TEN

Years later, when Doctor Dolittle was finally about to be released, Arthur Jacobs would, with a straight face, say that he and 20th Century-Fox had rejected Vincente Minnelli, John Huston, and William Wyler as directors before settling on the man who finally got the job, Richard Fleischer. The claim was classic Jacobs: one part truth to two parts hyperbole. Minnelli, who had never really been intimately involved with the movie’s development, left Dolittle before Leslie Bricusse had signed to write the screenplay, and the famously unrushable Wyler, who Jacobs felt sure “would take fifty takes of every shot and the picture would end up costing thirty-five million,” wasn’t seriously approached. But John Huston was, and for a while, the director, who had been working on The Bible for 20th Century-Fox, was interested. “Darryl [Zanuck] wanted Huston,” Jacobs said, “but I felt there was enough temperament with Rex.”¹ Jacobs got his way, but not before an overture had been made to Huston that had to be retracted with embarrassment and a collectively agreed-upon lie. The fib, Richard Zanuck decided in a cable to Jacobs, would be to tell Huston that “we have run into certain legal difficulties with basic material and have decided not to proceed until we have resolved those difficulties. Please tell Bricusse to stick to this story.”²

Richard Fleischer was not a marquee director; he was, recalls one colleague, “a nice man, and a man they could control—easy in that the studio knew he wouldn’t give them any trouble.” He had the confidence of Dick Zanuck, who at twenty-four had gotten his start as a producer on Fleischer’s 1959 fictionalization of the Leopold and Loeb murder trial, Compulsion; having just used Fleischer on the science-fiction adventure Fantastic Voyage, Zanuck knew that he was capable of handling what promised to be an elaborate physical production. Fleischer, the son of groundbreaking animator Max Fleischer, was known as a patient and pleasant director, so there was little chance of a clash of egos, and he was eager for the job. In his cigarillo-scratched rasp, Arthur Jacobs told Fleischer the same thing he had told Bricusse—that the job would change his life.

Dick Zanuck and Jacobs were both pleased with the work Bricusse had done on the Dolittle story line, and ecstatic about his speed. By July 14, 1965, he had turned in an elaborately detailed eighty-two-page treatment for Doctor Dolittle, with demos of four songs and lyric fragments for many others. Bricusse had concocted a promising opening sequence that involved Dolittle riding through the jungle on a giraffe to visit a crocodile with a toothache.³ And his treatment had also solved a problem with the story of Doctor Dolittle that could have led to disaster—the patronizing colonialism and racism of some of the source material. Though the depiction of Africans in Hugh Lofting’s first Dolittle book, which was published in 1920, was not vicious and would have shocked nobody in post–World War I England or America, it was, by contemporary standards, appalling. The Story of Doctor Dolittle features a voyage to Africa that leads to an episode between the doctor and Bumpo Kahbooboo, the son of the King of Jolliginki, who yearns for Dolittle to turn him into a white man so that the woman he loves will return his affection. Dolittle first asks if it would be enough to dye his hair blond, but when Bumpo insists on a full transformation, the doctor creates a potion that turns Bumpo’s skin white, at which point Bumpo “sang for joy and began dancing around.” As Dolittle sails away, he says, “I am afraid that medicine I used will never last. Most likely he will be as black as ever when he wakes up in the morning…. Well, well!—Poor Bumpo!”⁴ In later books, Bumpo leaves Africa to attend Oxford, and Lofting uses his malapropisms (and, at one point, his interest in cannibalism) as comic relief. (These segments of the books, with Christopher Lofting’s approval, were deleted and rewritten in the 1980s.)⁵

Bricusse kept Bumpo but dropped the skin-color-transformation episode and his mangled syntax and introduced the character after he’d completed his Oxford education; since Jacobs and Fox owned the rights to all twelve Dolittle books, he could cherry-pick plot points from any volume. Bricusse’s version of Bumpo was likable enough to bring Fox an early casting coup: The studio had gotten Sammy Davis Jr. to commit himself to the role. Davis had long been a fixture in Rat Pack movies and on television, where sooner or later, every western and cop series had an episode that called for a black guest star. In late 1964, Arthur Penn directed him in the Broadway musical adaptation of the Clifford Odets play Golden Boy, and the result was a hit show for which Davis received a Tony nomination. Getting him to agree to costar in Dolittle before they even had a completed screenplay was news that could be used to attract more talent and a sign to Jacobs and Zanuck that they had chosen their new writer wisely.

