Warner bros, p.18
Warner Bros, page 18
The two actresses were not as old as the novel called for: in 1962, Davis was fifty-four and Crawford fifty-eight. But they had so much in common: their faded eminence—they were both great stars in decline; their involvement with Warners; and the unstoppable legend of their rivalry. However the film turned out, casting the two of them as warring sisters guaranteed media coverage.
Jack Warner had turned the venture down when Aldrich approached him. Was there some tact in the boss that shrank from this sibling cruelty? Or was he nervous about “two old broads” meaning enough at the box office? A new production company, Seven Arts, agreed to make the film, and the boss there, Eliot Hyman, imposed tough terms on the two stars. Crawford did it for $40,000 and ten percent of the producer’s profits. Davis went for $60,000 and five percent of those profits. Aldrich agreed to make the picture for $850,000. After all, it was only the ladies, a house, a beach, and a dead parakeet. It didn’t need to cost much. At which point, Jack Warner agreed to distribute the result. He gave a luncheon where he posed for pictures with the two actresses who had done so much for him. They called him a father figure who had given them grief in the past, but who was their friend again.
The picture opened in October 1962, just as the Cuban missile crisis was subsiding, and it was an event, earning $9 million. The public reveled in the humiliation of the stars and in the notion that these goddesses of a former age were crazy, vicious relics. The actresses prospered on the picture, but they were being admitted to a brand of gloating horror that made fun of them. At the same time, Warners did an honest tough film: Days of Wine and Roses, about liquor. Director Blake Edwards plus stars Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick were all in AA. And the film’s ending stayed grim: Remick walks off into the night, a lost cause. Jack Warner called for a “happy ending,” but Lemmon left town before it could be filmed.
Jack had his own swan song planned, and he meant it to be as lush as Baby Jane had been macabre. From the moment he saw the show on Broadway in 1956, he had loved My Fair Lady. It brought out the singer in him, and he thought it obvious that the show (2,717 performances) was bound to be a smash on screen. He would produce it himself, he promised William Paley, who owned the rights. Jack paid $5.5 million (almost the total cost of Giant) for that privilege, and reckoned on a film that would cost $15 million.11
It was not an easy project. Warner considered getting Vincente Minnelli to direct, but finally he gave the task to George Cukor. Alan Jay Lerner did the script, from his own musical and from the George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion—there was little room for fresh thoughts. But Cukor quarreled with the appointed designer, Cecil Beaton, and the film is heavier-handed than anyone would wish. Jack had thought of Cary Grant for Henry Higgins and even Jimmy Cagney as Doolittle. But then he abided by the stage casting of Rex Harrison and Stanley Holloway.
He would assert himself, or be somebody, over the role of Eliza. Julie Andrews had played the part on stage in ways that defied thought of improvement. She had sung the songs and made them her own. She could have danced all night. But she had not yet done a movie. So Jack chose Audrey Hepburn instead: “There was nothing mysterious or complicated about that decision,” he would say. “With all her charm and ability, Julie Andrews was just a Broadway name known primarily to those who saw the play. But in Clinton, Iowa, and Anchorage, Alaska, and thousands of other cities and towns in our fifty states and abroad you can say Audrey Hepburn, and people instantly know you’re talking about a beautiful and talented star.”12
He agreed to pay Hepburn $1 million when still uncertain whether her voice could carry the songs. Hepburn was under great stress: her marriage to Mel Ferrer was ending; she felt the burden of matching the stage success falling on her shoulders; and then Jack told her that her voice was not good enough. Marni Nixon would dub the songs.
The movie of My Fair Lady opened on November 8, 1964. Its $17 million budget turned into earnings of $70 million. It won Jack and Warners the third Best Picture Oscar of his regime. George Cukor got the Oscar as Best Director. But Audrey Hepburn was not even nominated. In the meantime, Disney had taken the chance of giving Julie Andrews a movie debut, in a picture called Mary Poppins. At the Oscar ceremonies where My Fair Lady won Best Picture, and Audrey presented the Best Actor Oscar to Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews received the actress Oscar. From the stage, with that lovely smile of hers, she said how much she owed to Jack Warner, “for making it all possible.” He had to grin.
He had been building a grand finale for himself. To coincide with My Fair Lady and what he anticipated as its success, he compiled and published his memoir, My First Hundred Years in Hollywood (1965). It was not a reliable work: it omitted altogether the coup in which he had taken over from Harry; it told uncertain stories and delivered one-liners instead of being an attempt at history. Jack had not written all the book, but he had read it because he longed to believe it. It was a 332-page press release that ended on a vague embrace for family and strangers in the dark. My Fair Lady, he said, was, for the brothers,
the end product of their dreams, the reward for their years of disappointment and hunger and work and want. It belongs to Ben Warner, weary on his cobbler’s bench, hocking his watch and his horse because he knew his sons were right. It belongs to Pearl Warner, cooking and washing and scrubbing floors and enduring life in a peddler’s wagon so her kids could hold their heads high. It belongs to Sam and Harry and Albert and Milton [a brother who had died in 1915] and Dave [another brother, who had died in 1939] in exchange for what they paid to make the promise of Warner Brothers come true. [The five sisters were omitted. Women are the final, outcast immigrants.]
