“If we punished every commander who made a fool of himself . . . we wouldn’t have anyone left above the rank of centurion.”
—Laurence Olivier as Marcus Crassus
THE ALARM CLOCK WENT OFF at 6:00 a.m. Damn. I slammed it hard and thought of grabbing another hour of sleep. No way. There was too much to do. I looked over at Anne, burrowed under the covers. Now that we had two small children, sleep was precious to her. Fortunately, she slept through most of my now-daily predawn departures for the set.
It was Thursday, January 15, 1959. Since coming back from my mother’s funeral, I’d hurled myself headlong into preproduction on Spartacus. In less than two weeks, shooting would start in Death Valley, California.
Larry Olivier was due on the lot that day for his costume fitting as the regal General Crassus. I was being fitted for my various Spartacus outfits—the slave rags and the rebel leader’s battle garb. We were scheduled to have lunch together after our camera tests.
This would also be Tony Mann’s first meeting with Olivier. I knew he was nervous about directing the legendary Sir Laurence. Who wouldn’t be? Ten years earlier Olivier won the Oscar for Hamlet, having directed himself in the part. Tony knew that Olivier originally wanted to direct this picture too. That certainly wouldn’t help his confidence level in dealing with Larry, not to mention Laughton and Ustinov, who were themselves accomplished actor-directors.
I drove over the Cahuenga Pass to the Universal lot. The sun was just coming up over the vast San Fernando Valley hillside where the studio’s many soundstages were scattered like giant aluminum and cement bunkers.
True to his word, Lew Wasserman had just purchased all that acreage for the impressive sum of $11.25 million. Milton Rackmil made the announcement, welcoming his new “partners” at MCA, but assuring the world that the studio itself would still be run by him. Lew stood off to the side of the press conference, saying nothing. He knew that Rackmil’s days were already numbered, even if Milton did not.
Our small army of camera operators, electricians, set decorators, makeup artists, prop men, wardrobe women, grips, gaffers, and gofers was swarming over the lot that Lew bought. They already numbered well over a hundred people and that figure was growing steadily. And we hadn’t shot a single frame of film.
When I got to my dressing room, I was drawn instantly into the vortex of frenzied activity that engulfed Spartacus. As both executive producer and star, the buck (and with this film, there would be a lot of them—the budget was now up to $5 million and still climbing) stopped with me.
Even in my makeup chair, a constant stream of people threw questions at me.
Alexander Golitzen, the art director, brought over a genuine Roman medallion he’d received from Naples and also showed me the replica that studio artists had made from it. Did it look accurate?
A messenger arrived with the latest version of the script, along with a note from “Sam Jackson.” When could he expect to hear from me with my comments?
The phone on the left side of my chair rang. Ed Muhl, Universal’s production chief, was on the line with his daily call about the rapidly escalating budget.
While I was talking to Muhl, the other phone rang. It was Technicolor, the company we were using for its new Technirama color process. It still had some bugs in it and the head of the company was on the line to apologize.
“Hang on, Ed,” I said to Muhl. I grabbed the other phone. “Listen, we’ve announced that we’re shooting Spartacus in Technirama. You don’t want to make a liar out of me, do you?” I gave the phone back to the production assistant, and Muhl was still waiting patiently on the line.
“Jesus, Ed,” I continued, right where I’d left off. “We’ve been through all this. The Vikings came in over budget too, and UA got it all back in spades. They’re making money hand over fist on that picture. You’ve got to trust me on this. All right. Yes. Thanks, I will. Good-bye.”
While this chaos was happening all around me, bronze makeup was being applied to my face, arms, and bare torso for the camera test that Kirk Douglas, actor, was scheduled to have at 10:00 a.m.
It was a typical day at the office.
I poured myself a cup of coffee from the large thermos that was always by my chair as Eddie Lewis came into the dressing room. He clicked his heels and gave me a Nazi salute. “Heil Spartacus.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I heard you were talking to Sabina in German.”
“Not anymore. She’s got to work harder on her English. But I like her.”
As I sipped my coffee, Eddie filled up a mug of his own. “I didn’t know you speak German.”
“Yeah, French too, and a little Italian. What did you think I was doing when I made those pictures in Europe?”
He grinned. “I won’t answer that.”
“Don’t you speak any languages?”
“Yeah, Yiddish.” Eddie chuckled and sipped his coffee.
