Pictures at a Revolution (24 page)

Beatty returned to New York and decided to make one final run at Penn, telling Abe Lastfogel, the William Morris agent they shared, that he was going to lock himself in a room with Penn until he agreed to direct
Bonnie and Clyde.
¹⁹
Lastfogel stepped in and set up a lunch between the two men at Dinty Moore's. “I didn't stand a chance,” Penn wrote later. “Warren can be the most relentlessly persuasive person I know…. I had capitulated by the time Warren had finished his complicated order for a salad.”
²⁰
In truth, Penn had also looked at the script and found his own door into it for the first time. “I had seen it as this romantic legend all the way through. But then I thought, this is really a story about the agricultural nature of the country. Those banks out there [that Parker and Barrow robbed] were farmers' banks, and then the farmers couldn't pay their mortgages, and eventually the banks took over the farms…. Well, all of that was not in the script. But I thought it could be.”
²¹
Imagining
Bonnie and Clyde
as a canvas on which he could depict American social and economic injustice sparked Penn's excitement, and he knew that however contentious their relationship might become, Beatty would agree not to take the movie away from him during postproduction. He felt the script still needed work, but he was, finally, ready to sign on as
Bonnie and Clyde
's director.

“Arthur was my first choice not only because I knew him, but because I
could
get into an argument with him,” says Beatty. “So when he said he would make the movie, I said, ‘I want to have one agreement—that if we make this movie, we will have an argument every night. If we don't have anything to argue about, I want to find something to argue about, because there's always something that can be better or can be thought about more.' That's what I wanted the dynamic to be.”
²²

Penn agreed. And over the next several months, both men had no trouble keeping their promise.

 

Two weeks after
Richard Zanuck fired Rex Harrison from
Doctor Dolittle
, he rehired him. The showdown had benefited no one, with the exception of Christopher Plummer, who didn't have to miss a single performance of
The Royal Hunt of the Sun
on Broadway and still pocketed $87,500 in severance pay just for signing a contract.
²³
Harrison had misbehaved throughout the fall of 1965 in part because his marriage was at a point of dire crisis: During the production of
The Honey Pot
, Rachel Roberts had attempted suicide by taking an overdose of pills after a fight with him. “Rex was in a temper. Abuse flowed. I drank brandy. I came home to emptiness and ice, and swallowed Seconal,” she wrote in her journal.
²⁴
Joe Mankiewicz helped keep the episode out of the press. Given the strain Harrison had been under, Zanuck was willing to offer him a second chance. “Rex was a tough guy to deal with,” he says. “He could be mean-spirited and very excitable, and he'd have a few drinks and fly off the handle. And on top of it all, he was an egomaniac at the height of his clout. But when he heard about Christopher Plummer, he temporarily turned into a human being again and begged his way back. And from that point on, I had him.”
²⁵

Harrison's good behavior, however, bore a striking resemblance to his bad behavior. He still had little use for Leslie Bricusse or his screenplay; when the two men met in late January, Harrison gave him a set of notes on the
Dolittle
script that left Bricusse frustrated and bewildered. “Mr. Harrison would like the character of Dolittle to be more like Henry Higgins, a man of ‘amusing irritability,' to quote his own phrase,” Bricusse wrote to Arthur Jacobs after the meeting. “This represents a total change of mind from the meetings in Portofino when he ‘didn't care what the character was like so long as he wasn't like Henry Higgins.'…This basic change will necessarily have far-reaching effects upon the existing screenplay.” Among the other revisions Harrison was requesting were the addition of an opening sequence in London showing Dolittle “as a fashionable Harley Street consultant, bored with life,” the creation of a new underwater sequence in which Dolittle would be shown taking the pulse of an octopus, and more than a dozen other significant and expensive changes.
²⁶

In Los Angeles, as Bricusse worked on expanding the script, 20th Century-Fox's moneymen made their first attempt to create an itemized budget for
Doctor Dolittle.
Jacobs's original projection that the film would cost $6 million had given way to news that stunned the studio: The movie was now expected to cost $14.4 million.
²⁷
Suddenly, Darryl Zanuck's warning that his son could be headed for “economic disaster” seemed alarmingly plausible. “After
The Sound of Music
became the biggest picture of all time, we were really back in business, I was suddenly hailed as, you know, boy genius, and we were off to the races,” says Dick Zanuck.
²⁸
But even Zanuck's optimism had limits, and he told Jacobs to cut $2 million out of the budget, and quickly, since the start of production was less than six months away.

