Pictures at a Revolution (49 page)

But just as Poitier's success was being widely heralded, he was the subject of a frontal assault in
The New York Times
. On Sunday, September 10, the newspaper ran an essay by Clifford Mason, an African American aspiring playwright who occasionally wrote theater criticism, called “Why Does White America Love Sidney Poitier So?”—a sustained attack not just on Poitier's roles, but on the actor himself. Mason cited
A Patch of Blue
(“Probably the most ridiculous film Poitier ever made…he's running his private branch of the ASPCA, the Black Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Blind White Girls, the BSPCBWG”),
The Bedford Incident
(in which he played “a black correspondent who went around calling everyone sir. Did anyone ever see Gary Cooper or Greg Peck call anyone sir when they played foreign correspondents?”), and
To Sir, with Love
(“Instead of putting a love interest into a story that had none, they took it out”). Mason called Poitier's career “a schizophrenic flight from historical fact that [imagines] that the Negro is best served by…taking on white problems and a white man's sense of what's wrong with the world…. All this Mr. Poitier endures, and more, without a murmur of protest…. In all of these films he has been a showcase nigger.

“White critics will…applaud every ‘advance' in movies…as so much American-style democratic goodwill,” wrote Mason. “Gradualism may have some place in politics. But in art it just represents a stale, hackneyed period.” Poitier, he predicted at the end of his tirade, would never break free of roles in which he was “nonplussed by white arrogance…but, because of his innate goodness, finally [makes] that fateful decision to solve the problem for ‘them,' good nigger that he is.”
⁴⁶

Times
editor Seymour Peck's decision to publish the article with its racial epithets intact was a minor radical-chic moment, a way of inviting an angry black man into the homes of the paper's white readers, but its real effect was to expose, and deepen, the rift that had grown between Poitier and a younger, more militant black cultural intelligentsia. The week after the article ran, Poitier was attending a high school play in Harlem at the request of a friend, and Mason sat next to him, introduced himself, and asked if he had read the piece. “I want[ed] to say, ‘Yes, mother-fucker, I read your article,'” wrote Poitier in
This Life
. “Instead I say, ‘Oh, yes, I did.' Period.”
⁴⁷
Poitier was determined to avoid a confrontation, but he couldn't let go of his anger for months. He was terribly wounded by the story and furious at Mason's decision to lay “the film industry's transgressions at my feet,” but at the same time, he knew the arguments Mason was making represented the thinking of a portion of black America that was tired of compromises and half measures and was growing larger and stronger by the day. He paced his living room, reading the piece aloud and complaining to his friends, “Some day people will realize that I'm doing my part…. How long do you think I'd last if I came on like Stokely Carmichael or Eldridge Cleaver?”
⁴⁸
“It was crushing to him to be attacked as an Uncle Tom,” says Katharine Houghton. “That kind of thing just tore him apart.”
⁴⁹

Forty years later, Mason expresses a degree of regret about the article. “I was trying to inject a sense into my own people that we have to be less happy about
seeming
advantages instead of real achievement,” he says. “But I sort of jumped all over Sidney because I wanted him to be Humphrey Bogart when he was really Cary Grant. I wanted him to be a personality type that he wasn't, and that, of course, was unfair. But that role that Sidney always played—the black person with dignity who worries about the white people's problems—you don't play that part over and over again unless you're comfortable with that kind of suffering.”
⁵⁰

Mason's article, Poitier said later, started a “deluge” that steadily eroded his image among young black Americans and critics on the left. His acceptance by white moviegoers was used as evidence of how out of step his movies were with the needs and frustrations of his own people. Even journalists sympathetic to Poitier were starting to portray the actor as being aloof from the contemporary realities of the late 1960s; almost every profile and article made a point of referring to his Central Park West penthouse and its luxurious trappings, as if he were at an ivory-tower remove from the revolution taking place in the streets below. And the new level of success Poitier had achieved opened a floodgate of resentment among his own colleagues, who had kept silent when he himself was still struggling for parity with white movie stars but now demanded more from him than pleas for patience. Some of them wanted to know why doors weren't opening for more African American performers; to them, Poitier's career trajectory seemed to be creating new opportunities for no one but Poitier himself. “I'm tired of hearing Sidney say, ‘I'll do this
some
time,'” said a black actor after sitting in Poitier's living room and listening to him argue that his success would eventually benefit everyone. “It's always
some
time. What's the matter with right now?”
⁵¹
Even Harry Belafonte, sometime friend, sometime rival, raised the possibility, however obliquely, that Poitier had sold out. “A lot of people have made their bargains with the devil,” he told the
Los Angeles Times
. “Marlon has made his choice. Sidney has made his choice.”
⁵²
He didn't elaborate on what he thought those choices were.

