Pictures at a Revolution (26 page)

Dunaway was offered a contract to join the cast of the daytime soap opera
The Guiding Light
, but she turned it down. (“In New York, if you did a soap or a TV ad, you'd never admit it,” says Dustin Hoffman. “It meant you weren't serious.”)
²²
When Handman was casting
Hogan's Goat
, Dunaway had just suffered the first setback of her brief career; Kazan and Whitehead, whose ambitious Lincoln Center productions had received mixed reviews and done only modest business, were dismissed, and their replacements fired Dunaway and many of the other actors Kazan had mentored. When Handman saw Dunaway, he knew she was just one good role away from being noticed by the studios. He and Frederick Rolf hired her to play Kathleen, a challenging, emotional role that required the actress to rail drunkenly against her husband and fall down a flight of onstage stairs to her death in every performance.
Hogan's Goat
opened to excellent reviews in November 1965, and nobody was shocked when Dunaway was spotted by a scout for producer Sam Spiegel. “Dustin Hoffman was someone I would never have guessed would end up on a poster in girls' bedrooms,” says Handman. “But Dunaway becoming a movie star? That didn't surprise me at all.”
²³
Three months after
Hogan's Goat
opened, she left the play to make her first film. By the spring of 1966, Dunaway had signed long-term contracts with both Spiegel and Otto Preminger and had turned down a chance to test with Michael Caine for the sequel to
The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin.
²⁴
“I longed to do great work,” she said, “and since you must be famous to get those opportunities, I wanted to be famous.”
²⁵

In February, Dunaway left for Florida to star in
The Happening
, an uneasy combination of comedy and crime drama, for Spiegel and
Cat Ballou
director Elliot Silverstein. She was paid $25,000 for her role as a bored wild child who joins a group of hippies on a housebreaking escapade. Dunaway was able to resist the romantic advances of her notoriously insistent producer, but there was no escaping the intention of her director to transform her physically into “the cookie-cutter blond bombshell” that he wanted for the movie.
²⁶
“The role called for a more kittenish kind of girl,” says Silverstein.
²⁷
In 1966, “kittenish” didn't mean brunette, and the director insisted that Dunaway bleach and tease her brown hair into a blond mane and wear a padded bra and costumes that exposed as much skin as possible. Dunaway started starving herself, fearful about what “acres of bare midriff”
²⁸
would look like on a movie screen, and did her best to turn herself into what everyone was telling her she had to become. “I understood from her hair and makeup people that she was quite upset,” says Silverstein. “There were a lot of emotions.” Dunaway, after two years with Kazan, wasn't used to working fast, without any discussion. “I'd say, ‘Faye, the sun is fading, we have to move on,'” says Silverstein. “She was upset, but then she'd be fine. Most of the time she just walked right in and did it.”
²⁹

Hogan's Goat
continued without Dunaway, and Handman began to hold auditions for the American Place's spring production,
The Journey of the Fifth Horse
, Ribman's adaptation of Turgenev's
Diary of a Superfluous Man.
“I'm sitting in the theater next to Wynn,” says Ribman, “and in walks Dustin Hoffman,
again
, on an open call. He says, ‘I'm terribly sorry for what I did [on
Harry Noon and Night
], and I hope it won't interfere with you letting me read for the part.' One impetus I had was to grab him by the seat of his pants and throw him out. But he was terrific.”
³⁰

Hoffman wanted to play Chulkaturin, a young nobleman dying of tuberculosis. But Handman and Ribman steered him toward the play's other main role, a “character leading man” part, and cast him as Zoditch, a pinched, fussy proofreader who is forced to confront the tininess and circumscription of his own life while reading Chulkaturin's diary. Rip Torn and Susan Anspach were cast in the other lead roles, and the play went into rehearsals under the direction of Larry Arick. The level of tension in the room was intolerable almost from the first day. “Rip had a lot of problems with the director,” says Ribman. “He would sit there when Larry Arick was giving notes and hold a newspaper in front of his face—that kind of juvenile behavior. And he and Dustin and Susan became a kind of trio.”
³¹

