Pictures at a Revolution (13 page)

Poitier, still deeply conflicted about the end of his marriage, his tumultuous relationship with Diahann Carroll, and the fact that, as he later wrote, “it was still just Sidney Poitier out there,” was impassioned about the process of psychoanalysis at the time and spent four or five sessions a week on the couch, talking to his therapist.
²⁸
He was less excited about returning to work. Professionally, he now resided in a netherworld that placed him somewhere between movie star and role model. America seemed most comfortable with him as an embodiment of nebulously defined dignity and incremental social progress, and the movie industry was happy to deploy him as a sort of international goodwill ambassador, sending him off to the Berlin Film Festival as a cold war exemplar of America's open society. But where were the great roles? At one point in the wake of his Oscar, Poitier complained that two-thirds of the parts he had played in movies were “triggered by the Negroness of my own life. I'd hate for my gift—or whatever—to be circumscribed by color. I'd like to explore King Lear, for instance.”
²⁹
But he also must have wanted a privilege of stardom that was routinely accorded his white contemporaries—roles created especially for him, which at the time almost certainly meant race-specific parts.

In late 1964, Poitier went back to work. He costarred with Richard Widmark—a friend with whom he had worked twice before—in
The Bedford Incident
, a drama set aboard a navy destroyer in which he played a visiting journalist and Widmark the tyrannical captain with whom he comes into conflict. The film, shot in black and white, was not particularly distinguished—Poitier himself called it “a bad movie”
³⁰
—but it represented a $400,000 payday for Poitier (though half of it was to be deferred for more than a decade)
³¹
and a relatively rare chance to star in a movie in which race was not a central theme.
Bedford
was due to open at the end of 1965, along with a movie that Poitier had started shooting in March, just before that year's Oscar ceremony. The new film, MGM's
A Patch of Blue
, was, like
Lilies of the Field
, a racial homily, in which a young blind white woman (Elizabeth Hartman) falls in love with a black man. Poitier thought both movies were “fables” with “very little relation to objective reality,” and he had little interest in his saintly, restrained character, who again kept his serenity and temper in the face of racist abuse and was not allowed to manifest more than a hint of sexual appetite or energy. By the time Poitier finished the movie, he said, “I was at my wits' end.”
³²

No matter what kind of role he took, Poitier ended up feeling neutered. A race-blind part in a mediocre film like
The Bedford Incident
was more a step sideways than forward—in a country roiling with racial unrest, why make a film that averted its eyes from the problem? On the other hand, every time he played a character like
A Patch of Blue
's Gordon Ralfe, whose race was integral to the plot, he seemed to end up becoming complicit in a fantasy designed to explain to white America that racism was wrong because it meant mistreating someone as free of human flaws and foibles as Sidney Poitier.

The actor's frustration was reaching a peak at about the time that his agent, Martin Baum, got his first look at the manuscript for a new mystery novel by John Ball called
In the Heat of the Night.
Ball's book had been shopped to several studios; the playwright and activist Larry Kramer, then a twenty-nine-year-old reader in Columbia Pictures' New York story department whose job was to scout outside material for the studio, recommended that Mike Frankovich (who had made
The Bedford Incident
) purchase the rights as a possible vehicle for Poitier, but Franko vich wasn't interested.
³³
Ball's novel found a taker when Baum brought it to the Mirisch Company, which for the last several years had been the main independent supplier of movies to United Artists. The Mirisch brothers—“Harold was the older brother, who kind of made the final decisions, Walter was the production guy, and Marvin was the accountant,” recalls director Norman Jewison—didn't develop their own material. “They were middlemen,” says Jewison, “kind of wholesalers,”
³⁴
whose strategy was to pursue material that already had a strong director or star attached to it and then take the projects to UA to work out a deal. The Mirisches didn't spend more money than they had to—budgets for the first forty films they made for the studio generally stayed between $1.5 million and $3.5 million. They were efficient, and they were remarkably productive; in the most recent renegotiation of their deal with UA, in September 1964, they had promised the studio forty-eight films in ten years.
³⁵

