CHAPTER 20
The late seventies and the entire eighties decade brought me many amazing experiences both professionally and personally; however, the lines of exactly what was “professional” and what was “personal” became very blurred indeed. I represented Susan Saint James on and off for several years during the late seventies and early eighties, first as her publicist and then as her manager. She had been a television star in the sixties in Fame Is the Name of the Game, with Anthony Franciosa, and in McMillan and Wife, with Rock Hudson. Susan had a tendency to fall in love with her leading man. When she discovered Hudson wasn’t amenable to man-woman romance, she fell in love with and married her makeup artist, which wasn’t amenable to Hudson.
That Susan fell in love with her makeup man wasn’t unusual. An actress is with her makeup artist constantly. He’s the first person she sees in the morning; he gets to know her without makeup. The problem with Susan’s marriage was that she made her new husband her manager, and there’s a big gap between managing and putting on makeup. Susan became so much trouble that she was fired. McMillan and Wife was suddenly McMillan.
Getting fired from a television show is a profound event, particularly when the person fired is a star. Overnight Susan became poisonous to producers; word went out that she was too difficult. She was represented by a big agency that wasn’t helping her find work, yet they were asking her for exorbitant sums of money as if she were television dynamite. She wasn’t. She was a competent actress with a bad reputation. Susan and her husband were desperate, so desperate that she signed with me, a person philosophically alien to her lifestyle. And then they got divorced.
We made a strange combination. Susan was a flower child, a vegetarian, and an animal lover who detested meat and leather products; she thought of herself as a “natural girl” and she shunned the accoutrements of glamour, such as deodorant. I think she even stopped shaving her armpits. I was as far removed from the hippie lifestyle as a person could be; I thought they were idiots. I was a hunter, a heavy-duty meat eater, and I lived in a house in Stone Canyon full of stuffed animals I had killed on safaris. The only thing Susan and I had in common was that neither of us wore makeup. She was always voicing her insecurities. I got tired of listening to her complaints and starting searching for work for her.
Susan was ambivalent about acting. She wanted to be a star, but she also wanted to stay at home with her kids. When she was in her work mode, I got her a role in a Peter Fonda picture, Outlaw Blues, filmed in Texas. A couple of weeks into the production, I flew to Austin to see how things were going. Susan was head over heels in love with Peter. After the movie wrapped, Peter went back to his wife and Susan came back to my place in Stone Canyon with a broken heart. I had affairs with her just to keep her happy when her movies were over and her lovers went back to wives or girlfriends. I became her sexual therapist, physically as well as psychologically. It never failed. She fell in love on every movie, was rejected when the film wrapped, and then she came to Stone Canyon to cry on my shoulder and sleep in my bed until the next production. I learned to break up with the girl I was going out with just before Susan’s picture wrapped on location.
Mel Simon financed Love at First Bite, which I packaged with George Hamilton and Susan. Mel had not met her, so I threw a big dinner party so they could meet. Susan wore her “natural” look, which meant no makeup. Mel was horrified. The next morning he told me to fire her. He was willing to pay her in full, but he wanted an actress of glamour and beauty to play against Hamilton.
After Mel left for Indianapolis, I remembered a photograph I had of Susan and me taken at the world premiere of Julia, the Jane Fonda–Jason Robards film about the love affair between Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. She was gorgeous. I had my art people cut me out and make a dummy Glamour magazine cover using Susan. Then I hopped on a plane and trailed Mel to the Midwest. I showed him the phony picture cover and explained that Susan had made a bad decision by not wearing makeup to dinner. Mel relented.
The movie went forward and Susan promptly fell in love with George Hamilton. After the movie wrapped, of course, George was no longer interested in her. As usual, she came back to Stone Canyon with a broken heart, and we renewed our affair.
Next, she was cast in her first starring role in a TV movie, Night Cries, with William Conrad. Suddenly I could mount a movie around Susan Saint James. The final movie we did together was How to Beat the High Cost of Living in 1980. Although I packaged it, I did not take a screen credit. It was someone else’s movie.
How to Beat the High Cost of Living was the story of three housewives who, discovering that a million dollars was floating around a shopping mall, plotted to steal it. We cast Jane Curtin of Saturday Night Live as the second girl, but after Susan’s $350,000 and Jane’s $300,000, we didn’t have enough money left in the budget to get a third actress with star power.
I heard about a talented young actress who couldn’t get a job. But during due diligence, I was told she didn’t have talent after all. Suspicious, I went to see a movie she was in. Rumor had it she had rejected the sexual overtures of a director who then starting disparaging her talent. The movie was King Kong; the actress was Jessica Lange. I hired her for $10,000 to play the third housewife.
