Pictures at a Revolution (30 page)

 

If
Bonnie and Clyde
escaped Jack Warner's close scrutiny until it was too late for him to reverse himself, the distraction of
Camelot
was at least partly responsible, and Warner was hardly alone among studio chiefs in neglecting the rest of his films in order to concentrate on a single big-ticket entertainment that could prove to be the next
Sound of Music
. At Fox, Dick Zanuck was presiding over a lineup of movies being planned for release in 1967 that included several potential box office successes:
Hombre
, a western that would reunite Paul Newman with his
Hud
director, Martin Ritt, an adaptation of Jacqueline Susann's best seller
Valley of the Dolls
, and
Two for the Road
, a sophisticated bittersweet comedy about marriage starring Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney that a more relaxed Production Code had finally made it possible to green-light. But in the summer of 1966, everything was taking a backseat to Arthur Jacobs's mammoth effort to get
Doctor Dolittle
off the ground.

Zanuck had succeeded in shaving $2 million from the budget, although Rex Harrison had thrown a tantrum and threatened to quit when he learned he wasn't going to be working with Sidney Poitier after all.
²⁸
But Fox's attempts to economize were almost completely undone in the next couple of months, as the start of production approached. Work at Jungleland, the animal-training facility in California, was proving more arduous than anyone had anticipated, since, in addition to teaching a rhino, a giraffe, and several hundred chimps, pigs, birds, mice, sheep, cows, squirrels, chickens, and parrots to perform tricks, the handlers had to spend time simulating the noisy conditions and flashing lights of a studio soundstage in order to accustom the animals to being on a set.
²⁹
The American Humane Association (AHA) was taking an interest, writing detailed memos about the script to the studio. (“When Bellowes…flings the skunk away from him,” AHA director Harold Melniker reminded Fox politely after reading the script, “the use of a dummy skunk is in order.”)
³⁰
And for every item that had been extracted from the budget in the spring, another had taken its place, pushing the film's price tag past $14 million once again. The new cost estimate included $276,000 more for animals, real and mechanical; an additional $226,000 in previously unforeseen expenses for the location shoot in England; $72,000 more for sets; $20,000 to pay Harrison's personal public relations agent; a voice double to sing Samantha Eggar's numbers; a trainer who was up to the six-month task of trying to teach Chee-Chee, the chimpanzee (and his three stand-ins), to cook bacon and eggs in a frying pan; and $97,000 in projected overtime costs for the services of Leslie Bricusse,
³¹
who had to redraft an entire script without Poitier's character and make almost endless revisions to keep Harrison happy.

That was proving impossible. After his ill-considered attempt to select his own team of songwriters for
Doctor Dolittle
, Harrison had finally reconciled himself to working with Bricusse, but the fact that Bricusse's best friend, Anthony Newley, had come on to the project as a costar sent him into fits of anger and paranoia. He was sure that Newley and Bricusse were working together in Beverly Hills, shaping the script into a showcase for their talents and rewriting it to diminish his own role.
³²
Harrison wasn't entirely wrong to think that Newley's casting meant that the part of Matthew would be expanded. And his disdain for Newley was predictable—he had as little use for a British song-and-dance man as he had had for Sammy Davis Jr., whom he had dismissed as an “entertainer.” But undisguised prejudice, well-known among those who had worked with Harrison before, was also a factor. Before and during
Doctor Dolittle
's production, Harrison would disparage Newley, sometimes to his face, as a “Jewish comic” or a “Cockney Jew.”
³³
Newley was braced for it and, at least at the beginning, too excited about working on the film to care. In April, when he and the cast began learning the movie's choreography in Los Angeles, he wrote exuberantly to his friend Barbra Streisand, who was then performing in
Funny Girl
onstage in London, “We started rehearsing the dances for ‘Dr. Dolittle,' or as it's known amongst the Hebrew elements, ‘Dr. Tagoornicht'!!
^*
I shall have the pleasure of working with that well-known anti-Semite, Rex ‘George Rockwell' Harrison,”
³⁴
he added, referring to the head of the American Nazi Party.