Arick, for his part, was unhappy with Torn's behavior and was just as frustrated with Hoffman's tentative performance and uncompromising working methods. “Dusty did a good audition, but then, like any good actor, he let everything go and started from scratch,” says Anspach. “How do you play a character who's full of rage but too repressed to show it? It took a while for him to figure out how to show that without spelling it out. By the second week, they were sure they hired the wrong guy. By the third, they were ready to fire him. By the fourth, they had offered the part to another actor behind his back.” The actor, Albert Paulson, was a friend of Torn's, and Torn asked him not to take the job, telling him, “Please, this guy's gonna be brilliant, he needs a break, string them along, don't turn it down or accept it until it's too late and they have to keep him.”
³²
Torn was able to protect Hoffman, but not himself. Just a week before the play was to open, communication in the rehearsal room broke down entirely. “We had a few choices,” says Michael Tolan. “We could remove the director, Dustin, or Rip. Wynn Handman and I decided that the easiest thing to do was replace Rip.”
³³

Tolan stepped into Torn's part himself, and Handman postponed the opening to give the cast a few extra days of rehearsal. “At that time, Dustin was a very difficult actor to work with,” says Tolan, “because he had such an intense sense of capital-T ‘Truth' that he found it very difficult to give a performance. He was hardly talking above a whisper in his scenes because he wouldn't commit to anything that he thought would be false.”
³⁴
One afternoon, at the peak of his frustration, Hoffman cut short a rehearsal by saying, “Nobody likes me!” and walked out. “He just left for several hours—maybe to talk to his analyst—and when he came back, he was more confident,” says Ribman.
³⁵
But his performance still wasn't making any impression. “Wynn, Larry, and I got together and said, ‘What the fuck are we gonna do here?'” says Tolan. “At the final dress rehearsal, we said, ‘Dustin, we can't hear you past the second row of the theater. And he said, ‘What do you want me to do, shout?' And we said, ‘Yes!' And suddenly, he gave the performance that he'd been working on for weeks. He'd been getting there all along.”
³⁶

When
The Journey of the Fifth Horse
opened on April 21, 1966, Hoffman received his first review as a professional actor, from Stanley Kauffmann in
The New York Times
, who wrote, “This portrait of a repressed, clerkish tyrant is sharply outlined and vividly colored…. It is an able comedian's performance.”
³⁷
Other critics were even more enthusiastic; although
Journey
ran for just ten days, Hoffman won the Obie Award as the season's best off-Broadway actor, the first time the prize had been given since George C. Scott won it three years earlier. An abridged version of the play was filmed for National Educational Television, the forerunner of PBS, and Ribman and the producers quickly made plans to transfer the production to a commercial run at Greenwich Village's Circle in the Square. But shortly after the television taping was completed, Hoffman, just as he had done a year earlier, decided to drop out of the play, and the transfer was canceled. “The play was optioned, and Dustin Hoffman just walked out,” says Ribman. “And I think that was the last time I saw him.”
³⁸

“They talk about Oscar-itis,” says Hoffman. “Well, I guess I got Obieitis. I won the award, and I didn't work for six months.”
³⁹

 

Hoffman had given
his first preview performance in
Journey
the night after the 1966 Academy Awards ceremony. Like most New York theater actors, he professed not to care much about the Oscars. “There really was a red-state blue-state feeling,” he recalls. “New York was Arthur Miller. Hollywood was
Bonanza.”
⁴⁰
That year, the ceremony served primarily as an exercise in studio self-affirmation, an announcement from the Hollywood establishment that it was celebrating a year of having succeeded in doing what it had been built to do, which was to put out big, long movies that made lots of money.
The Sound of Music
won Best Picture and was probably the most critically scorned film in a dozen years to take the top prize. The night's other big winner, MGM's
Doctor Zhivago
, was an expensive, epic road-show presentation that was doing such massive business that voters permitted themselves to ignore the many critics who noted that the movie fell well short of David Lean's
Lawrence of Arabia.

