“You don’t want to know my name.
I don’t want to know your name.”
—Woody Strode as Draba
I’VE ALWAYS HATED DESKS.
They symbolize a stern authority figure judging me from on high. Sizing me up. Appraising me. Of course, I’m never good enough—“Sorry, Kirk, you’re not right for the part.”
Whatever the source of my phobia, it’s stayed with me all my life. Today, whenever I go into the Bryna Company, I pull up a chair next to my assistant’s desk. She places my correspondence at the corner of her desk, which is my space.
The big office down the hall, the one that does have a large desk in it, belongs to Anne, the president of Bryna. I love watching my wife sit behind it with confidence and command.
In the early years of Bryna, I had a big desk. I thought that I needed to prove I was the boss, to show everybody I was in charge. In those days, Anne was still at home taking care of our small child. Peter was just two. And soon we had another one on the way. Anne wouldn’t be able to take over the reins of the company for a number of years. By the way, short of marrying her, making Anne president of my company is the smartest decision I’ve ever made.
My forty-first birthday—Monday, December 9, 1957. I was whistling when I walked into Bryna that morning.
“Happy birthday, Kirk!” came the greetings as I passed through the office. When I got to my desk, a few wrapped gifts were already waiting for me, along with an ornate, handwritten card from my mother.
I sat down in my “big boss” chair. What a lucky guy. The Vikings was in postproduction and looking great. Arthur Krim, the president of United Artists, would be releasing it in the spring. They were pushing me hard for another big Bryna project, perhaps even another historical epic.
I picked up the phone and called my mother in upstate New York to thank her for my card. She loved hearing my voice over the phone, but worried about how expensive the call was.
“Hi, Ma!”
“Issur, my birthday boy. Are you warm enough?”
“Ma, it’s seventy degrees here. It’s not Albany. I’m in California.”
No snow in the winter! It must have seemed like a miracle to her. She had never been to California. I could never get her on an airplane.
“You look so thin in your last picture. I’ll send you some borscht.”
“Ma, don’t send me borscht.”
“You don’t like my borscht?”
“Ma, there’s no market for fat actors.”
As I was saying good-bye to my mother, I heard something land with a loud thud on my desk. I swiveled around in my chair, expecting another gift.
Instead, it was a book.
Eddie Lewis looked back as he walked out of the office. “Happy birthday, Kirk. There’s your next project.”
I picked it up. Spartacus, by Howard Fast. Heavy. I opened it to the end—363 pages.
I knew only some basic facts about the legend of Spartacus who lived before Christ was born and led a slave rebellion against the Roman Empire. I took the book home with me. It kept me up half the night, long after Anne had fallen asleep.
In the morning, I asked Eddie what it would cost to option the book. I was sure it would be expensive—blacklist or not, Howard Fast’s novels had sold millions of copies—but I wanted it.
“One hundred dollars,” he said, smiling slightly.
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“No, I’m not,” he said, plainly serious now. “But there’s a catch. Fast wants to write the screenplay himself.”
That could be a problem. Good authors are notoriously bad screenwriters. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis—all failed to master the craft. I didn’t know Howard Fast. Maybe he would be the exception. I’d heard him described as “brilliant.” Only later would I discover that the description originated with him.
The token option was not the risk. It would cost many thousands more to use Fast as the writer. That was the real gamble. But United Artists was begging me for another big picture. They’d back my play.
“Eddie, make the deal. We can spare the hundred dollars.” I was smug.
As 1958 began, things looked really good for me.
The Vikings would hit theaters in June as a big summer picture.
I was set to star in two other movies, Last Train from Gun Hill, a John Sturges western costarring Tony Quinn, and The Devil’s Disciple, a Revolutionary War story for Burt Lancaster’s company. Burt and I would share billing with Sir Laurence Olivier.
Kirk Douglas the actor was doing just fine.
But Kirk Douglas the businessman had problems.
