CHAPTER 26
I was at midlife. It wasn’t a crisis, but I had choices to make. I could either quit or find another rainbow. I decided to go for it.
My resumé listed several hours of television credits as an executive producer: the Wild Wild West telemovies, the ongoing Bring ’Em Back Alive series; Mickey Spillane’s Margin for Murder. In each case I had been the idea man, the packager and overseer, the mover and shaker of financing, but I had not been a hands-on producer. I decided to change that. I wanted to shape my next project from the mold of my own imagination and philosophy.
The character of Mike Hammer was forever in my thoughts. Politically I was a traditionalist, which was different from being a conservative. In my mind the last national hero had been a woman, Farrah Fawcett. The women’s lib movement had tried to reduce men to a secondary role in society and family. Athletes seemed to be out on strike half the time. General Westmoreland’s lies had eliminated military leaders as national heroes. Politicians were still drowning in the muck of the Nixon years. Musicians had green hair and wore body armor. I didn’t like any of it.
My old-fashioned ideas were wrapped up in men as leaders, heroes and mythical figures. Yet we were losing our manhood. We had become subservient to political correctness. In screen stories, evil now won out over good. The antihero reigned supreme. I saw in Mike Hammer a means to change that way of thinking, if only slightly. I wanted to revert to the truth of evolution, where for a million years men had been aggressive and women had been receptive; when men were warriors and women were domestic goddesses. I wanted to project the image of a take-charge man whose soul was committed to the protection of women and the fight against evil, not for money or material gain, but because it was right. The Mike Hammer philosophy was simple: revenge for injustices committed against good people.
We had gone from a permissive society to an ultra-permissive society. When the transition had begun in the postwar forties, Mike Hammer did something about it in Mickey Spillane’s books. I didn’t want Hammer to be wishy-washy. I wanted him to take over when government failed society. Criminals might beat the system in many of the new television shows, but in mine I wanted Mike Hammer to win out, regardless. I wanted to go back to Mickey’s prototype, a man who loved women and sex because it was man’s nature. I wanted women to be beautiful again, not the flat-chested androgynes being presented by extreme women’s libbers, clothes designers and style magazines. I knew tons of women, had affairs with hundreds of them, and not a single one sought to be Twiggy instead of sexy. No, the women I knew wanted to be treated like women. So something was wrong with the way the media was projecting the image of women. I wanted to change that, and I wanted to use Mike Hammer as my catalyst. It was not a new idea, of course; Clint Eastwood had shown there was still a huge audience for a one-man-vigilante-lover through his Dirty Harry character, but Clint was doing movies. I wanted to hit the vast television audience. I wanted them to say, “Mike Hammer might be unorthodox, old-fashioned, even immoral by today’s standards, but he’s right.” While the networks were trying to give the public what they thought it wanted, I wanted to give it what I thought it needed. I saw myself as the keeper of the flame.
On January 6, 1983, the Hollywood Reporter ran a front-page story: “Jay Bernstein Productions has finalized a deal to produce ‘Murder Me, Murder You’ as a telefeature in association with Columbia Pictures TV for CBS. . . . ‘Murder Me’ is from an original script by Bill Stratton and will be directed by Gary Nelson, with Lew Gallo producing. . . . The current project marks Bernstein’s fourth time as executive producer of a telefeature. . . . The increased moves into production will not preclude Bernstein’s partnership with Larry Thompson in what he called ‘our selective management business.’ . . . Recent signings by the duo include Tatum O’Neal, Catherine Bach and Stephen Macht. They join a client roster that includes William Shatner, Bruce Boxleitner, Cicely Tyson, Linda Evans, Gil Gerard, Robert Blake, Catherine Hicks, Jeff Conaway, Drew Barrymore and Donna Mills.”
The Hollywood Reporter had enough facts to lift anyone’s spirits, but what it left out what I was most excited about. Bud Grant had said, “Jay, if you can make Hammer successful again as a television movie, then you can take it into a series.”
I went to see Mickey at his home in South Carolina. He lived at Murrell’s Inlet, about ten miles south of Myrtle Beach, in the middle of nowhere. His house was an unpretentious abode on the ocean. It had a Jag sitting in the driveway and a boat on the water out back. “I’m not rich,” said Mickey, “but I don’t owe a dime. The bank can’t take my house because they don’t hold a mortgage. My car’s paid for. I’m just a working writer, but I get paid for it. I don’t have a yacht, just a fishing boat, but unlike the big fiberglass jobs with all the fancy fixtures mine really fishes.”
For Mickey, Murrell’s Inlet was ideal. He could lose himself in his work without fear of being bothered by his neighbors. The little town was still a village; when he first moved there its population was 750. People said, “What do you do for a living?”
