TWELVE

Arthur Penn was in New York City directing Robert Duvall and Lee Remick in the Broadway play Wait Until Dark when, for the third time in three years, he turned down an invitation to direct Bonnie and Clyde. This time, the offer was coming from Warren Beatty, whose argumentative collaboration with Penn during production of the ill-fated Mickey One had only increased his affection for the director. Penn liked Beatty as well. “Nothing on Mickey One was personal,” he says. “We remained friends.”¹ Beatty thought Penn’s affinity for the French New Wave made him a natural choice for the film, but Penn had no interest in directing Bonnie and Clyde or any other movie. The Chase was about to open to poor reviews, and the experience of having Sam Spiegel take the movie away from him in the editing room, eight years after Warner Brothers had done the same thing on his first picture, The Left Handed Gun, had convinced Penn he wasn’t meant to work in the movies at all. He had one Hollywood commitment remaining—a deal to direct a project about an ancient Native American and George Custer called Little Big Man—but otherwise, he intended to remain in New York and concentrate on directing Broadway plays and forming a repertory theater company in the Berkshires. “I was sick of movie shenanigans,” he said later, “and mostly sick of myself for abdicating responsibility.”² From now on, he told The New York Times, “I won’t touch anything I can’t control to the end.”³

Soon after Beatty bought Benton and Newman’s screenplay, he had to put his search for a director on hold; he had agreed to return to London in early 1966 to star in Kaleidoscope, a slapdash caper film about an elaborate card game scam that was intended to capitalize on the success of films like Charade and Topkapi as well as the public appetite for James Bond–like heroes scampering along ledges in scenic European locations. The blockbuster opening of the fourth Bond film, Thunderball, in December 1965 had only increased the urgency every studio felt to mount some competition; 20th Century-Fox had James Coburn in Our Man Flint, Columbia was beginning the Matt Helm series with Dean Martin, and even United Artists, the home of 007, was trying newcomer Michael Caine as a sort of unglamorous, bespectacled anti-Bond in The Ipcress File. Kaleidoscope was Warner’s unmemorable attempt to get in the game. “The shoot was great fun, very jolly,” says Susannah York, who replaced Sandra Dee as Beatty’s costar a few weeks before production. “It was a shame the movie didn’t really live up to the script.”⁴

Beatty’s colleagues on Kaleidoscope recall him as a funny and rambunctious presence during the shoot. “Warren is a great flirt, and if you’re up for it, that’s great,” recalls York. “But I was pretty newly married at the time, and he was still with Leslie Caron, and while I enjoyed his company on the set, sometimes I sort of had to put him down a wee bit.”⁵ In fact, Beatty’s relationship with Caron was coming to an end during production—a split he later said left him “with enormous, overwhelming sadness”⁶—and his mind seemed more on moviemaking than on romance. Before he could even try to get a studio to finance Bonnie and Clyde, he had a couple of key decisions to make, and while acting in Kaleidoscope, he made the first of them. Despite his initial interest in Bob Dylan and his later insistence that he did not intend to star in the film when he bought the script, Beatty does not appear to have given serious consideration to casting any other actor as Clyde Barrow; by the time he finished Kaleidoscope in March, he was committed to playing the role. That, at least, clarified two things for him: As a first-time producer who was also the film’s star, he could not consider directing Bonnie and Clyde as well, and Shirley MacLaine was now, obviously, out of the running to play Bonnie Parker.

While Beatty was in Europe, he met briefly with Jean-Luc Godard, mostly as a courtesy to Benton and Newman,⁷ who were not quite ready to give up their dream of making the first American French New Wave movie. But Beatty didn’t start thinking seriously about a director until he returned to the United States. In the decades since Bonnie and Clyde was released, a myth of rejection has been attached to the film, often burnished in the retelling by the moviemakers themselves; the project was said to have been turned down by every director, by every actress, by every studio. But, as Beatty says, “sometimes turndowns are not so clear…. You talk to somebody, and something doesn’t spark, so you don’t really follow it up and then you talk to someone else. So I guess it’s somewhat of a misspeak to say they all turned me down.”⁸ However, it’s easy to imagine that polite indifference would have felt like rejection to Beatty, and once he settled in Los Angeles and started meeting with directors, he found himself in a position that was as unfamiliar professionally as it was personally: lots of first dates that ended with handshakes and pleasant good-nights.