Even as
Dolittle
's costs were rising, the studio allowed Harrison to indulge for nearly two months in what turned out to be a drunken whim. On one of his visits to Italy to discuss the film with his star, director Richard Fleischer met Harrison and Rachel Roberts, both of whom were already intoxicated, in their suite at the Excelsior Hotel in Rome. Harrison, whom Fleischer wrote was “working himself into a frenzy of insecurity,” insisted that he wanted Bricusse replaced by different songwriters.
²⁹
He first suggested Betty Comden and Adolph Green and then brought up Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, a comic songwriting team who had been performing in their own revues in England for the last ten years. Fleischer, Harrison, and Roberts then went out to a local restaurant called the White Elephant for an evening that ended in utter chaos when Roberts, who had begun indulging her penchant for barking like a dog as soon as they entered the establishment, brandished a knife at her husband, and Fleischer hurried them out and poured them both into a cab.
³⁰

Fleischer had to baby-sit Harrison through every mood swing. “The ‘Talk To The Animals' number is a hang-over from the old character of Dolittle which I described as a sort of wet-nurse [and] wanted at any price to get out…the song to Sophie [the seal] is still
quite impossible for me to handle
…again utterly lacks humour,” he wrote to his director after their Portofino meeting. Harrison was convinced that Bricusse was trying to write songs that could become stand-alone hits. “He can do that with his partner, Newley,” he snapped. “I don't think I
have
a number yet.” Besides Flanders and Swann, Harrison also wanted Comden and Green to write him some songs: “Please try and explain this complicated artistic truth to Dick [Zanuck],” he wrote. “I cannot do any more work on any of this material. It just isn't
any fun
.”
³¹

Fleischer, by now, knew how to handle his star. “I've spent the day mulling over your letter and after analyzing it carefully…I have decided that the sky wasn't falling after all,” he wrote back. “Leslie is capable of coming through for you.” Fleischer wasn't a huge fan of the music he was hearing, either. “I'm praying that Flanders and Swann will come to the rescue…even partially,” he wrote. “[But] the situation, while urgent, doesn't call for the pressing of the panic button.” Asking the studio chief who had fired Harrison just two months earlier to hire still more songwriters would, he reminded his leading man, open a “Pandora's Box.”
³²
Harrison quieted down quickly.

Nonetheless, Jacobs went along with Harrison's demand that Flanders and Swann be signed to prepare an alternate score for
Doctor Dolittle
while Bricusse continued his own work. The duo spent a month writing songs, most of which were
My Fair Lady
knockoffs tailored to Harrison's limited range. One, called “I Won't Be a King,” included a wink to the actor himself, ending with the lyric “Lash me to an eagle / I won't be regal / Lock me in an attic / I shall still be most emphatic that I / Won't be / I can't be / I daren't be / I shan't be a king! / And another thing: I couldn't bear being called ‘Rex'!”
³³
When they presented their songs to a sober Harrison in April, the actor quickly realized he didn't dislike Bricusse's tunes so much after all, and he sent them packing.

