“Singer of songs . . . that’s my work. I also juggle.
I can do feats of magic.”
—Tony Curtis as Antoninus
DESPITE THE ODDS, WE’D WON our race with The Gladiators. But the victory was not without cost. Spartacus was now careening into production without a director, a leading lady, or a finished script.
Actually, we had too many scripts. Dalton Trumbo (still known on the leather-bound script covers as “Sam Jackson”) would later say he generated a quarter of a million words in the course of writing Spartacus. Many thousands of these came in the form of the multicolored pages that had expanded and deepened the roles of the English actors—Sir Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, and Peter Ustinov. Their parts were now central to the film. That would come back to haunt us when we started shooting.
Our start date was now three months away. My immediate problem remained finding a strong director. With Olivier out of the running (which came as a great relief to Laughton), we were back to square one.
I briefly considered Marty Ritt. It would be a consolation prize of sorts after he lost out on The Gladiators. Not available. He and Yul Brynner were still finishing their screen version of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.
With each passing day, Universal was growing more excited about the prospects for Spartacus. At a budget of $4 million, this was by far the biggest picture on their production schedule. Their future was on the line with this picture, not to mention mine. The rumors of the studio’s insolvency (and its possible sale) were swirling around the lot. Decca Records, which owned Universal, denied them repeatedly. In Hollywood, that often serves as confirmation.
Lew Wasserman remained the patron saint of Spartacus. Without his sage counsel and powers of persuasion, we wouldn’t have a cast or a studio. Now I needed his help again.
In early November of 1958, I went to see him. Surprisingly, Lew was uncharacteristically expansive. Never one for small talk, he casually asked me how I was getting along with “the boys at Universal.” There was an odd look on his face, an almost devilish glint in his eye. This wasn’t like him at all.
“Ed Muhl is calling me every day, Lew. He’s my new best friend.”
It was true. Now that he had given us the green light, Universal’s production chief was taking a hands-on role with Spartacus. So far, it was a good working relationship. They were going out of their way to accommodate me and my entire team.
“That’s good.” Lew was smiling. He knew something that he wasn’t telling me.
“Is there something happening with Universal that I should know about?”
I wouldn’t have believed it possible, but Lew was actually beaming.
“Kirk, can you keep a secret?”
“Lew, you know I can.”
He cleared his throat. “Next month, MCA is going to buy the entire Universal lot—367 acres, the soundstages, all the offices—everything but the studio itself.”
I whistled. So that was why Lew seemed to know so much about the inner workings of Universal. He was buying the lot! My agent was about to become my landlord.
“That’s terrific!” I extended my hand. “Congratulations!”
He shook it. “Thank you, Kirk.”
Then, Lew’s smile instantly disappeared. Once again—all business.
“We need to find you a director. Muhl wants Anthony Mann.”
“Anthony Mann?!”
“Kirk . . . I agree.”
“Jesus, I don’t know, Lew. Do you really think he’s up to it?”
“I do. And Universal does. Trust me on this. He’s good.”
I swallowed hard. I didn’t think he was the right director, but a bird in the hand . . . ? “Okay, it’s Mann.”
As I drove back to my office, I mentally ran through the Spartacus list: studio, check; director, check; Olivier, Laughton, Ustinov—check, check, and check. It had taken us eight months of hard work and strategy to defeat The Gladiators, but we did it. Checkmate.
As I pulled into my parking space, I couldn’t shake the worrisome feeling that we’d won the battle but might still lose the war.
In order to preempt the competition, we were now locked in to a late-January start date. Location scouts were already in Death Valley looking for a barren stretch of sand and rock to replicate the Libyan desert, where the Thracian slave Spartacus was captured and sold to the owner of the gladiator school to be trained for the amusement of his Roman masters.
This crucial scene would eventually start the picture, but Olivier still believed that his character, General Crassus, would open the film with a narrative description of Spartacus’ emergence as the leader of the slave revolt. This flashback device had persuaded Larry to play the part.
I knew that we weren’t committed to doing it that way. Olivier did not.
The unfinished script was the chief dilemma facing our new director, Tony Mann. My biggest problem was the one major casting decision left to be made: the female lead, Varinia, a slave girl who falls in love with Spartacus.
To me, it was important that this girl should have an accent that was distinctly different from the patrician Romans, and those parts were all being played by British actors.
