JOE AND DON

We were shooting Things Change on Oak Street Beach in Chicago. This was my mob comedy starring Joe Mantegna and Don Ameche. Don had been the biggest star in Hollywood in ’32 and ’34 and then, by his admission, was “out of work for two periods of twenty years each.”

The second ended when he made Cocoon (1985). He’d always played a suave cosmopolitan, his demeanor and accent as universal-unplaceable as Cary Grant’s.

Cary grew up, an orphan, in London, and Don was raised by his immigrant father in a bar in Kenosha, Wisconsin. One of his father’s friends shot a fellow drinker in the bar. Don’s father nodded, took out a stiletto and stabbed his friend in the belly, put the knife in the dead man’s hands, and called the cops.

And Joey, of course, came from Cicero.

Joe’s Uncle Willie returned a decorated hero of World War II and went to work for various enterprises on the West Side of Chicago. Joe said he’d once landed at O’Hare and gone out to find his Uncle Willie, who’d volunteered to pick him up; and there Willie was, facedown over the hood of his car, handcuffed, and being beaten by the cops. All in good fun, tempers cooled, and Joe asked what happened. Willie explained that the cop had asked him, “Sir, would you please move your car into the designated pickup area?” and he had replied, “Fuck you, you mick cocksucker.”^I

Joe and Don got on magnificently; in fact, each was as fine a gentleman as you’d discover on a Hot Summer’s Day.

Shel Silverstein and I wrote Things Change. We were shooting in Tahoe and Vinny Guastaferro and Joe cooked Italian food, and Don had wines from his L.A. stash flown in for our delight. We were at lunch one day, in pre-production, and a beautiful young woman came up to Joe and explained that she’d always loved his work, and asked what we were doing in Tahoe.

Joe said we were filming and would be there for a month. She said she’d be very pleased to show him around and began to write down her number.

Joe said, “You have an interesting accent. Where are you from?” She said she was from Czechoslovakia.

“Really,” Joe said. “My wife’s from Czechoslovakia.” Pause pause pause. And the young woman went away.

Shel said, “Joe, when that broad says she’s from Czechoslovakia, you don’t say, ‘My wife’s from Czechoslovakia.’ You say, ‘I want to knock you down and suck your pussy till you die.’ ”

Don roared, and I’ve never heard anyone laugh longer.

I take it back. David Geffen threw a small dinner party for Mike Nichols’s seventieth birthday. Eric Idle rose to make a speech. “What could be more enjoyable,” he said, “than having your face licked, while ejaculating into the body of a young woman?” The select crowd roared. As we quieted, he began to speak again, and we all thought, No, you can’t top it.

However: “I asked my wife, ‘Where,’ I said, ‘where could you find a man equal to Mike in talent, humor, and grace?’ ‘Hurry up and come,’ she said.”

Don was eighty during the shoot and spending much of his off-time with one of the crew’s young women.

And, on the beach, at the last day’s shooting, Don became testy, and very testy indeed. It occurred to me that night that of course he was facing the transition, yet again, from deservedly revered film star to Old Man.

Don said, “Joe, you’re my best friend since Ty Power.” Rest in peace; for doth it not come to us all?

Unless one punches out, one will be reduced to signing photos at a supermarket opening, shoplifting, reclusion, or self-imitation.

Henry Fonda, than whom we had no finer actor, never received a competitive (real) Oscar till On Golden Pond, playing a character part of an old man. I met him on the set of Summer Solstice, a Television movie, the ancient template: an old couple reminisces over the oompth decades of their troubled marriage, its early years played by younger actors.

Henry’s wife in the film was Myrna Loy, with whom I am still in love. (What more touching and unusual love scene than hers with Clark Gable in Test Pilot. His plane runs out of gas and lands in her pasture, she says, “I know you: you’re the prince. A nice, charming prince, right out of the sky. A young girl’s dream.” Check it out.)

I am a devotee of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

I was a high school wrestler and, later, boxed and studied kung fu. But Jiu-Jitsu is the Old Man’s Sport: its wisdom is based upon conservation of strength and knowledge of body mechanics.

I’ve always been built like a mailbox, and from earliest youth was likened to a bear. Having the eye-hand coordination of a sloth, I was happy to find a fighting form that was dependent not on striking (hand or foot quickness and accuracy) but grappling (tying up the other guy, and proceeding from there).

