With my daughters when they were young: at Chasen’s with Courtney (PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER C. BORSARI); in Scotland, while producing Madame Sin, with Katie (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR); on the Splendour with Natasha (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR).
The first project Leonard and Aaron brought to us as part of the development deal was a project of Leonard’s called Alley Cats. It was, without exception, the biggest piece of shit I have ever read. Even Aaron thought it was shabby. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” he told Leonard. I told Leonard what I thought, and he told me, “The girls we have cast will be on the cover of Time magazine in a year.”
I didn’t believe him. My carefully considered opinion was that the show would be canceled about ten minutes after the first episode ran, but I got involved anyway. I brought in Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, who had written White Heat for Jimmy Cagney as well as a lot of other good movies, to run the show, and I brought in Jaclyn Smith to go along with Farrah Fawcett and Kate Jackson, who had already been cast. Aaron and Leonard changed the title and put the rest of the project together. Natalie and I owned 50 percent of the show they called Charlie’s Angels. When it finally went on the air in the fall of 1976, it was a tremendous hit from day one—the equivalent of buying stock in Microsoft. And Jaclyn was the only one of the girls who stayed with the show for the entire length of the run.
Over the years, I have spent a great deal of time in court, battling with Aaron and Leonard over their definition of profits, and I’m glad to say I’ve usually won, allowing the children to be brought up very comfortably. As for the two succeeding shows in the original three-show deal, another one was developed but never went forward, and the third never happened at all.
Despite Natalie’s disinterest in working, it wasn’t long before she had a good offer for a film called Peeper, with Michael Caine. We leased a house on Foothill Road while she did the film. She had always liked Michael, and it was also something of an experiment to see if a career could be successfully juggled with motherhood. We decided to move back to Beverly Hills; I sold the house in Palm Springs, and we found our house at 603 Canon Drive. It was a two-story house in a sturdy Cape Cod style; Patti Page had bought it with some of the royalties from her recording of “Old Cape Cod.” I believe we paid $350,000 for the house.
It was a large, comfortable place that Natalie decorated with her favorite French paintings, my favorite sculpture and drawings of the American West, and a lot of tropical plants. Her maturation was evident in the change in her tastes since the marble and gold period of our first house years before. Now her taste was very low-key and homey. She decorated the house in floral upholstery and needlepoint pillows. The master bedroom had wicker armchairs and a quilted floral bedspread. Upstairs were three bedrooms for the kids as well as a playroom. Over the garage was an apartment where Josh Donen lived for a time.
I fully intended to live in the Canon Drive house until it was time for the Motion Picture Home; as it was, we lived there for the rest of Natalie’s life.
Disaster movies are heavy lifting for the second unit and the stunt crew, but not so much for the actors. What you basically have to do is project either fear or resolution in varying degrees. My sequence in The Towering Inferno was done near the beginning of the production, and it was quite dangerous—for the stuntmen. For those few of you who haven’t seen the picture, a new skyscraper catches on fire, and I die a spectacularly unpleasant but flamboyant death trying to save lives. The same could be said of most of the cast.
My stuntman worked for at least a month on controlling his breathing before the scene was shot, because once he was set on fire, he couldn’t breathe, not even once. If he breathed, he died. It was a very dangerous shoot, but amazingly, given the dicey nature of working with fire, not one person was hurt making that picture, although Fred Astaire had a near-miss.
They were shooting the climactic sequence, where Fred and those members of the cast who hadn’t already been killed were huddled in the penthouse waiting for the cistern to be dynamited, thus putting out the fire. Fred was on the floor when they had to shift the lights. Fred was seventy-four years old when we shot the film, and he liked to stay in place after a take so he didn’t have to get up, then get back down in position.
“It might be a while, Fred,” they told him, and he said that was okay, he’d just stay there. But they insisted, and somebody came and helped him get up. A minute later a big 10K light came crashing down on the precise spot where he’d been sitting.
Critics never gave Irwin Allen much of a shake, but then, they never thought much of Cecil B. DeMille either, and Irwin’s best pictures were like DeMille’s. It wasn’t about subtlety or characterization, it was about promising the audience a big show and delivering a big show. Most movies promise dollars and deliver pennies, but The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno never cheated the audience.
I loved Irwin. For one thing, he knew how to make those pictures; for another, he lived and breathed his movies and was genuinely interested in the people who worked for him. He was friendly and affable to work with, and he would take time to talk to the electricians or anybody else.
It was wonderful to be working with Fred Astaire again, even though we didn’t have any scenes together. He was still Fred, still in good shape, and our friendship remained strong for the next five years. It wasn’t until after he went east to shoot Ghost Story that his old friends were gradually ostracized by Robyn. His phone numbers were changed, and nobody could get in touch with him. Not only that, but Robyn weaned him off racing, which he had loved since he came to California to get into the movie business. Greg Peck didn’t see him after that, and neither did I.
When he died in 1987, Greg and Veronique Peck, as well as Bill Self—three of his oldest friends—weren’t invited to the funeral. Bill Self went anyway and stood under a tree. About the only people from the old days who were invited were Ava, Fred’s daughter, and Fred’s choreographer and alter ego, Hermes Pan. They probably just made it under the wire.
