CHAPTER 16
In Hollywood, you usually know who you’re dealing with. That’s not necessarily the case with international producers. When I put Killer Fish together for Lee Majors with Carlo Ponti, I had never met Ponti. He had “people,” a horde of lieutenants and aides to deal with, mostly by telephone. Ponti was married to Sophia Loren, so he had more pleasurable things to do.
Dino De Laurentiis had people, too, but he wanted Farrah so badly for a movie that he felt it necessary to meet with me in person. I met him in his office in New York City. Dino was sitting behind his desk getting his hair cut.
“Ah, Jay, ah, Jay, ah, Jay! I have this picture perfect for the Farrah. Wind and rain and love in the storm. It’s perfect for the Farrah!” He acted as if we were blood kin, and I’d never seen him before in my life.
The barber didn’t miss a clip as Dino made his pitch. The movie was Hurricane, a multi-million-dollar remake of a 1937 classic. “Roman will turn her into an even bigger star!” he exclaimed. Clip! Clip!
Roman was Roman Polanski, the Polish director recently self-exiled back to Europe to escape a statutory rape charge in Hollywood. He was a great director, but his off-camera behavior was not fiction. I found Dino’s proposition distasteful; I thought Farrah might also, and I was certain Lee would. The movie was going to be filmed on a remote island in the Pacific; telephone communication would be minimal. I wouldn’t be there; Lee wouldn’t be there; and if Farrah became unhappy with Roman’s intentions, well . . .
Dino offered $2 million. I turned it down. I foresaw nothing in Hurricane but trouble. As it turned out, the picture was miscast with Mia Farrow, and Swedish director Jan Troell replaced Polanski. It was a bomb, even though it had a stellar cast in support of Mia, including Jason Robards, Max von Sydow and Trevor Howard. The storm Dino’s special-effects crew reproduced on a remote island cost him 30 million bucks.
Later I turned down a second De Laurentiis offer. He wanted Farrah to star in The Fan, the story of a Broadway actress who is stalked by a psychotic admirer. I thought it was too dangerous, and might put Farrah at risk of copycat syndrome.
Meanwhile, Suzanne had a guest role on a Paul Anka television special produced in Monte Carlo. It was Anka, Suzanne and Donna Summers. Alan went with Suzanne, and I took Marna Winter, a wisp of a girl Lee and I had met in Atlanta a couple of years before.
I recognized Stavros Niarchos’s yacht anchored in the harbor. We had hardly dropped our own sails before an invitation arrived at the hotel. Niarchos was having a big dinner party and he wanted Suzanne as his special guest.
My memory of the yacht during the Cannes Film Festival failed me. If anything, it was bigger than I remembered, as big as Spelling’s Love Boat, except it wasn’t a set. It was real.
The dining room was set up with two major guest tables, one for Niarchos, who placed Suzanne beside him, with Alan on Suzanne’s other side, and Niarchos’s current inamorata, Princess Somebody, at the other table, seated beside me. It was an honor to be assigned a seat beside the princess, but when Marna and I went to the table there was only one empty chair with a guest card—mine. I was taken aback, but before I could signal what I perceived to be a mistake, little Marna was escorted away by one of myriad major domos. I watched her for a moment and then the crowd swallowed her.
I sat down, but I couldn’t get Marna off my mind. She was hardly more than a teen, and I was worried about her. I kept looking from table to table, but I never spied her among the two hundred or so guests. I felt badly because I pictured her sitting in the kitchen with the hired hands. I tried to make the best of the dinner, chatting amiably with the princess, who spoke English as if she’d just finished a weekend crash course at a school in Tijuana.
Before and after dinner, we suffered through numerous toasts and flirtations and broken conversations. When it was finally over, I excused myself from the princess and went in search of Marna. The guests seemed to have grown in number and I suspected Niarchos had a secondary list of invitees for the after-dinner cocktail party. Then I saw her, looking a little elfin standing among the crowd of spectators. I rushed to her. “Marna, I’m so sorry you didn’t get to sit with me.”