Bricusse’s treatment surmounted one major hurdle when it received the enthusiastic approval of Hugh Lofting’s widow, who called his work “a complete surprise…he has caught the spirit of the Doctor himself. The lyrics are…right in the vernacular of Dolittle. I predict nothing but success.”⁶ But a more forbidding potential obstacle loomed in Rex Harrison, whose rejection of either Fleischer or Bricusse could scotch the whole enterprise. Harrison, basking in the afterglow of his Academy Award and awaiting the start of production on Joseph Mankiewicz’s Volpone variation, The Honey Pot, had installed himself in his villa in Portofino and was completely aware that he now held the project’s future in his hands. Accordingly, Fleischer and Bricusse, with Jacobs coming along as a sort of marriage broker, were dispatched to Italy and told, in essence, to pitch themselves.

Harrison could be hard on directors, especially younger ones. A few years earlier, when Norman Jewison had directed him in a TV variety show, Harrison greeted him by saying, to nobody in particular, “He looks like a paperboy.” “My God, he was a pain in the ass,” recalled the usually unflappable director.⁷ When Fleischer arrived in the dining room of the Hotel Splendido with Bricusse, Jacobs, and two of Harrison’s agents, the star first asserted his authority by showing up ninety minutes late to lunch. Fleischer was forty-eight, old enough to know how to handle the vanity of an aging leading man, and decided to gamble on a joke. “I’m sorry,” he said to Harrison, “but I just don’t think you’re right for the part.”

After a long and blood-freezing moment, the silence was broken by a laugh from Bricusse. And then Harrison laughed as well. “Perhaps you’re right,” he replied affably.⁸ “Nice chap, good chap,” the star told Arthur Jacobs later.⁹ Fleischer had the job.

Bricusse’s memories of his own “audition” are less happy. Harrison, he wrote, was “charm itself to my face and as trustworthy as a crocodile behind my back.”¹⁰ “I believe the idea of Leslie coming to Portofino will be most fruitful,”¹¹ Harrison had written to Jacobs. But once there, Bricusse found himself at the mercy of a star who had expected to be working with Alan Jay Lerner and was not about to let go of his disappointment quickly.

In the days after their lunch at the Splendido, Harrison summoned both Bricusse and Fleischer to his home at the Villa San Genesio to talk about any aspect of Dolittle, large or small, that crossed his mind. Harrison was a serious drinker whose moods lurched and careened as his level of intoxication rose; his much younger fourth wife, actress Rachel Roberts, suffered from suicidal depression and violent mood swings that were exacerbated by blackout drinking;¹² she had accompanied Harrison to the initial getting-to-know-you lunch and ended up, as Bricusse recalls it, drunk and barking like a dog in an impromptu audition to provide animal voice-overs for the movie. Harrison had not yet signed off on Bricusse and had questions—or, rather, accusations—about his lyrics. When Bricusse arrived at the villa, Harrison began by expressing particular unhappiness about a line in “Talk to the Animals”: “If people asked us, can you speak in rhinoceros / We’d say ‘Of courserous, can’t you?’” Rhinoceros and “of courserous,” Harrison noted, do not rhyme.

When Bricusse replied that the song was supposed to be humorous, Harrison snapped, “A humorous song is meant to be funny. This isn’t funny,” then added, “Oh God protect me from fucking puns…. The point is that it doesn’t fucking rhyme!”¹³