I am a pack rat and collect various arcana: aviation memorabilia, Judaica, movie stuff… I had the chance to buy a collection of one hundred fifty Film Company Employee Badges some years back. These were not only the majors, but those of the long-forgotten Poverty Row. I didn’t meet the reserve bid of five grand and have regretted the loss ever since.

In Martial Arts bumf, I have cartes de visite of two of my favorite actors, both wrestlers: Kola Kwariani, who was in The Killing; and Stanislaus Zbyszko, who played, essentially, himself (ex-champion of the world) in Night and the City by Jules Dassin (1950).

Other beloved wrestlers included Nat Pendleton (1895–1967). Nat played the cop in The Thin Man series, and the cop or the light-heavy in dozens of films. (Light-heavy, a boxing class, here used to denote an actor playing a crook in a comedy.) He was a silver medalist in wrestling at the 1920 Olympics. And everyone said he was robbed.

Mike Mazurki played Moose in the Raymond Chandler film Farewell My Lovely (1944). In the ’30s he’d been starving as a lawyer and began anew as a professional wrestler before taking his 6'5" to Hollywood.

And I had a photo, signed by Fonda, of him getting sacrifice-thrown by his Jiu-Jitsu instructor. Both in white gis, Henry airborne and looking surprised. Pure gold.^II

UNTIL.

There I was at some function in the days I thought it good to try to chew the rubber chicken. And, at my table was an attractive older woman. She was introduced, but I didn’t catch her name. And as we chatted, I gleaned, from this or that reference, that she was Jane Fonda.

All-that-to-one-side: I was touched by the love with which she described her father. And so, the next morning, I sent her the photo.

See the scene in Fail Safe, between Fonda and Larry Hagman. Henry’s the president, and Larry’s his Russian interpreter, on the phone to the Russian premier. We’ve just mistakenly dispatched nuclear bombers to Russia.

It’s the best scene in The Movies, played against two white walls. Fail Safe was directed by Sid Lumet, who directed my script of The Verdict. I used to live around the corner from him in Manhattan and had dinner at his house once a month or so. I followed him on the sets of The Verdict, and there was a lesson. He was so quick we said we were lucky if we got one take.

Great lesson. To the contrary, I was on the set of Wag the Dog, watching Bob De Niro and Dustin Hoffman shoot a short “talky” scene (God forgive me), and they came into the shot, said the words, and walked out, and, camera still rolling, came in again; everyone copacetic with the notion there were many takes required. Problem is that, even were it so (which it isn’t), if you can’t succinctly tell the actors what you’d like different, you’re just burning film or, today, electrons. The problem worsens as you’re dumping more film on the editor’s desk and exhausting the actors, who, in their uninstructed repetitions, search not for a better way but for a way that might debar them from a) further criticism and b) further pointless effort. This way, inevitably, is “pretending,” that is, portraying whatever a sentient being might recognize as the approved way to say that line.

Ah, well. Also on the set, I got a hug from Anne Heche, and if she was Gay, she at least during that hug was bisexual.

Pretty swell.

Rest in peace. She died, in a car crash at an intersection just past the departure end of Runway 21, Santa Monica Airport. Some two hundred yards away, on the Penmar Golf Course, Harrison Ford put his broken airplane down in 2016. A superb bit of flying. He’d put the plane, a 1942 Ryan Aeronautical ST3KR, up for sale a year previously, and I’d considered buying it.

A decade ago, the airport was a thriving concern. Harrison kept four or five planes there; and he took me flying in one of them, an Aviat Husky. Tony Bill^III took me up in his WACO biplane, and we did lazy eights out over the ocean.

I don’t think there is a photo of a pilot and plane in which the pilot isn’t smiling. But this smiling was too much for the puritans of the Santa Monica City Council, and the airport’s been strangled into nonexistence, and an upcoming new life as a real estate boondoggle.

Most of the back lots of Fox have become Culver City, and the remainder parking for the drones pushing paper and calling it show business. Oh, embittered, embittered Dave.

But my wife, Rebecca, the wisest person I know, is a devoted student of yoga; and her guru is B. K. S. Iyengar, rest in peace. He was asked if he wanted to extend his life, and he said, “Why be greedy?”

Sue Mengers (1932–2011) said, “Show business doesn’t owe me a damn thing.”