“Sit down, Eddie. I want to tell you something.” Eddie looked at me curiously for a moment, but he complied. He grabbed a chair and pulled it over toward mine. I said to the young production assistant, “Can you give us a minute?” The boy left.
I turned back to Eddie. “Listen, I know how much of a schmuck you feel playing the fake writer.”
“I hate it.” He was emphatic.
“But I want you to know how much I appreciate it, and it won’t be for much longer.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.” I stood up. “Let’s go to the set.”
I strode toward the set for my camera test. Eddie walked along with me. “Sabina’s doing a photo shoot today for Life magazine,” he said.
Our selection of this unknown German girl to star in a major American motion picture had already made Sabina Bethman a huge celebrity back in her own country. Now the Hollywood press corps was discovering her too.
“That will be great publicity for the picture,” I said, as Eddie raced to keep up with me. “Are we good with the rest of the cast?”
“We’ve got John Gavin for Caesar. He’s a good-looking kid; I think you’ll like him. And we nailed down Nina Foch, John Ireland, Joanna Barnes, John Hoyt, Herbert Lom, and your old buddy John Dall for those other open parts.”
“What about Woody?” Woody Strode was a decathlon star at UCLA and one of the first players to break the color barrier in the NFL. Now an actor, he was my top choice to play Draba, the Ethiopian slave who is paired with Spartacus in a fight to the death.
“I think we’ve got him too,” gasped Eddie, out of breath from our on-the-run casting meeting. We’d arrived at the set.
I just woke up from a nap and reread these last few pages. Setting them down on paper was tiring. Writing about myself almost fifty-three years ago is a strange experience. I’m learning a lot about the man I was back then; I’m not sure I like him very much. Burt Lancaster once introduced me at a dinner by saying, “Kirk would be the first person to tell you he’s a difficult man to work with. I would be the second.” I laughed. The truth didn’t hurt.
I haven’t been that guy in many years, the man Dalton Trumbo described as “running so fast in such tight circles that he collided with his own spoor.”
At ninety-five, I don’t have a need to prove anything to myself anymore. Time is so precious. It’s the only thing you can’t get back. Instead of rushing so fast through life, I move at a far more measured pace. Age and circumstance—a stroke, a helicopter crash, knee surgery, and a pacemaker—have all slowed me down. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t race around like I did when I was making Spartacus.
I won’t lie and tell you that I like getting older. I don’t. What I do like is what my age allows me to see. My stroke taught me a lot. I discovered the magic of silence. It talked to me. When I was first recovering, I sat in my room and listened with my eyes shut. When I opened them, I always saw Anne standing there—beautiful.
Now I take time every day to walk in my garden, admiring the roses—God’s creation. When I was younger, busier, I never really saw the subtle color of roses. How could I have missed that for so many years?
After lunch with Olivier, I finally made a painful phone call that I’d been avoiding—I had to tell Gene Tierney she wouldn’t be playing Varinia. This was a particularly difficult call to make.
It was very hard to tell her she didn’t get the part. And it wasn’t easy for her to hear—maybe because she was afraid this meant her career might really be over.
Eddie Lewis walked in as I was saying good-bye to Gene. He knew by the expression on my face that it hadn’t been an easy call.
“How’d she take it?”
I just shook my head slowly.
Eddie roused me from my melancholy by swiftly changing the subject.
“Hey, did you know that Tony Mann took Ustinov over to Dalton’s house to meet him?”
“Yeah, I heard that from Larry at lunch today. He was a little peeved that Peter was let in on the secret of ‘Sam Jackson’ before he was.”
“He’s right,” Eddie said angrily. “Tony should have asked us before he took Peter out to Dalton’s house. That wasn’t smart. Ever since he got here Peter’s been so far up Tony’s ass he could draw a map of his colon.”
“Well, he did draw a sketch when was he was at Dalton’s house,” I said, laughing. “He showed it to Olivier this morning. Larry described it to me—it’s a picture of Laughton with a dagger in his back. Peter told him, ‘This is what I’m going to do to Charles.’ Larry thought it was hysterical.”
“So Olivier and Laughton really don’t get along at all?” asked Eddie, concerned at the prospect of these two titanic talents going to war with each other on the set of Spartacus.
I got up to leave. “Olivier thinks Laughton is jealous of him. Larry actually likes Charles, but Charles is a perpetual victim. He thinks everyone is always out to make him look bad. And Peter is playing the diplomat between them.”
“Yeah,” said Eddie, darkly. “The diplomat with the dagger. What are your plans this weekend?”