If Harrison never quite assented to the hiring of Bricusse during those first meetings in August 1965, he didn’t reject him outright, either. Bricusse wasn’t required to turn in a completed script until the end of the year, and Harrison, who was about to have his hands full with the shoot of The Honey Pot, was content to wait until then to make his decision. Besides, he had a more pressing matter to address with Jacobs and his new director: He wanted them to fire Sammy Davis Jr. “I don’t want to work with an entertainer,” he told them. “I want an actor. A real actor, not a song-and-dance man.” Fleischer and Jacobs’s attempts to talk Harrison out of his antipathy toward Davis only caused the actor to dig in more deeply and to raise the stakes on the spot: He wanted Sidney Poitier to play the role. Impervious to the reasonable arguments made by Jacobs and Fleischer that they weren’t certain if Poitier could sing or dance, or if he would be willing to take a supporting part, Harrison finally laid down an ultimatum: Sidney Poitier was in or Harrison was out. Jacobs, wrote Fleischer later, “would have loved to be able to tell Rex…go screw yourself, but he couldn’t. There was just too much at stake.”¹⁴

Bricusse flew back to Los Angeles to continue working on the script, and Jacobs and Fleischer glumly returned to New York, where they managed to set up a meeting with Poitier. The actor had just finished The Slender Thread for Sydney Pollack and was looking for a project he could fit in while In the Heat of the Night was being developed. The two men pitched him hard, selling him on Harrison’s appetite for an “actor” rather than an entertainer and offering him $250,000.¹⁵ Poitier had recently finished three small, serious, black-and-white movies—The Bedford Incident, A Patch of Blue, and The Slender Thread—none of which had been released yet and all of which seemed like minor films. In the wake of the vast success Fox was having with The Sound of Music, he may have been attracted to the prospect of a big payday for a small role—in Bricusse’s treatment, Bumpo appeared only in the last third of the movie—that would offer him a chance to reach a wider audience. Poitier accepted their proposal but made it clear that his agreement was contingent on a meeting with Leslie Bricusse. Elated, Jacobs promptly agreed to fly Bricusse to New York for a lunch date at Poitier’s favorite restaurant, the Russian Tea Room.

A few hours after they met with Poitier, Jacobs and Fleischer were due at the Majestic Theatre for an evening performance of Golden Boy, and Sammy Davis Jr. knew they were coming to see him; they were all planning to have dinner together afterward. As the two men sat in the audience, feeling like executioners, Davis, charged with excitement, sang, danced, and even threw in an ad-lib about Rex Harrison as a sort of secret nod to Jacobs. When the show ended, they went to Davis’s dressing room, listening to him talk with great enthusiasm about his ideas for Bumpo. The dressing room door then opened to another visitor: Sidney Poitier.

Neither Jacobs nor Fleischer had mentioned to Poitier that he would be replacing Davis during their pitch meeting. Poitier looked at them. They looked back at him. Fleischer, frozen in place, assumed Poitier would think they were trying to sell Davis on the same role. Davis had no idea anything out of the ordinary was going on. And Poitier gave nothing away. He simply paid his respects to Davis and left the theater.

At a dinner that Fleischer later described as “a nightmare…very mafioso,” Jacobs asked Fleischer to leave the table while he broke the news to Davis himself. Fleischer stood watching at a distance as, in his words, “this wonderfully talented, delightful elf [had] his dream blown to smithereens…. I could tell from watching Sammy’s face exactly where he was in the story.” Davis, understandably hurt and angry, told Jacobs he intended to make the incident public, go to the NAACP, and sue Harrison personally.¹⁶ By the next morning, Poitier had heard what happened and changed his mind about playing Bumpo. Davis was a friend; taking a role away from him would be disloyal. But Poitier insisted on keeping his date with Bricusse, and by the following week, when they met, the actor had presumably managed to smooth things over and confirmed that he would costar in the movie after all.

On September 28, Rex Harrison, all charm, wrote Jacobs from the Italian set of The Honey Pot (then called Tale of the Fox), “I was very delighted to hear of the possibility of Sydney [sic] Poitier for Dr. Doolittle [sic]…. I would have thought it was worth going to any lengths to get him for the part as he would be so fresh and exciting for it.” Harrison didn’t take long to offer some further suggestions: For the role of Emma Fairfax, which Bricusse was creating as a romantic female lead, he suggested one of his Honey Pot costars, Maggie Smith, a rising London stage actress who at thirty had made just a few movies. “I feel that she might be awfully good for the girl. She has rather a prim quality, and, of course, is able to acquire a period quality.” Harrison’s letter also contained a barbed reminder that he could pull the rug out from under Dolittle at any moment: “How is Leslie proceeding with the lyrics and music? He has, I know, got a couple of months more before he has to produce it, but I am naturally anxious.” And he warned Jacobs against any further casting decisions that might involve what he had called “entertainers”—in other words, anyone whose singing and dancing might call attention to Harrison’s deficiencies in those areas. “I think once we get anybody who is musical comedy in the film,” he wrote, “it is dead.”¹⁷

