Pictures at a Revolution (40 page)

Hoffman was then marched onto a soundstage that contained a bed, Katharine Ross, and a crane on which a camera was mounted. “He had a
crane
,” says Hoffman. “How many screen tests use a crane? Maybe he was working something out—it was only his second movie. Or maybe he was trying to see whether I could do a movie at all—‘Can the kid sustain?' All I know is that through lack of sleep, makeup chair paralysis, and nerves, I couldn't get through it.” Nichols did take after take, coaching Hoffman, trying to relax him, taking breathers. It was going badly—so badly that Ross began to tense up as well. “He looks about three feet tall, so dead serious, so humorless, so unkempt,” she thought. “This is going to be a disaster.”
⁴³
At one point as the hours dragged on and the two sat wearily on the bed, Hoffman reached over and pinched her bottom, trying to relax her or perhaps energize himself. She spun around in cold anger. “Don't you
ever
do that!” she said. “I'm in the wrong place,” he thought. As Nichols seemed to shift his attention to Ross, Hoffman got even more clenched and inexpressive.
⁴⁴

“He was just sitting like a lump,” says Nichols, “not visibly doing much, which of course I'm usually crazy about. But it was a hard day.” Nichols was impressed by Ross—“I thought, this is her, this is how I want Elaine to look, she even knew what to wear”
⁴⁵
—but less sure about Hoffman. After twelve hours, it was over. Hoffman shook hands with the director, “and Nichols's hand was so damp that I really got nervous because I realized how nervous
he
was.” Hoffman shoved his hands back into his pockets; when he pulled them out again, several subway tokens flew out. “Here, kid,” said an exhausted and annoyed crew member, picking them up. “You're gonna need these.”

Hoffman flew back to New York, where his costars in
Eh?
, Elizabeth Wilson and Alexandra Berlin, were anxious to hear if they were going to lose their leading man. He told them not to worry.
⁴⁶
In Los Angeles, enthusiasm wasn't running much higher. “I looked at it, and it was just this ugly boy playing the part, and I thought, ‘Ugggh,'” Nichols's editor, Sam O'Steen, said later.
⁴⁷
“There was no ‘Eureka!'” says Nichols. That is, until they printed the screen test and watched Hoffman on film. “He had that thrilling thing that I'd only seen in Elizabeth Taylor,” says the director. “That secret, where they do something while you're shooting, and you think it's
okay
, and then you see it on screen and it's five times better than when you shot it. That's what a great movie actor does. They don't know how they do it, and I don't know how they do it, but the difference is unimaginable, shocking. This feeling that they have such a connection with the camera that they can do what they want because they own the audience. Elizabeth had it, and by God, so did Dustin.”
⁴⁸

“With that, in one fell swoop, we lost all the blonds we were thinking about,” says Buck Henry. “I remember Mike said, ‘I have the rationalization for Dustin—he's a genetic throwback. Somewhere in the genes of these people, there was some twisted dark pirate uncle, and that gene got passed on to Dustin. His whole appearance suggests that he doesn't belong in that laboratory full of blond gods.”
⁴⁹

A few days later, Hoffman got a call from his agent telling him to phone Nichols. It was a snowy Sunday morning, and Hoffman had walked to the Upper West Side apartment of his girlfriend, a ballet dancer named Anne Byrne, to make breakfast with her. “Anne was cooking eggs at one end of the apartment, and I was on the line at the other, and there was a typical Nicholsian pause, and he said, ‘Well…you got it,'” says Hoffman. “And I didn't say a word, except maybe thank you. And he said, ‘You don't seem very excited.' And I said, ‘Oh no, yeah, thanks.' All I knew was that I was working with the greatest director of my life and that he was about to make the biggest mistake. I hung up the phone and looked at my girlfriend and said, ‘I got it,' and there was this terrible, sad moment when she said, ‘I knew you would.' It was heavy. Laden with potential regret that this was going to break us up.'”
⁵⁰
Ironically, Hoffman was now going to have to turn down a second movie role—one that had been offered to him by the husband of his new costar, Bancroft. Mel Brooks was also working for Joe Levine; he too had seen Hoffman's performance as
Harry Noon and Night
's German transvestite and now wanted him to play a Nazi playwright in his new comedy, tentatively titled
Springtime for Hitler
. “I thought he was the most original, spectacularly funny guy,” says Hoffman, “and I had to call him up and say, I can't do it.”
⁵¹