“I’m a writer,” answered Mickey.
“But what do you do for a living?” they repeated.
That’s when he knew he had found a home.
He was working on a children’s book, which caught me by surprise. Mickey Spillane, the creator of Mike Hammer, doing a children’s book?
“I don’t make any money out of it, but my publisher challenged me to do it. Anybody can write a detective story, but a children’s book? Now, that’s something else.”
Mickey and I worked out a step sheet to a new Hammer teleplay. Originally Mickey’s Hammer was a veteran of World War II, but we updated his military experience, making him a Vietnam vet, while retaining his 1950s view of life. That was important. I wanted people to get back to an ethic we were losing. Back in Hollywood, Bill Stratton did an excellent job of capturing the essence of the ideas Mickey and I came up with.
When a producer has an agenda, his project usually fails. You can’t hit people with a sledgehammer to get your point across. The audience knows what you’re up to and usually switches channels. I didn’t want to use a sledgehammer, but I did want to make some subtle points. Mickey Spillane’s Murder Me, Murder You was entertainment, and I always kept that in mind. Hammer wasn’t Sherlock Holmes. He worked on hunches and instinct; he was Everyman. I wanted to project three basic things: criminals brought to justice, men who were men, and women who were women.
I did not have an actor in mind to play Mike Hammer. I knew only that he wouldn’t be Kevin Dobson. The network strongly suggested Stacy Keach. I didn’t know Stacy, but I remembered his performance in a John Huston–directed boxing movie, Fat City, made ten years earlier. Ray Stark, the movie’s producer, had told me, “I knew Fat City was a loser when it won first prize at Cannes. It was just too artsy-craftsy.”
I wasn’t looking for artsy-craftsy. Also I was concerned about Stacy’s background. He was a trained Shakespearean actor. I was in the television business, not in theatrical arts. After word came down the network pike, I checked out Stacy’s resumé more thoroughly. He’d been in two recent movies, Roadgames, with Jamie Lee Curtis, and Cheech and Chong’s Nice Dreams. He’d also starred in a major CBS Civil War miniseries, The Blue and the Gray, the reason the network was high on him.
We met in my office at Columbia, then located at the Burbank Studios. “Have you ever read any of Mickey Spillane’s books?” I asked.
Stacy laughed. “When I was in junior high the word circulated that some guy named Spillane was writing stuff that nobody else would touch. Hot sex scenes and violence. Naturally, his books became black-market items. One night I fell asleep before hiding Kiss Me Deadly. My mother found it on my bed the next morning. All hell broke loose. When I told her a friend had loaned it to me, she said I needed new friends!”
We chatted further. I expressed my mind-set: “The public is fed up with the ‘me generation.’ It wants a ‘we generation,’ stars it can respect and look up to, on-screen and off.”
Stacy agreed. By the time he left my office he was the new Mike Hammer. He could shed his lackluster “good actor” image and become a “star personality,” combining adventure with humor and romance. I thought Mike Hammer would change Stacy’s image from a character lead to a leading man. It was a case of the right actor in the right role at the right time. Mike Hammer fit Stacy Keach like a glove.
Our story was simple. Hammer discovers he has a daughter (Lisa Blount) whose mother (Michelle Phillips) is his ex-lover and the only woman he ever loved. The troubled girl is missing, and the trail Hammer follows to find her leads to some typically awkward situations. Bill Stratton had done an excellent job in retaining the snappy flavor of Hammer’s one-liners. What violence we had was necessary to the story, not gratuitous. The humor came from the women. It was a fun mystery with a Mickey Spillane twist at the end. No one could guess who the murderer was until Mike Hammer knew.
Aside from Hammer, the two most important roles were Velda, Hammer’s secretary and girl Friday in Mickey’s novels, and Pat Chambers, the NYPD police captain. I cast Tanya Roberts as Velda. Charlie’s Angels had just been canceled, which meant I had worked with the first Angel, Farrah, and now I would work with the last, Tanya. I had known Tanya since Suzanne Somers’ first starring role in Zuma Beach. I cast Don Stroud as Chambers. It was Don’s first good-guy role after playing a hundred villains. He was like Charles Bronson, Walter Matthau, Lee Marvin and Anthony Quinn—all villains before their careers took off. Now it was Don’s turn to be a good guy.