By the time Bricusse turned in the first draft of his screenplay on October 22, the runaway success of The Sound of Music, which had been in theaters for seven months, was so apparent that every studio in Hollywood was pushing hard to get a giant road-show musical, or two, or three, into production. Warner Brothers was actively developing Camelot, the film it hoped would be the next My Fair Lady; Disney was planning to follow Mary Poppins with The Happiest Millionaire; Columbia had bought the rights to the Broadway shows Funny Girl and Oliver!; MGM had commissioned six new songs from Irving Berlin for a biopic called Say It with Music; UA was adapting How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Alan Jay Lerner’s On a Clear Day You Can See Forever had just opened on Broadway that week, and the rights were going to Paramount; and Universal could boast the biggest casting catch of the year, having secured the services of Julie Andrews for Thoroughly Modern Millie.¹⁸ Nowhere was the urgency greater than at Fox, where The Sound of Music had almost single-handedly undone the damage wrought by Cleopatra. So it was hardly a surprise that when Dick Zanuck and Arthur Jacobs read Bricusse’s script, their orders to him were simple: Make it bigger.¹⁹

In part, Jacobs meant that literally: Doctor Dolittle would have to run at least two and a half hours in order to merit an intermission and a reserved-ticket, road-show-style release. Some members of the Fox team disagreed with that strategy: Mort Abrahams, who was to serve as the movie’s associate producer, wondered whether the material was strong enough to make Dolittle a must-see event for parents and children, an audience that any road-show release needed to be successful.²⁰ David Brown, who had left New American Library to become Zanuck’s associate in New York, was analyzing the musical boom with more wariness than many of his colleagues; he noted that musical budgets were growing fast and that the pictures tended to perform poorly in markets outside the United States, an area of revenue that was already considered critical by the 1960s.²¹ But Jacobs and Zanuck persisted with their more-is-more vision. Doctor Dolittle was going to be shot on the Fox lot in Los Angeles, on location in England, where they intended to find a town to double as Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, and in the Caribbean. The studio wanted Poitier’s role enlarged with a major new sequence, a flashback to Bumpo at college early in the picture, to give them more bang for their $250,000.²² And although he no longer had any hope of signing Julie Andrews, Jacobs was still hoping for big names to fill out the remaining principal roles in the cast: Emma Fairfax and the doctor’s merry Irish friend Matthew Mugg.

As Fox started pulling deal memos together—the studio agreed to pay Fleischer $300,000 plus 5 percent of the net profit and $7,500 for every week the film ran over schedule,²³ and Harrison, over and above his salary, was to receive a rising percentage of the gross if the film became a hit²⁴—Jacobs continued to hunt for talent. Looking for an Emma Fairfax, he went to New York in an unsuccessful effort to woo Barbra Streisand (“Forget about her,” Dick Zanuck wrote after her agents asked for $500,000).²⁵ He then began talks with Hayley Mills, the very popular child star of Disney’s Pollyanna and The Parent Trap who was, at nineteen, attempting a transition into young adult roles. Mills’s participation would have been a tremendous boon in marketing the movie to kids, so much so that Fox was willing to offer her $300,000 and billing equal to Rex Harrison’s.²⁶

For the role of Matthew, Harrison, who was continuing to make his feelings known on everything from casting to Jacobs’s choice of cinematographer, was enthusiastic about David Wayne, a character actor and TV mainstay in his early fifties who had been a familiar face since the Katharine Hepburn–Spencer Tracy comedy Adam’s Rib in 1949. Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby were also among the names that had been floated.²⁷ But Jacobs wanted a younger leading man, and an obvious candidate presented himself in Bricusse’s creative partner, Anthony Newley, who at thirty-four was just wrapping up a run on Broadway in their flop, The Roar of the Greasepaint—The Smell of the Crowd, and was eager to relocate to Los Angeles with his wife, Joan Collins, and their two small children. After some push and pull over his salary, Fox signed him to play Matthew for $200,000,²⁸ and the Newleys relocated to Bel Air, where Collins reentered the Hollywood social scene she loved with the vigor of an Olympic athlete.

