CHAPTER 21
In 1979, I packaged Suzanne’s first and last movie for theatrical release in the United States. Alan and I were executive producers.
Nothing Personal was about a college professor (Donald Sutherland) who was trying to stop a corporation from slaughtering baby seals. His co-conspirator was a young lawyer (Suzanne) who attempted to help him. It was essentially an inane romantic comedy.
Suzanne had a tendency to exaggerate everything. A couple of years later, when ABC’s 20/20 produced a profile about me, she told a story that was far-fetched but whose roots almost set off a war between animal preservationists and me.
The film was scheduled to begin production in Ontario during the week of my birthday. Somebody threw a big party for me in Beverly Hills and I flew to Canada the following day. My clothes were in two pieces of beautiful new luggage my mother had sent me.
I arrived at the hotel without fanfare, but the second the bellboy entered the lobby with my luggage a buzz began to bounce off the walls like an echo growing louder. I had no idea the whispers were about me, but I definitely heard the hum of the mantra. “They’re made out of sealskin,” it said repetitively. “They’re made of sealskin.”
The subject of the gossip was my new luggage, which I thought was made of pony, a natural fabric commensurate with my mother’s particular high-fashion eccentricity. It wasn’t. The pieces were made out of sealskin.
Now here I was executive producing an eco-picture with a storyline about two people trying to save the world’s baby seals from the slaughter of greedy and ruthless furriers. My luggage wasn’t exactly the image I wanted to present. And Suzanne didn’t help.
She told people I had arrived with sixteen pieces of luggage, like a modern-day Marco Polo intent on gaining attention of press and photographers. It was absurd. Even Elizabeth Taylor hardly traveled with sixteen pieces of luggage. The press took it in nevertheless, and to this day I think Suzanne believes I brought sealskin luggage by design.
Nothing Personal had a nude scene between the two leads. Suzanne and Donald weren’t inclined to disrobe, so we decided to cast their doubles locally. The director seemed excited about the casting session, which made me suspicious. I thought he was a little kinky, although my opinion was strictly intuitive. When one of the wannabes asked me what was “really” going to happen, her suspicion prompted me to attend the session, which was to be held in a hotel suite.
When I arrived, several young women were parading back and forth in their birthday suits. They all seemed delighted to be displaying their bodies, including the girl who had approached me earlier. I was amazed at how many women wanted to play Suzanne in the nude. We were only paying a hundred dollars and their faces would not be seen in the film, but there was a bevy of them nevertheless.
During the flesh parade I was called to the telephone. It was my insurance lawyer. “We’ve got a problem,” he said, referring to the John Gavin libel suit.
The suit had been lingering for years, revolving around Joyce Haber, who was Hedda Hopper’s replacement at the Times and a woman full of malice. Joyce was a cunt. She was a talented, educated person whose success transmogrified her into a monster. It was a shame, because Joyce was more talented as a writer than Hedda or Louella ever were. Success, however, went to her head. She was the most divisive writer I ever knew—she glorified in hurting people.
Joyce, like a self-appointed arbiter of social class, divided the industry into two groups, people of importance and people of unimportance. Her decisions were arbitrary, and they bothered me. Half of my clients were young and ambitious, often without significant credentials. They were B-list people, according to Joyce. The A-list people were the rich and powerful.
When I had parties I mixed my successful guests and less successful guests. It was my way of letting some of my wannabes rub elbows with movers and shakers, and on more than one occasion the mix helped move a client up the ladder of success. When I moved into Elvis Presley’s former Bel Air mansion in Stone Canyon, I went so far as to hand out cards at my housewarming party as the guests arrived. The card read: “You are definitely on the A list!”
Although I didn’t like Joyce, I needed her, especially after she became the most powerful columnist writing about the industry. It was not easy for me to get along with her, but I did my best, often giving her tips on stories totally unrelated to my clients.
