IT’S GREAT fun for me to have Picture’s age—half a century—celebrated. In the summer of 1950, when John Huston invited me to come out to Hollywood to watch him work, movies as we know them had been around for less than half a century. (The seminal film The Great Train Robbery was forty-five years old, and the landmark Potemkin was only twenty-five.) Yet the basic and high-stepping patterns and mores of the moviemaking industry had already settled in, and they seem to have persisted to this day.
I went west to see Huston make his movie The Red Badge of Courage, which was based on Stephen Crane’s famous Civil War novel. Huston, a unique, magnetic, many-faceted director, gave me special, generous, and open access to himself and the project, and that is what made it possible for me to tell this story.
It turned out, long after Picture was published, that the making of this film had been a key issue in the struggle for control of the studio. The entire movie industry at that moment in its history was being shaken up by the emerging monster, television, and the studio powers in New York used this issue, among others, as a way of wrestling control from L. B. Mayer in order to face the threat.
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During World War II, Huston had been a major in the Pictorial Service of the Army Signal Corps and had directed now famous documentaries, including San Pietro, a film about a group of American soldiers assigned to capture a town in Italy, and Let There Be Light, a film about psychologically damaged veterans. The first feature movie he directed was The Maltese Falcon. In 1948 he directed The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, for which he won two Oscars—Best Direction and Best Screenplay—and for which his father, Walter, won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar.
Later that year, I went to Hollywood to do a story for The New Yorker about the congressional investigation of what was called, by the investigators, “un-American activities” in the movie industry. Despite the pressure of the investigation, Huston, a man of unfailing spirit and lighthearted high jinks, was brave, outspoken, independent, and funny. Conversation with him was like fresh air. He voiced courageous views about all the nonsensical fear and paranoia going on around him, and he showed, with his particularly sardonic and wry diplomacy and humor, his impatience with the cowardly and silly behavior of some of his peers. While I was there, he was directing Key Largo with Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Edward G. Robinson, among others. I had a good time visiting Huston on his set and meeting an assortment of people in the business. In the story I wrote, titled “Come In, Lassie!” I told about meeting John Huston for the first time, at lunch one day with cast members of Key Largo at the Lakeside Golf Club, a favorite buffet eating place among stars on the nearby Warner lot:
The actors were in a gay mood. They had just finished rehearsing a scene (one of the new economies at Warner is to have a week of rehearsals before starting to film a picture) in which Humphrey Bogart is taunted by Robinson, a gangster representing evil, for his cowardice, but is comforted by the gangster’s moll, who tells Bogart, “Never mind. It’s better to be a live coward than a dead hero.” Bogart had not yet reached the point in the movie where a guy learns he must fight against evil.
Huston was feeling particularly good, because he had just won a battle with the studio to keep some lines in the film from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s message to the Seventy-seventh Congress on January 6, 1942: “But we of the United Nations are not making all this sacrifice of human effort and human lives to return to the kind of world we had after the last world war.”
“The big shots wanted Bogie to say this in his own words,” Huston explained, “but I insisted that Roosevelt’s words were better.”
Bogart nodded. “Roosevelt was a good politician,” he said. “He could handle those babies in Washington, but they’re too smart for guys like me. Hell, I’m no politician. That’s what I meant when I said our Washington trip was a mistake.”
“Bogie has succeeded in not being a politician,” said Huston, who went to Washington with him [to protest the investigation]. “Bogie owns a fifty-four-foot yawl. When you own a fifty-four-foot yawl, you’ve got to provide for her upkeep.”
“The Great Chief died and everybody’s guts died with him,” Robinson said, looking stern.
“How would you like to see your picture on the front page of the Communist paper of Italy?” asked Bogart.
“Nyah,” Robinson said, sneering.
“The Daily Worker runs Bogie’s picture and right away he’s a dangerous Communist,” said Miss Bacall, who is, as everybody must know, Bogart’s wife. “What will happen if the American Legion and the Legion of Decency boycott all his pictures?”
“It’s just that my picture in the Daily Worker offends me, Baby,” said Bogart.
“Nyah,” said Robinson.
“Let’s eat,” said Huston.
