ONE OF THE last two books I worked on was George Jonas’s riveting memoir, Beethoven’s Mask: Notes on My Life and Times. Set against the grim facts of the twentieth century, it is by turns comic and tragic, bemused and opinionated. It is classic Jonas. George muses on the rise and fall of nations, on human follies and foibles, on Hitler and the pope, on political correctness, pomposity, ignorance, anti-Americanism, nationalism, on the scope and barbarity of the Holocaust, the future of the European Union, and even life and death.
In the Preface to Beethoven’s Mask, George quotes his opera singer father: “ ‘Europe is a carnival in Venice,’ he offers, ‘with assassins dressed up as lyric poets. Butchers lurk in ducal palaces wearing Beethoven’s mask. The voice is Beethoven’s, but the hand is Beria’s.’ ”I
The other manuscript was Norman Jewison’s This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me. It’s a great title for a memoir and I wish I could have used it for this book. It took me over a decade to convince Norman to tell his story. For more than forty years, Norman had been one of Hollywood’s fabled filmmakers. He had directed many of the great stars of the era, from Steve McQueen (“the camera loved him”) in The Thomas Crown Affair and The Cincinnati Kid, to Cher (“she is in touch with the reality of ordinary people . . . they identify with her”) in Moonstruck. He also worked with Faye Dunaway, Goldie Hawn, Burt Reynolds, Anne Bancroft, Meg Tilly, Doris Day, Rock Hudson, and, in the very early days of television, Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra.
His landmark film, In the Heat of the Night, with Sidney Poitier, was shot in 1966, in a small southern corner of Illinois, to quote Norman, “as Southern as we could get without actually crossing into the Confederacy, where black men were still being lynched.” It was a time when the civil rights movement in the South was held in check by brutal police forces. “Sidney said there was no goddamn way he’d go below the Mason-Dixon Line for the eight weeks we’d needed to shoot the movie.” When the Poitier character, Tibbs, slapped the Rod Steiger character, Endicott, it was the first time that a black man had slapped a white man in an American movie.
The film won five Academy Awards. Norman would eventually receive the Academy’s lifetime achievement award in 1999. To help nurture Canadian talent, he created the Canadian Film Centre on what used to be E. P. Taylor’s estate in north Toronto, and judging by its graduates’ careers, it has been a great success.
We worked on the manuscript for several weeks, most of the time in Malibu, where we started early mornings and didn’t finish until after midnight. I was editing the manuscript all the way home on the plane, testing a few ideas on the flight attendants.
This Terrible Business is not a personal autobiography. Like this book, it’s mostly about Norman’s craft, the people he worked with, the films he directed. “I tried to be truthful and entertaining,” he wrote in the Preface. And his films reflect this simple but powerful credo.
I. Lavrenti Beria was the chief of Joseph Stalin’s secret police.