One of my icons when I was a youth was Betty Grable. In a publicity stunt, Twentieth Century-Fox insured her legs for a million dollars. Her World War II pinup poster was the cat’s meow. Every teenage boy had one hanging on his wall. She was the masturbator’s delight. I remember seeing reproductions of the image on the fuselages of bombers and fighter aircraft. It was a dorsal shot of the blond bombshell in a white, one-piece bathing suit looking back at the camera over her shoulder. Her hair was piled high. Unbeknownst to the viewer, she was pregnant. When the photographer saw Grable’s condition, he had said, “Forget it, Betty. Come back when you’re not pregnant.”
She didn’t want to come back. “No, let’s get something,” she said. “Let’s try an over-the-shoulder shot.” It worked. It was one of the sexiest photographs ever taken. The subsequent poster became an important part of America’s popular cultural history.
In 1973, Grable was hospitalized in Santa Monica. She was fifty years old, already a legend. Her friends told her she was going to be okay; the doctors told her she was going to be okay. Joyce Haber didn’t. Joyce wrote the truth: “Betty Grable is dying of cancer.” When Betty read the news, she plunged into the abyss and died a few days later.
So Joyce was not a nice person, yet she had a column that I needed space in.
One of my corporate clients was John DeLorean, the charismatic head of Chevrolet, the man who later tried to start his own auto-manufacturing plant and was destroyed in the process by an FBI sting operation concerning cocaine, a crime of which he was acquitted.
One night at dinner, DeLorean told me that actor John Gavin had recently been caught shacking up with Dolly Cole, the wife of the president of General Motors. I didn’t think anything about the story until I next saw Joyce Haber. I wanted something in her column. “If you’ll use the piece on my client,” I said, “I’ll give you some hot gossip.” We swapped stories. The next day the Gavin-Cole story ran in her column.
Giving Joyce Haber a rumor became a casus belli, first between John Gavin and Joyce Haber, then Joyce Haber and the Times, and then John Gavin and me. Gavin, because of his friendship with Dolly Cole or because Dolly Cole was so beside herself, had the power of General Motors’ advertising dollars behind him. They threatened to boycott the Times until Joyce revealed her source. The Los Angeles Times did not defend its columnist—Joyce was given an ultimatum. Either she revealed her source or she was fired. She revealed her source—me—and then got fired anyway. With that, Gavin changed the direction of his attack: he sued me for a million dollars. Newspapers had a field day. One of the New York papers displayed a picture of me on the front page with the corresponding headline: “Top PR Man Named Slanderer.”
My lawyer told me not to worry about it, but I did, immensely. For forty days I was in a storm of mental anguish. I was Noah ensconced in his ark, hoping the rain would stop. It didn’t. My business manager informed me that I was not insured, even though I was paying a small fortune for insurance. A few days later my insurance company dittoed his judgment. I saw my little empire falling apart. It wasn’t that John Gavin was such a big name, but he was bigger then than now, and the truth is, I was embroiled over an untruth, which wasn’t good for anybody, especially a publicist. I didn’t know what to do.
I was having lunch at Scandia one day with Harold Abeles on totally unrelated business, but my anguish was such that I couldn’t keep from bringing up the impending case. Harold and I had been friends since the beginning of my career.
“Don’t you have insurance?” asked Harold.
“Yes, but it doesn’t cover this type of suit.”
“Let me see the policy,” he said.
I took it from my briefcase, and Harold perused it for a few minutes. He looked up. “Who said you aren’t covered?”
“The insurance people.”
“They’re lying. You’re covered.”
I was relieved, but not acquitted. The suit continued. I did my best to avoid John Gavin. I knew I could never explain to him what really happened. The truth seemed so banal. What would I say? That John DeLorean gave me the story and I passed it on to Joyce Haber? That it was Joyce who didn’t verify the story? By not doing so, I went through a half-dozen years of hell. My explanation would not have satisfied John Gavin. As far as he was concerned, I should not have given Joyce the story in the first place. But then John wasn’t in the publicity business, where there was give and take between flack and columnist.