When
In the Heat of the Night
arrived, the Mirisch Company was in the market for new material. And Ball's novel, which was published in March 1965 and received warm reviews, was new, although not as new as many in the movie business may have imagined. Poitier's decision to play Virgil Tibbs, who in the book is a polite, chatty Pasadena police officer who passes through a town in the Carolinas on the evening of a murder and stays to help solve the crime,
³⁶
was noted as a Hollywood milestone: No black actor had ever starred in a detective movie before. But Tibbs was hardly a groundbreaker in mystery fiction, a genre in which black detectives and cops had already constituted a small but strong subcategory for years. In 1957,
Rebecca's Pride
by Donald McNutt Douglass, a novel narrated by a black police captain in the Virgin Islands, had won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for best first novel. The following year, Ed Lacy's
Room to Swing
, a first-person novel about a black private eye in New York, won the Edgar as the year's best mystery. And by the time
In the Heat of the Night
reached bookstores, the black writer Chester Himes had already published a half dozen of his lively, bawdy, richly textured Harlem novels featuring a black police team, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, books that would come to be viewed as classics of the genre.

Himes's novels came from a specifically urban, black perspective (it's no surprise that they were more attractive to Hollywood in the 1970s than in the 1960s). And although Ed Lacy was white (Lacy was the pseudonym for a political activist named Leonard Zinberg who was married to a black woman),
Room to Swing
, with its casual references to Marcus Garvey and black nationalism, its depiction of the intraracial class distinctions between light-skinned and darker-skinned African Americans, and its casual mockery of both patronizing white liberals and outright racists, was a good decade ahead of Hollywood in its thinking and far more sophisticated than anything
In the Heat of the Night
had to offer.
³⁷
But what made those novels strong on the page—the specificity and “blackness” of their worldview—is exactly what kept filmmakers away.
In the Heat of the Night
's take on race was easier for the studios to grasp. Virgil Tibbs is a foreigner in an unfriendly land, and Ball, who was white, wrote in a tone that was not omniscient so much as it was neutral; the novel simply observes Tibbs and the white cop and police chief with whom he is forced to work without attempting very much in the way of viewing things from Tibbs's vantage point or understanding his state of mind. As in
The Graduate
, the novel's relatively spare prose style allowed readers to fill in its blanks however they chose; and Ball's storytelling presented an opportunity to place Sidney Poitier in a position that seemed to please moviegoers—not as the master of his own fate, but as a low-key, unexpected, mostly affable presence in a predominantly white world.

Poitier liked the idea of playing Tibbs, but Mirisch, who was both a good liberal and a pragmatic businessman, knew the film might face resistance both from United Artists and from audiences, who were used to crime movies in which, as an article announcing Poitier's casting phrased it, “Negro actors [stay] on the sidelines…dogging the heels of the detectives as helpful servants or comedy relief.”
³⁸
Mirisch's solution was to sell UA on the film as a potentially profitable enterprise, not a worthy cause. “I made the argument [to UA] that, even if there was a great deal of exhibitor opposition to the picture below the Mason-Dixon line, it certainly would find a ready audience in the great northern cities,” says Mirisch. “And I argued that the cost of the picture was not so great that it couldn't recoup, even if it were never to play in the South at all. But we had to make the picture for a reasonable price.”
³⁹
Coming off of the success of
Goldfinger
, United Artists also knew that the character of Tibbs—even though he had appeared in only one novel—might represent another potentially lucrative film series for the studio, and the Mirisch Company had included, in its deal with Poitier, an option for two sequels. When Mirisch agreed to keep the budget low—around $2 million—and convinced Poitier to take $200,000,
⁴⁰
half of what he had received for
The Bedford Incident
, to play Tibbs, the studio gave the project its approval. In June 1965, soon after he finished
A Patch of Blue
, Poitier signed for the starring role.
⁴¹