“I represent ten million people in this country, and millions more in Africa…and I'm not going to do anything they can't be proud of,” Poitier said at a press conference to promote the start of production of
For Love of Ivy
. “Wait till there are six of us—then one of us can play villains all the time…. First, we've got to live down the kind of parts we've had all these years.” Poitier was referring, he said, to “frightened, bug-eyed maids and shuffling butlers.”
⁵³
But it was his own résumé of antiseptic, nonconfrontational role models that was drawing fire. The actor Brock Peters said publicly that Poitier's recent hits “don't go much further historically than, say,
The Defiant Ones
ten years ago”
⁵⁴
and suggested that Poitier was complicit in his own on-screen desexualization.

For the first time, Poitier agreed to take a role that departed from his spotless image: He would play the leader of a group of black revolutionaries who masterminds a payroll robbery in Universal's
The Lost Man
. But while the mainstream press focused on the fact that he would receive a career-high $750,000 for the role,
⁵⁵
Poitier felt a deep pessimism about his own prospects. If
In the Heat of the Night
's Virgil Tibbs had not assuaged the critics who faulted him for his on-screen passivity, he had little doubt what they would make of
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.
For fifteen years, Poitier had fought a battle for acceptance in an industry that was virtually closed to black people, and he had, just a year earlier, believed that
For Love of Ivy
would represent a giant step forward, a movie in which he could at last play a black man with a healthy libido and a romantic and professional life that had nothing to do with the white world. Now, he sensed it would be too little, too late. Throughout the fall of 1967, as one story after another appeared celebrating his breakthrough in mainstream Hollywood, Poitier felt, with growing certainty, that “my career as a leading man in Hollywood was nearing its end.”
⁵⁶

T
he Mann Theatre in Minneapolis was a good-luck charm for Dick Zanuck. In 1965, he and Robert Wise had flown to Minnesota with a print of
The Sound of Music
for a sneak preview at Ted Mann's big road-show playhouse. The city was in the middle of a blizzard so terrible that Zanuck and Wise wondered if anybody would show up. “A sneak was still a real sneak back then,” says Zanuck. “You didn't advertise the picture, but you tried to pick a theater that was showing a similar movie so that you'd get a friendly audience, and we'd usually leak what movie we were showing to a local disc jockey to get the word out.” Zanuck cheered up a little when he saw a long line of Minnesotans lined up outside the Mann, bundled against the snow but determined to get in. The movie got a standing ovation before its first intermission. “We were all delirious,” he says. “We came back to the hotel and waited in my suite, Bobby Wise and some of the executives and distribution guys, everyone from the picture. We got drunk and we waited for the comment cards to arrive.” About four hundred audience members had written down their reactions. “Getting that many was a good sign,” says Zanuck, “because when they like the picture, they'll take the time to write a card. By the time we got them, we were all pretty smashed. We divided them up and everybody started reading them off: ‘Excellent! Excellent! Excellent! Excellent! Excellent!' In my pile, there was one ‘Very Good.' I was so tanked up that I got enraged—I wanted to call Ted Mann and find out if there was any way of tracing who could have possibly written the card. We were living in such a stupefied world with that kind of hit.”
¹

By September 1967, when Zanuck, Arthur Jacobs and Natalie Trundy, Richard Fleischer, Leslie and Yvonne Bricusse, and the Fox brass all flew up to Minneapolis to preview
Doctor Dolittle
in the same theater, stupefaction, superstition, and liquor seemed to be an appropriate set of operating principles when it came to the fate of the movie. For the last several months, Zanuck had allowed the journalist John Gregory Dunne to have access to all but a few meetings and conversations at 20th Century-Fox for a book he was planning to write on a year in the life of a movie studio, and Jacobs, who had recovered from his heart attack and thrown himself into micromanaging every aspect of
Dolittle
's release, proved to be irresistible material for Dunne. Jacobs had lost thirty pounds since his illness but was otherwise the same chain-smoking, hard-drinking, fast-talking operator that he had always been. Dunne captured him proudly tooling around the Fox lot on a golf cart, showing off his new sports car, and boasting about the $12 million that fifty licensees had committed to promoting
Dolittle
on everything from cereal boxes to bottles of chocolate soda. He witnessed Jacobs's zeal in pushing Fox's “song plugger” Happy Goday to get dozens of singers to record songs from the movie before its release, including Bobby Darin, Andy Williams, and Tony Bennett. Goday even convinced Sammy Davis Jr., who apparently had gotten over his hard feelings about being dropped from the film two years earlier, to record an entire album of
Dolittle
music.
²