So, flashing back to the future, I now had my insurance lawyer on the phone, ordering me to come immediately to goddamn Detroit to resolve this ridiculous thing.
“Jay! You’re scheduled in court Monday morning in Detroit.”
“Detroit! Are you nuts?”
He explained that the company lawyer handling my case had left the firm and the paperwork had been passing desultorily from secretary to secretary. No one had been available to challenge the change of venue, which now was in the backyard of General Motors. Finally someone suggested, “Maybe we should tell Bernstein.”
“I can’t be there,” I told him. “I’m making a motion picture. Right now I’m in the midst of casting and shooting an insert in Canada. Monday is impossible. I have to be in Los Angeles where Farrah is shooting her first Charlie’s Angels special!”
He got another lawyer on the phone. Between the two of them they managed to assuage my feelings. They assured me that once the judge in Detroit realized the change of venue was their fault, he would postpone and delay the proceedings. “Don’t worry about it, Jay. We’ll handle it.”
When I went back to the room full of naked nubiles, the director had chosen the body double he best liked. I didn’t think she looked remotely like Suzanne, but then I had never seen Suzanne in less than a bathing suit.
The following Monday, when I was at Twentieth Century-Fox with Farrah, the judge in Detroit was telling my lawyers, “If Jay Bernstein thinks he is too important to be in my court in Detroit, then I find him guilty as charged.” He awarded John Gavin $280,000.
I was embarrassed by the denouement of the suit, and I was determined to avoid John Gavin. I did, for a year or so. Then I was in an elevator in Century City. The door opened and Gavin stepped in. It was just the two of us. I tried to avert my eyes, but it was useless. When I took a glance, he was staring at me. We descended in silence a moment, and then he said, “I hope you learned your lesson.”
I said nothing. What was there to say?
Twenty-five years after the fact, which was recently, I saw Gavin for the first time since the elevator incident. We were seated at the same table at a benefit. When I looked, Gavin was again staring at me. I averted my eyes and wrote him a note, to wit: “John, it’s been twenty-five years. Will you please accept my apology and forgive me?” I folded it and passed it down the table. After a moment, I dared give him another glance. He stared, then nodded yes.
After the court settlement, I had gone to visit a friend at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. As I was waiting for an elevator, a nurse trundled a patient to the door in a wheelchair. She was having trouble, so I helped her. When I glanced at the patient, I felt I recognized her. At first, I thought she was an aging movie star; then I realized she was Joyce Haber, aged beyond her years.
She was suffering from cancer, and between the disease and her alcoholism she had deteriorated almost beyond recognition. When the elevator stopped again, I helped the nurse pull the wheelchair into the corridor. Joyce looked at me, but it was obvious that senility had set in. She could have been looking at a tree trunk for all she knew. As the nurse pushed her away, I stared after her, considering how quirky life can be. She had once been a woman of great power and influence; now she was reduced to a withered old lady.
I was compatible with most actors, unless they were intellectuals. The problem with intellectual actors is that they think too much. They’re dying and the doctor gives them a choice: take the green pill or the red pill. They have to have an explanation first, and then they have to think about it. Donald Sutherland was an intellectual.
When he signed with me as a management client, he was making $500,000 per picture. I doubled his salary to make Nothing Personal with Suzanne. It wasn’t a very good movie, but no one started out with the intention of making it bad—it just happened. For me, it was a way to get Suzanne a theatrical release as opposed to more television productions, and for Donald—well, he didn’t give any of his million back.
After Nothing Personal, Sutherland was offered a leading role in Excalibur. He wanted to do it because he thought it was intellectual and prestigious, which it was. Before he signed, we were offered a smaller picture for less money but with a piece of the gross. I persuaded him to take the latter, which initiated his endless complaint.
“This picture is glorified television,” he said, apparently referring to his co-stars, Mary Tyler Moore and Judd Hirsch, both of whom had made their marks in TV.