R
obert Benton hadn't been thinking much about
Bonnie and Clyde
on the morning that Warren Beatty showed up on his doorstep, asking if he could read the screenplay. After the Godard fiasco, it had almost been a relief to stop hoping for anything, to drop it and move on. Even if he and David Newman had let themselves continue to cycle through one round after another of optimism and despair, there wouldn't have been any time to prepare for this one; Beatty had announced his interest in the movie just twenty minutes before he rang Benton's doorbell. The moment was disorienting: Movie stars didn't just arrive in one's living room after breakfast on a lazy Saturday. And it wasn't even clear who was supposed to be doing the courting.

Beatty had the advantage of surprise on his side and knew how to play the moment, but the last eighteen months had been somewhat humbling for him as well; he was no longer a cocksure star on the rise, but an actor trying to get his career back on track. Before he went to Chicago to start shooting
Mickey One
, Beatty had begun a serious affair with actress Leslie Caron. Caron was thirty-two, six years older than Beatty; she was married to the British theater director Peter Hall, and she was the mother of two young children. In June 1964, soon after the film was completed, their romance became public in the worst possible way, when Hall, who had already filed for divorce, charged Caron with adultery and named Beatty as corespondent.
¹
Since she was now enjoined from taking her two children out of England, Caron promptly returned to London to be with them, and Beatty soon followed her.

Being seen as a robustly active bachelor in gossip columns was one thing; being depicted as a dilettantish home wrecker in tabloid headlines in both England and America was another. The middle of 1964 marked the start of a bleak stretch in the actor's professional life.
Lilith
's poor reception at the New York Film Festival in the fall was, though not unexpected, still disappointing; Beatty knew that the oblique and experimental
Mickey One
, which was not scheduled to open for another year, would at best be received as an art-house curiosity. And his hope that he would finally have the chance to star in a comedy with
What's New, Pussycat?
had been dashed after a confrontation that left the actor feeling particularly stung.

Beatty had fretted about Woody Allen's
Pussycat
rewrites throughout the production of
Mickey One
and, after his move to London, found himself in a series of increasingly tense standoffs with his old friend Charles Feldman. Beatty still wanted to produce the movie with Feldman and star in it, but he was irked that his role had gotten smaller. When Feldman insisted on casting his girlfriend, the French actress Capucine, in a major role and, during contract negotiations, baitingly reminded the young actor that his “personal problem” with Caron was a potential liability,
²
the dispute between the two men became personal.
^*
Angry about the way the movie had evolved, Beatty fussed over his billing,
³
then quit the project, gambling that Feldman would cave in to his wishes rather than let him go. He was mistaken. Feldman was already disconcerted that at least one studio to which he'd pitched
Pussycat
had dismissed Beatty as “not a ‘top star'”;
⁴
he wrote Beatty off and moved on to what, at the time, was a much more bankable cast, signing Peter O'Toole as the Don Juan and Peter Sellers, hot from the success of
Dr. Strangelove
, as his psychoanalyst. “I diva'ed my way out of the movie,” says Beatty. “I walked off of
What's New, Pussycat?
thinking they couldn't do it without me. I was wrong. And I was hurt. I was really hurt.” Woody Allen, whose script Beatty still liked despite the degree to which he had augmented his own role, stayed on the film, and, says Beatty, “his part went from seventy-five pages to sixty to fifty to forty. By the time the movie was made, he might as well have been just a guy on a pogo stick again. They just went on to another guy and did another script. What the movie did was, it certainly caused me to be a producer. I really had been behaving as the producer of the movie and was unable to come to comity with the nominal producer. So I learned. Some things that you care about, you have to control.”
⁵