Finishing the movie had dragged on into midsummer, as Lionel Newman, the cantankerous head of Fox's music department, tried to fix one dead spot in the picture after another by patching scenes together with a score he had never much liked in the first place. Newman treated Jacobs with semiaffectionate contempt: “Hello, lardass,” he would say when the producer showed up on the recording stage. “Listen, lardass, is there any chance we can get a longer shot in the percussion sequence?” Newman particularly disliked “Talk to the Animals,” which he called a “lousy song”;
³
in fact, nobody who had worked on the film thought much of it. Most of the
Dolittle
team assumed that the breakout single from the movie would be the ballad “When I Look into Your Eyes”—that is, if listeners could ignore the fact that in the movie, Harrison croons the love song to a seal that he had dressed as an old lady just before he flings the animal over a steep cliff into the ocean, presumably sending her on a long plunge toward freedom.

In Dunne's 1969 book,
The Studio
, a classic of movie business reportage, he offers a bleakly funny account of the moment that everybody's hopes for
Doctor Dolittle
came crashing to earth. The Fox team had set off for Minnesota with high expectations and immense anxiety. “All I know is that when we go to Minneapolis, I'm going to take along a big bottle of Miltown and slip it into all that vodka you drink so much of,” Jacobs's fiancée, Natalie Trundy, told him.
⁴
The collective nervousness was more than understandable.
Dolittle
had become Fox's most expensive movie since
Cleopatra
. Although Darryl Zanuck didn't fly out for the screening, everyone else at Fox was there, filling three rows of the theater.

Dick Zanuck knew the movie was in for trouble as soon as he saw the audience, which included almost no children. He hoped that perhaps what he was witnessing was just a reflection of the fact that it was a nighttime screening. Perhaps word hadn't gotten out that they were showing an adaptation of a children's classic, because if it had, and this was an indication of the lack of interest kids had in it…The lights went down, and the movie, which ran close to three hours, began. In Dunne's description, the audience was “unresponsive” and “muted.” “The second half of the picture did not play much better than the first,” he wrote. “When the house lights came on, the only prolonged clapping came from the three rows where the Studio people were sitting.”
⁵

By the time Zanuck and his twenty-eight-man team returned to their rooms at the Radisson, it was painfully obvious that
Doctor Dolittle
was no
Sound of Music
. On the surface, the comment cards might have seemed encouraging: 148 moviegoers rated the movie “Excellent,” 76 rated it “Good,” and 42 called it “Fair.” (“Poor” was not offered as an option.)
⁶
But Zanuck knew the results were terrible: A massively expensive movie that almost half of its first audience declined to label as excellent was all but doomed. As is often the case after a bad preview, gloom quickly gave way to an atmosphere of frantic, hypercheerful rationalization. Kids would turn the movie into a hit, if kids could just be gotten into the theater, and their enthusiasm would spread to their parents! This wasn't a death sentence, just a heads-up that they could make the movie even better! The problem wasn't the movie, it was the audience—it was just a dead house! The problem
was
the movie, but it was nothing that couldn't be fixed with a few trims here and there—it wouldn't take much to guarantee that the next set of comment cards wouldn't include the phrase
Too long
, which seemed to be an issue for a surprising number of people.

The Fox team left Zanuck's suite and went back to their own rooms, where they got a few hours of sleep, or tried to. “There was no point,” says Zanuck. “Nobody could sleep.” At 5:00 in the morning, Zanuck called them all back to his room. It was time for a more sober, no-bull round of decision making.
⁷
Even though the image of Rex Harrison riding a giraffe had made the cover of
Life
magazine, the long prologue in which it appeared would have to go. Leslie Bricusse would write a new song for Anthony Newley to sing with a group of kids, something that would enliven the movie's second half and underscore its appeal to young viewers. Richard Fleischer was tasked with spinning the preview results to Rex Harrison, who was apt to use any bad news as an excuse for a drunken tantrum and whose cooperation would be needed at various premieres and benefits to promote the movie. They would find a way to salvage at least one shot of the giraffe. And then they would retest the picture. Preferably in a city as far from Minneapolis as possible.