I tried to ignore him, which wasn’t easy. When Donald thought he had a case, he was without mercy. “I’ve got a director who’s never directed, a boring story that might fit CBS’s Tuesday lineup and a cast of lesser players nobody’s ever heard of!”
His tirade was endless. Halfway through the production he fired me because I had persuaded him to bypass Excalibur, which was in production in England, starring Nicol Williamson. Frankly, I was relieved; it was good riddance for us both.
The story, however, did not end. The little picture I had talked him into went on to garner six Academy Award nominations for which it won four Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor and Best Screenplay. It was Ordinary People, and Sutherland’s cut of the gross was in the millions. Robert Redford directed and Timothy Hutton took the Best Supporting Actor award.
That still wasn’t the end of the story. Sutherland took his profits and ran, without paying me my share. I threatened a suit, and we settled out of court, which I’m sure Sutherland is still grousing about.
Everything was hectic. I was flying back and forth from one production to another, while managing several actors. Lee and I were back in Manila, preparing to fly to Canada. Farrah called. She wanted Lee to come back to Los Angeles. She complained that they had seen each other only ten days in one year. Lee, always quick to take credit but never one to be faulted, blamed me for the estrangement. I was the one who had put together his movie deals, thus I was the culprit. I remembered the day Farrah said, “Jay, unless you can get Lee some movies, too, I can’t do any more movies.” I had found him five, including the forthcoming The Last Chase, another Canadian production to be filmed in Ontario. Not bad negotiating for a Jew without horns.
As I recall, we flew to Los Angeles for a few days and then Lee went back to Canada. He had some looping to do for Agency, and he wanted to see the locations for The Last Chase. Because of tax incentives, Canada had become a haven for movie productions, and both Vancouver and Toronto were now Hollywood satellites. The locations for The Last Chase were near Caledon, a few miles from Toronto. Another company was filming Circle of Two with Tatum O’Neal and Richard Burton. I caught up with Lee in Canada.
Ryan O’Neal showed up to visit Tatum, and called on Lee at our hotel. Through the years, after Ryan had threatened to kill me, I had done my best to keep some distance from him. He and Lee had remained friends, or so thought Lee. We were still working on the Philippine deal and needed to go back to Manila. I remember Lee asking Ryan, when the latter was getting ready to return to Los Angeles, “Do me a favor, Ryan. Farrah is upset with me for not being home, but Jay and I have to go to Manila again. Can you give her a call and take her to dinner or something?”
Ryan agreed to help his buddy out. Whether he called Farrah when he returned, I don’t know, but he obviously called her at some point. I do not believe, however, that Ryan was the reason Farrah and Lee broke up. The seed had been planted long before Lee asked Ryan to give Farrah a call. A relationship between two actors is the most difficult in the world, particularly when both are stars. In my judgment, the primary problem in the Majors-Fawcett relationship was that they seldom saw each other. They simply grew apart.
I was with Lee in his suite in Manila when Farrah told him, via telephone, that she wanted a separation. He was devastated. Fearing he was going to jump from his fourth-floor terrace, I coaxed him away from the balustrade. Lee and Farrah had been married ten years with many ups and downs and myriad threats, but this time Farrah was serious and Lee knew it. She wasn’t asking for a divorce, but even legal estrangement was almost too much for Lee to handle. Meanwhile, neither Lee nor Farrah wanted the breach to become public. My task was to make sure the press didn’t pick up on it until they sorted things out. I flew back to L.A.
Farrah had changed dramatically in five years. The naïve little girl from Texas no longer existed. She was an experienced Hollywood woman now—smart, savvy and growing tough.
I had become her alter ego. She didn’t like giving interviews, so I gave them for her. It finally got to be too much for Farrah. We were doing a photo shoot at my home when she overheard me giving a telephone interview in another room. I had become Farrah. I said, “I get up in the morning and go jogging, and then I play racquetball. And then I do this and I do that.”