I looked back at Eddie, grinning. “What the hell do you think? Now I have to take Larry over to meet Trumbo too. He doesn’t want Peter to be the only one in the cast with a direct line to ‘Sam Jackson.’”
On Sunday afternoon, I picked up Olivier. He was staying in Hollywood with Roger Furse, the British production and costume designer who, on Larry’s recommendation, we’d hired for Spartacus. Roger and his wife, Inez, were providing Larry with the emotional support he needed. Larry and Vivien were heading toward their inevitable breakup. Larry’s melancholy was palpable. If anything, he appeared even more distracted than he was when we were making The Devil’s Disciple over the summer. And that had been a relatively brief shoot.
I smiled at him as he got into my car. Each of us was wearing sunglasses against the harsh glare of the Southern California sky. “Well, Larry, at least it’s a helluva lot warmer here than London,” I said.
“I got a letter from Joan in yesterday’s post. She tells me it’s been raining regularly there, although as yet there has been no snow.”
Shortly before leaving England, Larry began a romance with a young British actress, Joan Plowright. Over lunch, Larry told me he’d been teaching himself to type so that he could write to her every day.
“How’s the typing coming?” I asked, as I navigated onto the freeway.
“Splendidly,” he replied, though his tone belied the word. “A, S, D, F, G . . .”
“L, K, J, H,” I replied, finishing the typing lesson mantra that I’d learned long ago back in Amsterdam. I looked over at Larry, grinning.
“If this acting thing doesn’t work out for us, perhaps we can fall back on our secretarial skills.” Larry smiled wanly as he said this. He was still tremendously distracted, thinking of home and the complicated life he’d left on hold.
I was beginning to worry about Larry’s ability to focus on Spartacus—a six-month commitment that would keep him apart from his new love, while still legally bound to Vivien. Consummate professional that he was, Larry successfully concealed his troubles from everybody at work. He tried to maintain a brave face with me too, but his eyes revealed a sadness that he probably preferred to hide.
I was really hoping that an enjoyable afternoon spent with “Sam Jackson” would provide Larry with a much-needed distraction from his personal problems. Dalton, true to Trumbo form, didn’t disappoint.
“Come in, gentlemen! Come in!” As if he were the maître d’ of the Brown Derby, our host ushered us in to his small, book-lined living room with a sweeping gesture.
As we sat down, Dalton began bustling around behind the bar. His glass of bourbon was already half empty. I glanced at my watch—2:00 p.m. This was going to be a very lively Sunday.
“What will you have to drink? Larry? Kirk?”
“Vodka on the rocks,” I said.
“Sam, if that’s bourbon you’re drinking, I’ll have a bit of that,” said Larry.
“It is, and you will have more than a bit. By the way, my friends call me ‘Dalton’ or ‘Trumbo.’ Either will do better than ‘Sam,’” he said, winking as he poured.
“Thank you very much, Dalton,” grinned Larry, accepting a huge tumbler of bourbon.
“To Spartacus!” shouted Trumbo, raising his drink high into the omnipresent cloud of cigarette smoke that hovered above him. We clinked glasses loudly and settled in for a long afternoon of hazy good fellowship.
After much talk about our respective families, the conversation turned to the elephant who wasn’t in the room, Charles Laughton. He and his wife, Elsa Lanchester, were on a six-week holiday in Hawaii. Charles had stopped in briefly at the studio for his wardrobe fitting right before they departed.
“I like Charles,” said Dalton, “though he prefers Shakespeare.”
Larry and I roared.
Larry said, “We’re both at Stratford this season. I’m doing Coriolanus and he’s doing Lear. He’s asked me to direct him.”
“Really?” I was surprised.
“Yes,” said Larry, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. He sipped his drink. “I refused, largely because it would have meant taking the place of a friend who had already accepted the position. I think Charles was secretly hoping I would say no, so that he could take personal offense.”
“Now that sounds like Laughton,” said Trumbo, pouring himself another drink. His third? I’d already lost count. “We discussed the script and it went rather poorly. His sighs and grunts and soft reproaches somewhat unhinge me at close quarters. I think I will try to keep a little real estate between us from now on.”
Trumbo was as gifted a raconteur as he was a writer. I looked at Olivier, again red-faced with laughter at this spot-on description of Laughton. A quick thought flashed through my head: I hope Larry has this much fun for the run of the picture. He deserves it.