In his talks with directors, Beatty knew he was at a disadvantage: He was a twenty-nine-year-old actor with a spotty track record who was declaring his intention to become a producer at a time when only a handful of actors, all much older and more experienced, took those reins. Even his friends warned him he was making a mistake: “They would say to me, ‘Why are you producing this? You’re a movie star. What’s it going to say: “Produced by Warren Beatty”?’ Kirk Douglas could do that. But not conventional, pretty movie stars.”⁹

In the five years since his debut in Splendor in the Grass had won him access to anyone in old or new Hollywood, Beatty had done his homework and learned his movie history. The first director he pursued was George Stevens, whose career, which began when he worked as a cameraman on Laurel and Hardy silent shorts, had spanned two-thirds of the history of the American movie business. Stevens had made comedies (Alice Adams, The Talk of the Town), melodramas (Penny Serenade), action-adventures (Gunga Din) and, in the 1950s, three films, A Place in the Sun, Shane, and Giant, that some critics viewed as a thematic trilogy that explored American ambition, expansion, and longing. That was as much of a through line as anyone then looking to trace a pattern in Stevens’s work was able to discern. His reputation as a consummate, versatile craftsman was unimpeachable, but he was as far from Truffaut or Godard as it was possible to get: At sixty-one, he was part of Hollywood’s unapologetic old guard. As a director who tried to tailor himself to each movie rather than use his films to express an overriding personal vision, he was of little interest to auteurist critics or to New Wave directors. Nonetheless, “Warren had a real fascination with Stevens,” says Robert Benton. “He was one of the first names he mentioned.”¹⁰

Beatty may have looked at Stevens’s films of the 1950s and seen his gift for bringing out greatness in actors like Montgomery Clift and for pulling better work out of performers like Alan Ladd and Rock Hudson than anyone knew they had in them. “Warren spent a long time talking to George Stevens about doing the picture,” says Bonnie and Clyde’s script supervisor, John C. Dutton, who had worked with the director on The Greatest Story Ever Told. “I’d see the two of them walking up and down Sunset Boulevard—they’d have dinner someplace on the Strip and then walk, and Warren would talk about the picture.”¹¹ But in early 1966, Stevens was not in a state of mind to attempt a fresh approach to moviemaking. He had worked for six years on The Greatest Story Ever Told, planning a version of the life of Christ that would be stripped of pageant and spectacle, a counterpoint to the extravagant epics of Cecil B. DeMille. But Stevens, a deliberate worker who liked to shoot and reshoot scenes from all possible angles, took so long to make the movie that religious films passed out of fashion; by the time the 225-minute picture lumbered onto screens in early 1965, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s spare and stark The Gospel According to St. Matthew had dazzled European critics, and Stevens’s film was derided for being as stiff and old-fashioned as anything by DeMille.

After that, Stevens seemed to dig in his heels and rail against an industry that was changing more quickly than he could. In 1965, he filed a $2 million lawsuit against Paramount and NBC, charging the network with the “dismemberment” and “emasculation” of A Place in the Sun by planning to air it with commercial interruptions and claiming that Paramount had violated his right to control the film’s editing by selling it to a network.¹² Stevens’s suit came at a moment when Hollywood’s older directors felt particular enmity toward television, possibly because a new generation of TV-trained directors was asserting itself in the movie business. Otto Preminger had recently filed a similar suit over Anatomy of a Murder, and William Wyler sided publicly with Stevens in his claim against NBC, urging his colleagues at a Directors Guild dinner to join the “fight to keep our films from being mutilated on television.”¹³ But Stevens’s lawsuit was shot down,¹⁴ and he turned away from the industry. Beatty’s attempt to woo him for Bonnie and Clyde came to nothing, and he reluctantly moved on.