Everyone returned to Los Angeles that afternoon comforted by the knowledge that at least they now had a game plan. But Dick Zanuck knew it wouldn't make a bit of difference. “When a picture previews badly, there's very little you can do,” he says. “You can make it a better picture by putting some things in or taking some things out, but you can't save it. The hand has been dealt, and there's no way of putting the cards back in the deck.”
⁸

“This is to reassure you that there is absolutely no cause for any concern whatsoever,” Fleischer wrote to Harrison in a three-page single-spaced letter in which he cheerfully described the preview as “a very enlightening experience” and then told his star every detail of every change they would have to make, most of which involved the removal of footage in which Harrison appeared. “When you [preview] an original musical, it is really a New Haven opening…. After a great deal of analysis and agonizing reappraisal we came to the conclusion that the main offender was our lovely prologue…. What we have done is to remove approximately 7
¹
/
²
minutes of film that were really slowing us down terribly.”
⁹
Zanuck, Jacobs, and Fleischer ended up cutting a good deal more than that, peeling off verses from several songs that threatened to slow the movie's already leisurely pace to a crawl.

Harrison, predictably, exploded—he was particularly bitter about the trimming of his final song, “Something in Your Smile.” “Cannot have music department butchering any characterization of Dolittle by eliminating verse,” he cabled Zanuck. “Surely you cannot be in such time trouble that you cannot allow the leading character to round himself off and complete his statement.”
¹⁰
Zanuck cabled Harrison back immediately, telling him that he had “sensed a restlessness during the verse” among audience members and assuring him that “the ending of the picture and your characterization plays much better without it.” Attempting to calm his star, he reminded him that “as you know, I have ruthlessly cut Newley.”
¹¹
A somewhat mollified Harrison wrote back, “I see your point,” but grumbled, “For two years I was promised a tour de force number…comparable to ‘I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face'”
¹²
and never got it.

In late October, Zanuck previewed a shorter version of
Doctor Dolittle
in San Francisco with results that, as he feared, showed no change in the audience's response: The film's “Excellent” rating, which had been 56 percent in Minneapolis, was now 57 percent. One night later, he showed a significantly shorter cut in San Jose, and the “Excellent” rating improved to 63 percent.
¹³
Zanuck decided that the San Jose version, which ran 151 minutes, would be the final cut of
Doctor Dolittle
. By then, the internal cheerleading was ramping up again: Harrison suddenly announced that he was “relieved to have lost that number”
¹⁴
from the end of the movie, and Darryl Zanuck, who had bluntly warned his son two years earlier about the risks involved in making the picture, offered warm words of reassurance, telling Dick that “it is my prediction that even though at the beginning adult audiences may not break down the doors to get in it will eventually end up by having every child in America insist that their parents take them at least three times.”
¹⁵

By then, Dick Zanuck knew that they were all whistling past a graveyard. In October, Warner Brothers had opened Joshua Logan's $17 million, three-hour
Camelot
, the pride of Jack Warner's retirement and a picture that the studio had once hoped would play first-run engagements of a year or more in some theaters. Reviews were largely terrible, with
The New York Times
slamming its “dull and pretentious patches of realism and romantic cliché” and “grossly whimsy-whamsey Disneyland setting”
¹⁶
and
Time
writing that the movie, “which should have opened up the drama, shuts it down instead…. Even the makeup seems to have been applied by an amateur.”
¹⁷
But far worse news was the fact that audiences had absolutely no interest in going to see it—the film made back barely a third of its budget in domestic rentals. The Broadway pedigree that had created such high awareness for
My Fair Lady
and
The Sound of Music
did nothing for
Camelot
, which turned out to be one of the biggest financial failures of the late 1960s. Its demise sent a shudder through the major studios, which were in production or deep into preproduction with more than a dozen large-scale musicals that were slated to open between 1968 and 1970.

“You look back now and ask, how could you have been so stupid?” says Zanuck. “
Doctor Dolittle
was conceived in a period of euphoria. We were all riding a musical wave that we didn't realize was going to come crashing down on the beach all at once. Sure, there were probably signs and warnings out there, but you're already so committed financially and emotionally that it's very hard to pull the plug on these big undertakings. Thinking of it now, we should have sent the songs out before we made the picture to see if any of them worked! I like Leslie very much, but outside of one or two songs, there wasn't anything really spectacular.” For Zanuck, there was no turning back: He had already committed 20th Century-Fox to
Star!
(which, he consoled himself, at least had Julie Andrews as one of its assets) and
Hello, Dolly!
(which at least had a familiar score). “But none of that mattered,” he said. “When the big musical ended, it ended with a thud. And we got hit hard.”
¹⁸