Growing Up Laughing: My Story and the Story of Funny (23 page)

Marlo:
Why do you think people find self-deprecation so funny?

Kathy:
Because they can relate to it. I think more people can relate to me than they can to Nicole Kidman. I mean, if you’re going down the line and ask women, “Well, who do you really relate to?” they’re not going to say Nicole or Charlize Theron or Jessica Biel . . .

Marlo:
Right, right . . .

Kathy:
I mean, I wish I was Nicole Kidman! And I think women admire those people who are all perfect and put together. I just don’t think they look at those people and say, “Hey, she’s just like me!”

Marlo:
So in a way, they need you.

Kathy:
Yes. And I need them.

Chapter 40
Capra, Orson (the Other One), and Me

I
got a call from Fred Silverman, the programming chief of ABC.

“I’d like you to make a Christmas special for us,” he told me. “Something we could play for a few years.”

“Me?” I said. “I’m not Sammy Davis. I don’t sing and dance. What kind of Christmas special could I possibly make?”

“Just think about it,” Fred said.

“All right,” I responded, “but it’s already February. You mean for a year from this Christmas, right?”

“No,” he said. “I mean
this
Christmas.”

Really?

IT SEEMED IMPOSSIBLE
to create a brand-new anything in such an incredibly short time frame, but I talked it over anyway with Carole and Bruce Hart. We had done the
Free to Be
album, book and TV special together a few years before. Both of them were writers who were sharp on story and structure, and Bruce was a lyricist, as well. I loved working with them, and we were also good pals.

We agreed that a musical show was out of the question, unless I wanted to play host, like the Ed Sullivan role. So we started thinking about classic movies we might remake. We didn’t have much time, and coming up with the perfect Christmas movie for me wasn’t so easy. I was too old to play the little girl in
Miracle on 34th Street
, too tall to play Tiny Tim, and no matter what the film, Santa always had to be a guy.

We finally hit on it—we’d remake the Frank Capra classic
It’s a Wonderful Life
. It wasn’t really a Christmas story, but the plot builds to a moving and memorable scene on Christmas night. And the message was pure Capra—that each and every life mattered, and if one person was removed from the tapestry, all the other lives around him would never have been the same.

In the original, Jimmy Stewart played George Bailey, the man whose life mattered. For our movie, we’d turn George into a part for me, and call her Mary Bailey.

But remake Frank Capra—wasn’t that a mortal sin?

I’d grown up on Capra’s films—
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
,
You Can’t Take It with You
,
It Happened One Night
. They were Dad’s favorites, along with Preston Sturges’s films. Terre and I could recite almost every line from Sturges’s
Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
, starring Eddie Bracken. We’d even practice Bracken’s famous triple takes in our bathroom mirror. (Anybody can do a double take, but only Bracken could do three.)

Universal owned the rights to
Wonderful Life,
but Freddie loved our idea, so he arranged for us to produce it with Universal as our partners. “Partners”—they keep the money.

Out of respect to Mr. Capra, I knew that I had to let him know that I was going to remake his film. So I called him and asked if he’d have lunch with me. He lived in Palm Springs, but was coming to L.A. the following week, and he agreed to meet me. What a thrill it was to talk with him about his movies, and to have this icon all to myself. I asked him why he wasn’t making movies anymore. There was no one like him, and we needed more of him.

His answer was fascinating. “A good director doesn’t just shoot the script,” he told me. “He has his eyes and ears open to any new idea that might come along. For example, you remember the school dance scene in
Wonderful Life
?”

“Of course,” I said. “What Capra buff doesn’t remember when the gymnasium floor opens up, and Stewart and Donna Reed fall into the swimming pool underneath it?”

Capra smiled. “That wasn’t in the script,” he said. “I didn’t even know they had that sliding floor at Beverly Hills High. But when we got there that day to shoot the scene, someone on the crew told me about the pool, and I knew I had to use it. We had already shot the scene that came after it, when they walk home from the dance. So we’d have to reshoot it, because now they’d have to have wet hair and be dressed in robes.”

