I have heard that Ernie Lehman wrote in his autobiography that Lee Grant threw him off his own set. Yes. While directing his own script of Portnoy’s Complaint, Ernie turned into a cross between Cecil B. DeMille and Caligula.
The first clue came when I met him about the part of Portnoy’s mother. Portnoy was played by Dick Benjamin. I learned at the time that my rival for the part was Elaine May, my remarkably talented friend. I know she would have handled the situation differently, particularly since the first words out of Ernie’s mouth as we crossed a soundstage were, “I’ve got things on Mike Nichols, locked up in my safe.”
Huh? “But Virginia Woolf was brilliant!” I replied. “Your screenplay, his direction, the performances?”
“Never mind, I’ll get him if it’s the last thing I do!”
Mike had directed me in Plaza Suite and become a friend. His talent was legendary, and he needed no defending from anyone.
As a matter of fact, Ernie’s talent was pretty up there also. He’d written North by Northwest for Hitchcock and many other first-rate films. But the man I was meeting for the first time was an angry, small man with his neck pushed forward.
He showed up on the first day of shooting, on his first director’s job, dressed in pale linen, dark glasses, and an ascot. When he called “Action!” he would fall to his knees and demand that padding be slid under his knees as he fell. Since he never fell in the same place twice, as the scenes progressed, the unhappy wretch with the padding would be gliding around trying to guess where Ernie would land next. If Ernie landed on his linen-covered knees, the poor stagehand wouldn’t hear the indignant end of it. So, from the first day of shooting we all understood the main drama was going to be behind the camera, not in front of it.
In a dinner scene, the glasses placed in front of us were filled with red wine. We toasted—to God, or something—but the glasses at our places were water glasses, tall water glasses. Dick Benjamin suggested we exchange them for wineglasses, like real people drink from. Ernie walked back and forth, thinking about it, then asked for the storyboard on the scene. The storyboard artist had indicated “water glasses on the table.”
“No, these are the right glasses,” Ernie said. “They’re right here on the storyboard.”
Dick and I looked at each other and sipped wine from our water glasses.
Later in the scene, I toasted my son, my eyes full of tears.
“Cut! Cut!”
We turned to our director.
“Lee, your voice sounded funny. You know, thick . . .”
“I was moved, Ernie,” I said.
“Moved?”
“Never mind, Ernie. Let’s do it again, my voice will be clear.”
The last week of the shoot had an important hospital scene. I, Mrs. Portnoy, would age from forty to eighty, the character was now old and sick, sharing a room with another woman patient. My son comes to visit me; I’m lying in bed in my hospital gown. To convey my age and condition, I’d worn a lot of padding and wigs throughout the film, and for this scene, I’d chosen a big brassiere and filled it with birdseed, so it seemed like my breasts were falling on either side of me, like I’d seen on older, heavy-breasted women. The other woman in the room was played by an experienced Actors Studio actress, who had one line to say to me before my son entered the room. I don’t remember her line, but it was something like “So, your son’s coming to visit you. I’ll bet you can’t wait—blah, blah.” Innocuous. Ernie, now standing, no longer falling to his knees, had found his target. The actress read the line this way and that way.
“Cut! Cut!” he’d scream. “Can’t you do anything right?”
He screamed at her until she could no longer put the words together; they made no sense to her. This went on for an hour, leaving the big scene between me and my son dangling.
“Action!” he screamed every two minutes, pointing at her.
Suddenly I jumped out of my bed, in my hospital gown, my long birdseed breasts flopping against my ribs, my panty-hosed backside exposed.
“Stop it, stop it,” I screamed at Ernie. “You’re torturing her to death, you little shit. She’s a good actress! Look what you’ve done to her!”
The actress had tears running down her face. She literally could not put two words together by then.
“Get out of here!” I shrieked. “Go to the camera trailer and direct from there. Dick and I will do the scene without her line!”
Ernie looked around at the crew. They were silent.
“Go!” I pointed to the door, like an old Eloise.
He left. Dick and I filmed the scene, and Ernie stayed in the camera truck that day.
Everyone in this business knows that a problem with a line on set can be fixed in postproduction. Ernie Lehman was playing Erich von Stroheim, reveling in sudden power. Viewing Portnoy’s Complaint in the theater for the first (and last) time made me shrink back in horror. It was not a good reflection of Jewish family life. Maybe Ernie’s rage at Mike Nichols made him treat actors exactly opposite of how Mike does.
One more side note to Portnoy. Karen Black played the Monkey in the film—the crazy-beautiful model Dick Benjamin has an affair with. Karen had already done Five Easy Pieces and many more first-rate films. She was a big talent. We were going to the same parties around that time. Karen had a baby, a little boy, almost a toddler, whom she breast-fed at the parties. She wore satin nightgowny dresses, very glamorous, very alluring. She would lower one satin shoulder strap to reveal a charming breast, which in due time she would bring to the baby’s mouth. Her conversation had nothing to do with the breast or baby, it had to do with the universe, philosophy, things on a higher plane. I had totally missed the whole hippie thing, but I thought, What an innocent but provocative way to be really sexy and stand out in a crowd at a big party.