Her eyes sparkled. “Oh, I had a great time!” She had been seated at a peripheral table with Ringo Starr. “And he’s so funny and just wonderful and—there he is! Ringo! Ringo!”
Ringo came over with his longtime girlfriend, Nancy. We went through the introductions, which seemed ridiculous, since every time Ringo and I came across each other it was the same song and dance. Over time, we must have been introduced to each other a dozen times.
When I returned to Los Angeles, the first telephone call I received was from Nancy. Ringo was still in Monte Carlo, she said. “I’m lonely.” I was never a saint, but this time I went over the cliff. I had an affair with Nancy, short-lived as it was, but an affair nevertheless.
She had an apartment in a clump of buildings on Sunset Boulevard that included Schwab’s, the famous drugstore where so many starlets were supposedly discovered. Nancy and I would often tryst there, even after Ringo returned home. Finally we broke it off. The relationship had reached the point where she would be with me one night and Ringo the next, without Ringo knowing that she was cheating on him. My guilt overwhelmed me. I told her I couldn’t continue. “It’s best,” she said, “because I really love Ringo.”
Dissolve to a year and a half later. I read in a scandal sheet that Nancy had sued Ringo for breach of promise. She claimed he had promised to marry her; when he backed out—wham! She wanted her share of his fortune. Ringo had found a new girlfriend and Nancy felt cheated. I later heard that Ringo settled with her for a couple of million dollars.
I felt doubly bad because I didn’t have the guts to enter the fray and tell Ringo how she had cheated on him, with no less than me.
By 1978 Farrah had been on the cover of almost every major magazine in the world. The exception was Playboy, which usually featured a cover shot of its Playmate of the Month with a nude spread inside.
I was often invited to parties at the Playboy Mansion, although I was never more than an acquaintance of Hugh Hefner. I liked Hef, but his personality required a coterie of yes-men as friends, much like Sammy Davis, Jr.’s had, and mindless loyalty was not compatible with my personality. Hef and I were social friends, nothing more, and through him I met many of his editors and members of his magazine staff. It was September when I called the Playboy office.
“How would you like to have Farrah Fawcett on the cover of your magazine?”
Playboy acted fast, and Claude Mougin photographed the cover shot. Farrah’s body was in profile, leaning back, her head facing the camera at an angle. She wore spiked heels with inlaid diamonds and her right leg was raised in an inverted V. She held a glass of champagne, pricked her beautiful white teeth with a diamond-studded olive toothpick and wore a long silk shirt with the top buttons open, the left sleeve falling loosely from her shoulder. It was tasteful, sexy and far removed from pornography. The photo Playboy chose didn’t even reveal cleavage. It was scheduled for the December 1978 issue with the caption Farrah Comes Back . . . Big.
The shoot went fast, as if Playboy was afraid we might change our minds before Mougin clicked the first shot. Then they called Lee. “What date can we set for Farrah’s nude layout?” Lee went into paroxysms—nude shots had never been part of the package. They called me. “What about the nude layout, Jay?”
“What nude layout?” I asked. “Farrah isn’t doing a nude layout, and she never was. Nude shots were never in the mix. The idea never came up.”
“Well, we’ve got to do something. What about an interview?” said an editor.
Playboy interviews were in-depth, running ten to fifteen pages. Farrah was neither willing nor experienced enough to talk about world affairs and answer the sophisticated questions Playboy’s interviews entailed. I said an interview wouldn’t work, which threw Playboy into a panic.
“Come on, Jay. We’ve got to do something!”
I was nervous. I didn’t want to blow the deal. We needed it. Somebody Killed Her Husband was ready to open and I foresaw a box-office dud. I needed to keep Farrah’s name and image out there, in front of the American public. Suddenly I got an idea. “Remember when we were kids and played Twenty Questions?”
“Yes.”
“Send me twenty questions. I’ll give them to Farrah and get her answers to them.”
He did. I gave them to Farrah; she shrugged, gave them back to me and dashed off to play tennis. I answered the questions and sent them back to Playboy. This was 1978 and they’re still using the Twenty Questions format today.