In the weeks that followed, Beatty talked to at least a half dozen other directors. The conversations all led nowhere. He tested the waters with Wyler (like Stevens, a giant of the Hollywood establishment and a director for whom auteurists had little use at the time). He approached the sharp, modern filmmakers he had gotten to know while shooting Promise Her Anything and Kaleidoscope in London, discussing Bonnie and Clyde with both Karel Reisz, whose comedy Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment opened in the United States in April 1966, and John Schlesinger, whose 1965 film, Darling, had been among the best-reviewed films of the year. Beatty also discussed the movie with Brian Hutton,¹⁵ a young American director who had just completed The Pad and How to Use It (a comedy based on Peter Shaffer’s The Private Ear, the companion piece to the one-act play Mike Nichols had almost filmed, The Public Eye).

Robert Towne, though he had no official role in Bonnie and Clyde yet, had become a close friend of Beatty’s and an articulate champion of Benton and Newman’s screenplay, and he accompanied Beatty to many of the meetings. But Towne’s impassioned take on the script didn’t move any directors. “I remember at one point in the meeting—and this was typical of a lot of the interviews—Brian Hutton turned to me and said, ‘What do you think is so special about the movie?’” says Towne. “And I remember saying that this was something new in movies, that it may have been putatively a gangster movie, but that it was nothing like They Made Me a Criminal or I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang or You Only Live Once, all of those movies in which sociological issues were at the forefront and sympathy was enlisted because of the characters’ circumstances. This script eschewed that, and it was also a very bold use of what the French had been doing that at the same time transcended mere admiration for them and did something different. I certainly went on at some length. And he looked at me and said, ‘Well, that’s what you say is in it, that’s what you may think is in it, but it’s just in your mind. It’s not in the script.’ And that little scene was replayed many, many times. After a while, I just kept quiet.”¹⁶

Some directors may have shied away from Bonnie and Clyde because Beatty made no secret of his intention to serve as a hands-on producer. “My producing point of view came, really, when I was a kid,” he says. “The great advantage I had in getting famous when I was twenty-one was that I knew, very well, Sam Goldwyn, David Selznick, Sam Spiegel, Arthur Freed, Jerry Wald, Pandro Berman—so as a producer, I felt, I’m responsible for the movie. I started it, and I’m going to finish it, and if you’re going to be a director on a movie that I do, you better know you’re gonna have to put up with that.”¹⁷ But Beatty himself may have held back from making any director a firm offer because he still hadn’t taken Penn’s rejection as a final answer. In the late spring of 1966, Beatty met with Sydney Pollack about the movie. “I was quite serious about wanting to do it,” says Pollack, “but Warren was very honest with me. He said, ‘Look, I don’t know yet whether this is going to work out, but if it does work out and Arthur wants to do it, I’m going to do it with Arthur.’”¹⁸

Beatty returned to New York and decided to make one final run at Penn, telling Abe Lastfogel, the William Morris agent they shared, that he was going to lock himself in a room with Penn until he agreed to direct Bonnie and Clyde.¹⁹ Lastfogel stepped in and set up a lunch between the two men at Dinty Moore’s. “I didn’t stand a chance,” Penn wrote later. “Warren can be the most relentlessly persuasive person I know…. I had capitulated by the time Warren had finished his complicated order for a salad.”²⁰ In truth, Penn had also looked at the script and found his own door into it for the first time. “I had seen it as this romantic legend all the way through. But then I thought, this is really a story about the agricultural nature of the country. Those banks out there [that Parker and Barrow robbed] were farmers’ banks, and then the farmers couldn’t pay their mortgages, and eventually the banks took over the farms…. Well, all of that was not in the script. But I thought it could be.”²¹ Imagining Bonnie and Clyde as a canvas on which he could depict American social and economic injustice sparked Penn’s excitement, and he knew that however contentious their relationship might become, Beatty would agree not to take the movie away from him during postproduction. He felt the script still needed work, but he was, finally, ready to sign on as Bonnie and Clyde’s director.