My smug self-assurance that Arthur Krim and United Artists would “back my play” on Spartacus was instantly deflated when I received this surprising wire from Arthur on January 13:
DEAR KIRK: “SPARTACUS” COVERS THE SAME STORY AS “THE GLADIATORS” BY KOESTLER. WE ARE ALREADY COMMITTED TO “THE GLADIATORS” WITH YUL BRYNNER TO BE DIRECTED BY MARTY RITT WHICH MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR US TO INTEREST OURSELVES IN “SPARTACUS.” BEST—ARTHUR
While I was still reeling from the Spartacus news, I went home that night to Anne. She was four months pregnant with our second child, but that hardly explained the growing tension between us.
Anne was the most loving and loyal partner any man could be blessed to have. What she was not, however, was naive. She was tough and brutally honest about people, especially about one in particular: Sam Norton. She didn’t trust the way he handled my business affairs, even though he was also my best friend. I’d originally met him back in the hallways of Famous Artist Agency, when I was cooling my heels waiting for an audience with the big boss, Charlie Feldman. Sam was a junior guy in the agency, so he had time to shoot the breeze with a young actor. Like me, he was a physical guy—we had both done some wrestling. One day I pinned him to the floor of his office and our friendship was born.
Ten years later, he had become like family to me. I trusted Sam like the brother I never had, like the father I could never count on.
He handled everything—all my personal accounts and investments, as well as the Bryna Company. He got a 10 percent commission on all my deals, and his law firm got big fees for handling my business. I got the peace of mind of never having to worry about money. When I needed anything, Sam sent it to me.
Right from the day we were married, Anne had her doubts about Sam. Minutes before we exchanged vows, he put a prenuptial agreement in front of her and told her to sign it. I explained that Sam was just trying to protect me, but the high-handed way he’d done it had raised Anne’s suspicions from that day forward.
Four years later, Anne was not only worried about me, she was concerned about the financial security of our growing family.
“If something happens to you, what happens to us?”
“Anne, for Chrissakes, I’ve told you a hundred times. Sam will take care of you. He’s made me a millionaire. Isn’t that enough?!”
Anne looked at me impassively. Her voice was even, but firm. “Kirk, if you’re a millionaire, where is all the money? He says you have got so many investments—property, petroleum. Have you ever seen one oil well?”
I stormed out of the room. More and more, that was the way these arguments ended. At a deeper level, she was also saying that she didn’t trust my judgment. That was hard for me to take.
Back at the office, the news on Spartacus went from bad to worse. Marty Ritt, the director of The Gladiators, was furious that we were poaching on what he considered his historical turf. He told Eddie Lewis that they were way ahead of us with script, location scouting, and casting. Not only did they have Yul Brynner, they’d also signed Tony Quinn. I made a quick call to Tony and he confirmed this was true.
Eddie Lewis and I discussed the possibility of combining the two projects. Marty Ritt would direct. Yul and I would costar. We floated the idea and Marty shot it down quickly: “No way. Yul won’t work with Kirk. He hates him.”
Marty didn’t dare say this to me directly, because it wasn’t true. Yul and I went on to make two pictures together. And, when he and Frank Sinatra were on the outs, Yul came and stayed with me and Anne in Palm Springs. That sure is a funny way to “hate” a guy.
Another surprise. We found out that United Artists had also trademarked several possible names for their Gladiators project, including Spartacus. Now we owned the rights to a book, but not the title!
There’s always been a certain part of my personality that kicks in when people tell me I can’t do something. “You can’t make Spartacus.” “You can’t trust Sam Norton.”
I’d had enough of being told “You can’t.”
The last straw came with an ad in Daily Variety—a full-page picture of Yul Brynner looking ferocious in a rented Spartacus costume. “The Gladiators—next from United Artists!” was emblazoned across the photo.
In that moment, I realized they were bluffing. They hadn’t shot a frame of film. The word around town was that The Gladiators had a budget of $5.5 million. My anger turned to determination.