I was confused. “What does that have to do with not making movies anymore?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t do that today,” he said. “I’m too old. I’d just shoot the script. And that’s not the way you make a good movie.”

Sigh.

I then told Capra that I was planning on remaking that very movie, and I asked if he’d consider being a consultant on it. It would be such an honor to work with him, I said. His response was a most definite no.

His answer saddened me. I not only wanted to spend time with him, but even more, I wanted his approval.

“Well, do you have any advice for me?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Don’t do it.”

I tried one more time to convince him, by comparing his classic film with all the classics in literature that had been retold many times through the years, some of them for centuries. But his stand was clear. He wasn’t angry. He was, well . . . Sicilian. And if there’s one thing I’d learned from my life experience, it was that you don’t talk a Sicilian into or out of anything. I really couldn’t blame him. He just didn’t want to be a part of the remaking of his own classic. I loved him, I honored him, I had wanted him to be a part of it. I hoped now he wouldn’t blame me for wanting to remake it.

So we forged ahead.

One of the most memorable characters in the picture is Mr. Potter, who was played in the original by the great Lionel Barrymore. Potter was a true villain. He owned everything in the small town of Bedford Falls, and delighted in buying up even more, no matter how much it destroyed other people’s lives. He was the original “greed is good” character.

In my mind, no one could replace Barrymore in that part but Orson Welles. The head of ABC movies, Brandon Stoddard, bet me a hundred dollars I would never get Welles—and for a while, he was winning the bet. At first, I couldn’t even
find
him, but Cybill Shepherd (who lived with Peter Bogdanovich, a great pal of Orson’s) sneaked me his home number. I tried him at all different times of the day, but he was never there, and I didn’t want to leave a message. The surprise attack is always your best chance.

Frustrated, I tried him at eight in the morning.
Oh God,
I thought as I listened to his phone ring in my receiver,
what if he gets mad at such an early call? What if he just hangs up on me?

A groggy voice answered the phone. It was unmistakably Welles. I immediately dove into my pitch, chirping on about how I was producing a television remake of the movie, and no one but him could possibly replace Barrymore, and that we’d schedule the shoot so he only had to work five days—I was talking as fast as I could. And the poor man was just trying to wake up.

Finally I took a breath, and he spoke.

“How much will you pay me?” he asked.

“How much do you want?” I said.

“Ten thousand a day.”

“Sold!” I said.

I already had a hundred dollars from Brandon. Now I just had to find the other $49,900.

WE CAST WAYNE ROGERS
as my husband, and he was terrific in the part. But as we started to work on the script, what was really interesting was to see how our gender-switch underscored the difference between men’s and women’s roles. For me to play the George Bailey part, our screenwriter, Lionel Chetwynd, barely had to change a line from the original screenplay. The character was in financial ruin, brought on by the greedy Mr. Potter, but was so loved in the town that his neighbors all stepped forward to rescue him. That scenario could happen to a man or woman, so it wasn’t hard to change the gender for that character.

Orson Welles and me. There’s something I never thought I’d say.

Bailey’s wife was another matter. In the original, all Donna Reed’s character needed to do was support George’s dreams and dearly love him. But for Wayne to play my husband, he couldn’t just be supportive on the home front. We had to give him a job, his own goals and new lines. Many of them.

The day Orson Welles came to the set, everyone was very excited. I had personally overseen all the goodies to put in his trailer. Then I saw Barney, who worked the cue cards on a lot of variety shows. I asked him what he was doing there.

“I do Mr. Welles’s cards,” he told me.

Mr. Welles uses cue cards?
I thought.
On a movie?
I was flabbergasted. I was about to act in scenes with the great Orson Welles, and he was going to be reading from cards! Sure, Bob Hope and Dean Martin used them all the time on their TV specials, but this was a dramatic film. I felt sick to my stomach.