The big-screen movies I placed Susan Saint James in were independent productions with major studio distribution. Unless an indie film takes off on its own, the majors aren’t going to spend much money to exploit it through advertising, so you’re starting out in a hole with a steep climb up a sheer face. Susan’s movies were good, but they didn’t propel her to stardom.
I came across a pilot script for a potential television series called Kate & Allie. One of the two leads was perfect for Susan’s personality and talent. The story pitted a liberal woman (Susan) against a conservative woman (Jane Curtin). I can honestly say there would never have been a Kate & Allie had there not been a Jay Bernstein. Susan had real drawing power on television. I went to the producers and sold her as the talent they needed. The rest is history.
During hiatus from Kate & Allie, I put Susan in an NBC movie-of-the-week, Desperate Women, a remake of the 1956 Clark Gable movie The King and Four Queens. Susan had enough cachet with independent productions that I could pick the male lead to play against her. It was a payoff picture rather than a starmaker. I wasn’t representing Robert Redford or Paul Newman—I had to make do with what I had. That’s one reason I didn’t put my name on the screen as an executive producer. I was playing the money game.
Susan finally got tired of being stabbed in the back by wayward lovers. I was pleased because I thought she had come to understand her problem. Her solution, however, was absurd, and her timing was out of kilter. She decided she didn’t want to do any more movies. This was after she had signed to do Desperate Women, assuming the role previously played by Eleanor Parker.
The project was strictly about money. The fact that I signed Dan Haggerty for the Gable role was an indication that none of us thought we were going to make a great movie. Most important, though, as I explained to Susan, it was a movie in which there was little likelihood of her falling in love with her leading man. Haggerty was famous as Grizzly Adams, a role far removed from anything Gable ever played.
A week before we were scheduled to begin production, Susan jumped off a fence and injured her knee. She did it on purpose. She was pleased, even with her pain, because now she wouldn’t have to do the movie. Angry, I took her to a doctor.
“It’s bad,” he said. “It’s a real injury.”
Susan grinned.
“How long will it take to heal?” I asked.
“Four to five weeks,” the doctor answered.
“What can you do that will allow her to work for thirty days, starting immediately?”
The doctor mentioned some new steroid shots.
“No way,” said Susan.
“Give her a shot,” I told the doctor.
“No way,” Susan repeated.
I vented my anger. “Dammit, Susan, you’ve got a network contract. I’m not going to let you pull this. If you do, you’ll ruin your career!”
She acquiesced. The doctor gave her two shots and a bucket of medicine.
Relieved, I hauled her back to my car and started for Stone Canyon. We were halfway home when she said, “I’ve got another problem.”
I wasn’t concerned with a new problem because I now knew we could make the picture. “Oh, yeah?” I said. “What is it?”
“I’m pregnant.”
I almost crashed the car.
The next day I took her to another doctor; a week later we started the movie.
I was right—Susan didn’t fall in love with Dan Haggerty. Rather, she fell in love with Haggerty’s buddy, Stephen Stills, of Crosby, Stills & Nash, when he visited the location set. They had a torrid affair. When the movie wrapped, she moved in with him near my house in Stone Canyon. I was glad; I could have a real girlfriend again.
A month later, Susan called me, in tears. She had broken up with Stills. He, and his bodyguards—it seemed all pop musicians and rockers had a legion of security people—wouldn’t let her in the house to get her clothes and things.
“Calm down, Susan,” I told her. “I’ll get your clothes.”
I strapped on a holstered belt with two .45s, set a cowboy hat at a rakish angle on my head and went to Stephen’s house. I knocked on the door. It opened. Two burly bodyguards who looked like army tanks stood on the threshold.
“Are we gonna have a shoot-out here?” I asked, placing my hands on the handles of my six-shooters. “Or is the girl going to get her stuff?”
Susan got her clothes back.
The whirlwind of activity continued. Farrah went to London to make Saturn 3. Sunburn was in postproduction. Suzanne was riding high as Chrissy in Three’s Company, but chomping at the bit to make theatrical movies and perform in nightclubs, and Lee was prepping to do Agency in Canada. Each day rolled into the next. I flew to Canada. Lee liked to play between workdays. Work, play—it was all the same to me. Everything was connected.
I got a bead on some movie money in Manila. The two of us took off for the Philippines. The money didn’t come through, and we hurried back to Canada, where Agency was ready to go into production. Robert Mitchum was the star, but Lee had equal billing, his name beside Mitchum’s on the same line. He was excited about working with Mitchum. He said they had once been drinking buddies.