Throughout rehearsals, Bricusse sequestered himself in his home office in Beverly Hills, rewriting and refining the script, changing song lyrics, and trying to meet the demands of his star, Arthur Jacobs, and Fox. He was beginning his second year on the job and tiring of it. “I am desolated that I was not with you at the Grove last night,” he wrote after turning down an invitation from Newley and Joan Collins. “The strain of ‘Dolittle' has been beginning to show lately, but I do so desperately want it to be good. This is our first cinematic outing in Hollywood, Newberg, so how can I expect you to be as good as I want you to be unless I give you something to be good with? Deep down beneath several crusts of misery that have been heaped on to me during the past few months is the same happy, laughing idiot we all used to know and love.”
³⁵

Much of that misery came at Harrison's hands. Whatever the actor's other faults, laziness was not among them, and he besieged Bricusse with questions, requests, and revisions. To Harrison's credit, he was taking his role as Doctor Dolittle seriously; he filled a June 1966 draft of the script with handwritten notes, some of them directions to himself (“very real despair,” he jotted next to one of his lines), some of them suggestions that Bricusse incorporate more dialogue from Hugh Lofting's books, and some of them sharp-eyed notations of lapses in logic. Harrison was a close reader and circled lines in which his character seemed to be repeating himself; he also had an experienced performer's sense of what would and would not work once he was on the set interacting with actual animals. “It is no good taking a chance that something [funny] will happen,” he wrote of a scene in which Dolittle was to stroll through his menagerie. “Each animal cannot do the same thing…. Think cockerel is important. Perhaps the cockerel doesn't approve of Dolittle. I feel that it [will be] the
reaction of the animals
[that] gets the laugh—not what Dolittle does so much.”
³⁶

Harrison was willing to shorten his own lines or suggest that the camera cut away from him in order to make a joke work, but he was unable to contain his jealousy and contempt when he came to any scene or speech in which Newley's character had a lot to do. “All the quips of Matthew are impossible and unanswerable and hold up the scene,” he complained of one exchange. “These unanswerable set ups are monotonous,” he wrote, dashing out lines twenty pages later.
³⁷

But many of Harrison's instincts were wrong and costly—Bricusse had to waste an entire draft accommodating his insistence that Dolittle be depicted as a sophisticated London physician before he admitted the idea was a dead end.
³⁸
And even as Harrison was slowing everyone down, his agent, Laurie Evans, was demanding that the actor be guaranteed $75,000 for three weeks of overtime, a situation that Arthur Jacobs apoplectically called “disaster and blackmail.”
³⁹
An excitable man on the calmest of days, Jacobs was now beginning to suffer physically from the stresses of
Doctor Dolittle
; in the spring, he was hospitalized for what he told his colleagues was surgery for “some rather irritating sinus condition.”
⁴⁰
But Jacobs, a forty-three-year-old hyperactive overweight chain-smoker, was really beginning to suffer from heart problems. When he was released from the hospital, he apologized to Harrison for missing a meeting in New York, saying only that he was under doctor's orders not to travel.
⁴¹
In the next month, he pushed ahead, hiring crew members, fighting the picture's rising costs, and telling no one that he was seriously ill.

In late June, the
Doctor Dolittle
crew flew to England to set up shop in Castle Combe, a small town in Wiltshire that proudly advertised itself as “the prettiest village in England,” a designation it had won from the British tourist bureau. With Barnumesque brio, Jacobs started talking up the production in the press, ordering the staging of a photo opportunity in which Chee-Chee and Polynesia the parrot would “greet” Harrison upon his arrival in London,
⁴²
and boasting that the movie would use 1,150 animals, 480 of them for the “Talk to the Animals” sequence alone (“He does the number and the camera slowly pulls back showing 480—I mean
four eight oh!
—animals standing there,” he announced with delight), and “the biggest publicity and merchandising campaign ever.”
⁴³
Jacobs was somewhat more restrained when discussing the budget, telling one reporter the movie would be made for $12 million and another that the final cost would be somewhere between $11 million and $15 million.
⁴⁴
In fact,
Doctor Dolittle
was already moving briskly past the $15 million mark, in part because of a colossal miscalculation: Nobody at Fox had realized that the hundreds of animals that had been trained in California would have to be quarantined as soon as they were shipped to England. An entirely new troupe of birds and beasts had to be found and trained on the spot, while the Jungleland animals were returned to California to be held for use on the studio lot.