Farrah didn’t like what she heard. Later she cornered me. “I heard you give that interview as if you were me.”
“Well, you hate to give interviews,” I said. “I’m just making it easier for you.”
She made a face. “It’s crazy, Jay. It’s like we’re in the Twilight Zone.”
It was true. Sometimes I didn’t know if I was Jay or Farrah, and the same was true of her. In retrospect, it was a pivotal moment. Farrah had been dependent on men all her life. Her father had been a strict disciplinarian, and then she had come to California and immediately met Lee. She had never been independent. The men in her life had guided her every move. She looked to men to make decisions, as if they were carrying suitcases too heavy for her to lift. She had counted on Lee for years, but now I had taken over his decision making. Of course, I thought I was building her into something she had never been—a role model, a legend, a living symbol of the best things in American life: baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet. I had pushed her beyond her limit, because Farrah was not ambitious. It was me—I was ambitious for her. Now that was changing.
The release date for Sunburn was approaching; we had a seven-city promotional tour in front of us. The press was clambering as ever, wanting stories. The Los Angeles Times called, wanting to interview Farrah about the movie. I said yes.
The Times’ Charles Champlin was the most likable, personable and smartest of the Los Angeles film critics. He was a real journalist who took his business seriously. I’d had good rapport with him for years.
Farrah and I met Champlin on a bright, sunny afternoon at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was Tuesday; he was writing for the Times’ Sunday entertainment magazine. A pleasant man, prematurely gray at the temples, he exuded warmth and a genuine admiration for Farrah. The first thing he asked was, “How is Lee doing?”
“Wonderful,” said Farrah. She glanced at me, determined that her private life was going to remain a secret, with me caught in the middle like a punching bag. I shrugged and nodded.
Farrah giggled and exuded a lot of verbiage about how much she missed Lee and how well he was doing in Canada on his shoot and how she wished he could be with her on the forthcoming tour for Sunburn and how they talked to each other on the phone every day, gushing on and on ad infinitum, Lee and Farrah, two lovesick puppies.
Champlin believed her, and I wanted to. Their lives were not running smoothly, but maybe there was still room for patches on the old inner tube. It was a good interview.
We left the next morning for Dallas, the first of seven cities. Farrah seemed remote, caught up in her thoughts. She slept until it was almost time to touch down at Dallas/Fort Worth International. We had been given the “Fasten your seat belts” announcement when Farrah said, “Before we have our press conference, I want you to announce that Lee and I have separated.”
What? The first thing that came to my mind was the Champlin piece for Sunday. After Somebody Killed Her Husband, which some critics had tabbed as “Somebody Killed Her Career,” we needed some good press to get Sunburn off and running. Champlin was going to be one pissed-off journalist. Worse, he was a journalist with clout; he could kill a movie.
“What about all the lovey-dovey stuff you told Champlin?”
“He’ll have to change his story.”
In my years with Farrah, there were few times when she wouldn’t listen to my advice; this was one of them. Her mind was made up; it wasn’t going to change. I began to think of ways to handle the press.
We landed, and I called the AP and UP. I put out a tersely worded statement confirming that Farrah Fawcett and Lee Majors had separated: “For the past two years their careers have interfered with their marriage. They have been like ships passing at sea, pausing only to exchange mail. This is a trial separation, not a divorce; they hope reconciliation can be attained.”
I was right about Champlin. When he heard that Farrah and Lee were separating, he felt betrayed. He had to rewrite his story, which had been a blissful portrayal of the Fawcett-Majors marriage. Farrah had almost made a fool of him. It did not bode well for Sunburn.
Thirty reporters were waiting in a conference room at our hotel in Dallas. Two dozen more were tied in by telephone from other cities. I told them questions about Farrah’s marriage were off-limits, and then Farrah came out. The first question was about her marriage. She began to cry. I handled the rest of the questions, and then we dashed back to the airport. The next stop was Atlanta.