Newley’s hiring was bound to inflame Harrison, who had already made clear his distaste for musical theater actors and younger male costars, but at the moment, his mood was plummeting for other reasons. Joseph Mankiewicz’s first script for The Honey Pot had been too innovative and bizarre for United Artists—the characters in his original screenplay included Production Code censors who were to show up periodically during the movie itself to delete unacceptable material—and to Harrison’s disappointment, he had redrafted the film as a far more conventional dark comedy by the time shooting began. Mankiewicz fired his first cinematographer; the second died suddenly during the shoot; Rachel Roberts, upset that Maggie Smith had won the role she wanted in the film, was spiraling into deep depression and barbiturate abuse, and Harrison and Mankiewicz, by this point, felt, in the words of Mankiewicz’s agent, Robert Lantz, “enough residual contempt [for each another] to last a lifetime.”²⁹

At the moments when Harrison was able to turn his attention to Dolittle, he did so with irritation and volatility. Fleischer had found a picturesque English town called Castle Combe to serve as Puddleby, Dolittle’s home village, but in November, Harrison told Jacobs and Fleischer that he didn’t want to have to shoot the film in England; before agreeing to Castle Combe, he forced Fleischer to go on a pointless location-scouting trip to Ireland. The towns he found there, he told Harrison, were “depressing, faceless places, more suitable for a Great Potato Famine story.”³⁰ (Castle Combe itself was far from ideal; a National Weather Institute memo sent to Fox warned the studio months before the shoot that the sun shone only five days a month during the summer,³¹ but in the manic optimism that preceded the production of Dolittle, the news was ignored.) Harrison also insisted that he be allowed to perform his own songs live on the set rather than lip-synching to tracks that would be recorded before the start of production, a costly whim that nobody at Fox thought was likely to yield any usable scenes. “Everything Rex did and said indicated that he was very hesitant about saying yes,” says Mort Abrahams. “He wasn’t happy with the book, with the score, with the script.”³²

Harrison’s inconsistency bewildered Jacobs and Zanuck, who could barely keep pace with his mood swings. On December 7, his discontentment boiled over. Laurie Evans, Harrison’s agent in London, called Arthur Jacobs to tell him that Harrison had read Bricusse’s screenplay and was rejecting it. Jacobs was floored. “He would like to get out of his commitment,” he wrote in a memo to Zanuck. “He claims it was not written for him. It is not what his fans expect of him. He claims it is for a small round man like Edmund Gwenn. He said he will not do prat falls. He said he will not be part of a trio. He said he will not be sung to [by other actors]…. Laurie said that Rex said, ‘Why don’t you get Cary Grant to do it and let me out?’…I said I was totally amazed, stunned and shocked and would get back to him.”³³

Five days later, Dick Zanuck received a more serious and troubling critique of the script—a thirteen-page memo from his own father. Darryl Zanuck, in his sixties, was still a fiercely competitive man, and his son’s relationship with him was, in some ways, an extended Oedipal wrestling match (literally so when the younger Zanuck was a kid and he and his father would go at it every weekend, each trying to pin the other to the ground).³⁴ He had given his son a studio to run, but even though he now spent most of his time in New York or Europe, he still held on to his own authority and oversight. As Dick became more self-assured in his position, his father gave him a freer hand, but when he chose to step in, he did so with formidable force. Fox’s willingness to throw good money after bad on Cleopatra had almost destroyed his studio and cost hundreds of people their jobs, and the elder Zanuck was not about to let that happen again. “Since this is the most expensive project on our entire program we have got to be positive that the final script will be a masterpiece,” he wrote. “This story can become great only if it is really funny and delightful from beginning to end…and if the musical numbers are outstanding…. In Doctor Dolittle we do not have any genuine suspense, no danger and no conflict…. This leaves us then with comedy and music as our foundation. It will only reach the top brackets if we are almost continually funny, delightful, and musically superior…you could eliminate almost any one of the individual episodes and you would not miss it, particularly in the last half of the screenplay. These are facts that must be analyzed even if they cannot all be ‘cured.’”