She was the most interesting person in Hollywood. Like Mike Nichols, Francis Lederer, Hedy Lamarr, Billy Wilder, Peter Lorre, and hundreds of others, she was a refugee.

Most, the Jews, as above, fled the Nazis. Alexander Golitzen (1908–2005) fled the Reds. His was one of the richest families in Tsarist Russia. He got out with the shirt on his back and lived and worked in Hollywood as an art director (Foreign Correspondent, Spartacus, To Kill a Mockingbird).

The Mitteleuropean Jews lived where I live now, in Santa Monica, and down the hill in Rustic Canyon, where the early moguls had their Parcs-aux-Cerfs.^IV

Santa Monica was known as Weimar on the Pacific. I will note Billy Wilder, coming into a kaffeeklatsch of Hungarians (sign on leaving Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: It is not enough to be a Hungarian, you must also work), the boys were chatting away in Magyar, and Billy said, “Boys, boys, this is America: Speak German.”

Billy and his wife, Audrey, were great friends with my friend Joe Sugarman. Billy died before I washed up out West, but Joe and his wife, Oddy, had us to dinner with Audrey, who told us tales of Old Hollywood. She’d been a singer in Fred Astaire films and said the watchword among the hoofers was “not a word about Fred.”^V

They were on their second date when Billy asked, “Would you consider leaving show business and marrying me?” And she replied, “I thought you’d never ask.”

She can be seen, fleetingly, as the cheating wife quitting the Other Man’s bedroom at the Ritz in Love in the Afternoon.

This is the perfect Viennese bedroom farce, delivered, by Billy et al., with magnificent reserve. It features Audrey Hepburn; we always said she was Jewish. It turns out she wasn’t but Kate Hepburn was. Go figure.

Her love interest is Gary Cooper, who’s old enough to be her grandfather. And Billy did it again in Sabrina, where Audrey’s in love with Bogey, old and ill and tired. God bless him.

But as we age, there ages also our notion of “Young.”

I’m seventy-five at this writing, and a forty-year-old is a young man.

So Billy, engaging, as all us directors do, in overt or crypto love for his star,^VI cast a couple of old fellows opposite the world’s loveliest young woman.

Audrey was also the sole actress more beautiful than Gary Cooper. (I am tempted to exempt Dietrich in Morocco; but I must be true to my girl, just as I would to my School.)

Sue Mengers came over at age six, just ahead of the Nazis. She became not just an agent but a Superagent, representing the Grandes Dames of the seventies (Barbra Streisand, Ali MacGraw, Cher, Candice Bergen, Joan Collins, Faye Dunaway). And she held a salon, to which my wife and I were very pleased to be regularly invited.

Her best friend was Geffen, and she was referred to in the crowd as Mrs. Geffen. He and, I believe, Jack Nicholson bought her her house, behind the Beverly Hills Hotel, and gave it to her when her husband died and she went bust.^VII

The Beverly Hills Hotel, where I played piano four hands with Randy Newman in the empty ballroom; where Alan King held court in the first booth at the Polo Lounge; where we had burnt Rye Toast and Coffee in the coffee shop served by the same orange-haired waitresses who had served the same for decades and no doubt offered, in their youth, other dainties to the Community.^VIII

For the question is: What happened to those, the prettiest girls in Waxahachie, Walla Walla, Dubuque, who got their on-screen break saying, “One moment please, and I’ll connect you…” and then were seen no more.

Africans were kidnapped and forced to work American rice fields because a hereditary trait made many of them resistant to malaria, their genetic superiority an unfortunate inducement to their exploitation. See also the casting couch.

1. I. For years Joe has voiced the character of “Fat Tony” D’Amico on The Simpsons, as an homage to his Uncle Willie.

   Joe, in addition to being the world’s best raconteur, is a story magnet. He reports he was on the set with a huge star, renowned as a womanizer. They were sitting around, pause, pause, and the star turned to him and said, “If you were a car, what kind of car would you like to fuck?”

2. II. Orthodox Jews and aviators speak of the past greats as of intimates: the Masters of the Talmud talk about Rashi and Maimonides as close, if momentarily absent, members of the group, just as aviators talk about Ernie Gann or Pancho.

   Watching Kiss of Death, I see a bulking shape lumbering through the background. It’s Dewey Sullivan, who played in Preston Sturges’s stock company; and there he is, at the end, not even doing a walk-on but working as an extra.