I had first met Mitchum in the sixties through Mike Connors, a friend of his. Mike and I went to Stephanino’s to have a drink with Mitchum. He was already there, knocking down drinks like bowling pins. In less than an hour he had three to my one. I was afraid of getting drunk and making an ass of myself. Mitchum seemed as sober as when we arrived. “Let’s have another drink,” he said.
“That’s okay with me,” I said. He’d been reminiscing, and I wanted him to continue.
More drinks arrived, and I said, “What was it like working with Kirk Douglas?” They had recently co-starred in The Way West.
“It’s real interesting to work with a movie star,” said Mitchum, after he mulled over my question. “It takes Kirk thirty minutes to dive off a diving board. He has to get up there and pose. He’s gotta make sure everybody sees that dimple.” He laughed under his breath. “Yep, it’s an interesting experience to work with a movie star.”
I told Lee the story. He laughed and said he knew Mitchum front and back. He decided to play a joke on Mitchum, become Red Buttons. That was Lee’s sense of humor—playacting.
The day Mitchum arrived, Lee donned a chauffeur’s uniform and drove to the airport to pick him up. He went through a chauffeur’s routine, the Six Million Dollar Man acting out another role. He met Mitchum at the gate, wearing his black chauffeur’s hat. Mitchum said hello.
Lee loaded Mitchum’s bags and opened the limousine door for him. Finally, he exposed his true identity. The joke backfired. Mitchum had absolutely no fucking idea who Lee was. When they got to the hotel, Mitchum gave him twenty dollars. Agency was just another job to Mitchum. He wouldn’t know The Six Million Dollar Man from The Threepenny Opera.
Years later, Carrie Mitchum, Robert’s granddaughter, became a friend of mine. She was in The Bold and the Beautiful, an afternoon soap opera. I had an avuncular relationship with her that on two occasions resulted in fisticuffs.
The first was at the Bistro in Beverly Hills. She was with a guy who was playing with her more than she wanted to be played with. He was making fun of a tattoo on her ankle. She looked at me, signaling “help” with her eyes. I went to their table and asked the guy to stop. He said, “Go fuck yourself!” I didn’t want to do that, so we had a fight. The result was that he stopped harassing Carrie.
Another night I was at the Heartbreak Café, a new place on La Brea Avenue. Carrie was there, and a bar hound was hassling her. Carrie asked him to leave her alone. He didn’t, so I asked him to stop bothering her.
“Go fuck yourself!” he said.
Again, I didn’t want to do that. Rather, I picked up a bowl of salad and slammed it against the side of his head as hard as I could. He stopped bothering Carrie.
The next day the restaurant manager left a message for me to please call him. My alert signal sounded. I smelled a lawsuit. Hesitantly, I returned the call.
“We’re changing our menu,” the manager said. “Would you mind if we listed a ‘Jay Bernstein Tossed Salad’?”
After that, Carrie always said I was her Sir Lancelot.
In 1980, I was forty-two years old, financially successful, yet I didn’t own my own house. In fact, I had never owned a house. I had missed two golden investment opportunities, Richard Donner’s house at Sunset Plaza above the Strip and Elvis Presley’s place in Stone Canyon, because I couldn’t afford them due to gambling debts. I could have had Dick’s house for $118,000 and Presley’s for $220,000. Within a few years each was worth millions.
A realtor called me. He was representing a mountainside home built by Carole Lombard before she married Clark Gable. I was interested, not because it was a good investment (it wasn’t), but because of its history. Lombard was still married to William Powell when she built it in the 1930s; then she divorced Powell and became Gable’s lover. She and Gable lived in it for one year before they married and moved to Gable’s ranch in the Valley. So it was the house where Gable fucked Lombard.
I went to see it. It was an architectural feat, five stories built in Spanish style on a virtual cliff. It rambled up, down and all around. There was a bedroom on the top floor, a bedroom on the bottom floor. The main floor was terraced; the staircase was spiral; the house had a small indoor-outdoor swimming pool. The views were magnificent. From one direction, you could see the skyscrapers in downtown Los Angeles. From another, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Century City. To the west, the beach cities, Santa Monica and Manhattan Beach, and the Pacific Ocean. Yet it was almost walking distance from the Beverly Hills Hotel and the Polo Lounge.
