CHAPTER 19
Cary Grant was on the board of directors of Fabergé. When he called me, it was a replay of the time Henry Fonda called regarding Peter’s trial. I was awed; that’s the only way to describe it, for, regardless of my success and the myriad famous people I knew, at heart I was still a fan of the screen stars of old. Cary Grant was one of the great ones, and although he had retired from acting he was still very much alive, active in the corporate world and a vibrant personality.
“Jay, I was speaking to Prince Charles,” he began, and no one my age could miss the inflections of his voice. “Jew-day, Jew-day, Jew-day,” kept ringing in my mind as he spoke, although he never really said that line in a motion picture. “The Prince would very much like Farrah to be one of the co-masters of ceremonies at a forthcoming event for the Queen, to be held at Albert Hall,” he continued. “It will be very exclusive—no mere dukes and duchesses—but the elite of European royalty and top international political leaders: kings, queens and presidents.”
I was excited, but when I told Farrah she said, “No, I don’t want to do it.” She was afraid of making a fool of herself. They hadn’t taught her in school in Texas how to meet a queen. I would have to persuade her, and it would take time.
Grant kept calling. “We really need her,” he said.
At last she acquiesced, if for no other reason than my persistence. To me, after having discovered her and engineered her career, Farrah’s appearance before the queen as an actual participant in the ceremony was a larger honor than winning an Oscar. When you create a star, you want your star on the highest pedestal attainable. I did not think she could top it.
In the appearance deal, which for once I desisted in asking for extra perks, we were given two tickets for Farrah’s parents and two for my parents. The good news was that my parents were going to be in London at the precise time of the event, on a buying trip for their store. I was excited because I wanted them to see my own Oscar, which was Farrah.
We flew first-class on a jumbo jet. By the time we were airborne, Farrah was napping, curled up comfortably in her seat. I looked around. Sitting beyond us and across the aisle was none other than the influential media mogul Sir Lew Grade. I went over to him. For a dinner in his honor in New York, I had once miraculously managed—overnight—to attract Hollywood’s glitziest stars, from Burt Lancaster to Robert Mitchum to Charlotte Rampling to Goldie Hawn to Tom Jones to John Lennon.
Lew and I chatted a moment, mostly about Farrah. When I saw that she was awake, I said to him, “Would you like to meet her?”
“I would love to.”
After I introduced him, he said to Farrah, “I’m just reading a script that you’d be perfect in. Would you care to read it?”
Lew extracted a screenplay from his briefcase. After another five minutes of talk, we all settled in for the long flight. Lew went back to his seat, but every once in a while he looked over his shoulder to see if Farrah was reading.
“This is different,” she whispered, “but I don’t know if it’s for me.”
It was a futuristic space film, a genre neither of us was in tune with, but Farrah liked the emotional aspect of the character she would be playing. “Why don’t you read it?” she asked.
I did. She was right; it wasn’t necessarily her kind of story, but her character had promise. “Maybe it can be fixed,” she said. “Maybe we should consider it.”
“Lew doesn’t realize you’ve been blacklisted,” I told her. “He doesn’t know we lost Foul Play and Coma. We’ve got to do something, until the atmosphere clears in Hollywood.”
“Talk to him,” said Farrah.
I went over and sat down by Lew. “Here’s the deal,” I told him. “We’ve had so many offers that it’s hard to sift through them all. But Farrah likes your story. She’ll do it if we can close a deal before this plane lands, before its wheels touch down.”
“Go on,” said Lew. “I’m interested.”
“Farrah chooses the leading man, someone like Kirk Douglas.” I threw in Douglas because we were seeing him the next evening. Then I mentioned some perks.
Lew didn’t blink. When I finished the list of perks, all of them coming off the top of my head except for Farrah’s sauna, he said, “Okay. How much?”
“$750,000.”
He looked at me, blinked a couple of times and said, “Okay. We have a deal.”
That’s how Saturn 3 came into existence, through linguistic subterfuge. What I didn’t know was that Lew was giving me more fluff than I was giving him. The screenplay wasn’t even his property. It belonged to, of all people, Elliott Kastner, who had asked Lew to read it, hoping he would be interested in financing it. The next day in London, Lew optioned the property from Kastner.
Farrah and I had suites at the Dorchester. Lee was in Canada prepping for Agency, the fourth picture I had put together for him in a year’s time. When my parents arrived, they stayed at the Inn on the Park. My mother called. At the last moment, she had decided to bring her assistant buyer, Mary Nobody. “You’ll have to get an extra ticket for us,” she said.
“That’s impossible,” I told her. “I can’t call the queen of England and ask for an extra seat at a function where they’re not even letting Prince Hamlet attend!”
“If you don’t get us a third seat, then we’re not going.”