As a favor, I did test one American actress, my old girlfriend Gene Tierney. I felt sorry for her. Like Vivien Leigh, Gene suffered from severe mental health problems. Two years earlier, after numerous electric shock treatments failed to cure her chronic depression, she walked out on a building ledge, ready to jump. Rescued at the last minute by police, she was hospitalized again for many months. Slowly, she improved. Even before I saw the footage, I could tell she wasn’t right anymore. Gene—the beautiful girl I once dated, the actress who captivated movie audiences as “Laura”—was gone. The spark in her eyes just wasn’t there anymore.
My first serious choice was a stunning blond French girl, Jeanne Moreau. Her smoldering sexuality and deeply expressive eyes evoked a young Bette Davis (a comparison that she later told me she hated—“I can’t stand Bette Davis”).
Jeanne’s recent film with director Louis Malle, The Lovers, was garnering international attention. Her performance as a young married woman who abandons her family after a casual sexual affair was suggestive to the point of controversy. The film was banned in parts of America for its “obscenity.”
A theater owner in Cleveland was convicted of obscenity for showing The Lovers. The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which eventually threw out his sentence. This led Justice Potter Stewart to make his famous statement about pornography: “I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”
In the prefeminist 1950s, few actresses would take a risk like that. That’s why I thought Moreau would be perfect for the role of a slave girl who’s literally liberated from a life of indentured servitude.
When I went to see Jeanne in Paris, she was in a play, La Bonne Soupe, at the Théâtre du Gymnase. I took her out for dinner. She was even more beautiful in person than on-screen.
I offered to buy out the run of the play if she would come to America and portray Varinia. I told her she would become the biggest star in the world. None of this mattered to her. Politely, Jeanne turned me down cold.
I was disappointed. Orson Welles subsequently called Jeanne Moreau “the greatest actress in the world”—but she was not going to prove it in Spartacus. I still needed a leading lady.
Somehow, Jean Simmons got a copy of the script and was badgering me to play Varinia. She was living on a ranch in Arizona with her husband, Stewart Granger. I had great respect for Jean, a beautiful girl and lovely actress, but she was British—that just wasn’t the accent I wanted.
MCA sent the script to Ingrid Bergman, who I didn’t think was right for the part. Fortunately, she didn’t like the story, calling it “too bloody.”
Elsa Martinelli, my “fan” from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, was no longer under contract to my company. She’d wanted the freedom to do other pictures, so I let her go as she’d asked—and now her career was floundering. She was back in Italy making low-budget films.
I’ve never stood in the way of someone’s career. A contract is just a piece of paper. If it doesn’t represent an artist’s true commitment, no amount of money can make up for that.
If Elsa had stayed under contract to Bryna, I probably would have given her the part. Unfortunately—for both of us—she was no longer a credible choice.
We were under the gun. As Thanksgiving approached, we decided to put out a worldwide casting call. If an established actress wasn’t available, why not a newcomer? It would be a funny story—“Slave girl wanted for $5 million picture; no experience necessary.” The columnists would love it, and we’d get a lot of free publicity out of the search itself.
Eddie Lewis and I looked at reel after reel of beautiful young European women. My eyes were bleary and I went home.
Anne wasn’t sympathetic to my “plight.” She just looked up from dinner and said, “I thought you wanted a good actress. What does it matter where she comes from, so long as she can act?”
“Jesus, Anne! How many times do I have to tell you that Varinia can’t speak with a British or American accent?!”
Wiping the corner of her mouth with a napkin, she held my gaze steadily. I knew that look. “Then why did you do a screen test with your old girlfriend Gene Tierney?”
“How did you even know about her?” Anne had a third eye when it came to the women in my life.
She folded the napkin back into her lap and continued eating. “I know a lot about you, Mr. Douglas,” she said, her blue eyes twinkling.
Finally, we found the right girl. She was a twenty-seven-year-old German beauty named Sabine Bethmann. The screen test captured her incandescence—a breathtaking, almost ethereal loveliness. Her blond hair and blue eyes would be striking in Technirama, the new wide-screen format we’d decided to use for Spartacus.
She looked even younger than her twenty-seven years. This, too, was an important asset. The character of Varinia, a girl who falls in love with Spartacus, must be able to convey the innocence and optimism of youth. Sabine Bethmann, on camera, had that quality. Eddie and I looked at each other in relief.
There was still a huge amount of preparation we had to do, just to get her ready for the part. The problem was she barely spoke any English. Her short film experience was entirely in the German cinema. She would be very difficult for American audiences to understand. We hired the best coach available, Jeff Corey, a blacklisted actor who, out of necessity, had become a respected drama teacher.
Universal’s publicity department created a whole campaign around our new “star.” They started by changing the spelling of her name, replacing an “e” with an “a” and dropping an “n.” Sabine Bethmann became “Sabina Bethman.” In a town filled with Tabs, Troys, and Rocks, I’m sure someone thought this was a brilliant idea.