As for Stacy, he had a distinctive look, but he wasn’t Robert Redford. I knew what to do. I surrounded him with beautiful women that I named the “Hammerettes.” I sometimes interviewed seventy girls to cast one that might have a single line. By the time I finished, we had fifteen of the most beautiful women in the world. I hung an eight-by-ten publicity glossy of Stacy surrounded by five Hammerettes in my office; never once did a visitor fail to mention it. Women would say, “Oh, I’d like to meet him!” The psychological message was simple: if a woman wanted Stacy, then three more might want him; if five wanted him, then another twenty would want him.
If Stacy was going to be a hero, he had to look like a hero. When I first met him, he was overweight. Mike Hammer was mean, lean and athletic, the toughest of all private eyes. Stacy tried to lose weight but nothing worked. I tracked down a trainer who had worked with John Travolta and Sylvester Stallone. After five workouts Stacy said to me, “I hate your guts.”
“Think of it this way,” I told him. “It’s better to hate me now than to hate yourself later.”
By the time we began shooting, he was a rock. He looked like Superman.
Wardrobe was another problem. I sent Stacy and our production manager on a shopping spree to find Mike Hammer clothes. When they returned, Stacy looked like James Bond. I flipped. “Oh, no!” I said. “Hammer is like Columbo. Chic he isn’t.”
Stacy got another set of clothes. Instead of letting the wardrobe people hang up his suit when Stacy took it off, I had them shove it in the drawer of the desk in the Mike Hammer office. Stacy hated wearing wrinkled clothes, but for me the more wrinkles the better. Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer was not a clotheshorse; he also wasn’t a slob, but he was unpretentious.
I spent seven days a week on Hammer. I’d been working in the industry so long that my life had become a movie itself. I went to bed late and was up early. The first sound I heard when my eyes popped open was the smack of a clapboard and a director saying, “Action!” Some people couldn’t take it. Most people are attracted to Hollywood glamour, but making a motion picture entails much more. Glamour is the icing; we were making the cake. It required sacrifice, a reality many people are unwilling to accept.
Director Gary Nelson brought the production in on schedule and within budget. When I saw the assembled movie, it was apparent that we had something. To promote Murder Me, Murder You, I put together a multi-city tour for Mickey, Stacy and me. Mickey, now in his mid-sixties, had a recognizable image because of his beer commercials, and Stacy was Stacy. We wore Mike Hammer snap-brim hats. Stacy was a consummate actor, so I knew he would do well with the press. It was Mickey, however, who stole his thunder. At one press conference a reporter asked if Mike Hammer was an anachronism in the 1980s. Mickey fired back: “Wait a minute. I’m here, ain’t I? I just got married a couple of months ago and my wife is thirty-seven. What you see in me standing here isn’t some old anachronism creeping around. Believe me, I can still pull my own weight.”
A few critics disqualified Hammer as a hero because he liked girls. They said he was sexist, which was fine with me. I liked girls also, as did the rest of America’s red-blooded males. Teenage boys and young men had not bought 12 million Farrah Fawcett posters because they thought she looked like a woman wrestler; it was her sexuality that appealed to them.
Murder Me, Murder You was scheduled to air at nine p.m., April 9, 1983. It was pitted against Fantasy Island on Saturday night. I wanted a big rating. I wanted to beat Fantasy Island, but more important, I wanted to beat Aaron Spelling, who produced it. I did.
I was always enamored of the Academy Awards, even though I realized from my own experience that the process of choosing nominees and winners could be manipulated. To me the ceremony was the most glamorous show on earth and the singular event where moviegoers from around the world could participate vicariously in the phenomenon known as Hollywood. I gave short shrift to other awards presentations, and I attended or didn’t attend depending on whether I had a client up for an honor or not.
The Emmy Awards for prime-time programming between July 1, 1982, and June 30, 1983, were presented at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium on September 18, 1983. Murder Me, Murder You received only one nomination, which disappointed me. I was pleased, however, when cinematographer nominee Gayne Rescher was announced as the winner. That is, until he gave his acceptance speech. He made a terse comment, something to the effect of “I want to thank everybody,” and that was it; he walked off the stage. Everybody? Who in hell was everybody?
The next morning I called the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. After identifying myself, I told the guy at the other end, “I’m upset about last night’s awards. I want the Academy to give Emmys to Stacy Keach and to my line producers Lew Gallo and John Anderson.”
“You want what?” the guy asked snidely.
“I’ve had my lawyers research your bible,” I continued. “It says you can give Emmys for contributions. I want those Emmys based on your regulations, and I’m going to fight for them.”
“That’s unheard of!”
“Read your Academy bible. My cinematographer received an Emmy last night and he didn’t have the courtesy to acknowledge a living soul responsible for Murder Me, Murder You. I can assure you, other people were more important to the project than he was! So I want three—no, make it five—Emmys for contributions, as your rule states. Larry Thompson and me, executive producers, Anderson and Gallo, producers, and Stacy Keach, who is Mike Hammer incarnate.” I hung up.