I called their bluff. I sent Arthur Krim another wire:
ARTHUR: WE ARE SPENDING FIVE MILLION FIVE HUNDRED AND TWO DOLLARS ON SPARTACUS.
YOUR MOVE, KIRK.
I sent the smart-alecky wire, but I didn’t feel so brave. I’m a pretty good actor and I played the role of someone who was confident and sure. But underneath I was afraid and wondered what I was getting myself into.
As I sit here today writing this, I realize I’ve grown more conservative with age. I don’t mean that in a political sense. I mean that I’m less impulsive now, less likely to take a foolhardy risk. When I was making Spartacus, I was young, reckless. I insisted that I do all my own stunts. Now I have two new knees and a bad back. Was it worth it? With age you think differently.
Howard Fast began working on the script in New Jersey, and we went around Hollywood looking for a studio.
We were running a race with The Gladiators. It felt like they had a chariot with a full team of horses, while I was chasing after them on foot, hoping to keep up.
Everywhere I went, they had been there first. Paramount. MGM. Columbia. Two movies about Spartacus? Forget it. It seemed United Artists’ bluff had worked. The race was over and Yul Brynner’s picture had won.
I went to see my new agent, Lew Wasserman. Lew was the head of MCA, the most powerful talent agency in Hollywood. Their client list read like a Who’s Who of Hollywood—Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda, as well as newer stars like Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe.
Lew had his own big desk he always kept spotlessly clean—the important information was in his head. Lew Wasserman knew more and forgot less than anyone in Hollywood.
“What’s happening with Spartacus?” he asked, owlish behind his thick glasses.
“We’ve been all over town with it, Lew. That damned Variety ad makes it seem like The Gladiators is in the can. Nobody wants to risk a fight.”
Lew was a man of few words. “What about Universal?”
“We haven’t been there yet.”
Had it come to this? Universal-International Pictures was a studio where you went in desperation. My friend Tony Curtis was under contract there. He couldn’t wait to get out. “Jesus, Kirk. I’m on a lot with Ma and Pa Kettle and Francis the Talking Mule!”
They were also hemorrhaging money. Could they even afford a project of this size? None of this seemed to concern Lew. He rose, signaling the end of our meeting.
“I’ll have Eddie Muhl call you.”
Ed Muhl was head of production for Universal. Within hours, he called. Lew had wasted no time.
“It’s a great book, Kirk. I’ve read it. But do you think it’s a movie?”
“I really do, Ed. We’re going to build the whole story around Spartacus the man, not describe him in flashback the way Fast does in the book.”
In Fast’s novel, Spartacus is dead at the opening of the story. You didn’t meet him, you only heard him talked about. And even in flashback, he dies right in the middle of the book.
“Lew tells me Howard Fast is writing the script. Kirk, I’m a little nervous about that.”
“Don’t worry, Ed. He understands the book won’t play dramatically. He’ll do what we need.”
I wasn’t at all sure Fast could do it.
“No, no. It’s not that. It’s the Communist thing. We’ve got enough headaches over here.”
I was surprised. I thought that Fast’s public recanting and denunciation of Communism was common knowledge.
“He’s no Red. Fast told them all to go to hell. They hate him now.”
“I know that, Kirk. And you know that. But try telling it to Hedda Hopper. That woman has the memory of an elephant.”
I laughed. “You mean she has the legs of an elephant.”
Muhl was laughing too. A good sign. I moved in to try and close the deal. “How about this, Ed? I’ll have a first draft of the screenplay in four weeks. If you like it, we take it from there.”
“Okay, Kirk. We’ll put the word out that we’re thinking of making Spartacus with Fast. If there’s no big reaction, we might be able to use him. Get me a script as soon you can.”
I quickly called Lew Wasserman. He came on the line without saying hello.
“How did it go with Muhl?”
“I think he might be in, but he’s worried about Howard Fast. We need to get him a script in four weeks.”
