Pictures at a Revolution (19 page)

In choosing to root the script so firmly in contemporary Southern California, Nichols and Henry solved another problem: They brought
The Graduate
up-to-date. Eisenhower was barely out of office when Webb had first gotten the idea for his novel, but five years later, generational wars that had previously focused on an antipathy toward consumer culture and conformity were now being fought on different fronts. Nichols and Henry were not especially interested in making a “sixties” movie (had the label or its meaning even existed in 1965), but they didn't want to make a comedy with one foot still planted in the previous decade, either. Henry, in particular, was so worried about the script sounding dated that he came close to dropping the line that became the movie's first big laugh, when a middle-aged businessman offers Benjamin just a single word of advice about his future (a scene that's not in the novel). “I worried about ‘Plastics' for a while,” Henry said, “and even talked to Mike about it, saying, are we too old-fashioned, with what was a sort of fifties…society way of complaining about falseness? But I couldn't ever think of a better word for him to say.”
⁴⁰

Y
ears later, when
Doctor Dolittle
was finally about to be released, Arthur Jacobs would, with a straight face, say that he and 20th Century-Fox had rejected Vincente Minnelli, John Huston, and William Wyler as directors before settling on the man who finally got the job, Richard Fleischer. The claim was classic Jacobs: one part truth to two parts hyperbole. Minnelli, who had never really been intimately involved with the movie's development, left
Dolittle
before Leslie Bricusse had signed to write the screenplay, and the famously unrushable Wyler, who Jacobs felt sure “would take fifty takes of every shot and the picture would end up costing thirty-five million,” wasn't seriously approached. But John Huston was, and for a while, the director, who had been working on
The Bible
for 20th Century-Fox, was interested. “Darryl [Zanuck] wanted Huston,” Jacobs said, “but I felt there was enough temperament with Rex.”
¹
Jacobs got his way, but not before an overture had been made to Huston that had to be retracted with embarrassment and a collectively agreed-upon lie. The fib, Richard Zanuck decided in a cable to Jacobs, would be to tell Huston that “we have run into certain legal difficulties with basic material and have decided not to proceed until we have resolved those difficulties. Please tell Bricusse to stick to this story.”
²

Richard Fleischer was not a marquee director; he was, recalls one colleague, “a nice man, and a man they could control—easy in that the studio knew he wouldn't give them any trouble.” He had the confidence of Dick Zanuck, who at twenty-four had gotten his start as a producer on Fleischer's 1959 fictionalization of the Leopold and Loeb murder trial,
Compulsion;
having just used Fleischer on the science-fiction adventure
Fantastic Voyage
, Zanuck knew that he was capable of handling what promised to be an elaborate physical production. Fleischer, the son of groundbreaking animator Max Fleischer, was known as a patient and pleasant director, so there was little chance of a clash of egos, and he was eager for the job. In his cigarillo-scratched rasp, Arthur Jacobs told Fleischer the same thing he had told Bricusse—that the job would change his life.

Dick Zanuck and Jacobs were both pleased with the work Bricusse had done on the
Dolittle
story line, and ecstatic about his speed. By July 14, 1965, he had turned in an elaborately detailed eighty-two-page treatment for
Doctor Dolittle
, with demos of four songs and lyric fragments for many others. Bricusse had concocted a promising opening sequence that involved Dolittle riding through the jungle on a giraffe to visit a crocodile with a toothache.
³
And his treatment had also solved a problem with the story of
Doctor Dolittle
that could have led to disaster—the patronizing colonialism and racism of some of the source material. Though the depiction of Africans in Hugh Lofting's first Dolittle book, which was published in 1920, was not vicious and would have shocked nobody in post–World War I England or America, it was, by contemporary standards, appalling.
The Story of Doctor Dolittle
features a voyage to Africa that leads to an episode between the doctor and Bumpo Kahbooboo, the son of the King of Jolliginki, who yearns for Dolittle to turn him into a white man so that the woman he loves will return his affection. Dolittle first asks if it would be enough to dye his hair blond, but when Bumpo insists on a full transformation, the doctor creates a potion that turns Bumpo's skin white, at which point Bumpo “sang for joy and began dancing around.” As Dolittle sails away, he says, “I am afraid that medicine I used will never last. Most likely he will be as black as ever when he wakes up in the morning…. Well, well!—Poor Bumpo!”
⁴
In later books, Bumpo leaves Africa to attend Oxford, and Lofting uses his malapropisms (and, at one point, his interest in cannibalism) as comic relief. (These segments of the books, with Christopher Lofting's approval, were deleted and rewritten in the 1980s.)
⁵