In the middle of all this, my friend Bernie Schwartz called—he had also changed his name . . . to “Tony Curtis.”
“How’s it going, Big Panther?”
I laughed. Tony once told a reporter that I was like a panther with a thorn in his side, muscles taut, prowling the set. In those days, it was true.
“Tony! How’s Janet?
“She’s doing great. Big as a house. The baby is due any minute.” Tony and Janet Leigh already had a young daughter about Peter’s age—Kelly. The new baby would be named Jamie Lee.
“That’s great! Tell her that Anne and I send our love.”
“I will. I will.” A pause. “So, when do you start shooting Spartacus?”
“In two months. We just found this beautiful German girl for the lead.”
A longer pause.
“Hey, Tony, what’s the matter?”
“I’m kind of hurt there’s no part in it for me. Don’t you love me anymore?”
That was all I needed right now—friends hitting me up to be in a picture that didn’t even have a finished script.
“Are you schnorring me, you sonofabitch?” I deliberately used the Yiddish word, which means wheedling a person until he gives you something for free. I wasn’t angry, just annoyed by his brashness. But that was Tony. He could be very persistent.
“Kirk, boychick, it doesn’t have to be a big part. A couple of scenes will be enough to get rid of one of my commitments to Universal.”
I knew Tony hated working at Universal. Spartacus would put him one step closer to getting out of his contract.
“I started at Universal when I was nothing and they still treat me like nothing.” Tony’s voice was filled with anger.
I understood. The same thing happened to me when I started in the business with producer Hal Wallis. When I refused to sign a seven-picture contract extension with him, he threatened to drop me. I said, “Fuck you. Then drop me!” I pulled the thorn out of my own side.
“Tony, I can’t think of any part that would be right for you.”
There was a small, but crucial, role: that of another slave who tries to kill Spartacus, in order to spare him from being crucified by the Romans. But that role was intended for an older, stronger man; someone more equal in size and stature, who would make a more convincing opponent in hand-to-hand combat. That wasn’t Tony Curtis.
“Let me think about it and I’ll get back to you.” I hung up the phone. Tony seemed so down—I wanted to do something for him. I dialed Eddie at home.
“How’s the writing coming?” It was now a running gag between us. Every time Eddie Lewis told someone he was writing Spartacus, it embarrassed him. He wasn’t an actor but he had to do a lot of acting.
We both knew it was necessary; the blacklist was still a real threat. The revelation of Dalton Trumbo’s involvement with Spartacus could shut down the entire picture. So Eddie continued to play the producer-turned-writer, a charade he hated.
“Tony Curtis just called me. He wants to be in the picture.”
“Jesus, maybe he could play Varinia!” Tony had just done drag with Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe in the new Billy Wilder movie, Some Like It Hot.
“What do you think, Kirk? The accent would work perfectly. She’d be a slave girl from the Bronx.” Eddie was still laughing.
“Hey, I’m serious. He wants in. It doesn’t need to be a big part, just a couple of scenes. What can we find for him?”
Eddie was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, the laughter was gone from his voice. “I think it’s a lousy idea, Kirk. But he’s your friend. I’ll call Dalton and get him working on something for Tony.”
“Thanks.” Eddie was right. I was letting Tony play on our friendship. But it was my decision and I’d made it.
“Okay, Kirk, I’ll see you tomorrow at the office. Oh wait, there’s one more thing.”
“What is it?”
“Dalton keeps asking me about Nixon. What should I tell him?”
A few months earlier, I was surprised to get an invitation to a private event in Washington, D.C., with Vice President Richard Nixon. He was running for president to succeed Eisenhower, so I assumed he was trying to find some support in Hollywood. Maybe he thought my friendship with John Wayne would make me sympathetic to him. I wasn’t really interested in politics, but I accepted the invitation anyway.
When Dalton Trumbo heard about it, he was tremendously excited. With the election just two years away, he thought Nixon would be looking for ways to moderate his image as a virulent anti-Communist. (Years later, after he became president, Nixon flew to Beijing and met with Mao Tse-tung. People said, “Only Nixon could go to China.”)