After Courtney was born, Natalie became totally involved with her. She was very much into being a mother, which meant she was less into being an actress. Peeper had been a pleasant shoot, but the movie was terrible, and Natalie didn’t seem to care all that much. She began turning down job after job, including some films she would have killed to be in just a few years before. Her priorities had shifted to her family and kids. There was nothing more important to both of us than that.
Our kids meshed—my Katie and her Natasha became our Katie and Natasha. Marion had opened a couturier shop on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills that proved very successful. The shop was called “Marion Wagner” and was confirmation of her fine taste. Katie was living with her mother, but she was over at the house all the time and had a fine time with Natasha and the baby. Katie fell right into the fold, and there was plenty of room at the house for all three girls, so gradually Katie came to live at Canon Drive.
When I think about how Natalie and I melded the kids into one group, I realize that we did it together. No parental decisions were made independently. We decided things together, rewards and discipline alike. The key thing was that we loved each other—everything stemmed from that. We had found something that eludes many couples: true compatibility. We had a similar rhythm, and we both took a lot of pleasure in caprice. Acting had taught us that you have to take advantage of circumstances; if I wanted to drop everything and go to San Francisco for dinner, Natalie would enthusiastically go along, but we were just as happy to have a quiet dinner at home.
There were times when we would ask ourselves if it was okay to be as happy as we were. Was there something wrong with us? We both knew how chancy life was, and how difficult show business can be, and it seemed that we had come through every obstacle and landed on an island. And the other person on that island just happened to be the person we loved the most in the world.
I don’t mean to suggest that there was never a cross word. I tend to accentuate the positive, while Natalie was a full-blooded Russian and at times could be moody. But she wouldn’t allow herself to be overwhelmed by those moods. I found her to be a wonderful mother, with very good instincts about what the children needed.
Natalie was never a woman to dance around the kitchen, but she kept it all together. She could arrange things faultlessly. Along with all her other talents, she had a gift for assimilation and organization; she could run the house, tend the children, and also pay attention to her career when she felt like it.
All the kids were completely different, but the blessing was that they all loved one another. Katie has always been very self-possessed and self-sustaining. She always wanted to work. When she was a kid, she was a box girl at the market and later a clerk. She was a fine gymnast as a girl, loved tumbling and was very good at it, and has had a very successful career as a TV host.
Natasha was very sweet and insecure. It was difficult for her to be by herself. If Natalie and I had to go out, we’d have to sit with Natasha for a while and slowly edge our way out of the room. Even then, she always wanted to be with us and wanted to know where we were at all times.
Courtney quickly mastered everything she touched, but would get bored just as quickly. She’s always been a wonderful artist and good at athletics, although academics were never her strong point. With my own history, I didn’t exactly have the moral authority to read her the riot act. She picked up golf very easily, and I swear that the first time I took her out on a course after some time on a driving range, she parred the first hole. She was and is capricious in her brilliance.
The Canon Drive house was perfect for a family. There was a large garden in the back, and I grew a very nice selection of vegetables there. Other kids were always at the house, and we had a lot of garden parties in the afternoon. Courtney was swimming by the time she was two, so a lot of family time was spent in the pool. These were years of bounty and joy.
In my mind, that house is defined as a home for the children. Courtney would be roller-skating around the kitchen with a hamster on her shoulder, and the dogs and cats would be dodging her and running through the house. It was noisy, boisterous, and wonderful. And Natalie would walk through all this wonderful noise and clearly be delighted. She wanted a house that was fun—something she hadn’t experienced as a child—and she got it.
In this, as with everything else, she was very down to earth and, unusually for a movie star, very skilled with people. If a friend was ill, Natalie would research the symptoms and find the best doctor. If we had a problem, she would outline the problem and her suggested solution, and more often than not, I agreed with her ideas.
Our primary consideration was always for the children. We took two vacations a year, one with the kids, one with just the two of us. And we made a commitment that we wouldn’t both be working at the same time, that one of us would always be home with the kids. With very few exceptions, we kept to that rule.
At Thanksgiving I would put on a red scarf and we’d have an open house. The door would be open, the fireplace would be roaring, and everybody in our life was invited to stop by for some turkey and a drink—not just friends and agents and the like, but the servants, the delivery men, everybody who made our lives what they were. It was not a house where anybody stood on ceremony.
You can tell why I loved her. Why did she love me? I think it was because I made her laugh. Natalie had this great, boisterous guffaw, and I could always make her roll over with laughter. And she knew that I was there for her. A friend of ours once asked her how she managed to keep herself so together. “Because I have RJ behind me,” she said. “I always know he’s there.”
Someone who was there for both of us was Paul Ziffren, who had always been Natalie’s lawyer. Paul was an extremely dynamic personality, highly respected, a truly superb lawyer who was also the head of the Los Angeles Democratic Party. Paul and his wife, Mickey, had taken Natalie under their wing when she was single and introduced her to Los Angeles society, and they made sure to include her in the welcoming committee whenever any Russian artists came to town. I’ve always felt that the combination of intelligence and kindness contains the best of both worlds, and that described Paul. We quickly became very close friends, and he became my lawyer as well as Natalie’s.