Beatty wasn't ready to produce yet, but he took a step in that direction on his next movie,
Promise Her Anything.
Arthur Hiller's film, which started production in early 1965 in London, gave him his first role in a contemporary light romance. The character of a charming, energetic, slightly reckless man brought up short by overexuberance or blind confidence—someone who doesn't have nearly the control of his own life that he imagines he does—was one to which Beatty was deeply attracted; it would define the majority of his best-known roles, no matter what the genre, for the next twenty years. While
Promise Her Anything
was only a minor comedy, it represented Beatty's first opportunity to present his own version of himself to the public. In the movie, which was released by Paramount, he plays an aspiring director who specializes in short “nudie” flicks but has too arty a touch to satisfy his boss (Keenan Wynn), who mocks him as “the Ingmar Bergman of the mail-order movie.” The film was one of the first mainstream movies to acknowledge, albeit lightheartedly, a worry that had been hanging over Hollywood for years: The prudery of the Production Code had been causing the studios to lose a share of the audience to European films. “The customers are getting too hip! Times have changed!” Wynn complains.

“Sex never changes,” replies Beatty.

“Only in America,” says Wynn. “In Denmark it changes….. Today if a guy wants to see some broads in bikinis, he don't need no mail-order movie—he just goes down to the corner supermarket. If he wants
real
kicks, he goes to an Italian movie!”

Promise Her Anything
appealed to Beatty for several reasons. It allowed him to costar with Caron, who plays his girlfriend, the mother of a little boy. It kept him in England; Seven Arts, which produced the movie, agreed to shoot it at Shepperton Studios, building sets that doubled, none too convincingly, as Greenwich Village, so that Caron could be near her children while her divorce was pending. And it had a patient and easygoing director in Hiller, whose recent film, the sharp, dark antiwar comedy
The Americanization of Emily
, Beatty had admired. “On
Promise Her Anything
, you could
feel
Warren as a director and producer,” says Hiller. “You could feel his grasp of movies increasing—he had an appetite for everything about it. I don't think that he wanted to be doing the actual directing or producing yet, but he was very strong. There were times when he wanted something different than I wanted, but we'd talk it out.”
⁶

When production ended in May 1965, Beatty, for the first time in a few years, could celebrate the end of a smooth and convivial shoot. And he liked living in London, which by then had transformed itself into a third entertainment capital. If Los Angeles was the home of movie and television production, and New York represented the energy of theater and publishing, London took the best of both cities and added to it a music scene that was having worldwide impact on fashion, photography, art, and, most of all, youth. A third of the city's population was between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four, and the never-ending party roved from coffee bar to discotheque to gallery to town house to boutique, with playwrights and photographers, rock stars and fashion models, actors and directors, all intermingling along the way. The Beatles had just finished shooting
Help!
for United Artists (“it's a rollicking, rollicking, happy, smash, uhh…what are the other words you say about films?” joked John Lennon).
⁷
The Rolling Stones had just come on the scene to challenge them for the rock-and-roll throne; the Bond films had made Sean Connery an international star; Albert Finney, Richard Harris, Terence Stamp, Julie Christie, Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave, Tom Courtenay, and Michael Caine were all emerging; and whatever fusty, embalmed image American pop-culture consumers had once had of England was giving way to a sense that it was the new center of freedom, style, and sexual openness. Since almost every American studio maintained a base of operations there, London by the mid-1960s was also a thriving hub of film production, whether they were scruffy homegrown dramas or expensive studio undertakings that drew talent from Hollywood and Europe. “In a decade dominated by youth, London has burst into bloom. It swings,” declared
Time.
In such a spirited milieu, Caron became “unquestionably this season's most with-it hostess,”
⁸
and Beatty was right where he most enjoyed being—at the center of the action.