I thought she was bluffing. The event went off, with two cold, empty seats at my parents’ table. They were probably watching television at their hotel, only one mile away. But that was the nature of my mother.
Part of Farrah’s responsibility was introducing some Slavic aristocrats from Eastern Europe. Albert Hall had no teleprompters, and she kept fumbling through the names during rehearsal. After we left the hall, I had some cue cards made that spelled the names phonetically.
When we returned for the real event, however, Farrah panicked. She came up with a stomach attack. “I need to go backstage,” she moaned. I found a dressing room in the back of the hall where I sat her down.
“I can’t do it,” she said. “I’m sick. Tell them I can’t do it.”
First it was my mother; now it was Farrah. “Okay,” I said, shrugging, “but first I’m going to find a doctor and see if there’s anything he can give you that will help you regain your composure.” I was thinking of the Fernet Branca that Bill Holden had given me at the Rome airport, a real cure-all. I had some in my room. I dashed away. When I returned, Farrah was worse.
“Tell them I can’t do it, Jay,” she moaned. “Just go tell them.”
“I found a doctor,” I said, “and he gave me some medicine.” I poured a tumbler full of the foul-smelling herbal mix, 40 percent of which was alcohol. “He said for you to drink this, and if you don’t feel better in fifteen minutes, then I should take you back to the hotel.”
Farrah was under pressure, and she knew it. She downed the Fernet Branca in one big chugalug. Her face screwed up, but ten minutes later she was feeling better; twenty minutes later she was on a cloud. She was tipsy, of course, but she didn’t realize it.
“How do you feel?”
“Better. Much better,” she said, fairly floating.
“Then go break a leg.”
Everything went off perfectly, due first to the Fernet Branca and second to the cue cards. Farrah pronounced the names as if she were a Slav.
At the dinner following the ceremony, Farrah, her parents and I were seated at a table with some of the royal family. Jim Fawcett, Farrah’s father, a stereotypical good ol’ boy from Texas, began some heavy-duty drinking. He was sitting next to Prince Charles and his language was definitely down-home. First he dropped the royal title; then he reduced the Prince’s first name to a diminutive. Between spasms of laughter, the future king of England became Chuck, usually with a hospitable Texas slap on his back.
We flew back to the States in the Fabergé jet. Farrah sat with her secretary and I sat with Cary Grant. I had the same feeling I’d experienced when I first met Alan Ladd. We chatted amiably, and I asked him, “Who today could best play the movie roles you played?”
He hardly mulled it over before saying, “Either Dustin Hoffman or Richard Dreyfuss.”
In Hollywood a few nights later, I ran into Dreyfuss at a party. When I told him what Cary Grant had said, he glowed. Today, when I see him, he always says, “Tell the Cary Grant story, Jay. Please tell the Cary Grant story!”
I was reasonably certain Three’s Company—the Americanized version of Man About the House—would never be shown in Europe because of the difference in their humor and our humor. Yet I wanted Suzanne to be recognized in Europe, particularly in the United Kingdom, as an up-and-coming star. I placed an emphasis on Britain because most European production money was coming from England.
While in London with Farrah, I learned of a movie script called Yesterday’s Hero, about World Cup soccer. Jackie Collins, Joan’s sister, had written it before she became the female Harold Robbins. Elliott Kastner was going to produce the movie, and the word I got was that he had cast Ian McShane and Lesley Ann Warren in the leading roles.
Jackie had once stayed briefly with Leslie Parrish and me. I called Jackie, whose husband owned Tramp, a famous London nightclub, and made an appointment to see her there.
Jackie was charming, attractive and enthusiastic. When she told me Lesley Ann Warren had not yet been signed to do the movie, I became extremely interested in it as a European vehicle for Suzanne. “Look,” said Jackie, “you need to talk to Elliott.”
I had dealt with Elliot so many times in the past that I felt we were in the same fraternity. An American who spent a great deal of time abroad, he was a man I could talk with on a serious level. I tracked him down and said, “Elliott, I want to sell you Suzanne Somers for the lead female role in Yesterday’s Hero.”
He could not have been nicer or more blunt as he drove home the limitations of American television abroad. “Jay, I’ve never heard of Suzanne Somers, and we already have someone in mind.”
Elliott had made two dozen movies, but he was a better dealmaker than he was a packager. Most of his movies had been forgettable, and few had profited from television syndication.
“Suzanne is a television star in the States,” I told him, “and she can make you a lot of money with a television sale after your movie runs out of steam at the box office.”
“I’ll keep her in mind,” said Elliott.
Back in the States, I closed an $800,000 deal for Suzanne with Ace Hardware for a series of TV commercials. The structure of the deal was laden with conditions—all mine. My major criterion was that Suzanne would never be photographed with hardware. She did a song-and-dance routine with background dancers, then the camera cut to the hardware pitchman.