“Arthur was my first choice not only because I knew him, but because I could get into an argument with him,” says Beatty. “So when he said he would make the movie, I said, ‘I want to have one agreement—that if we make this movie, we will have an argument every night. If we don’t have anything to argue about, I want to find something to argue about, because there’s always something that can be better or can be thought about more.’ That’s what I wanted the dynamic to be.”²²

Penn agreed. And over the next several months, both men had no trouble keeping their promise.

 

Two weeks after Richard Zanuck fired Rex Harrison from Doctor Dolittle, he rehired him. The showdown had benefited no one, with the exception of Christopher Plummer, who didn’t have to miss a single performance of The Royal Hunt of the Sun on Broadway and still pocketed $87,500 in severance pay just for signing a contract.²³ Harrison had misbehaved throughout the fall of 1965 in part because his marriage was at a point of dire crisis: During the production of The Honey Pot, Rachel Roberts had attempted suicide by taking an overdose of pills after a fight with him. “Rex was in a temper. Abuse flowed. I drank brandy. I came home to emptiness and ice, and swallowed Seconal,” she wrote in her journal.²⁴ Joe Mankiewicz helped keep the episode out of the press. Given the strain Harrison had been under, Zanuck was willing to offer him a second chance. “Rex was a tough guy to deal with,” he says. “He could be mean-spirited and very excitable, and he’d have a few drinks and fly off the handle. And on top of it all, he was an egomaniac at the height of his clout. But when he heard about Christopher Plummer, he temporarily turned into a human being again and begged his way back. And from that point on, I had him.”²⁵

Harrison’s good behavior, however, bore a striking resemblance to his bad behavior. He still had little use for Leslie Bricusse or his screenplay; when the two men met in late January, Harrison gave him a set of notes on the Dolittle script that left Bricusse frustrated and bewildered. “Mr. Harrison would like the character of Dolittle to be more like Henry Higgins, a man of ‘amusing irritability,’ to quote his own phrase,” Bricusse wrote to Arthur Jacobs after the meeting. “This represents a total change of mind from the meetings in Portofino when he ‘didn’t care what the character was like so long as he wasn’t like Henry Higgins.’…This basic change will necessarily have far-reaching effects upon the existing screenplay.” Among the other revisions Harrison was requesting were the addition of an opening sequence in London showing Dolittle “as a fashionable Harley Street consultant, bored with life,” the creation of a new underwater sequence in which Dolittle would be shown taking the pulse of an octopus, and more than a dozen other significant and expensive changes.²⁶

In Los Angeles, as Bricusse worked on expanding the script, 20th Century-Fox’s moneymen made their first attempt to create an itemized budget for Doctor Dolittle. Jacobs’s original projection that the film would cost $6 million had given way to news that stunned the studio: The movie was now expected to cost $14.4 million.²⁷ Suddenly, Darryl Zanuck’s warning that his son could be headed for “economic disaster” seemed alarmingly plausible. “After The Sound of Music became the biggest picture of all time, we were really back in business, I was suddenly hailed as, you know, boy genius, and we were off to the races,” says Dick Zanuck.²⁸ But even Zanuck’s optimism had limits, and he told Jacobs to cut $2 million out of the budget, and quickly, since the start of production was less than six months away.

Even as Dolittle’s costs were rising, the studio allowed Harrison to indulge for nearly two months in what turned out to be a drunken whim. On one of his visits to Italy to discuss the film with his star, director Richard Fleischer met Harrison and Rachel Roberts, both of whom were already intoxicated, in their suite at the Excelsior Hotel in Rome. Harrison, whom Fleischer wrote was “working himself into a frenzy of insecurity,” insisted that he wanted Bricusse replaced by different songwriters.²⁹ He first suggested Betty Comden and Adolph Green and then brought up Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, a comic songwriting team who had been performing in their own revues in England for the last ten years. Fleischer, Harrison, and Roberts then went out to a local restaurant called the White Elephant for an evening that ended in utter chaos when Roberts, who had begun indulging her penchant for barking like a dog as soon as they entered the establishment, brandished a knife at her husband, and Fleischer hurried them out and poured them both into a cab.³⁰