Lew was already moving on. “How do you see it cast?”
I took a deep breath. “What about Larry Olivier, Charles Laughton, and Peter Ustinov?”
Anybody else might have dismissed me as delusional. Not Lew.
“Why not?” was his immediate reply.
“You think we could get them?”
“They’re my clients. You sure as hell can talk to them.”
That night, I told Anne that Spartacus might really happen. All we needed now was for Howard Fast to come through with a script.
Unfortunately, he did.
We’d flown Fast out to California from New Jersey, setting him up at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The now-former Communist didn’t complain about his posh digs, but he was already showing signs of becoming a major pain in the ass. I should have seen it coming when he asked me if I had optioned Spartacus just because his name was so valuable.
Still, Fast was writing steadily. Two weeks after he arrived in California, he sent us his first draft.
“This is crap!” Eddie Lewis said about what Howard Fast had just handed in to us. He got no argument from me.
Dear God, it was awful—sixty pages of lifeless characters uttering leaden speeches. It was as if he hadn’t read his own novel. There was no dramatic arc, no spine on which to build a usable script.
“Get Fast in here now!”
“He’s busy, Kirk!”
“I want to see him.”
“He’s giving a lecture over at UCLA.”
I’d promised Muhl a screenplay in four weeks. We’d used up half that time with nothing to show for it. Fast hadn’t worked for us. Now we needed speed.
I had an idea.
Bryna had another writer, Sam Jackson, who we had just put under contract. He was working on adapting a novel that I really liked, The Brave Cowboy, by Edward Abbey. I hadn’t met this Jackson fellow yet, but I knew his reputation. He was the quickest writer in Hollywood. I knew something else about him too. Although we had hired him under the name of “Sam Jackson,” that was not his real name.
It was Dalton Trumbo. And I didn’t give a damn about his politics.
I asked Eddie Lewis to set up a meeting with him right away. There was the obvious problem of where to meet, since no blacklisted writer had set foot on a studio lot in more than a decade, and Dalton Trumbo was a highly recognizable figure. If his trademark handlebar mustache was spotted on the Universal lot, a panicked Eddie Muhl might shut down the whole film.
Trumbo came out to my house, a half-hour’s drive from his home near Pasadena. Once the highest-paid writer in the business, he now drove an old car that could barely make the drive over the pass to Beverly Hills.
I opened the door to greet him. He was small, graying. The mustache dwarfed his face, yet his eyes—magnified by thick glasses—were his dominant feature. They had warmth and intelligence, along with a direct quality that said this guy was no phony.
“It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Sam,” I said, escorting him into my living room.
“So this is how the other half lives,” he said disarmingly.
The rapport between us was instant and easy. Over coffee, I asked him how he had come up with the name “Sam Jackson.”
“Did you ever see a movie I wrote called The Remarkable Andrew?”
“No, but I loved Kitty Foyle and A Guy Named Joe.” Then, grinning, I added, “The Brave One was a terrific picture too.”
He smiled, taking a long drag from the cigarette that he kept perpetually lit in his signature black holder. “Bill Holden plays a young man named Andrew—a bookkeeper framed for a crime he didn’t commit. Railroaded off to jail, he’s visited by the ghost of General Andrew Jackson. He tells him to fight, that ‘one man with courage makes a majority.’
“I wrote that in 1942, before all this blacklist nonsense.” He waved his cigarette in the air, dismissively, then added, “The ‘Sam’ is for Samuel Adams, one of my favorite Founding Fathers.”
As we continued to get acquainted, we discovered that we shared the same birthday—December ninth! Trumbo was born in Colorado in 1905. That made him exactly eleven years older than I was, to the day.
I told him that I’d first received Spartacus on “our” birthday. He flicked the ashes from his cigarette and said drily, “So where’s my copy?”
I don’t believe in coincidences. I’ve said that often. Sometimes the universe shows you that you’re precisely where you belong, often by putting you together with exactly the right person.