Abruptly, Larry stopped laughing. Staring off into the middle distance, he said softly, “It’s queer. He’s envious of me, but I’m not his equal.”
Dalton and I exchanged glances.
“I’m nowhere near up to him intellectually. I never really feel on the same level as he.” He was musing aloud now, more to himself than to us.
Larry fell silent for a moment, reflecting on the still-painful memory. Carefully, he roused himself to his feet. “Where’s the loo?”
Dalton pointed down the hallway and Larry, somewhat unsteadily, ambled off.
I walked over to the bar and poured myself another drink. “I told him on the way over here that we were seriously thinking of opening the picture in the desert, not in flashback from Crassus’ point of view. He took it rather well. I think he’s pleased with how you’ve beefed up his part.”
“He may be pleased,” observed Dalton, drily, “but Charles and Peter will see it as a Kirk-Larry coup.”
I heard Larry coming back down the hall. “That’s next month’s problem. Tony Mann can play goodwill ambassador once we start shooting. I’m retiring.”
“You’re retiring?” Larry asked quizzically.
“From sobriety,” I said, raising my glass toward Larry, as Dalton handed him a fresh bourbon.
“Eddie Lewis certainly had me fooled about the authorship of your fine work,” said Larry, accepting the drink.
“No worse than what your beloved Bard did to that poor bastard Bacon,” replied Trumbo.
Olivier chuckled. “Touché,” he said. “Odd that you should mention the Bard. Only just now I was thinking about Shakespeare with regard to this fellow Crassus. You’ve written him brilliantly, Dalton. I just wonder . . .”
Here we go, I thought.
“I just wonder,” repeated Olivier, draining his glass, which Trumbo moved quickly to refill, “if you see him as a hero or a villain? Or, perhaps, both?”
I answered for Dalton. “He sees himself as a hero, Larry. Crassus passionately loves Rome and is fighting to protect her from what he believes is a threat to her very existence. In his eyes, that makes him heroic.”
Larry considered this thoughtfully for a moment, and Dalton filled the silence by asking, “Who’s hungry? Cleo has dinner on the grill.” I looked again at my watch . . . six-thirty. My God, we had been talking for over four hours.
We headed toward the rear of the house. The unmistakable aroma of sizzling steaks wafted toward us as we approached the backyard. Larry was walking arm in arm with Dalton, his new brother in bourbon.
“Trumbo, indeed, I believe you are the Bard! I had been thinking of playing Crassus with just a touch of the flirting femininity of Richard III and, by God, that new homosexual scene of yours has inspired me! That’s exactly how I shall play him!”
The scene Larry was talking about was a risky one. It involved his character attempting to seduce his “body slave,” played by Tony Curtis. We were going to have a tough time getting it by the censors, but I liked it.
As we walked outside, I wondered what Dalton’s wife, Cleo, would think of Larry’s surprising declaration, but she didn’t even look up from the grill. By now she was inured to the steady stream of outrageous comments that were her husband’s stock-in-trade. Why should his friends be any different?
“How do you boys like your steaks?”
The remainder of the evening was a blur of good food and tales that grew taller with each passing drink. Finally, around nine-thirty, we poured ourselves back into the car. “Home, James!” Larry said grandly, now completely in his cups.
Ten days later, our Spartacus army was finally on the march. The troop movements were massive. Planes, cars, buses, and trucks filled with actors, technicians, equipment handlers, and extras were dispatched in continuous waves to our base camp in Death Valley.
At 7:15 a.m., on Monday, January 26, a black Lincoln town car pulled up in front of our new two-story, five-bedroom home at 707 North Canon Drive in Beverly Hills. My bags had been packed for days. Anne was awake, as was our three-year-old, Peter. Eric, the baby, was asleep in his crib. I leaned in and kissed him. Peter clutched my ankles. “Daddy, stay!”
I swept him up in my arms and hugged him. “Daddy has to go to work. I’ll be back soon.” Passing him to Anne, I kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll call you tonight, honey.”
“Good luck, darling.” She was stoic. Anne understood this was only the first of many trips I’d be making for Spartacus. Neither of us would have guessed that before this film was finished, our now-seven-month-old baby would be talking in complete sentences.
I arrived at the Furnace Inn Ranch, our location headquarters, shortly before noon. As I was checking in, I ran into Peter Ustinov and Tony Mann in the lobby. They were chatting and laughing together as I approached. Eddie was right; they’d already gotten real friendly. Maybe too friendly.