One of the flight attendants was almost as pretty as Farrah. Farrah saw that I was enamored. “Why don’t you go talk to her?” she asked.
I made up an excuse not to. I didn’t want to be rejected in front of Farrah. It was a three-hour flight. When Farrah went to sleep, I slipped out of my seat and approached the attendant. Her name was Kathy Dutler; she was in her early twenties. My fear of failure was unfounded—we hit it off immediately, joking and laughing. Atlanta was her termination point. “Why don’t you hang out with us while we’re in town?” I said.
Kathy joined us the next day, which was the beginning of a relationship between us. She had an apartment in Chicago, her home base, but she flew in and out of Los Angeles a great deal.
We finished the tour in ten days. Farrah cried a lot. The first press-conference question was always “What about you and Lee?” We avoided it, often with Farrah running offstage, escaping and leaving me to answer the rest of the questions.
Sunburn opened as we completed the promotional tour. The first bad news was Charles Champlin’s review. It was devastating. He was still upset over Farrah’s deceit regarding her breakup with Lee. (Champlin later told me he actually enjoyed the film.) His review was all Paramount needed. They pulled the film after three days.
We were in a dilemma. We had two independent movies behind us, one moderately successful and the second pulled from distribution, with a third on the horizon. Part of my job was to keep my clients working, but three hitless movies in a row wouldn’t help Farrah’s future. It was evident she couldn’t carry a theatrical movie. She would never go to the Super Bowl unless she could finish a season. Right now, I was having trouble keeping her in the game.
We had a second feature deal lined up with John Daly and Hemdale Films, Strictly Business. Roger Moore was set to co-star. When Sunburn was pulled, Moore walked. Then Farrah and I walked, giving up her $800,000 salary and my $100,000 fee as executive producer. Farrah’s future as a film star did not look good.
Bubble gum and hustle had not worked. We had made the films because no offers had been forthcoming from the studios after the Spelling-Goldberg suit. I told Farrah the truth: “We didn’t pick Somebody, Sunburn and Saturn over offers from Fox, Universal and Warner Bros. We took what we could get. You haven’t been getting bad reviews, Farrah; the movies have,” which was true.
Farrah understood. She was tough and resilient. I began to put together a new plan, still convinced she could become a legend like Harlow and Monroe, without having to die at midnight. We would have to bypass movies for a while. I thought a Broadway play could be a starting point, followed by a Kazan-type, art-house movie. The main emphasis would be to showcase her talent, which had become evident even to the critics who blasted our movies. As I vented my thoughts, Farrah said nothing. Unbeknownst to me, I was chasing moonbeams.
After we got back to L.A., I received a belated birthday card in the mail: “Dear Jay, I love you and happy birthday two months late, August 7, 1979. En route was one of my most fun and fascinating trips ever, the Sunburn tour. You are my favorite traveling companion—Farrah.”
The gossip sheets reported that she was dating Ryan O’Neal.
August ended, September passed. One October morning, Farrah called me. She wanted to know if I could meet her at the Bagel Nosh, a small restaurant in Beverly Hills. We sat across from each other chewing bagels. The atmosphere was distinctly foggy.
“Jay, I’m concerned because the movies haven’t done very well.”
“It’s funny,” I said. “We didn’t do them to make gobs of money, but you’re rich now.”
“Richard Barrie says my new Fabergé contract will have a condition.”
“Like what?” I answered, as if I didn’t know.
“They won’t renew it if you are my manager.”
I did not say anything. Barrie had bypassed me because he knew I would bring a stiff bargain to the Fabergé table. I observed Farrah. When I had become her manager, she was the second-billed Angel. The number of lucrative contracts I had negotiated for her in the interim was too many to calculate, but she was now a bona fide multimillionaire.
“What do you think I should do?” she asked.
“You’re asking me a silly question, Farrah,” I said calmly. “You already know what you’re going to do.”
She did not know what to say. The silence was suddenly funereal. Without another word, I got up and left.