I needn’t have worried—they didn’t call him Orson Welles for nothing. When we began to rehearse our first scene, it was clear that the way he held his head to read the cards—with his chin slightly down and his eyes peering at me from beneath his intense brow—he looked perfectly right from the camera’s view. And it didn’t hamper his great acting style in any way.

I, on the other hand, didn’t know where the hell to look. His eyes weren’t available to me, and I could hear the cards constantly flipping behind me. I’ve always known that an actor’s performance is in the eyes of the other actor. I remember when I was first studying acting, I asked my father what he did when the actor he was working with didn’t give him anything back. His reply: “I fire him.” Funny, but not practical.

Luckily, in all my scenes with Orson I had to be in a very anxious state. Mr. Potter was the bad guy and I was the little guy being beaten down by him. I barely had to prepare. The real situation had everything I needed to be fearful and anxious.

THE SHOOT WENT SMOOTHLY.
Well, we went over budget and over schedule, but the network was thrilled with the rough cut. We were in postproduction, and all we had left to do was put in the music. We had hired Johnny Mandel, one of the great movie composers, to create the score. And after that, we’d be done.

I was looking forward to finishing. Carole and I had been working on the movie full-force for nearly nine months, and we were exhausted. Our plan was to deliver it to the network by Thanksgiving, which was late for promotion, but there was no way we could have done it any faster. It was a miracle that we made it in time for Christmas.

One other reason I was eager to be done was because I was thinking a lot about Phil. We had met in January—just a month before all of this had started—and had been quietly dating throughout. Things were getting serious—so much so that he wanted us to finally come out of the closet with our romance. So he decided to throw a party at his house—rent a tent, hire a band, make it a big bash—to introduce me to his friends and some of the interesting Chicago people he thought I’d like to meet, like Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel, Mike Royko and others.

Phil’s party was scheduled for the weekend right after we would finish the final mix of the movie—which included the music.

What’s that old saying? “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” The Friday before the scoring session, Johnny Mandel had a heart attack.

We were in shock. Johnny was such a lovely man, and Carole and I had spent many hours spotting the music with him, and had been eager to hear what he was writing. I called the hospital to see how he was. He sounded relieved to be there, but very weak. He was such a pro—he felt terrible to have let us down.

“Don’t worry about us, and just take good care of yourself,” I said. “There will be other pictures for us to work on.”

Okaaay. Panic.
We not only had to get a new composer, but we had to have the work done in just a few days or we would miss our mix date. And if you miss your mix date, it can take weeks to get another one. So we needed to move fast: find a composer, sit with him, watch the movie several times, select the right moments for music, then go over every theme. It was a gargantuan task.

Carole and I begged Stephen Lawrence to take it on. Stephen had composed such great music for
Free to Be,
and he was our friend. You could never tackle this with a stranger. So he was our best shot. But the idea of going to Chicago for Phil’s party was now out of the question. There was simply no time. I wouldn’t even be able to sleep for five days.

I had to call Phil.
Well,
I thought,
this could be the end of it
. Being with an actress is a lot of trouble for a guy. My brother, who produced many TV series and spent most of his time with actors, told me once that he went out of his way never to date an actress. And when Phil and I started dating, he always got a laugh with his line “I never knew a woman who had so much energy for so many things other than me.”

Phil picked up the phone. I told him about Johnny’s heart attack and that it would be impossible for me to come to Chicago for his party.

“You’re kidding, right?” he said. “Can’t someone else oversee it just for a day?”

“No,” I said. “There are no extra days. I have to do it. I’m the producer. The buck stops here.”

Phil was silent. I felt awful.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a spot like this,” I offered, “when your work life suffocates your personal life. But I’m hoping you’ll understand.”

I waited, hoping. Finally, Phil said, “Yes, I have—more times than I’d like to admit. But when they pass out the disasters, I’ll take this one.”