THINGS CHANGE

George Beau Brummell (1778–1840) was the most famous of the Regency Fops. He was great friends with the Prince of Wales, the future George IV. His name today is a byword for The Dandy, which he was, but he was petted, in his day, because of his wit. He came late to some rendezvous and explained that he’d hurt his leg. “And,” he said, “it was my favorite leg.”

During the Vietnam War, an anonymous soldier was immemorialized by a phrase still part of Military vocabulary. The soldier was on the radio to Command when he came under fire and exclaimed, “What the fuck…”

His commander scolded him, “Say again, using proper radio procedure, over.” The soldier responded, “What the fuck, over.”

An agent, now deceased, well known to us all, hired a young secretary. At the end of her first day, he offered to drive her home. They took winding Mulholland Drive; and he began to drive aggressively; she asked him to slow down, and he sped up; she pleaded she was becoming frightened, and he said, “Show me your tits or I’ll kill us both.”

Memorable phrases from my own film career follow.

I first met Paul Newman at Sidney’s office, during pre-production for The Verdict. I said, “Hello.” He replied, “I just got laid.”

Ben Gazzara played the Bad Guy Associate of Becca Pidgeon’s villain in our Spanish Prisoner.

At our first meeting, I said, “Glad to meet you,” and he said, “I’ve never been able to penetrate an Italian woman.”

Down the list, but a small footnote to history, is our pre-Oscar party for The Verdict. We were invited to David Brown’s house in Malibu: myself, James Mason, Sidney, and Paul.

David was married to Helen Gurley Brown (Sex and the Single Girl, 1964). Walking up to the house, Sidney said, “She’ll insult you within twenty seconds.” She greeted us, said hello to Sidney, James, and Paul, and asked me, “What do you do…?”

And I believe it was Samuel Goldwyn Jr. (producer of my film Oleanna) who said, of my script, “The enormous respect I have for your talent does not permit me to do anything but puke over this piece of shit.” He hated both the script and the film, but he was a charming man, and spoke lovingly of George Cukor, who, he said, was his cherished surrogate father. God bless them both.

The Communist International was the Bolshevik Apparat promoting world Marxism. It was known at the Comintern; and Cukor’s group as the Homintern. A philologist might treasure the bon mot as evidence of the universality of Communist thought in Hollywood. This interest was just fashion. The randy, drunk, doped, crazed-by-greed, and be-fantasized movie folk took to Communism then as today they “fight global warming.”

McCarthy landed on Hollywood Reds, hounding various for their publicity value, and probably drove more folk to suicide than drugs or the films of Ingmar Bergman.

There weren’t a lot of yoks coming out of the blacklist, but Lucille Ball was called to testify before McCarthy’s Senate Committee, and Desi defended her with “The only thing red about Lucy is her hair, and that’s fake.”

The Hollywood humor of my day was sex humor.

What does a teamster girl say after sex: “Where are you guys from?” How do you know a teamster has died: “His wife picks up his checks.”

And always indictable were producers and, of course, agents.

This, told of Mike Ovitz:

Young woman gets into an elevator with Ovitz.

She asks, “How about a blow job?” He responds, “What’s in it for me…?”

The joke certainly goes back to the dawn of the movies, and probably dates back to ancient Rome.

I got off a few good things in my time.^I And put them in the movies. I did it for a living.

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We remember our youth as pleasure or noble struggle and dramatize the infirmities of age as injustice.

The movie biz of my time was an adventure—the culture was raunchy, ribald, and energizing; it held the promise of any next moment bringing love, sex, money, fame, artistic challenge, or an encounter with the highwaymen.

But of course things do change. The culture of Hollywood today resembles that of my youth as little as a PTA meeting calls to mind a fire in a whorehouse. Simultaneous with a raid. The workers and the thugs, in my time, were many things, but I do not recall that we were sententious.

1. I. Bruce Berman was head of something or other at Warners some time back. I’d been working with Randy Newman, my hero, on a libretto of his Faust. Bruce wanted Randy and me and Lorne Michaels to come by Warners and pitch something or other. It may have been Faust, I don’t remember. In any case, in we went.

   Bruce was forty-five minutes late for the meeting, and showed up with still-wet mustard on his tie. “Well,” he said, “it’s such a pleasure to meet you three, especially you, Randy, as I ‘was’ you for a while. When the Beatles first came to New York, I figured they’d very likely known your music, but didn’t know you; so I went to their hotel, told them I was you, and palled around with them for a week. Now…

   “It’s absurd that I would ask you, Randy, you, Lorne, and you, Dave, to ‘audition’ a project for me, but what the hell, not everyone likes Mexican food…”

   He turned to me, as it was the “Writer’s Turn.”

   Pause pause.

   “What the fuck do you mean,” I said, “ ‘not everyone likes Mexican food’?”

   That closed the meeting. Out in the hall Randy suggested I’d just cost him a quarter of a million bucks. And I was sincerely contrite. But hey…