Two days later the same guy called me back. “We’ll make a deal with you,” he said. “We’ll give you the Emmys, but on the condition that you won’t tell anyone how you got them.”
“Naturally I won’t.”
“This will be a first, and it will be a last, because we’re going to amend the rule book, so this will never happen again.”
Five Emmy plaques for special contributions were issued. Of course, I had never read the Academy’s rules and regulations in my life, but neither had anyone else. It was over a thousand pages.
Bud Grant of CBS was a man of his word. When Murder Me, Murder You got the numbers, he okayed another Mike Hammer movie to be followed by a midseason replacement series.
But no project is problem-free. During the writing phase of More Than Murder, my writer quit with the teleplay only two-thirds finished. Time was of the essence—I finished the script myself. I didn’t take credit for it, but the experience was cool. After we went into episodes, I wrote three of the Mike Hammer scripts.
The cultural climate had changed since my first Mike Hammer movie with Kevin Dobson. Times required a reinvention of Hammer. I wanted his character to be a cross between Dirty Harry and James Bond, and I wanted the stories to be hard-hitting. I didn’t want a watered-down show. I wanted to do something John Wayne fans would admire, while watching a lot of gorgeous women.
Tanya Roberts was no longer available. She was now Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. Tanya had been a good Velda, but this time I wanted an actress who fit my exact vision of Hammer’s secretary. I initiated a national Velda search, always a good idea for generating publicity.
We’d been casting six weeks, but still no Velda. I was getting nervous. Then Tim Flack, my casting director, brought in a girl who was perfect. She was Lindsay Bloom, a voluptuous dark-haired beauty with perfect breasts, a thin waist, the right weight—everything I wanted. “She’s Velda!” I told Tim.
He laughed. Lindsay had auditioned five weeks before and I had rejected her. She had been a chubby blonde with a southern accent, not the type of woman I had in mind. But Tim thought her personality matched what I wanted, so in the interim he got Lindsay a trainer (she lost twenty-two pounds), dyed her hair black and got her voice right. Then he brought her back, knowing he had created the vision I had described to him.
The casting couch is part of Hollywood lore. No doubt many young women have given sexual favors to producers and directors in hopes of getting parts in movies, but it seldom works.
I’m aware of only three people who accomplished their goals by sleeping with someone. Two of them are women, and each attained a level of stardom before descending to a lower plateau. (Both have roles in this book, but legal considerations keep me from identifying them.)
One of them was extremely selective, bedding a director to get her first major movie role; then bedding a star to get her second major role (she upstaged him in their movie); and then she made room in her boudoir for a producer, securing her third starring role. All three movies were hits. She stayed on top for fifteen years, until gravity took its toll.
The second actress was less discreet. She bedded everyone she could—usually producers, directors and writers of B movies—until one of the movies vaulted to the top and became a box-office hit. For a fleeting moment she was a hot item. She made two more big-budget movies, but both failed, sending her back down the ladder.
The third casting-couch veteran slept with his producer to get an acting role; then he slept with his producer to get a writing job; finally he slept with his producer to get a directing job. In each case the successful aspirant was Jay Bernstein, but so was the producer. By sleeping with myself, I became a member of the Writer’s Guild, the Director’s Guild and the Screen Actors Guild.
Every person who has ever told a lie is an actor, which means all of us are actors, to one degree or another. Occasionally acting is elevated to an art form. Following World War II, a shift to true art took place, first on the stage and then in movies, motivated by the Russian theater director Stanislavski and enhanced by American director and acting teacher Lee Strasberg, among others. From the new school came the likes of Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Paul Newman and a host of lesser names—lesser only because they did not receive star status. A movie star and a movie artist are not synonymous, although true artists sometimes become stars, like those mentioned above.
By the mid-eighties, I had been representing actors for twenty-five years, yet every actor I knew told me I didn’t understand actors and acting. Thus I decided to become an actor, temporarily. Tawdry as my means were, I cast myself, which Columbia Studios didn’t look upon favorably. We were fifty-fifty partners, but they didn’t want me in my own movie. Why? Because they thought I would get a bad laugh. That’s when I laughed. How many of our 40 million viewers would know who the hell I was?
However, the Columbia execs were adamant. I had to fight my own studio to get a part in my own movie. But I was determined. I went to my lawyers and had them peruse my contract with a microscope. Then I bypassed the studio and got permission from CBS, which had final authority. The episode left a bad taste in my mouth because I realized Columbia was no longer a risk-taker. The hierarchy was changing; the new people got nervous when anyone wanted to do something different. As executive producer, I set my acting salary at half scale, just enough to pay my way into the Screen Actors Guild.