Nichols brought Hoffman to meet Levine in his New York office on a rainy afternoon. The financier was not impressed with Nichols's choice of star. “The windows leaked when it rained,” Levine said years later. “Mike pushed him through the door with a towel in his hand. I thought it was the plumber who had come to fix the leaks. I pointed to the window that was leaking and said, ‘It's over there.'”
⁵²
But Hoffman, at least, came cheap: He would cost Levine just $750 a week.
⁵³
His casting was announced in February 1967; production would begin in April, after he returned from Italy, where he had agreed to spend a few weeks shooting an ultracheap comedy called
Madigan's Millions
. A couple of days after the news broke that an unknown young New York actor would star in
The Graduate
, the Academy Award nominations were announced. Nichols's adaptation of
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
led the field with thirteen, and suddenly Joe Levine realized that he had the money to make
The Graduate
after all.

I
must say that I haven't known any colored person particularly well,” Katharine Hepburn told a journalist during the making of
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.
“I've never had one as a friend.”
¹
Somewhat more remarkably, given the length of her career, Hepburn had never had a black actor as a colleague, either: She had not shared an extended scene with a well-known African American performer since 1935's
Alice Adams
, in which her character watched helplessly as a housemaid played by Hattie McDaniel made a shambles of her attempt at a fancy dinner party. So in early 1967, when Hepburn and Spencer Tracy invited Sidney Poitier over to Tracy's cottage for a getting-to-know-you dinner party, it was an unofficial dress rehearsal for the awkwardness of the comedy they were soon to play out collectively on screen.

In the decades after
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
, Hepburn developed and cultivated a reputation as a strong-minded Yankee liberal and social progressive—the trousers-wearing iconoclast who was a feminist before the word existed, the high-minded blue blood whose mother had been a pioneering suffragist, the actress who, at least on screen, would confront intolerance with chin-up common sense. But Hepburn's off-screen politics, such as they were, emanated from more personal and often contradictory standards: Mixed in with her professed approval of independence and strong will was a streak of unreconstructed prudishness, an appetite for indignation, a high level of arrogance, and, in many cases, astonishing naiveté. When Poitier was first taken to meet the actress at her Los Angeles home, he encountered the tough, unsmiling Hepburn that many journalists met in the 1970s and later—the one who knew her own reputation and inwardly delighted in letting people know that they were being judged and, sometimes, found wanting. “Every time I spoke, every response I made, I could imagine a plus and minus column, notations in her mind,” he wrote.
²

But Poitier encountered a far milder version of Hepburn when he arrived at Tracy's home a few days later for a meal she had cooked. As many who knew the couple have noted, Hepburn submerged her personality when she was in Tracy's presence: She would mute her own power and authority and become deferential and doting, letting Tracy take center stage every time. There is a sameness to the anecdotes about Tracy and Hepburn in the 1960s that has little to do with their on-screen sparring, in which she usually gave as good as she got and then some. The stories, often told as examples of her devotion and their mutual affection, generally come with an undertow of anger and abusiveness; they begin with Hepburn expressing an opinion about something and end with Tracy snapping at her, belittling her, cutting her down, or telling her to be quiet.
³

Poitier knew that Hepburn and Tracy were on unfamiliar terrain just trying to get through a dinner with a black man who wasn't serving them. Although he permitted himself some private irritation—“If it had been Paul Newman they were going to do a movie with, would they have checked him out so thoroughly?” he wondered—he made as many allowances as he could for two stars who struck him as “exceedingly decent people.”
⁴
Still, one can only imagine his polite smile as he listened to Hepburn feel her way toward some sort of position on contemporary race relations, a subject on which her tone-deafness could be stunning. “I made a picture in Africa,” she told an interviewer at the time, “and I know that there is one characteristic the Negroes have which is wonderful and basic: the desire and ability to make people feel wonderfully about themselves…. I think that when the bulk of them get out of the rut they've been kept in, they're going to snag all the public relations jobs because they're brilliant about remembering people. When you drive into New York…there's a colored policeman at the [bridge] who says, ‘Miss Hepburn, you're back. How nice.'…This quality is straight out of the jungle; they had it in the jungle when I made
The African Queen
.”
⁵

After the dinner was over and the guests moved to the living room, Tracy told some well-rehearsed anecdotes about his old movies, and Hepburn, according to Poitier, would “listen to each with wide-eyed fascination, as if she were hearing it for the first time.” When she would interrupt, Tracy would cut her off with, “Oh, Katie, just shut up and let me tell the story.”
⁶
By the end of the dinner, Poitier knew that he had passed whatever test he had just been asked to undergo.

