blockbuster, Paint Your Wagon.

Even as editing teams were still struggling to cut Lili into a coherent movie, yet another Paramount mammoth musical—one I had known virtually nothing about—was being unveiled to bewildered audiences on October 15, 1969. Paint Your Wagon had been an early Bluhdorn pet project—one he had been protecting like a mother hen. I had seen its title on the production sheets, but knew little about it.

Across town, Twentieth Century-Fox had just capsized because of its own musical calamities, thus abruptly ending the rule of the Zanuck dynasty at that studio. A close friend of Evans, Dick Zanuck, had inherited the studio from his fabled father, Darryl, and had turned out a series of worthy films such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Patton. All was going well for the young Zanuck until he, too, came under the spell of the musical. In quick succession his company produced bombs like Doctor Dolittle, Star, and Hello, Dolly, resulting in giant losses that threatened the very life of the company.

Dick Zanuck’s firing cast a pall over Evans. If the scion of the Zanuck dynasty could be abruptly dismissed, surely Evans, too, was headed for the guillotine, even though he had opposed the musicals that now enshrouded the studio.

Paint Your Wagon, like Darling Lili, grew out of an early Bluhdorn infatuation. Julie Andrews radiated stardom to Bluhdorn, and Alan Jay Lerner belonged in the same constellation. He was the impresario who seemed to own Broadway and who would surely have the same impact in Hollywood.

Bluhdorn had met Lerner a couple of times, and Evans had dated Karen Gunderson, the attractive young actress who was about to become Lerner’s fifth wife. A small, fidgety, hyperactive man, Lerner had been born into money thanks to his parents’ chain of low-end clothing stores. At forty-nine, he was determined to build his career in show business beyond Broadway. His partner, Fritz Loewe, at sixty-three, was a genteel European who pined for semiretirement.

Both had been frustrated by their earlier experiences in the movie business. The screen adaptations of Brigadoon and My Fair Lady had seemed tasteless and cheesy in their view. Lerner, a control freak, felt an urgent need to prove himself and to bring the same mastery to cinema that he had evidenced on Broadway.

Hence, Lerner was highly susceptible to Bluhdorn’s exuberant courtship. Not only would both Paint Your Wagon and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever be made, but Lerner would exercise creative control, and receive producer credit. To further sweeten the deal, Paramount offered to put up $2.5 million to develop yet another Lerner-Loewe musical called Coco, based on the life of the French couturier Coco Chanel. The show had allegedly attracted the interest of Katharine Hepburn.

The deal seemed too good to be true, and Charlie Bluhdorn even assured them that he would consent to Barbra Streisand starring in Clear Day—his admission that his disparagement of Funny Girl had been a mistake.

An aura of desperation seemed to surround Paint Your Wagon from its moment of inception. No one seemed to believe it would be a success. The sheer mention of the title evoked apprehension, even denial. Paint Your Wagon was like a virus, and everyone around it seemed eager to distance himself.

From the moment I learned of the project, my own attitude was one of disbelief. I vaguely remembered seeing the show, which had been launched during the 1951–52 Broadway season. I think I nodded off even then when an actor started to sing “I Talk to the Trees.” And I never understood why the wind was named Mariah.

On Broadway, the show got mixed reviews; critics found the plot about the 1849 California gold rush to be an odd setting for a musical. The book was weak and there was no runaway hit song. After a decent run, the show ended up with a modest $95,000 deficit.

Nonetheless, the team of Lerner and Loewe had already established an aura of invincibility. Paint Your Wagon seemed clunky, but there were hints of momentous things to come—My Fair Lady, of course, in 1956, was to transform Lerner and Loewe into theater royalty, as was Gigi, in 1958, and Camelot, in 1960.

The notion of a Paint Your Wagon movie musical had been dismissed by one studio after another since the show’s opening. The consensus in Hollywood was that the basic plotline of a drunken old prospector who finds love with a Mexican outcast was intrinsically unappealing.

Paramount had flirted with it as a possible Bing Crosby vehicle, but Crosby had rejected it. The MGM hierarchs considered it for Spencer Tracy and Kathryn Grayson, but that went nowhere. Louis B. Mayer optioned it as he was departing as boss of MGM, and he’d talked to Clark Gable as a possible lead (Gable couldn’t sing). Finally, Eddie Fisher, the crooner, optioned the show as a possible role for himself, but that, too, could not find a backer.

“Bluhdorn loves it,” Evans said defensively. “Alan understands the problem with the book. We’re hiring the best writer in the business to fix it, Paddy Chayefsky.”

As it turned out, Chayefsky’s take on the musical was bizarre. Instead of sticking with the original narrative, he created a bawdy tale of a town called No Name City, which was occupied by French hookers and grumpy prospectors. The principal characters were two partners who apparently shared a wife and who hung out in saloons and bawdy houses.

My suspicion was that Chayefsky, who was rumored to have writer’s block, had simply decided to earn a quick payday. Still Lerner, to my surprise, said he liked the draft and was going to do some further work on it. He also was bringing aboard André Previn to create two fresh numbers to be titled “Gold Fever” and “The Best Things in Life Are Dirty” (Lerner’s old partner, Fritz Loewe, had quietly dropped out of the adventure).

Since the “new” Paint Your Wagon was even stranger than the original one, I felt that the studio would never find a director willing to tackle the project. Lerner had earlier approached Blake Edwards, who’d turned it down (unfortunately, one reason he passed was that he was about to spring Darling Lili on the studio). Don Siegel, another Hollywood veteran, also passed.

But Lerner had his own secret weapon in reserve—the veteran Broadway director of South Pacific and Mister Roberts named Josh Logan. Lerner went to Bluhdorn with the proposal to go with Logan, and the studio officially agreed. This was now a “go” picture, Evans informed me. “Grin and bear it.”