The ten Oscars won by
Zhivago
and
The Sound of Music
represented a defiant ratification of old-fashioned picture making and a preference for defending familiar turf over breaking new ground. But the threat to old Hollywood was evident right in the nominations, which seemed to emanate from England and New York as much as from Los Angeles. For Best Actor, Hoffman was rooting for Rod Steiger, a New Yorker who had crossed successfully into Hollywood with his Method training intact; he was nominated for his performance as an emotionally deadened Holocaust survivor working in Harlem in Sidney Lumet's
The Pawnbroker
, which epitomized the kind of uncompromising East Coast filmmaking the studios wouldn't touch. It was left to Samuel Z. Arkoff and James Nicholson's exploitation company, American International Pictures, to distribute the movie, an odd fit on a slate of 1965 releases that also included
How to Stuff a Wild Bikini
and
Die, Monster, Die!

One Best Picture nominee came straight out of the New York theater-television nexus—a cheaply made black-and-white adaptation of the play
A Thousand Clowns
that starred Jason Robards Jr. and Martin Balsam. Another nomination went to John Schlesinger's tough-minded swinging-London comedy-drama
Darling
, which turned Julie Christie into an international celebrity and a fashion sensation and gave Embassy's Joseph E. Levine, whom everyone enjoyed belittling as a noisy New York importer of Italian schlock and European art-house films, his first-ever Best Picture contender. Only eight of the twenty acting nominations went to Americans, and the night's big old-guard moment—the “surprise” presentation of an honorary Academy Award to the show's host, Bob Hope, who had already been given four other honorary Oscars—was so anticlimactic that
Time
magazine said the telecast (the first time the Oscars aired in color) “made
The Beverly Hillbillies
look good.”
⁴¹

Warren Beatty, back from shooting
Kaleidoscope
, was present to hand out an award, as was one of the actresses he was still considering as a possible Bonnie Parker, Natalie Wood. Another presenter, Yvette Mimieux, had drawn the interest of United Artists' David Picker,
⁴²
who was still interested in making
Bonnie and Clyde
and also wondering who could play the female lead. That evening, Beatty watched yet another potential Bonnie, Julie Christie, take home the Best Actress prize. A few weeks earlier, he had met Christie for the first time in England as they both stood on a receiving line to greet Queen Elizabeth II at the royal premiere of
Born Free
,
⁴³
and he couldn't get his mind off the woman who was to become his lover and frequent costar in the 1970s. “I had met Julie Christie. Oh boy, had I met her,” he says. “We had lunch at Shepperton [Studios in England]. I thought she would be, physically, very good for the part. Bonnie was petite, and it struck me as more dramatic to have this petite thing be so tough. But she was British, so that just wasn't going to work.”
⁴⁴
In any case, Beatty knew there was no point in casting Bonnie until he had a deal with a studio, and that meant shopping the project to the same people who had already turned it down.

In Los Angeles to begin rehearsals and song prerecording for
Doctor Dolittle
, Rex Harrison, the previous year's Best Actor winner, showed up at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium to present Christie with her award. Among the actresses she beat were Julie Andrews, who had been Arthur Jacobs's first choice for
Dolittle
's female lead, and Samantha Eggar, who, carefully counting the number of days she was allowed to spend in the United States, had returned to attend the ceremony and begin preparations for
Dolittle.
Sidney Poitier was not present that evening; both of his costars in
A Patch of Blue
, Elizabeth Hartman and Shelley Winters, had been nominated, but he had not. The Best Actor slot he might have gotten went instead to Laurence Olivier's blackface performance in
Othello.
Despite Poitier's own misgivings about playing the part, it was hard not to feel that Olivier's nomination was undoing whatever symbolic progress had been made in giving Poitier an Oscar two years earlier, especially since Olivier was being honored for an overripe, pop-eyed filmed stage turn that
The New York Times'
Bosley Crowther had called an “outrageous impression of a theatrical Negro stereotype. He does not look like a Negro…. He looks like a Rastus or an end man in an American minstrel show. You almost wait for him to whip a banjo out.”
⁴⁵
And what was Poitier (or any other black actor) to make of Pauline Kael's patronizing assertion in
McCall's
that she “saw Paul Robeson and he was not as black as Olivier is…. Possibly Negro actors need to sharpen themselves on white roles before they can
play
a Negro”?
⁴⁶