Darryl Zanuck’s lecture to his son continued with a reminder that he had been in the movie business since Rin Tin Tin was a star and thus spoke from experience when he wrote, “It is my belief that you will not be able to do more than half the ‘animal scenes’ that are written into the script.” The production, he warned, was bound to be “a hell of a mess.” He told his son that animal trainers always overpromise good results, that the film was too long, that Bumpo’s dialogue was flat (adding, “I have never seen Sidney Poitier in a comedy”), and that a scripted encounter with a pirate ship would only raise the budget and should be eliminated.

Zanuck’s conclusion was grim: “I am deeply concerned about the overall cost,” he wrote. “This is a big physical picture with enormous mechanical problems…it is absolutely essential that every episode we photograph remain in the picture. This is not a film where you can afford to overshoot.” Of Dolittle’s planned June 1966 start date, he wrote, “Since I must speak frankly I believe you are taking a hell of a gamble…. I know of no motion picture that needs more careful and expert preparation than this one. When you deal with a number of almost uncontrollable items, it goes without saying that you have to know exactly what you can and what you can’t do from a practical standpoint, otherwise it can be an economic disaster.” The memo was signed “D.F.Z.”³⁵

Dick Zanuck’s response, which was sent a few days later by cable, was amiable but firm. He reassured his father that they planned to make changes in the script, but he insisted on keeping the pirate ship sequence and calmly concluded, “Despite the multitude of problems and difficulties I do feel that we will be prepared by July First.”³⁶

Father and son were in agreement on only one point: Rex Harrison, without knowing it, had finally overplayed his hand. The actor’s tyrannical irascibility had pushed his employers to the breaking point. “He will drive us all to an asylum,” Darryl Zanuck wrote. For the first time, the Zanucks and Jacobs began a fresh discussion: What if Rex Harrison wasn’t in Doctor Dolittle after all? Over the next several days, the three men started talking over a new list of names. What about Alec Guinness? Too much of an “art-house star,” said Darryl Zanuck. “All the boys here [in New York] are dead set against Peter Sellers,” he added. “And they are also not in favor of Jack Lemmon…while he is a star he is an out-and-out comic and a far cry from the character of Doctor Dolittle.”³⁷

Darryl Zanuck was intrigued by the idea of Peter Ustinov, but his son resisted the suggestion, wanting to protect Richard Fleischer from another star who was thought to be uncontrollable by directors. During these discussions, Harrison’s agents, oblivious to the deep trouble in which their client now found himself, were cabling Arthur Jacobs wanting to know whom he was planning to hire to rewrite Bricusse’s script, music, and lyrics and conveying Harrison’s wish that Alan Jay Lerner be wooed back to the film, or perhaps Frank Loesser.³⁸

In the last week of December, the Zanucks finally found their new leading man: He had been in front of their noses for almost a year. Christopher Plummer, star of The Sound of Music, would be hired to replace Harrison. The studio offered Plummer $250,000³⁹ and also spent a great deal of money to buy out his contract for Peter Shaffer’s Broadway play The Royal Hunt of the Sun, in which he had been starring since October. By the time Harrison himself got wind of what was happening, he was too late. On December 30, he cabled Dick Zanuck himself, pleading ignorance of his agent’s most recent demands. “Personally consider am fully committed Dolittle,” he wrote frantically. “Can we not clear this up personally?”⁴⁰

The next day, Dick Zanuck sent a telegram to Harrison assuring him that it was nothing personal at all. “From the very beginning you were always our number one choice,” Zanuck wrote. “I am extremely gratified to receive your wires which express your attitude of honor and integrity…. Really Rex I am dreadfully sorry that things have turned out this way.”⁴¹ Then he fired him.