Next I went to Vegas to see if I could make a deal for a Suzanne Somers nightclub act. I took Alan Hamel with me. In Suzanne’s memoir, After the Fall, she gave Alan credit for virtually every deal I made for her, which was absurd. One’s memory often fails, but it doesn’t fail on every recollection. I didn’t mind, though, because everyone I negotiated with realized Alan had no expertise in dealmaking.
In Vegas, Alan knew nothing and nobody. I knew the power players who could move things because I’d represented so many singers and entertainers who performed there. It probably didn’t hurt that I’d lost a couple of million dollars gambling. At that time, many of the casinos were still influenced if not controlled by the mob, although nobody ran around saying so. Howard Hughes had made his Vegas power grab from his suite at the Desert Inn, purchasing hotels and other properties, and although the industry was in transition, the old players of debatable virtue still counted.
I sought out Bernie Rothkopf at the MGM Grand, and Alan sat in a chair listening while I pitched Bernie. In Vegas you dealt business on a different level. In contrast to what Suzanne later wrote, I cut a deal while Alan looked on like a simpleton with no experience, which is exactly what he was at the time. I hold nothing against Suzanne, because I’m sure Alan rewrote the experience for her. But here’s what happened:
“Bernie, I’d like to book Suzanne Somers at the MGM Grand.”
Like Elliott Kastner, Bernie said, “I’ve never heard of her.”
His ignorance was more forgivable than Elliott’s. With the exception of fight matches, the only television monitors the casino guys watched were the ones that homed in on gamblers at the slot machines and gaming tables.
“She’s a big television star,” I continued, “with a variety of talents. She’ll be a tremendous hit here.”
He shrugged. “Get me a tape showcasing what she can do, and I’ll take a look.”
Alan and I left. I took Suzanne’s Ace Hardware commercial, snipped off the beginning and the end, and went back to see Bernie Rothkopf. I played the tape. Bernie liked what he saw. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll give the girl a week at $150,000.”
I remembered Alan Ladd telling me how his wife, Sue, had sold him to A-picture producers for less money than she charged B producers. “No,” I said to Bernie. From the corner of my eye I saw Alan flinch at my words.
“That’s my top offer. Not a dime more,” said Bernie.
“I don’t want one-fifty for one week,” I told him. “I want fifty a week . . . but I want three weeks at three different times.”
I was not speaking out of turn. I knew the history of other celebrities who had tried Vegas. Telly Savalas, Lynda Carter, Richard Chamberlain, even Ronald Reagan—all had short, lucrative runs, but then it was over. None was invited back. It took time to build a following in Vegas, which I felt Suzanne could do with enough bookings.
Like Farrah, Suzanne had guts, a prerequisite to major stardom. But her courage was of a different sort—she was extroverted and Farrah was introverted. Although Suzanne had never sung and danced in front of a live audience, she wanted to try it, knowing it wouldn’t be much different from performing in front of a studio audience when Three’s Company was taped after a week of rehearsals.
Bernie bought my offer, and we signed a deal for Suzanne to perform live at the MGM Grand Hotel, starting sometime in the near future.
I took Suzanne to dinner at La Scala. It was the place to see stars, and now that she was one of the biggest, I wanted her to celebrate. It was not unusual to see Henry Kissinger at the first table, Paul Newman at the second and an important producer at the third.
We pulled up in my James Bond Aston Martin. The valets went hopping like rabbits when they saw Suzanne. The maître d’ met us at the desk and asked us to wait a moment. As usual, the place was packed. Sitting at the number one table were Natalie Wood and Sir Laurence Olivier. I asked Suzanne to excuse me for a moment and went over to the table.
I’d known Natalie for years, but I’d never met Olivier. I knew that Suzanne, like any actor, would leap at the chance to meet the British thespian. He was God. Natalie smiled and introduced me to Olivier. After a moment of small talk, I asked her if she had ever met Suzanne.
“No, but I’d love to!”
“May I bring her over?”
“Oh, please do, Jay!”
I brought Suzanne over and introduced her. She was nearest Olivier and I thought I’d let her talk to him while Natalie and I chatted. Natalie and I got into a tête-à-tête; I was leaning close to her, my back to Suzanne. After a couple of minutes, I glanced over my shoulder; Suzanne was no longer there. I looked around; she was standing at the end of the bar like a pale ghost. I quickly bid adieu and went to her.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
She was near tears. “He told me to fuck off,” she said.
Like all celebrities, Olivier had a side to him that wasn’t reflected on the screen. To him, Suzanne could have been a member of a film crew. He didn’t give a damn that she was a famous sitcom star. He didn’t watch American television. He was Laurence Olivier, and when you were Laurence Olivier you could be rude to anyone with impunity. Suzanne was upset, but when we got to our table she rebounded. The truth is, she was the most popular star in the restaurant, and there was nothing Olivier could do about it.