   Thinking about Sturges led me to Veronica Lake.

   She plays the angel/waif/love interest in Sullivan’s Travels, the greatest of American Comedies. For those late to the party, they sculpted her blonde hair in a signature that fell down over one eye. It was so widely copied, women in the Defense Plants began coming to grief at their lathes. So Veronica changed her hairdo.

   I saw my first Sturges film in the auditorium at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, in 1973. Later that week some friends and I drove to Burlington.

   There was a woman at the diner who caught my attention. On the drive home I said, “Omigod, that was Veronica Lake.” My friends told me I was just loony-in-love, which I was. What in the world would she have been doing in Burlington? Some years later, reading up on Sturges and his Merry Folk, I learned she’d fetched up in Vermont at a sanatorium. And there she was. And I’d seen her.

   Or perhaps not.

   Any number of guides, amateur and pro, will take you to the staircase where Laurel and Hardy filmed The Music Box, each guide, of course, choosing differently.

   In 1973, Veronica went into Burlington Memorial Hospital, where she died of cirrhosis of the liver. Frances Marie Ockelman, that was.

   What actual connection could a snakebit fan (myself) (or, for that matter, you) have with Celebrity? Answer, none.

   Our babbling praise is, to them, an imposition. Most will be gracious; and many will accept the difficult along with the delightful that comes with their status. And many drink themselves to death.

3. III. Producer of The Sting, etc.
4. IV. Louis XV’s private whorehouse.
5. V. After Billy’s death, Audrey gave some mementos to Joe Sugarman. Several years after her death, Joe passed one on to me. It is an African tribal mask, which can be seen behind Billy’s desk in many photos. I’ve tried to hang it here and there but have been unable, to date, to live with it, as it scares the shit out of me.
6. VI. More wisdom from Mike Nichols: it’s okay to schtup your Leading Lady. But don’t stop. I was always a straight arrow on my sets. First, I had a girl; and, then, I was so tired at the end of the shooting day, sixteen hours on my feet. I shot Heist with Gene Hackman, then seventy. I was driving him home one night, and he asked me if I ever grew tired on set. I said I did not but that each night when I arrived at my house I had no idea how I was going to make it out of my car.
7. VII. Dave and Sue were the best of friends, but one year they had a pseudo-marital tiff and would not hear each other’s names. A year passed. David called to bury the hatchet and wanted to get together. The reconciliation as told to me by Sue: “Come by tonight,” I said. “There’ll be nobody here but no-good, ungrateful faggots.” “I’ll be there,” he said.
8. VIII. Back in the seventies it was not the Industry but the Community that was bicoastal. One would see one’s like on Tuesday at Elaine’s in Manhattan, then on a red-eye to L.A., then Saturday morning at brunch at the Bev Hills. These were not the suits but performers and directors and writers, flying back and forth not to “meet” but to work.

   The Boeing 747’s upper deck was a feature of first-class travel. It was a lounge, a bar. At one time, one of the lines installed a piano. If sleepless or looking for company, one could climb them spiral stairs and find it there.

   I saw Alan regularly, not only in his booth at the Bev Hills but in his and Sid’s offices in New York. He’d just done Just Tell Me What You Want, a Lumet comedy, and we were acquaintances, back when the term meant “friend, adjacent,” back before the term meant “friend, former.”

   Whoopi Goldberg was another of that coterie. Mike Nichols helped put her on Broadway. She and I became friends. I was in the audience regularly. I mention her because of a compliment.

   I was having coffee at Alan’s office, and he asked if I’d seen Whoopi’s show. “You got to see it,” he said. “She stops it.” He paused. “She stops it dead.”

   From a comic this is the highest praise. One might say “they peed their pants” or “they threw babies from the Balcony,” but these phrases are, I think, never uttered about any performance other than one’s own, their incipient hyperbole recognizable by all.

   But “she stopped the show” is unadulterated tribute.

   I mention, also, in this regard, my daughter Zosia. She insisted her way onto the TV show Girls.

   They wrote her a bit part as Shoshanna, realized their wisdom, expanded the role, and, time after time, she stopped the show.

   We may discuss those lauded as “great” (e.g., Laurence Olivier or Gregory Peck) and nod in appreciation. But I explain my relationship to Shoshanna, and folks smile.