I gave my new friend “Sam” a copy of the book and he promised to read it right away.
I had been thinking a lot about the day when the blacklist would end. No more fronts. No more pseudonyms. The question was not “if” that day would come, but “when.”
But I knew I couldn’t take that chance with Spartacus. With a budget of at least five million, the risk was just too great.
We still hadn’t told Howard Fast that his script was unsalvageable. We couldn’t afford to. We might need his name on the final version, no matter who wrote it. His insufferable ego notwithstanding, there were Writers Guild issues to be dealt with. We would need a front, even for rewrites. As a producer, Eddie Lewis could play that part without violating Guild rules. That would be the plan.
Complicating things further, Dalton Trumbo and Howard Fast had their own “unfriendly” history. They had only met once, in New York, on the night Trumbo was released from prison.
Here’s how he described the single time their paths had crossed. I only wish you could hear his voice:
My wife had just got me out of jail at midnight. . . . We took a B&O to New York and some of the attorneys had a little dinner in an apartment and Howard Fast arrived, and I saw him through the door. I had never met him, but I had heard stories of him from convicts who had transferred from his jail to our jail, and they found him a baffling, wonderful mystery.
I saw him enter from the hall, see me, turn back, and then make a big entrance.
And then he said, “Fellow convict! How are you?!”
And there was something about it that irritated me and I was a little high and I said, “By what right do you call me a fellow convict—what did you serve? Ninety days with time off for good behavior?! You are no convict. You are a little casualty.”
He’s not a funny man, you know.
Trumbo’s humor was his saving grace. And I decided it would be ours as well. Trumbo—“Sam Jackson”—was the only guy who could get us a great script in the short window of time we had left. He was stunningly prolific. Where other top writers could turn out twenty pages per week, he could do twice that amount in one day!
But would he do it? The call came the next day.
He refused to let his feelings about Howard Fast, personal or political, stand in the way: “If I were to turn this down because of the author, because I disagreed with the politics or the public behavior or the private behavior of the author, I would become a party to the same blacklist that I have been dedicating my life to fighting.”
He had agreed to adapt the Fast book.
Eddie Lewis and I were elated. I said to him, “Dalton Trumbo. It’s too bad we can’t use that name. I like the sound of it. ‘Trummbbo!’ Don’t you hear trumpets blaring and drums beating?”
In forty-eight hours Trumbo sent us a seven-step outline based on Fast’s novel. The difference was immediately apparent—and brilliant. In two days, he had created the entire character of Spartacus—a slave who starts out as a savage, an animal, then grows into a man with a heart, a brain, a soul. Ultimately, he becomes a leader—a hero to thousands of men.
Eddie Lewis had the unenviable task of presenting this new structure to Howard Fast. Worse yet (for Eddie), he had to claim it as his own.
Predictably, Fast exploded, berating and belittling Eddie as a “half-wit” with delusions of being a genuine writer—like him. It’s possible to laugh about it now, but at the time we ran the very real risk of Howard Fast blowing up the whole deal.
After much persuasion—and massive ego massage—Fast agreed to continue writing his screenplay based on the “Lewis” outline. We knew that his work would never be used. He never had a clue about the parallel play that was being written simultaneously by “Sam Jackson.”
For the next two weeks, Dalton worked almost around the clock to produce the script that we would actually send to Universal.
Trying to spare both his time and the wear and tear on his old car, I made the trip out to his house several times during that frenetic fortnight.
I’d often find him working in the bathtub. He had a wooden tray set across the top, which preserved his modesty and gave him a place to put his typewriter, an ashtray, and an ever-present glass of bourbon.
He was a unique, idiosyncratic guy who, like me, loved animals. He was particularly fond of birds, often rescuing injured ones and nursing them back to health. He had so many parakeets and mockingbirds that he built an aviary for them in his backyard.