Fleischer had to baby-sit Harrison through every mood swing. “The ‘Talk To The Animals’ number is a hang-over from the old character of Dolittle which I described as a sort of wet-nurse [and] wanted at any price to get out…the song to Sophie [the seal] is still quite impossible for me to handle…again utterly lacks humour,” he wrote to his director after their Portofino meeting. Harrison was convinced that Bricusse was trying to write songs that could become stand-alone hits. “He can do that with his partner, Newley,” he snapped. “I don’t think I have a number yet.” Besides Flanders and Swann, Harrison also wanted Comden and Green to write him some songs: “Please try and explain this complicated artistic truth to Dick [Zanuck],” he wrote. “I cannot do any more work on any of this material. It just isn’t any fun.”³¹

Fleischer, by now, knew how to handle his star. “I’ve spent the day mulling over your letter and after analyzing it carefully…I have decided that the sky wasn’t falling after all,” he wrote back. “Leslie is capable of coming through for you.” Fleischer wasn’t a huge fan of the music he was hearing, either. “I’m praying that Flanders and Swann will come to the rescue…even partially,” he wrote. “[But] the situation, while urgent, doesn’t call for the pressing of the panic button.” Asking the studio chief who had fired Harrison just two months earlier to hire still more songwriters would, he reminded his leading man, open a “Pandora’s Box.”³² Harrison quieted down quickly.

Nonetheless, Jacobs went along with Harrison’s demand that Flanders and Swann be signed to prepare an alternate score for Doctor Dolittle while Bricusse continued his own work. The duo spent a month writing songs, most of which were My Fair Lady knockoffs tailored to Harrison’s limited range. One, called “I Won’t Be a King,” included a wink to the actor himself, ending with the lyric “Lash me to an eagle / I won’t be regal / Lock me in an attic / I shall still be most emphatic that I / Won’t be / I can’t be / I daren’t be / I shan’t be a king! / And another thing: I couldn’t bear being called ‘Rex’!”³³ When they presented their songs to a sober Harrison in April, the actor quickly realized he didn’t dislike Bricusse’s tunes so much after all, and he sent them packing.

While Fleischer kept Harrison at bay, Jacobs assembled the rest of Dolittle’s cast and crew, hiring Herbert Ross and Nora Kaye to choreograph the film’s big numbers³⁴ and Ray Aghayan to design the costumes. His negotiations with Hayley Mills had fallen apart, but Jacobs had found a strong substitute to play Emma Fairfax: Samantha Eggar, a twenty-six-year-old auburn-haired Englishwoman who had recently starred as a kidnapping victim in William Wyler’s The Collector. Eggar and Wyler clashed repeatedly during the shoot; Wyler said that directing the young actress was “like carving soap,”³⁵ and Eggar didn’t hide her feeling that he was a withholding, punitive martinet who had made her first time on a Hollywood set “sheer hell.” But the result impressed critics and audiences alike; as her $250,000 deal to star in Doctor Dolittle was closing,³⁶ she received a Best Actress Oscar nomination for The Collector. Jacobs was so happy to get her that he didn’t even worry about the fact that Eggar couldn’t sing; he just added the need to hire a voice double to one of the to-do lists he carried around on index cards.