Bricusse kept Bumpo but dropped the skin-color-transformation episode and his mangled syntax and introduced the character after he'd completed his Oxford education; since Jacobs and Fox owned the rights to all twelve Dolittle books, he could cherry-pick plot points from any volume. Bricusse's version of Bumpo was likable enough to bring Fox an early casting coup: The studio had gotten Sammy Davis Jr. to commit himself to the role. Davis had long been a fixture in Rat Pack movies and on television, where sooner or later, every western and cop series had an episode that called for a black guest star. In late 1964, Arthur Penn directed him in the Broadway musical adaptation of the Clifford Odets play
Golden Boy
, and the result was a hit show for which Davis received a Tony nomination. Getting him to agree to costar in
Dolittle
before they even had a completed screenplay was news that could be used to attract more talent and a sign to Jacobs and Zanuck that they had chosen their new writer wisely.

Bricusse's treatment surmounted one major hurdle when it received the enthusiastic approval of Hugh Lofting's widow, who called his work “a complete surprise…he has caught the spirit of the Doctor himself. The lyrics are…right in the vernacular of Dolittle. I predict nothing but success.”
⁶
But a more forbidding potential obstacle loomed in Rex Harrison, whose rejection of either Fleischer or Bricusse could scotch the whole enterprise. Harrison, basking in the afterglow of his Academy Award and awaiting the start of production on Joseph Mankiewicz's Volpone variation,
The Honey Pot
, had installed himself in his villa in Portofino and was completely aware that he now held the project's future in his hands. Accordingly, Fleischer and Bricusse, with Jacobs coming along as a sort of marriage broker, were dispatched to Italy and told, in essence, to pitch themselves.

Harrison could be hard on directors, especially younger ones. A few years earlier, when Norman Jewison had directed him in a TV variety show, Harrison greeted him by saying, to nobody in particular, “He looks like a paperboy.” “My God, he was a pain in the ass,” recalled the usually unflappable director.
⁷
When Fleischer arrived in the dining room of the Hotel Splendido with Bricusse, Jacobs, and two of Harrison's agents, the star first asserted his authority by showing up ninety minutes late to lunch. Fleischer was forty-eight, old enough to know how to handle the vanity of an aging leading man, and decided to gamble on a joke. “I'm sorry,” he said to Harrison, “but I just don't think you're right for the part.”

After a long and blood-freezing moment, the silence was broken by a laugh from Bricusse. And then Harrison laughed as well. “Perhaps you're right,” he replied affably.
⁸
“Nice chap, good chap,” the star told Arthur Jacobs later.
⁹
Fleischer had the job.

Bricusse's memories of his own “audition” are less happy. Harrison, he wrote, was “charm itself to my face and as trustworthy as a crocodile behind my back.”
¹⁰
“I believe the idea of Leslie coming to Portofino will be most fruitful,”
¹¹
Harrison had written to Jacobs. But once there, Bricusse found himself at the mercy of a star who had expected to be working with Alan Jay Lerner and was not about to let go of his disappointment quickly.

In the days after their lunch at the Splendido, Harrison summoned both Bricusse and Fleischer to his home at the Villa San Genesio to talk about any aspect of
Dolittle
, large or small, that crossed his mind. Harrison was a serious drinker whose moods lurched and careened as his level of intoxication rose; his much younger fourth wife, actress Rachel Roberts, suffered from suicidal depression and violent mood swings that were exacerbated by blackout drinking;
¹²
she had accompanied Harrison to the initial getting-to-know-you lunch and ended up, as Bricusse recalls it, drunk and barking like a dog in an impromptu audition to provide animal voice-overs for the movie. Harrison had not yet signed off on Bricusse and had questions—or, rather, accusations—about his lyrics. When Bricusse arrived at the villa, Harrison began by expressing particular unhappiness about a line in “Talk to the Animals”: “If people asked us, can you speak in rhinoceros / We'd say ‘Of courserous, can't you?'” Rhinoceros and “of courserous,” Harrison noted, do not rhyme.