I hired an acting coach who didn’t teach me anything I didn’t already know. I’d been acting all my life. I wanted to make my character a cross between Charles Revson and Hugh Hefner. After I had my role down pat, I added a couple of props; I carried a white cat à la Leslie Parrish and used one of my trademark walking sticks.
On the day my scene was shot I was nervous, but I tried not to show it. I was in the first ten minutes of the movie, and then I got killed, riddled with machine-gun bullets. It was fun, but it was also my first and last effort acting in front of a camera. I had more fun acting the role of Jay Bernstein.
The Hammerettes provided comedy in otherwise hard-hitting stories. I wasn’t concerned about the feminist movement, although I realized we would lose hardcore libbers from our audience. Hammerette cleavage had everything to do with me, not Mickey, Stacy or anyone else. It was my preference because I thought women’s bodies were beautiful and something to be admired. Since I was the executive producer, I had the power to give the viewers cleavage, and I did. It didn’t take a genius to realize we were not playing the Hammerettes as serious entities. Even diehard feminists couldn’t make that mistake. We were being silly, offering comic relief.
For casting purposes, I invented the pencil test. I needed approximately seven beautiful girls in each episode, and I wanted them to have real breasts. Silicone implants didn’t work for the costumes; the gap in cleavage was too wide. False boobs looked false. The pencil test wasn’t politically correct, and today I would probably be arrested for it. Women executives at the network hated it, but none of them would have passed the test anyway. It was simple but foolproof. I would take a pencil and drop it between an actress’s breasts; if the breasts were firm and close enough to hold it, she was hired. If the pencil slipped through, she got paid, but I didn’t use her. When reporters asked if I was the one who gave the tests, I said, “Well, somebody has to do it!”
I cast a lot of the non-recurring roles out of the trunk of my car. I would go to parties and bump into people. Susan Strasberg asked me one night if I could help her; she had just moved out from New York and she was without representation. “Come to the studio in the morning,” I told her. “I’ve got a part for you.” I did the same thing with Dick Van Patten and a dozen other actors. I was limited by Columbia’s stingy budget—I could only pay $2,500 for a guest appearance, far less than most series paid, but I could get them to do it for me.
Sharon Stone was a struggling actress with savvy. She knew how to go after a part and she wanted badly to be cast in one of the Mike Hammer episodes. She was a bright, beautiful, sexy young woman, and if you didn’t believe she was bright, beautiful and sexy, all you had to do was ask her. She never stopped selling herself, which is what an unknown has to do.
“Your thighs are too big,” I told her.
My criticism didn’t faze her. The word no didn’t exist in Sharon’s vocabulary. I finally relented and gave her the part of the villain in an episode entitled “A Shot in the Dark.” Of the guest stars, she got third billing below Delta Burke.
The filming went well until the final scene—the demise of Sharon’s character. She had to fall into a vat of black oil, which was really colored water. Sharon balked.
“I’m not doing it,” she said. “I’m not jumping into a pool of anything.”
“What? The scene is critical to the story, Sharon. You knew you had to do this when you took the job!”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I’m not going to ruin my hair.”
“But you have to!”
“I don’t have to do anything,” she said, and walked off the set.
We had to scramble to find a Sharon look-alike. I was angry. She wasn’t remotely the star; she was just getting her career off the ground. Furthermore I was scheduled to attend a triple-A dinner party that evening in honor of Steven Spielberg.
Two hours later, after immense overtime costs, we finally had a stunt double in place, wigged and costumed, who could play Sharon’s role as long as the camera didn’t show her face. We got the shot, and it was a wrap.
I arrived at the Spielberg dinner party an hour late, found my seat and looked around. Seated at the head table next to Steven was Sharon, aglow in the limelight of the evening. Her hair looked great. She obviously thought Spielberg was more important than Mike Hammer, but it took her another ten years before she got star billing alongside a major star. And Steven Spielberg was not the director.
When I was handling Farrah, my dentist was always after me to send her to his office. I finally did, and he told me his business doubled after Farrah became a client. Some years later, he asked me if I would recommend him to Sharon Stone, who had become famous for Basic Instinct. I didn’t want to, but he kept after me. Then I ran into Sharon at an Academy Awards party. I used my dentist as a conversation piece.
“He’ll do your teeth free of charge,” I told her.
She arched her brow. “I’m pleased with the dentist I have, Jay,” she said. “And besides, I remember what you once said to me.”
“What was that?” I asked curiously.
“You said my thighs were too big!”