“At that time, I was under contract to Columbia and Paramount,” says Eggar, “and I didn’t have a green card,” which limited the number of days she could live and work in the United States each year. “Every five months, my husband and my child and I would have to move out of the country, with a new house rented by the studio every time I came back. I can’t believe the kind of life we led.” When Eggar got the Dolittle offer, she had just left her month-old baby to travel to Tokyo, where she was starring opposite Cary Grant in what turned out to be the actor’s final film, Walk, Don’t Run. “Given the toll that took on my health and my psyche, I don’t think I realized the scope of Doctor Dolittle, the size and responsibility, at the time I signed the contract…. I never got that message.”³⁷

Eggar had no idea that her twenty-six-week commitment to Doctor Dolittle would eventually double, but in one regard she was already well prepared for the production. A few years earlier, she had signed to costar with Harrison in an adaptation of Graham Greene’s play The Living Room. “Everything was fine until the first day of shooting, and on the first day, Rex walked out—just as he had walked out of many other commitments that he had made. He doubted himself, always. Regardless of being such a brilliant light comedian, he had this gross insecurity about himself. So I already knew this side of him—I had had a Rex experience.”³⁸

For two weeks in February, 20th Century-Fox struggled to cut Dolittle’s budget. When Donald Pleasence asked for $60,000 to play a supporting role in the film and Robert Morley wanted $50,000,³⁹ Jacobs was told to hire the less-known Peter Bull for $11,000.⁴⁰ The animal-training budget estimate fell by $300,000, a cut that was predicated on wild optimism about the ease of working with parrots, pigs, and chimpanzees. And the pirate ship sequence that Dick Zanuck had insisted remain in the script a couple of months earlier was jettisoned as well. But the single biggest piece of cost cutting was one that had the potential to cause a terrible embarrassment: Zanuck and Jacobs decided to eliminate the character of Bumpo, writing Sidney Poitier out of the film altogether and saving themselves his salary, which, given the new, longer production time that Dolittle would require, had risen from $250,000 to $400,000.⁴¹

At the same time that Leslie Bricusse, who hadn’t been told of the studio’s sudden change in plans, was turning in a new draft of the script in which he had followed Jacobs’s orders to enlarge Bumpo’s role, Fleischer was complaining that the Bumpo sequences were “extraneous nonsense,”⁴² and Zanuck and Jacobs were fretting over how to handle the firing of America’s only Oscar-winning black actor. In addition to the certainty that the decision would enrage Harrison, who had insisted on Poitier’s casting, their blunder would bring the film unwelcome publicity, and they would probably have to spend far more to pay off Poitier than it had cost them to end their two-week dalliance with Christopher Plummer. As it happened, Jacobs and Zanuck got lucky: Poitier had never signed his contract. A few weeks after they decided to cut him from the film, Poitier’s agent, Martin Baum, brought up some minor sticking points in his deal for Dolittle. Jacobs flatly refused to give an inch, hoping to force an artificial confrontation, and his strategy worked: Poitier quit. That saved the producer from having to send out a press release that he had drafted in which he was ready to fall on his sword, admitting that “we simply had a script which ran well over four hours” and noting that the role of Bumpo would have to shrink so much that “it would have been an imposition to insist that Mr. Poitier continue in it.”⁴³

Poitier himself could have chosen to make Fox’s sloppy treatment of him public, but by the time his Dolittle deal came undone in April, he was probably happy to be rid of the film. The actor had not had high hopes for any of the three pictures that opened at the end of 1965, and he was right about The Bedford Incident and The Slender Thread, which received indifferent reviews and did little business. But the third movie, MGM’s A Patch of Blue, was surprising everyone by becoming the biggest box office success of his career. Poitier had agreed to a substantial salary cut, taking just $80,000⁴⁴ in exchange for 10 percent of the gross to star in director Guy Green’s low-budget black-and-white drama about a black man who befriends a teenage blind white girl (Elizabeth Hartman) and then runs afoul of her slatternly, racist mother (Shelley Winters). His decision paid off handsomely when A Patch of Blue returned $6.8 million to the studio. In promoting the movie, MGM followed the Lilies of the Field playbook to the letter, selling the film as a parable of racial understanding in the press while soft-pedaling anything that could offend southern theater owners or audiences. Print advertisements for the film showed Hartman swinging gaily around the trunk of a tree, with a tiny head shot of Poitier placed as far away from her as possible,⁴⁵ and MGM’s endorsement of racial understanding proved to be somewhat flexible; the studio willingly cut eight seconds from all prints of A Patch of Blue that showed in the South,⁴⁶ excising what would have been the first time a black man kissed a white woman in a major Hollywood film.