The place was in need of major repairs, but I bought it anyway. I thought the ghosts of Lombard and Gable might inspire me. They didn’t, but Bren Simon, Mel’s wife, did. She was an internationally recognized decorator and designer who took on the task of renovation. She inspired me to work harder, because during her six months’ work on the house I didn’t receive one bill. I calculated that I owed her another $500,000 on top of the purchase price, which was frightening. When at last she finished and I moved in, I received the bill in the mail. It was my birthday, and the bill was in the form of a card gifting me with the renovation.
With a new home, I felt I had finally arrived. The house was now Gable-like rather than Lombard-like, with room aplenty for my memorabilia, paintings and trophies from hunting safaris. It became my headquarters for business as well as pleasure, which for all practical purposes were still one and the same. One task was left unfinished, though. Carole’s pool, hardly larger than a fishpond, was too small for real swimming. I turned it into the largest Jacuzzi in the country, with forty jets surrounding a water fountain. It was perfect; it was Hollywood.
For months the scandal sheets had been predicting a Fawcett-Majors breakup. Nobody took it seriously except Lee and Farrah. All was not well in paradise—they had hardly seen each other in a year. Then Farrah called me from London. She was being stalked by two men on motorcycles. Finally, bobbies confronted them. They were private eyes, they said, spying for an undisclosed client. Farrah didn’t say it, but she intimated they worked for Lee.
Saturn 3 wasn’t going well. Stanley Donen, originally a consulting producer, took over as director. He was one of the greats (Singin’ in the Rain, Charade, Two for the Road), but when directors are changed midstream something is awry. It was beyond Donen’s control. There was no chemistry between Farrah and Kirk Douglas. She was in every scene, Kirk was in every scene, and Harvey Keitel was in almost every scene. Three actors confined to a cubicle in outer space. Kirk was too old to play a space cadet; Farrah was too beautiful. Keitel could play anything, but Saturn 3 wasn’t his cricket game.
In California, summer turned into Indian summer. In Canada, Lee was cold. In London, winter turned to spring. In Utah, the weather was unpredictable. I was in Utah with Suzanne and Alan. She was guest-hosting a National Cheerleaders television special.
Third parties are a manager’s nightmare. A woman client always has a boyfriend or husband watching from the wings. He always tells her he’s a genius. Some of it comes from macho necessity, the alpha male thing; some of it comes from ignorance, sometimes stupidity. Pillow talk, however, gives him an advantage.
With Farrah it was Lee, but once she told me to get him some movies, he was pretty much out of the management picture, busy with his own career. With Suzanne there was Alan Hamel, although Alan was smart enough to realize, at least in the beginning, that management was beyond his realm of experience. Management required strategy as well as tactics. It was long-term thinking. On Sunday Alan thought of Monday, the next day; I thought of the Monday a year from now.
Since Suzanne wanted to be Farrah’s equal, I had a great relationship with her and Alan at the outset. They not only treated me as a family member, but they demanded my time socially. They wanted to go everywhere I went, be seen with me constantly; when I evaded them to give my time to Farrah, their disappointment was evident.
Suzanne had a driving ambition to succeed. She never questioned my judgment, always willing to do what I asked of her, which was one reason she became an overnight sensation. I was petrified, however, of the possibility of walking into a room and finding both Suzanne and Farrah present. I had learned much about the ego of stars, beginning with a Las Vegas steam-room episode with Sammy Davis, Jr., and Vic Damone, when Vic fired me because I spoke to Sammy first.
I don’t know how I did it, but I managed to keep Farrah and Suzanne at a distance. Not once during the years I managed them both did they ever meet. I worked at the separation because I didn’t want to face the complications a meeting would engender. But in Utah, I was with Suzanne and Alan in their suite when Farrah tracked me down by telephone. Suzanne answered the call and then handed me the phone. Her face was pale, expressionless.
Farrah was upset; she wanted me to drop everything and fly to London. I was in a quandary, not wanting to show favoritism to either actress, listening to Farrah’s complaints and demands while Suzanne and Alan were listening to me. It was disconcerting, but I stumbled through the conversation without offending anyone.
By the time I arrived in London, Farrah’s spirits had changed from low to high. I stayed only long enough to have another fight with the Fabergé people, a big one. They wanted Farrah to go to Paris and other European cities to promote Farrah Fawcett Fabergé Shampoo. They were adamant. Diplomacy was dead because Farrah’s contract was coming to an end. Fabergé had the leverage. With me, they threatened to not renew Farrah’s contract; with Farrah, they dangled a carrot: perfume in addition to shampoo.
I explained to Farrah the problem I was having with them. She shrugged and feigned naïveté. “Can you fix it where I can approve the scent of the perfume?”