Dalton figured Nixon might be receptive to a pitch from me about ending the blacklist. Signing it “Sam,” Dalton wrote an eloquent letter, giving me ammunition for our possible meeting. It read, in part:
Eleven years later, I doubt that there are five members of the Communist party in all of Hollywood. Most blacklistees have been out of the party for years. Some of them have become conservatives, some have become democrats, and some have maintained a generally socialist point of view. But to the last man they cannot in conscience admit the right of any legislative committee to judge their loyalty. Beyond this, they view a forced confession of former guilt or stupidity as no different in principle from the public confessions that have characterized Russian justice, or the brainwashing that is charged to the Chinese. For this reason, and this reason only, scores of them have kept silent and suffered the consequences. I do think there are very, very strong arguments against the blacklist . . . and I have taken the liberty of setting down a few notes, in a style which I hope is cool enough and detached enough that they might be left in the possession of Mr. N[ixon] without compromising the person [Kirk] who turned them over to him.
The event was subsequently postponed, but Dalton kept bringing Nixon up with me. He had watched then-Congressman Nixon sit silently during the House Un-American Activities Committee, while J. Parnell Thomas was banging his gavel and issuing contempt citations. Dalton believed that Nixon was never really comfortable with the witch hunts.
I was skeptical. Nixon would have the credibility to say it was time to end the blacklist, but would he have the guts?
Ending the call, I said to Eddie, “Let ‘Sam’ know that I’m still working on getting in to see Nixon.”
I did make a trip to the East Coast before the end of the year, but it wasn’t to see Nixon. It was a trip I didn’t want to make. Ever.
The week before Thanksgiving, my mother called me. This was strange. My birthday wasn’t until next month. She wanted to know when I was coming to see her next. That was even less like her. She never pressed me to come visit. Then it hit me.
When my plane landed in Albany, New York, a limousine was waiting to take me to the assisted-care home where my mother was living. It was her idea to move there. Initially, I’d been against it.
Later, I realized that it was difficult living with my sister Fritzi and her two kids. Whenever Fritzi went out, Ma ended up taking care of the kids. It had become too much for her.
I arrived at the home. A female supervisor was waiting for me.
“I’m so glad you came, Mr. Douglas. We’re moving your mother to the hospital tomorrow.”
She escorted me to Ma’s room. I looked at the door; her name, “Bryna,” was printed on it.
She opened it a crack and peered in. “She’s asleep. Don’t stay long.” I went in, closing the door behind me.
I pulled up a chair and sat down beside her. Her arm hung loosely over the bed. I took her hand, held it gently, and listened to my mother’s labored breathing. I looked around the room. There was the big television set I had given her. It made Ma very popular in the house. Everyone wanted to visit her and watch their TV shows. My eyes drifted to the dresser and I couldn’t help but smile; there was a half-empty bottle of scotch. Ma never drank in her whole life, but a year ago, the doctor recommended she take a shot of whiskey every day to stimulate her heart. Ma got to like that remedy, and I’m sure she’d sneak a second shot in.
On the table, I saw two very familiar objects—two candlesticks that my mother had brought from Russia. They must be more than a hundred years old, made of pewter that was shined endlessly. Of course, tomorrow, Friday, was the Sabbath. My mother was ready to light the candles and say the prayer. I was awakened from these reveries by the weak voice of my mother.
“Issur?”
“Hello, Ma, it’s me.”
“My big-shot son.”
“Oh, Ma, you always say that. But I like it.”
“Az men ruft on dayn nomen, es tsitert di gantse erd.”
“Ma, the whole world does not tremble when they say my name.”
Whenever my mother got emotional, she always spoke Yiddish.
“They know your name too. Remember when we drove the limousine to Times Square?” When The Vikings opened, I took her to see the huge BRYNA PRESENTS sign covering the block.
“Yes, I remember. I remember,” she said. The memory brought a small light to her tired eyes. She started coughing. There was a glass of water on the bedside table. I held it to her lips. She took a sip.
“Ma, I started a new picture.”
“What picture?”
“Spartacus. A man called Spartacus.”
“Sparti-kus. A good man?”
“Oh yes, Ma. Very good.”
“Action?”
“Lots of action.”
“Do you get hurt?”
“No, Ma, I don’t get hurt. But at the end I do get crucified.”
“Huh?” She looked confused.
I smiled, reassuringly. Taking her hand, I said, “It all ends happily.”
Would she ever be able to see it? I was fighting back tears. I saw the kind face of the young girl who came from Belarus, married a cruel husband, and had seven children. Her last wish was to not be buried next to Pa. How she must have suffered.
Suddenly, her hand became limp. Her eyes closed. Had she stopped breathing?
I was terrified. “Ma! Ma!”
Her eyes opened, and she looked up at my terrified face. She took her hand from mine and extended her index finger. Where was she pointing? I turned around. I couldn’t believe it. She was pointing at the whiskey bottle.
I looked down at my mother. Now she was smiling.