A Patch of Blue turned Poitier into a first-tier national movie star. Despite Variety’s concern that the film would have “possible limited appeal in Dixie,”⁴⁷ the movie was his first to do big business in cities like Atlanta, Houston, and Charlotte,⁴⁸ playing well in both black and white neighborhoods. Most critics felt that the mawkish material was elevated by the performances and shared Judith Crist’s conviction that the movie showed Poitier “at the peak of his abilities…the embodiment of a man secure within himself.”⁴⁹ But many also expressed impatience with seeing the actor forced into one more turn-the-other-cheek characterization. White liberals were especially eager to take on the mantle of black rage: “The caricature of the Negro as a Madison Avenue sort of Christian saint, selfless and well-groomed, is becoming a movie cliché nearly as tiresome and, at bottom, nearly as patronizing as the cretinous figure that Stepin Fetchit used to play,” wrote Brendan Gill in The New Yorker. “Negroes must find it extremely irritating.”⁵⁰ “The implicit moral is that affection between a Negro man and a white girl is all right so long as the girl is blind, ignorant, undeveloped and 18 years old,” complained the reviewers for Film Quarterly. “We will have got somewhere when she’s a bright 25-year-old who knows what she’s doing.”⁵¹

The critics who argued that A Patch of Blue’s take on race relations was hopelessly behind the day’s headlines never mentioned that the film had to be bowdlerized in order to play in half the country. Nor did they acknowledge that they stood an ideological world apart from some of their own colleagues. In the widespread shock that followed the Watts riots, some white commentators and cultural critics started to articulate a ludicrous position of evenhandedness, attempting to advance the notion that in 1966, the problem of antiwhite anger could be reasonably discussed in the same breath as the issue of civil rights for black Americans. Positioning itself above what it decided were the orthodoxies of both sides, Saturday Review praised A Patch of Blue for refusing to “imply that racial tolerance is wholly ‘one-sided’”⁵² (a message that is nowhere to be found in the movie itself). Meanwhile, members of the Ku Klux Klan were picketing the Memphis theater showing the movie, calling it “ungodly” and complaining that “the nigger’s name [is] above the white woman’s on the marquee.” The protesters were far outnumbered that day by moviegoers.⁵³

In the winter and spring of 1966, Poitier, thanks in part to the persistence of Harry Belafonte, was becoming a more visible and audible political activist. He and Belafonte went to East Harlem to talk to four thousand grade school students for what was then called Negro History Week;⁵⁴ the two men paid the bail for five protesters, including SNCC chairman John Lewis, who were arrested for picketing against apartheid at the South African consul general’s office in New York;⁵⁵ and Poitier made a guest appearance in The Strollin’ Twenties, a CBS special produced by Belafonte that was a rarity for network television, a proudly Afrocentric history of entertainment in Harlem.

But when it came to acting challenges that would take him in new directions, Poitier was, perhaps for the first time, as hamstrung by the restrictions he placed on himself as by the limitations of the material he was given. After fifteen years of being Hollywood’s exception to the rule, he either would not or could not see himself as anything other than a role model. He could barely suppress his weariness with material like A Patch of Blue (“I don’t think anyone familiar with American social life could construe [it] as being representative,” he said), but when opportunities to shake off his plaster-saint image presented themselves, he turned away. That summer, Poitier entertained an offer to play Othello in an NBC special, a role that surely would have been the most challenging of his career. After weeks of indecision, he dropped out, claiming defensively that the role “bored me”⁵⁶ and that he didn’t want to play a black man who was “a dupe.”⁵⁷ “If the fabric of the society were different, I would scream to high heaven to play villains. But I’ll be damned if I do that at this stage of the game. Not when there is only one Negro actor working in films with any degree of consistency. It’s a choice,” he said. “A clear choice.”⁵⁸