I wasn’t against Fabergé. The company had helped make Farrah wealthy, but it was her screen potential that would sustain her future. And that part of my plan had not gone well. Somebody had been only moderately successful. Sunburn had not been released; if it didn’t open well, Paramount would drop it like a hot coal. Farrah’s movie career might go down the tubes, because secretly neither of us had faith in Saturn 3. It was now a money picture, incapable of exploiting Farrah’s assets. These were facts and speculations we avoided discussing.
Stanley Donen, Farrah’s new director, was staying at the Dorchester. He was married to Yvette Mimieux, the beautiful actress with Einstein’s brain. I ran into her at the hotel. As we talked, I decided to pull a joke on Stanley. Yvette was amenable; we colluded.
When Stanley came home from the set, he found Yvette and me in bed together. It was a take-off on the old joke about the three most horrific words in the world when you’re making love: “Darling, I’m home!”
Yvette and I, under the bedcovers, made sounds of wild passion. Stanley glanced in the bedroom without comment, then went into the parlor and mixed a drink. We made more sounds, then paused. We heard the tinkle of ice in a glass. We made more sounds, then paused again. After a minute Donen called out, “Bernstein, will you get the fuck out of here? I’m tired!”
Suzanne and Alan were still in Salt Lake City. When I checked into the hotel, I had a message to call Elliott Kastner in London. I didn’t think it was important, so I didn’t return the call.
We flew to Las Vegas to take in the Ann-Margret show. The desk clerk at the MGM Grand gave me eleven messages from Elliott. I went to my suite and called him. He was exhausted and nervous, which translated into desperation. He was a week away from his opening shot on Yesterday’s Hero.
“I was in London a couple of days ago,” I said.
“Why didn’t you call me?” He didn’t give me time to answer. “I checked out your girl. I’m interested in using her in my picture.”
“What happened to Lesley Ann?” I asked.
“We had an argument. I want to go with Suzanne. Otherwise I’m in trouble.”
“How much were you going to pay Lesley Ann?”
“Seventy-five thousand for three weeks’ work.”
“Send me the script,” I said. “I’ll talk with Suzanne.”
Two days later, I received the script. I read it and gave it to Suzanne. She thought it was interesting. On a scale of ten, it was a five; Alan said it was a two.
“Look, Alan, Suzanne needs to do a movie in Europe. It’s important for her career.”
“Forget it,” he said. “It’s a piece of shit!”
I called Elliott. “She and her husband don’t want to do it, and I can’t talk them into it,” I told him. I suggested Lynda Carter.
“Jay, I need your girl.”
“The only way I could possibly talk them into it would be—I’m embarrassed to tell you how much money it would take to keep them from refusing.”
“How much?” he asked.
“One hundred thousand a week with a three-week guarantee.”
The phone clicked in my ear, but three hours later Elliott called back. “Okay, I’ll go with your girl for three hundred grand.”
“I’ll get back to you, Elliott.”
I chased down Suzanne and Alan. Alan still didn’t want to do it.
“For Christ’s sake, Alan, this is not only a financial windfall but it will give Suzanne exposure in Europe.”
He began to argue with me. I lost my temper and shouted him down. Finally he agreed, but with conditions: “We want everything paid for. First-class plane fare, the best hotel suite, unlimited dining-room expenses. Everything! And we want the money in cold, hard cash!”
I went to my room and called Elliott. “She’ll do it.”
The next day Suzanne and Alan boarded a plane for London and I flew to Los Angeles. Over the next few days, I talked to them several times. All seemed to be going well. Apparently, the minute they arrived Alan began hounding Elliott for Suzanne’s money, in cash. At last Elliott delivered, all crisp bills in paper sacks. Then, two weeks into the production, Alan called me. “We’re coming back today.”
“What? I thought you still had a week of shooting.”
“The picture will have to wait. We have to go back to do an Ace Hardware commercial.” After negotiating the hardware commercial, I had turned the project over to Alan.
I was flabbergasted. “Alan, you can’t leave in the middle of a production.”
“Watch us,” he said sharply. “Call Elliott and tell him.” He hung up.
Elliott closed shop for ten days. It cost him a fortune because he had to keep his cast and crew on payroll. He didn’t speak to me for two years, until he needed another actress, Catherine Hicks, whom I was representing.
I never knew for certain, but Elliott must have presold Yesterday’s Hero, because when it finished he gave Suzanne a Rolls-Royce. That was the good news. The bad news was that it belonged to Elliott’s ex-wife. When she discovered her car was gone, she sued him.