One bird he didn’t have—and always wanted—was a parrot. So I bought him one. He bonded with that bird. It was often perched on his shoulder while he was writing in the tub.
My other friend Sam—Norton—told me I could deduct the parrot later as a business expense. When I laughingly told this to Anne, she just rolled her eyes—more of Sam’s creative “advice.”
Universal loved the “Eddie Lewis” draft. We got a tentative green light from Muhl. But we still needed a major star to win the race with United Artists and Yul Brynner.
Laurence Olivier was the greatest actor in the English-speaking world. He remained at the top of our list. We’d heard (from Lew Wasserman) that United Artists intended to send Olivier the Gladiators script as soon as it was ready.
There, I had a slight advantage. Burt Lancaster and I were coproducing a film called The Devil’s Disciple, costarring Olivier. I would be spending the summer with Larry in London.
The Gladiators had a top director in Marty Ritt. Lew Wasserman felt strongly that in order to nail down the deal with Universal, we needed to lock in a good director. Quickly.
Eddie Lewis and I went through our Rolodex of possibilities. The first one we came to was a “D,” Delmer Daves. He’d done Demetrius and the Gladiators, but he had heart problems and couldn’t commit to a major project.
We kept looking. “E.” “F.” “G.” Eddie liked the British director Peter Glenville. No go—he had a play on Broadway.
“K.” Stanley Kubrick. Paths of Glory had been a critical success. However, as I’d predicted, it made no money. (It hadn’t helped that the French and German governments had done everything they could to kill it, short of burning the prints.) Besides, Kubrick was in preproduction to direct a Brando film called One-Eyed Jacks.
I spun the Rolodex. “L.” David Lean. Perfect! He’d just won the Academy Award for Best Director with Bridge on the River Kwai.
We got the draft script to him immediately. He was equally as quick in politely passing on our offer: “I can’t somehow fit myself into it style-wise. I couldn’t bring it off. Best of luck to you!” (I learned later that Lean had his heart set on an even bigger project, adapting the T. E. Lawrence novel Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Four years later he succeeded on a grand scale—Lawrence of Arabia. Passing on Spartacus was a good move for Lean, if not for us.)
We were at the “M”s. Joe Mankiewicz! Now there was an idea. He’d done Julius Caesar, and we had worked well together on A Letter to Three Wives. He had just finished writing and directing The Quiet American with Audie Murphy. Joe had nothing on his plate.
I called Lew Wasserman. No pleasantries, just a quick, “No, Kirk. With a budget this big, Universal wants a technician they can manage. That’s not Joe.”
Damn, we hadn’t even made the final deal with Universal and they were already sticking their camel’s nose deep into my tent. This was not a good sign. I reluctantly went back to the Rolodex.
Where was I? Oh yeah, “M.” I skipped right past Anthony Mann. He was a good director but not right for Spartacus. He’d done a lot of westerns. But Spartacus was not going to be a Roman-style western. I had no interest in doing a “shoot ’em up” with spears.
Halfway through the alphabet and we were striking out big-time. I paused. “Olivier.” Should I ask him to play a major part and direct? Would that be an incentive or would it make it even less likely that he’d agree? I took out his card and set it aside.
I finished turning the wheel of names. George Stevens was unavailable. Willy Wyler was shooting Ben-Hur. He had his epic.
Nobody! I called Lew Wasserman back. He encouraged me to talk with Olivier about directing while I was with him in London. He also said that Universal really liked Anthony Mann, as did he. Mann was a technician. Not an artist. Not a perfectionist. He was the kind of guy the studios loved because he could keep a picture on schedule and bring it in on budget.
I was surprised. Not about Mann, but by what Lew seemed to know about the inner workings of Universal. I had the sense that he was plugged in there more closely than to any other studio in town. Hell, if that was true, it would be great for Spartacus. And that was all I cared about. I mean, to make this picture I was willing to be as ruthless and pragmatic as I had to be.