Hepburn decided she officially approved of Poitier, albeit on her own cringe-inducing terms. What the actress intended as a gush of praise for her new colleague—“I can't consider Sidney as a Negro; he's not black, he's not white, he's nothing at all as far as color is concerned”
⁷
—represented exactly the attitude that was bringing Poitier under increasingly direct fire from social critics and movie reviewers alike. Much of the anger was coming from black progressives, who were starting to use Poitier's weakness for playing cardboard heroes as a means to attack Hollywood's unwillingness to create stronger black characters. In an essay titled “And You Too, Sidney Poitier!” in his 1966 manifesto,
White Papers for White Americans
, Calvin Hernton complained, “Why can't Sidney Poitier…make love in the movies?…By desexing the Negro, America is denying him his manhood.” Hernton went on to accuse Hollywood of a “systematic attempt to castrate” Poitier or, worse, to make him play “faggots.”
⁸
At the same time, there was no shortage of white commentators who were eager to use Poitier as a vehicle to peddle their own noxious stereotypes. “Where is the Negro American life depicted in movies as it's lived by American Negroes? Where's the child desertion and illegitimacy, the policy games and the bag women?” wrote Burt Prelutsky in the
Los Angeles Times
. “Do you think for a moment that you will ever go to a movie and see Sidney Poitier father an illegitimate child, live off his woman's earnings or mug an old Jew on the subway?” Concluding that “the pendulum” had swung too far, he labeled Poitier a “Negro in white face.”
⁹

Poitier, always conscious of playing to the center of the American moviegoing audience, knew that the center was starting to move, and he was trying to move along with it. He used his growing influence to urge Stanley Kramer and William Rose to toughen his character in
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
, and they added a scene in which Prentice privately confronts his own father about his resistance to the marriage, one of only two moments in the movie when the audience is permitted to overhear a snatch of conversation between two black characters without a white observer present. But Poitier was still hamstrung by three unsolvable problems: Kramer's insistence that his character be so far above reproach that Tracy and Hepburn would not be able to, in her words, consider him as a Negro; the screenplay's gimmicky contradiction of a man independent enough to propose an interracial marriage after a whirlwind courtship but so timid and traditional that he leaves the final decision to his fiancée's father; and the fact that Kramer and Rose wanted the young woman herself to be a blank slate, a middle-aged man's idealization of innocent yet contemporary mid-1960s girlhood.

To that end, they cast the film's final principal role with Katharine Houghton, an untried twenty-one-year-old actress who was the daughter of Hepburn's sister Marion Hepburn Grant. Houghton was, in most ways besides genealogy, an unlikely choice; she had suffered from a severe bout of rheumatic fever as a teenager and went through her adolescence with what she calls “a very limited physical life…. I had been told initially that I would be in a wheelchair by the time I was twenty-one, or dead, so I was always feeling that I was living on borrowed time.” Houghton began acting in student films while at Sarah Lawrence College, realizing that in the short takes required by movies, nobody would be able to see her pronounced limp or “put it together that I was an invalid.”
¹⁰
Kramer always maintained that Houghton was initially suggested to him by Carl Reiner, who was making
Enter Laughing
at Columbia while Kramer was casting and had auditioned her for the comedy, but it's clear that Hepburn's enthusiasm about her niece played a decisive role. Hepburn had, after all, gotten Tracy to do the film, and Kramer knew how much he owed her, although the debt, of course, was never expressly called in. Throughout the making and release of
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
, everyone involved stuck to the same story—Kramer was charmed by the young actress, dumbstruck by her resemblance to Hepburn, and he chose her completely on his own. Clearly, his hand wasn't forced: As a producer, he knew exactly the human-interest magazine stories Houghton's presence would generate. “‘This is a family,'” Kramer's wife, Karen, told him, “‘Why not take the niece? There's a great publicity factor here, with “Aunt Kate” and Katharine Houghton. Why don't you do it?' I was newly married, and we're sometimes most effective at that moment. So he took her.”
¹¹
But there is no doubt about Hepburn's advocacy and involvement: Behind the scenes, she oversaw and approved every detail of Houghton's contract, which came to a grand total of $6,000 and included an option for four more films for Columbia at preset, modest salaries.
¹²