Ustinov said, “I was just telling Tony about my encounter this morning with one of the local residents. She saw all the crew activity and came over to me with a quizzical expression on her face.”
Peter, a superb mimic, immediately switched into a high-pitched woman’s voice.
“Excuuuse me, Mr. Ustinov,” he said in an uncanny imitation of a female American tourist, “are you here making a motion picture?”
“Yes, madam. Indeed we are.” This was said in his urbane British accent.
“What is the name of this picture going to be?”
“Spartacus.”
“Spartacle? That’s a funny name for a major picture.”
Tony Mann doubled over in laughter. He was completely enthralled by Ustinov. Over the next few weeks, I would discover how in thrall to him he was.
The first week went very well. We shot the opening scene in the mine where Spartacus stops working to help a fellow slave who’s collapsed in the grueling heat. Treating him like a rabid dog, the Romans beat him savagely until he snaps—locking his jaw on a soldier’s ankle and only letting go after he is beaten into unconsciousness.
The things I had to do to make a living.
Tony seemed to have everything well in hand; the rushes looked good. We had some disagreement over how animalistic Spartacus should be in resisting the Romans, but nothing that seemed out of the ordinary when starting a new picture. Universal wanted a director who could make this huge train run on time. It seemed they were right about Tony.
Things were running smoothly.
Then we moved to the gladiator school run by Peter Ustinov’s character, Lentulus Batiatus—and the wheels came off the train.
Ustinov’s influence on the set was as outsized as his performance—a performance he was now improvising (if not improving) in almost every take. The problem wasn’t Peter. Every actor, myself included, instinctively tries to interpret a part to his best advantage. Sometimes that helps a picture. Sometimes it doesn’t. It’s the director’s job to know when and how to rein in that instinct.
Peter told Eddie that he was “happy to help Tony into the saddle any time he was getting ready for a shot.” Of course he was. Tony was letting him run wild. The rushes from the second week couldn’t have been more different from the first. In the scene with the slave girls, Peter’s character throws them violently into their cell, then grabs one by the throat for having rebuffed his advances. Little of this was in the script. Worse, it was broad and over the top.
It soon became clear that Tony Mann had no interest in taking the reins back from Peter. He seemed overwhelmed by the enormity of the entire picture.
We had a problem. By the beginning of the third week, Universal knew it too. They were getting regular reports about Mann’s loss of control. We were running behind schedule, and the budget had now crept north of $6 million.
By Thursday, February 12, my “best friend,” Universal production chief Ed Muhl, was in a panic.
“Kirk, you have to do something. This guy isn’t cutting it. We can’t afford to let this picture get away from us.”
“Us? Us?! You guys were the ones who thought Tony was right for this picture. I never thought he was the right guy, but I went along with it. And now we can’t afford to let this picture get away from us?”
“Now, Kirk . . .” Muhl began.
“What do you want me to do, Ed?”
There was a momentary silence. “You have to fire him.”
Now I was silent. I knew he was right, but I’ve never enjoyed firing people. I’m no Donald Trump; I get no pleasure from it. And I liked Tony. He was a genuinely decent guy who was in over his head. That wasn’t a capital crime, but apparently I was expected to be his executioner.
“Kirk, are you still there?”
“Yeah, I’m here,” I said tersely. “We may have to shut down for a week or two until I can find another director, but I’ll do it.”
There was relief in Muhl’s voice. “Thanks, Kirk. I really . . .”
“But listen to me carefully, Ed. This time I’m picking the director. You got that? Whoever he is, he’s going to be my choice. Agreed?”
More silence. Reluctantly, Muhl said, “Agreed.”
That night, I got very little sleep. It was almost as if I was the condemned man waiting for the sun to come up. When it finally did, I took a long shower and tried to clear my head. After I toweled off, I threw on my robe and walked to the front door to grab the morning paper. On the porch next to it was an envelope containing that day’s script pages and the call sheet, the list of times we were due on the set. I glanced at the sheet: “Eleventh Day of Shooting—Friday, February 13, 1959.”
Friday the thirteenth! Poor Tony.
He took it better than I could have hoped. He actually seemed relieved. Tony didn’t say it, but I had the feeling he’d been looking for a graceful way out on his own. I told him that I owed him a movie and we’d honor his $75,000 contract in full. We agreed that his departure would be by mutual consent over “creative differences.” Standard Hollywood-speak for a no-fault divorce.
Now, where in the hell was I going to find another director?