Castle Combe welcomed the production with a combination of suspicion and delight. Residents were not happy when Jacobs's crew decided the village wasn't quite pretty enough and went through the town tearing down Coca-Cola signs and antennae. They were temporarily mollified when Jacobs got Fox to pay for a community antenna to bring the quaint little town what it really wanted—better TV reception. But when Jacobs had his construction team dam the local trout stream and fill it with artificial seaweed and rubber fish in order to make it deep enough to pass as a river on which Dolittle could set sail, grumbling gave way to sabotage.
⁴⁵
On June 27, before the actors arrived, Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, a twenty-two-year-old baronet, and another man were arrested for trying to set fire to an outhouse with a can of gasoline and blow up the sandbag dam. His goal, he announced, was to stop “mass entertainment from riding roughshod over the feelings of the people.”
⁴⁶
(Fiennes, a distant cousin of the actor Ralph Fiennes, later became a well-known explorer and writer and was briefly considered as a possible replacement for Sean Connery when Connery quit the James Bond series in 1967.) The baronet's unsuccessful attempt at vandalism did no real damage to the production.

As Richard Fleischer put it, “It is the weather, not the bombs, which has made life intolerable.”
⁴⁷
Of the two months the
Dolittle
production spent in Castle Combe, all but five shooting days were either shortened or canceled altogether because of the constant downpours—a condition about which the studio had chosen to ignore all warnings.
⁴⁸
“Big rain,” says Samantha Eggar, reading from her diary entries at the time. “‘More rain…. Rained all day…. Whiled away the time with Pat [Newcomb] and Tony [Newley] and the Rosses [Herb Ross and Nora Kaye]…. Poured all day…. Pouring again.' It's on every page.”
⁴⁹

“Castle Combe is a gorgeous place, but everywhere you walked there was either cowshit or mud,” says Ray Aghayan, the film's costume designer. “It rained every day except the one day we needed it to rain—we had to shoot that day with phony rain.”
⁵⁰

Even on the rare occasions when the weather was forgiving, the animals were not. Shooting with animals that had barely been trained was “not easy,” said Ross, who had been brought over to stage the musical sequences. “The script just says, ‘Swans do something,' and we have to see what they do.”
⁵¹
The fields where many of the animals were kept became so saturated with rain that they turned into swamps. The rhinoceros got pneumonia. In his autobiography, Harrison wrote that the animals became “restless and angry” (“I was bitten by a chimp, a Pomeranian puppy, a duck and a parrot”), that their trainers were occasionally abusive, and that shooting was “inordinately slow.” Even a shot as simple as one in which Dolittle addresses a few lines to an attentive parrot and squirrel who are standing on a railing became a nightmare when the recalcitrant squirrel wouldn't stay still. When crew members tried to wrap tiny wires around its paws and then attach the wires to the rail with tacks, the squirrel became understandably agitated. The production broke for lunch, and Fleischer, furious, went off to find a local veterinarian to find out how the squirrel could be sedated. In the afternoon, trainers filled a fountain pen with gin and fed it to the squirrel drop by drop. Finally, Harrison wrote, they got “a few seconds of film showing the squirrel…nodding and swaying” before it passed out cold.
⁵²

The cast and crew greeted each new catastrophe with gallows humor. “We are deep in the heart of British Occupied Wiltshire making a grand Todd-AO Classic—‘Dr. Dolittle,'” Newley wrote to a friend. “You will probably be seeing it in 1984!”
⁵³
But a generational rift quickly developed, with Harrison and Fleischer on one side and Newley and Eggar on the other. Harrison, wrote Fleischer, thought the younger actors were “twits when they clowned around on the set and disturbed his concentration.”
⁵⁴
But Harrison was so consistently unpleasant to Newley that the younger actor had little reason to make things easier for him.