Kramer had looked at other young actresses for the role of Poitier's fiancée; he was interested in Mariette Hartley but didn't think she was a good physical match for Hepburn, and he approached Samantha Eggar, whose high cheekbones and auburn hair would have made her a more than credible choice as Hepburn's daughter.
¹³
But even though production on
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
was not scheduled to begin until March, Eggar saw no end in sight to
Doctor Dolittle
. She also would have been fifty times as expensive as Houghton, and with Tracy's health appearing to worsen by the month, Columbia was not about to do anything to increase its financial risk. “There was nothing hypothetical about it,” says Houghton. “Because Kate was my aunt, I knew, of course, that Spencer really was dying and that it was becoming a dire crisis.”

Just how dire became clear only a few weeks after Tracy and Hepburn's dinner with Poitier. In February, as the last sets at Columbia were being built and some of the supporting actors were coming onto the lot to sign their contracts, Tracy collapsed at his home, so sick from a buildup of fluid in his lungs that paramedics had to come and give him oxygen. He recovered after a few days but told Kramer he didn't think he was up to doing the movie. The director was in San Francisco, already beginning to shoot the scene that opens the film, in which Poitier's and Houghton's characters arrive at the airport from a vacation in Hawaii. “I called Kate, and she said the film had been canceled,” says Houghton. “I thought, well, I had one day—that was fun.”
¹⁴
Production was postponed for a few weeks. It was then that Kramer agreed to put his half-million-dollar salary in escrow and also told Tracy that he wouldn't make the movie without him. Columbia, looking at a reduced budget (including $71,000 in insurance for Tracy that was now canceled), stayed on board.
¹⁵
Tracy rallied and a few days later felt well enough to step back into the project and announce that
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
would be his seventy-eighth and, he said, final film.
¹⁶

 

Eggar wasn't wrong
about
Doctor Dolittle;
what had originally been planned as a brief reunion of the cast for the final shoot in Los Angeles stretched into four more months of production. The delays caused by both the natural and man-made disasters of the location shoots in Castle Combe and St. Lucia had forced the re-creation of lengthy segments of the movie on the 20th Century-Fox lot, and although Richard Fleischer insisted in interviews that the film's budget was holding steady at $15 million,
¹⁷
$18 million was closer to the truth. With panic about
Dolittle
's expenditure and schedule now almost pointless, Jacobs and the studio started killing the messengers; shortly after film editor Marjorie Fowler warned the producer that any guess about a timetable for editing
Dolittle
“quite possibly carries the same validity as a tea-leaf reading,” she was fired.
¹⁸

Rex Harrison and Rachel Roberts, set up in a mansion in Beverly Hills, were both drinking more heavily than ever in what Roberts later called a period of “real disintegration.”
¹⁹
“They had rented a house that my godfather, Jean Negulesco, used to own,” recalls Natalie Trundy, who was by then Arthur Jacobs's fiancée. “There was one night when Rachel Roberts was so drunk that the police picked her up—she had run away, and they found her crawling through the grass, trying to get home. And Rex used to come to the set in the morning with about five martinis in him. It was pathetic.”
²⁰
The couple's problems were becoming dangerously public: They showed up disheveled and disoriented at a tribute to George Cukor one night, Harrison with his toupee stuffed in his jacket pocket; on another occasion, Harrison appalled a room full of the Hollywood establishment—among them William Wyler, Billy Wilder, Jimmy Stewart, and their wives—at a party at the Los Angeles restaurant the Bistro, singing obscene lyrics about his penis to the tune of “I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face” while Roberts, who was not wearing underwear, did handstands.
²¹