After the story was published in the magazine, Huston wrote to Harold Ross, the editor, and congratulated him on running it. Huston and I then began an unusual friendship that lasted until his death in 1987. Often when he was planning to come to New York, he would alert me, and we would meet. Hanging out with him was always high-spirited fun; it invariably felt as though I were part of one of his dramatic, intriguing movie scenes.
When I entered a restaurant with him—“21” for example—life inside seemed to stop, with the action fixed on this tall, gracious, conquering figure arriving, with his characteristically slow, loping walk, to bestow the royal favor of his presence equally on the grateful owner, the grateful maître d’, and the grateful waiters, all of whom lent themselves enthusiastically to his performance. I accompanied him to Tony’s—the restaurant owned by Tony Soma, father of Ricki, the beautiful young dancer Huston married and with whom he had a son and daughter, Tony and Anjelica. Soma, a Yoga devotee, might be found in a corner standing on his head, and Huston would insist forcefully on not disturbing this ritual. He would then bend down, contorting himself into a position that afforded consultation with the upside-down Tony, in a deeply conspiratorial manner, about what we would drink and eat. The New York dinners that Huston valued above all others, however, were those he was led to blindfolded, late at night, in mysterious Sicilian restaurants lacking a conventional address. He was sworn to secrecy and hosted personally, Huston claimed, by the most powerful anonymous Mafia lords in the criminal universe. “Their food,” he would report in his strictly confidential whisper, “is . . . by all means . . . incomparable!”
On his visits, I would also accompany him to museums, one of his favorites being the Hispanic. “They’ve got half a dozen El Grecos in there!” he would say. “My God, those El Grecos!”
“Three of the greatest Goyas I’ve ever seen,” he would add. “Unbelievable Goyas. And those two Velazquez . Don’t they make you weep?”
In 1950, when I decided to take Huston up on his offer to come watch him make The Red Badge of Courage, I actually was taking that opportunity to try to escape from my personal entanglement with my editor, William Shawn. He was then the managing editor of The New Yorker and was married, with young children. He had told me he was in love with me; I was in love with my work, and I was becoming dangerously drawn to him. I had intended to stay in Hollywood a few months; I stayed for a year and a half. From the moment of my arrival in Hollywood, Bill Shawn and I talked on the telephone or wrote to each other regularly. In addition to our personal situation, one of the things we talked about was what I was going to write:
“You see, if the story turns out to be what I think it is, it’s really almost a book, a kind of novel-like book because of the way the characters may develop and the variety of relationships that exist among them,” I wrote in one of my letters to Shawn. “I don’t see why I shouldn’t try to do a fact piece in novel form, or maybe a novel in fact form. It’s an exciting thing to think about. It’s almost as though the subject material calls for that kind of form.”
Doing the reporting for what became Picture was a heady and exciting experience. I didn’t miss a single day of the filming. Early every morning, I drove from my hotel in Beverly Hills to Huston’s ranch in the San Fernando Valley. Huston encouraged me to stay close to him and his cast and his crew before, during, and after each shot and to join every discussion with his producer, his cameraman, his production manager, and his actors. Gottfried Reinhardt, Huston’s witty, imaginative, and sophisticated producer, was also enthusiastic about my doing the story, and he generously provided me with every scrap of information I asked for. Both Reinhardt and Huston also brought me along to their meetings with Dore Schary, MGM’s production head, and, at my request, they helped set up my sessions with L.B. Mayer.
Early on, I knew that I would make Huston, Reinhardt, Schary, and Mayer my four leading characters. In their presence, I was always taking notes in my little three-by-five-inch notebooks. I went to their homes and to their parties. I met their families and their friends. I watched movies, listened to music, played tennis, and rode horseback with them. I ate breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with them. They always included me in holiday celebrations and entertaining events with scores of people in the movie industry. It seemed to be the Hollywood way. They joked and laughed a lot, often at themselves. I liked, and still like, these people. I took them on their own terms, and I enjoyed writing about them. Many of them became lifelong friends. I happen to like forthright, up-front crooks and villains, and I gloried in finding some of them in Hollywood.