When Bricusse replied that the song was supposed to be humorous, Harrison snapped, “A humorous song is meant to be funny. This isn't funny,” then added, “Oh God protect me from fucking puns…. The point is that it doesn't fucking rhyme!”
¹³

If Harrison never quite assented to the hiring of Bricusse during those first meetings in August 1965, he didn't reject him outright, either. Bricusse wasn't required to turn in a completed script until the end of the year, and Harrison, who was about to have his hands full with the shoot of
The Honey Pot
, was content to wait until then to make his decision. Besides, he had a more pressing matter to address with Jacobs and his new director: He wanted them to fire Sammy Davis Jr. “I don't want to work with an
entertainer,”
he told them. “I want an actor. A real actor, not a song-and-dance man.” Fleischer and Jacobs's attempts to talk Harrison out of his antipathy toward Davis only caused the actor to dig in more deeply and to raise the stakes on the spot: He wanted Sidney Poitier to play the role. Impervious to the reasonable arguments made by Jacobs and Fleischer that they weren't certain if Poitier could sing or dance, or if he would be willing to take a supporting part, Harrison finally laid down an ultimatum: Sidney Poitier was in or Harrison was out. Jacobs, wrote Fleischer later, “would have loved to be able to tell Rex…go screw yourself, but he couldn't. There was just too much at stake.”
¹⁴

Bricusse flew back to Los Angeles to continue working on the script, and Jacobs and Fleischer glumly returned to New York, where they managed to set up a meeting with Poitier. The actor had just finished
The Slender Thread
for Sydney Pollack and was looking for a project he could fit in while
In the Heat of the Night
was being developed. The two men pitched him hard, selling him on Harrison's appetite for an “actor” rather than an entertainer and offering him $250,000.
¹⁵
Poitier had recently finished three small, serious, black-and-white movies—
The Bedford Incident, A Patch of Blue
, and
The Slender Thread
—none of which had been released yet and all of which seemed like minor films. In the wake of the vast success Fox was having with
The Sound of Music
, he may have been attracted to the prospect of a big payday for a small role—in Bricusse's treatment, Bumpo appeared only in the last third of the movie—that would offer him a chance to reach a wider audience. Poitier accepted their proposal but made it clear that his agreement was contingent on a meeting with Leslie Bricusse. Elated, Jacobs promptly agreed to fly Bricusse to New York for a lunch date at Poitier's favorite restaurant, the Russian Tea Room.

A few hours after they met with Poitier, Jacobs and Fleischer were due at the Majestic Theatre for an evening performance of
Golden Boy
, and Sammy Davis Jr. knew they were coming to see him; they were all planning to have dinner together afterward. As the two men sat in the audience, feeling like executioners, Davis, charged with excitement, sang, danced, and even threw in an ad-lib about Rex Harrison as a sort of secret nod to Jacobs. When the show ended, they went to Davis's dressing room, listening to him talk with great enthusiasm about his ideas for Bumpo. The dressing room door then opened to another visitor: Sidney Poitier.

Neither Jacobs nor Fleischer had mentioned to Poitier that he would be replacing Davis during their pitch meeting. Poitier looked at them. They looked back at him. Fleischer, frozen in place, assumed Poitier would think they were trying to sell Davis on the same role. Davis had no idea anything out of the ordinary was going on. And Poitier gave nothing away. He simply paid his respects to Davis and left the theater.

At a dinner that Fleischer later described as “a nightmare…very mafioso,” Jacobs asked Fleischer to leave the table while he broke the news to Davis himself. Fleischer stood watching at a distance as, in his words, “this wonderfully talented, delightful elf [had] his dream blown to smithereens…. I could tell from watching Sammy's face exactly where he was in the story.” Davis, understandably hurt and angry, told Jacobs he intended to make the incident public, go to the NAACP, and sue Harrison personally.
¹⁶
By the next morning, Poitier had heard what happened and changed his mind about playing Bumpo. Davis was a friend; taking a role away from him would be disloyal. But Poitier insisted on keeping his date with Bricusse, and by the following week, when they met, the actor had presumably managed to smooth things over and confirmed that he would costar in the movie after all.

On September 28, Rex Harrison, all charm, wrote Jacobs from the Italian set of
The Honey Pot
(then called
Tale of the Fox
), “I was very delighted to hear of the possibility of Sydney [
sic
] Poitier for Dr. Doolittle [
sic
]…. I would have thought it was worth going to any lengths to get him for the part as he would be so fresh and exciting for it.” Harrison didn't take long to offer some further suggestions: For the role of Emma Fairfax, which Bricusse was creating as a romantic female lead, he suggested one of his
Honey Pot
costars, Maggie Smith, a rising London stage actress who at thirty had made just a few movies. “I feel that she might be awfully good for the girl. She has rather a prim quality, and, of course, is able to acquire a period quality.” Harrison's letter also contained a barbed reminder that he could pull the rug out from under
Dolittle
at any moment: “How is Leslie proceeding with the lyrics and music? He has, I know, got a couple of months more before he has to produce it, but I am naturally anxious.” And he warned Jacobs against any further casting decisions that might involve what he had called “entertainers”—in other words, anyone whose singing and dancing might call attention to Harrison's deficiencies in those areas. “I think once we get anybody who is musical comedy in the film,” he wrote, “it is dead.”
¹⁷