While Fleischer kept Harrison at bay, Jacobs assembled the rest of
Dolittle
's cast and crew, hiring Herbert Ross and Nora Kaye to choreograph the film's big numbers
³⁴
and Ray Aghayan to design the costumes. His negotiations with Hayley Mills had fallen apart, but Jacobs had found a strong substitute to play Emma Fairfax: Samantha Eggar, a twenty-six-year-old auburn-haired Englishwoman who had recently starred as a kidnapping victim in William Wyler's
The Collector.
Eggar and Wyler clashed repeatedly during the shoot; Wyler said that directing the young actress was “like carving soap,”
³⁵
and Eggar didn't hide her feeling that he was a withholding, punitive martinet who had made her first time on a Hollywood set “sheer hell.” But the result impressed critics and audiences alike; as her $250,000 deal to star in
Doctor Dolittle
was closing,
³⁶
she received a Best Actress Oscar nomination for
The Collector.
Jacobs was so happy to get her that he didn't even worry about the fact that Eggar couldn't sing; he just added the need to hire a voice double to one of the to-do lists he carried around on index cards.

“At that time, I was under contract to Columbia and Paramount,” says Eggar, “and I didn't have a green card,” which limited the number of days she could live and work in the United States each year. “Every five months, my husband and my child and I would have to move out of the country, with a new house rented by the studio every time I came back. I can't believe the kind of life we led.” When Eggar got the
Dolittle
offer, she had just left her month-old baby to travel to Tokyo, where she was starring opposite Cary Grant in what turned out to be the actor's final film,
Walk, Don't Run.
“Given the toll that took on my health and my psyche, I don't think I realized the scope of
Doctor Dolittle
, the size and responsibility, at the time I signed the contract…. I never got that message.”
³⁷

Eggar had no idea that her twenty-six-week commitment to
Doctor Dolittle
would eventually double, but in one regard she was already well prepared for the production. A few years earlier, she had signed to costar with Harrison in an adaptation of Graham Greene's play
The Living Room.
“Everything was fine until the first day of shooting, and on the first day, Rex walked out—just as he had walked out of many other commitments that he had made. He doubted himself, always. Regardless of being such a brilliant light comedian, he had this gross insecurity about himself. So I already knew this side of him—I had had a Rex experience.”
³⁸

For two weeks in February, 20th Century-Fox struggled to cut
Dolittle
's budget. When Donald Pleasence asked for $60,000 to play a supporting role in the film and Robert Morley wanted $50,000,
³⁹
Jacobs was told to hire the less-known Peter Bull for $11,000.
⁴⁰
The animal-training budget estimate fell by $300,000, a cut that was predicated on wild optimism about the ease of working with parrots, pigs, and chimpanzees. And the pirate ship sequence that Dick Zanuck had insisted remain in the script a couple of months earlier was jettisoned as well. But the single biggest piece of cost cutting was one that had the potential to cause a terrible embarrassment: Zanuck and Jacobs decided to eliminate the character of Bumpo, writing Sidney Poitier out of the film altogether and saving themselves his salary, which, given the new, longer production time that
Dolittle
would require, had risen from $250,000 to $400,000.
⁴¹

At the same time that Leslie Bricusse, who hadn't been told of the studio's sudden change in plans, was turning in a new draft of the script in which he had followed Jacobs's orders to enlarge Bumpo's role, Fleischer was complaining that the Bumpo sequences were “extraneous nonsense,”
⁴²
and Zanuck and Jacobs were fretting over how to handle the firing of America's only Oscar-winning black actor. In addition to the certainty that the decision would enrage Harrison, who had insisted on Poitier's casting, their blunder would bring the film unwelcome publicity, and they would probably have to spend far more to pay off Poitier than it had cost them to end their two-week dalliance with Christopher Plummer. As it happened, Jacobs and Zanuck got lucky: Poitier had never signed his contract. A few weeks after they decided to cut him from the film, Poitier's agent, Martin Baum, brought up some minor sticking points in his deal for
Dolittle.
Jacobs flatly refused to give an inch, hoping to force an artificial confrontation, and his strategy worked: Poitier quit. That saved the producer from having to send out a press release that he had drafted in which he was ready to fall on his sword, admitting that “we simply had a script which ran well over four hours” and noting that the role of Bumpo would have to shrink so much that “it would have been an imposition to insist that Mr. Poitier continue in it.”
⁴³