My story, a long one titled “Production Number 1512,” was published in The New Yorker in installments over a period of five weeks. The circulation department reported to Bill Shawn that the magazine was selling out on the newsstands almost as soon as it appeared. My colleagues were very generous in their praise, and Joe Mitchell came into my office grinning and laughing and shaking his head and reading lines from my story aloud to me. Praise from my peers has always been the ultimate reward. I couldn’t ask for anything better.
When the story was published as a book, Bill Shawn suggested the title Picture for it. I dedicated it “To The New Yorker.”
For years after Picture was published in 1952, I couldn’t resist the temptation, every once in a while, to write about Huston for The New Yorker. Whatever I did with him always made me laugh, and I hope I made readers laugh, too. In 1965, I went to Rome, where he was directing The Bible, in which he had cast himself, with a long white beard, as Noah, wearing a long white robe and leading all the pairs of animals, including elephants, into the Ark.
“Our hippo was the greatest actor in the picture,” Mr. Huston told me. “Every time that hippo saw me coming, he broke into the damndest grin you ever saw. The giraffes were the gentlest actors in the Ark. I couldn’t ever get past them without their frisking me for something to eat.”
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Four years later, Huston was in New York, directing The Kremlin Letter, for which one scene took place at the Central Park Zoo, in front of cages occupied by two baby gorillas, a black panther, and a lioness. For “luck,” as he put it, he cast my son Erik, then three years old, in a non-speaking role, running past the cages. At one point in a story I wrote, I described Huston walking over to the cage of the baby gorillas and greeting them in his usual ultragracious manner:
“Well. My goodness. Hel-lo, babies. How are you this morning?”
The baby gorillas leaped at the bars, as though Huston were a mother gorilla. . . .
“Those are the babies,” Huston said. “Aren’t they the dearest, gentlest, most wonderful creatures?”
“Well, yes,” said De Haven [the producer].
“A friend of mine has eight gorillas as pets,” Huston said. “John Aspinall. He runs the Clermont, on Berkeley Square—the biggest gambling house in England. . . . And John Aspinall is a gentleman, an Oxford man. He lives out in Kent, near Canterbury. He invited me out to meet his gorillas. And I went into the cages with them. And, I tell you, they’re the nicest people I’ve met in a long time.” Hustonian laugh. “There was one young lady in the cage,” Huston said, lowering his tone. “And she made it clear to me, if I sent her flowers—why, she’d go to the theatre with me.”
“I see,” said De Haven.
“You go for walks with Aspinall’s gorillas,” Huston said. “He takes the gorillas out for walks, two at a time. Holding each by the hand. I tell you, I’d love to spend the night in the cages with those gorillas, spend the whole night with them. To penetrate the mystery of it.”
“Forty” was the title of the last “Talk of the Town” story I wrote about Huston, in the issue of October 15, 1984. The number referred to his fortieth movie, Prizzi’s Honor, which starred his daughter, Anjelica, Kathleen Turner, and Jack Nicholson. Huston—wearing one of the short-sleeved khaki safari-like suits that he designed for himself—directed, working eighteen-hour days, including some cold, damp nights in various locations in Brooklyn. He was seventy-eight by then, with emphysema, and he was tethered to an oxygen machine. “On the first day of shooting, he left his hotel at 7:30 A.M. and was on the set in time to supervise detail after detail after detail,” I wrote in my remarks at his memorial service, read by Jack Nicholson. “By the time the first shot was taken, everybody else around Huston looked frazzled. Not him. He looked quietly joyous.” I had never seen him in better spirits. Anjelica Huston won the 1985 Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the film. She now directs and writes screenplays in addition to acting, as does her younger brother, Danny Huston. The last film directed by John was The Dead, based on the James Joyce story, with a screenplay by Tony Huston. It was released in 1987, shortly after John’s death, and is considered by many people to be John Huston’s greatest film.
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About a week before John died, he telephoned me at home. I was not there, and he left a message on the answering machine for me and my son, Erik.
“I just want to reassure you,” he said, in his familiar, inimitable, melodic actor’s voice, “I am quite all right. Good night, darlings. Good-bye.”
—LILLIAN ROSS
2002