In the mid-1960s, real celebrity meant making it in all three cities, and as Warren Beatty was traveling across the Atlantic in one direction, Leslie Bricusse was working his way west. Bricusse was thirty-four, a composer and lyricist who had begun writing songs as a Cambridge University undergraduate, where his theater club collaborators included writer Frederic Raphael and director Jonathan Miller; their first effort together transferred to the West End when the three men were just nineteen years old. Bricusse met the rising pop singer Anthony Newley soon after that; they struck up a friendship and decided to write a musical together. They first tried adapting Ingmar Bergman's
Smiles of a Summer Night
, a project that foundered over their inability to obtain rights to the film (a problem that Stephen Sondheim was able to solve several years later with
A Little Night Music
). The effort left them each with a new nickname, obtained by dividing the last name of the director they so admired (Newley became “Newberg” and Bricusse became “Brickman”), and an undiminished determination to get a musical to the West End.
⁹

Bricusse and Newley worked astonishingly fast. Ten weeks after they sat down together to begin writing
Stop the World—I Want to Get Off
, the show, starring Newley, opened in Manchester. The bare-bones production, budgeted at just £6,000,
¹⁰
moved to London soon after and became an immediate success, powered by the belted-out ballads “What Kind of Fool Am I” and “Once in a Lifetime.” In 1962, Bricusse and Newley brought the musical to New York, where both men received Tony nominations. Bricusse and his wife, Yvonne, both enjoyed the party circuit, and given that Newley, his best friend, had just married Joan Collins, it was perhaps inevitable that the attractions of Los Angeles and the movie business started to tug at them.

Bricusse was not Arthur Jacobs's or Dick Zanuck's first choice to write
Doctor Dolittle
after Alan Jay Lerner was fired. With
Mary Poppins
making a tremendous amount of money, Jacobs had, even before dismissing Lerner, checked on the availability of Richard and Robert Sherman, the songwriting brothers who had composed the score for
Poppins
and had just won the Best Song Oscar for “Chim Chim Cher-ee.” But the Shermans were tied to Disney, and Jacobs realized that hiring Bricusse would solve a problem and save some money, since, unlike Lerner, he could write the film's music as well as its lyrics and screenplay.
¹¹

A week before he fired Lerner, Jacobs sent Bricusse the Dolittle books and sounded him out; on May 6, Jacobs spent the day with him in San Francisco, where Bricusse was working on material for an ill-fated musical called
Pickwick
(an adaptation of
The Pickwick Papers
).
¹²
Bricusse wanted to impress him—his second Broadway venture with Newley,
The Roar of the Greasepaint—The Smell of the Crowd
, had not received anything like the acclaim of
Stop the World
, and with
Pickwick
in trouble, the prospect of a Hollywood job and paycheck was auspiciously timed. Bricusse's only previous work on a movie had been the amusingly overwrought lyrics for Shirley Bassey's thunderous rendition of
Goldfinger
, but he knew how to work his way through a pitch meeting. During his meeting with Jacobs, Bricusse threw several suggestions for animal-related tunes on the table—many of which were actually concepts that he had come up with for an unfinished musical called
Noah's Ark
—and also recommended the addition of a character that could serve as a female lead. The delighted producer responded by telling him, “I am here to change your life!”
¹³

“Yesterday he had more specific ideas than the other gent has had in 14 months to think about it,” Jacobs told Zanuck in a memo. He added, perhaps too optimistically, that Rex Harrison “is a great fan” and also noted the approval of the man who had (very temporarily, it turned out) replaced Vincente Minnelli in the director's chair, George Roy Hill. While Jacobs cautioned Zanuck that, contractually, any replacement for Lerner would have to be approved by Hugh Lofting's widow, he felt it wouldn't be a problem.
¹⁴

In June, Zanuck agreed to hire Bricusse on a sort of trial basis, making a deal to put him up in Los Angeles, where he would write two songs and the first twenty pages of the
Doctor Dolittle
screenplay. Bricusse and his wife drove down from San Francisco and took to Beverly Hills instantly, moving into a house off Coldwater Canyon. The day Bricusse began to work on the film, he wrote the song “Talk to the Animals,” tailoring it to Harrison's narrow vocal range and what he called his “unique
Sprechge-sang
style.”
¹⁵
Two weeks later, Bricusse was summoned to the Fox lot to give the song a test run in front of the studio's music director, Lionel Newman, and a full orchestra. Bricusse got the job. But somehow, everyone forgot to tell Rex Harrison.