The Josh Logan–Alan Jay Lerner favorite to play the lead was James Cagney, who had no intention of coming out of retirement. Their backup was Lee Marvin, who, like Clark Gable, Louis B. Mayer’s choice, couldn’t sing. Marvin, a famously heavy drinker, needed a job.

His movie sidekick would be another apparent non-singer, Clint Eastwood. Having made his name in the Rawhide TV series and in Sergio Leone westerns (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, for one), Eastwood felt it would be a kick to sing in a Hollywood movie.

Though few in Hollywood knew about it, Eastwood had once made an album in which he sang country-and-western songs—numbers that sounded as though they’d fallen out of a vintage Hollywood western. The album didn’t generate any excitement, but Eastwood was proud of it nonetheless.

As his final casting inspiration, Logan settled on Jean Seberg to play the wife of the Mormon traveler who is auctioned off to the Marvin and Eastwood characters. Again, this marked a sharp departure; the actress had played the title role in Saint Joan and then appeared in Bonjour, Tristesse.

The one decision on Paint Your Wagon I favored was the choice of location. By building a huge set in a remote section of northeast Oregon, forty-five miles from the town of Baker, Lerner and Logan guaranteed that few would bother visiting the set. The show would be isolated, as though it were a crazed relative. And starting in late spring of 1968, that is how it was regarded.

The shoot was troubled from the outset. Arriving on location, Eastwood was indignant over Lerner’s extensive rewrites of Chayefsky’s screenplay. He felt the story had been conventionalized. Marvin started drinking heavily and was late to the set most mornings. Lerner and Logan soon started quarreling over performance and even camera angles, with Lerner criticizing his director in front of the company.

Not surprisingly, the show was soon drifting behind schedule with Logan losing control of his set. Though the shoot was hermetically sealed from the outside world, word of trouble was now seeping out. One gossip column quoted Tom Shaw, the line producer, as saying, “We’re in one helluva fucking mess up here.” Eastwood summoned his agent to fly up for a meeting, and Lee Marvin was asked to join them. Marvin, having been drinking, promptly fell asleep at the table even as the salad was served.

An alarmed Lerner started a furtive conversation with Richard Brooks, the veteran director of The Professionals and In Cold Blood, asking him to take over the reins from Logan. Brooks rejected the idea, but the approach nonetheless made a column item in the Los Angeles Times, thus causing Logan to fall further into panic.

Evans flew to Oregon to reassure him. “Josh has been on lithium since preproduction,” Evans told me. “Now even the lithium isn’t enough to get him working.”

Seberg and Eastwood, bored with the slumberous pace, had started a blatant affair. When Seberg’s husband, the French novelist Romain Gary, unexpectedly arrived on the set, he challenged Eastwood to a duel. Lee Marvin started disappearing regularly. The budget had almost doubled to roughly $100 million in current dollars. And Lerner, impotent as a producer, kept biting his fingernails so ferociously that the white gloves he habitually wore were bloody at the fingertips.

Finally, production didn’t so much end as simply expire, its principals exhausted. The actors later grudgingly returned to rerecord their songs, Marvin’s in a low growl, Eastwood’s in a reedy tenor. Seberg’s songs were a total loss—another singer was summoned to record them. Lerner and Logan, meanwhile, kept quarreling, reediting each other’s work. One unexpected editing problem: Paramount wanted the film to be rated for family audiences, like most musicals, but its ad line announced: “Ben and Pardner shared everything—even their wife.” The motion picture code demanded an M tag, putting Paint Your Wagon in the rare position among musicals of earning a “mature audiences” admonition.

Upon the film’s opening on October 15, 1969, the critics picked up on the off-center plot. Vincent Canby of the New York Times acknowledged his pique over “the rather peculiar psychological implications in the plot”—namely the bonding of the two leading males. Writing in Holiday, Rex Reed dismissed it as “a monument of unparalleled incompetence.”

In one magazine interview, Logan described Lerner as having been “pieced together by the great, great-grandson of Dr. Frankenstein from a lot of disparate spare parts.” The director described the movie as “the most flagrant throwing away of money I’ve ever seen.” To be sure, he’d presided over the excesses.

After the movie’s release, Marvin promised never to sing again. Eastwood vowed he would henceforth commit only to films made on a disciplined budget. Josh Logan never again directed a movie. Jean Seberg’s career all but disappeared.

Lerner and Loewe would live to regret their exuberance over their Paramount connection. Despite Lerner’s creative control, or perhaps because of it, both Paint Your Wagon and Clear Day would be major failures at the box office, both critically and commercially. Coco never opened on Broadway. Instead, an original film for the screen called The Little Prince would go into production and it, too, would be a dismal failure. A version also failed on Broadway.

Alan Jay Lerner in particular became embittered by his Paramount experience. It utterly confounded him that his films would seem to reflect, if not exaggerate, his weaknesses—extravagance and an absence of discipline—rather than give voice to his soaring imagination. To compound his frustration, Lerner was to see Paramount’s fortunes climb from the moment that he left the studio. It was as though the studio suffered from a Lerner curse.

He was now aware that while his ferocious willpower could reshape financial deals, it could not reshape a motion picture. Egos like Alan Jay Lerner’s and Blake Edwards’s were simply immune to the Bluhdorn bluster. He could rage and fume, but films would still fall relentlessly behind schedule. He could promise blockbusters to theater owners, but now they became keenly aware that he was delivering bombs.

But, Bluhdorn was not ready to give up on the movie business. And even as he raged at Bob Evans, and tried to blame him for his own shortcomings, he knew that Evans in fact represented his only hope.