And it belongs to you who believed in us, for without you and all the rest I could not have told you about my first hundred years in Hollywood.13
The End? Exit music? Kol Nidre?
Not quite. There is a coda to the book, for Jack or the publisher had persuaded Ann to add a page: “In the more than thirty years I have been with Jack I have seen a man, supposedly shy and aloof, go out of his way to give courage and confidence to so many men and women as they played their part in building the name of Warner Brothers.”14
Presumably, that grouping would have to include Jackie Park, the mistress Jack had taken to the London opening of My Fair Lady. He had introduced her that evening as having “a heart of gold and a snatch to match.”15 There are lines that stick in your head. A few years later he dropped Jackie and gave her a parting check for $5,000.
Jack L. Warner did sell the studio, in 1966, to Seven Arts, with $32 million coming to him personally. He rejoiced in that sum, but observers noted that he was soon lost with so little to do and no one to compete with. He attempted to preside over Bonnie and Clyde, which he understood was a gangster picture, even if one where the dame fired guns, too. The old man was unimpressed by the movie. He couldn’t quite see it or hear it, let alone work out its purpose.
Its star and producer, Warren Beatty, took the film to Jack’s house on Angelo Drive to show it to him, but Warner started going to the bathroom after the first reel. What is this stuff? the boss wondered. Beatty told him, “It’s an homage to Warners gangster films.” And Jack fired back, “What the hell is an homage?”16
Bonnie and Clyde was a rhapsody for beautiful kids in a stricken land who just wanted to be somebody—it was the immigrant dream, the one that parents, priests, rabbis, and teachers had advised against. But this time the kids robbed banks and shot anyone trying to stop them; they discovered love or sex and having their pictures taken; and if they were headed for a shoot-out where they were turned to chaff and fragments—wasn’t that going to be the best death scene ever? The insolence was a philosophy in which the old hope for law and order was gone with the wind. It was the explosiveness that had always been hanging on Jolson’s “Wait a minute!” or Leslie Crosbie’s being ready to fire a hundred shots if her gun had had them.
To the racing soundtrack of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” Bonnie and Clyde opened in 1967, and became a success after initial dismay gave way to enthusiasm, and after Beatty had persuaded Warners to sell the film with conviction, because he was a new somebody. In London, Beatty told the projectionist to play the gunfire extra loud. But Jack never understood how close to his old heart the film was. He was losing his touch. In the same year, his “personal production” of Camelot (directed by Joshua Logan) was a disappointment. Jack chose Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave, instead of Richard Burton and Julie Andrews, who had done it on stage.
Albert Warner died in Miami in November 1967 after a day at the track. He went home, sat down in front of the TV and had a stroke.
Jack died on September 9, 1978, after strokes had left him blind and helpless. He was eighty-six, and he didn’t recognize people. Only the ghost of Harry might have revived him. Jack could be a jerk—he couldn’t be much else—but nobody’s perfect, and he had led and bamboozled the best studio there ever was. If there were bodies left in the streets, there always had been in Warner pictures.
Warner Brothers went on; you can say it’s still there, in movies, television, music, and eternal branding. But the studio system is gone, and no one makes its movies now. Warner Bros had its share of trash, but few of its films were boring or pretentious. For a moment, they told our story as well as their contemporaries, those nifty automobiles, good for a getaway or taking a sweetheart to the beach. With luck, you were young at the right time—1927 to 1967, more or less—and you were as naïve and cocksure as Cagney, Bette, or Bugs, top of the world and horny.
America has become a tedious doom-ridden country now. But in those precious years it hated to be boring. It would kiss you if it hadn’t just washed its hair.
NOTES
1. An Introduction
1. On Gentleman’s Agreement, see Steven Bach, Dazzler: The Life of Moss Hart (2001), 276; Elia Kazan: A Life (1988), 331–34; Mel Gussow, Don’t Say Yes Until I Finish Talking: A Biography of Darryl F. Zanuck (1971), 158.
2. John Gregory Dunne, The Studio (1968), 242.
3. Ibid., 244.
4. Gussow, Don’t Say Yes, xvii.
5. Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles (1992), ed. Jonathan Rosenbaum, 296.
6. Ibid., 274–75.
7. Director Edward Sutherland’s Columbia Oral History quotes Chaplin saying, “I think I might have Jewish blood. I notice that my characteristics are very Semitic, my gestures are, my thinking is certainly along money lines.” This is quoted in Kenneth S. Lynn, Charlie Chaplin and His Times (1997), 20.
8. In Alan LeMay’s original novel, “Ethan” Edwards is named Amos. Apparently the movie rejected one Jewish name for another because Amos was thought likely to remind viewers of Amos ’n’ Andy. See Glenn Frankel, The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend (2013), 256.
2. The Greatest Moment?
1. Stephen Karnot, reader’s report, December 11, 1941, quoted in Aljean Harmetz, Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca (1992), 17. See also Noah Isenberg, We’ll Always Have Casablanca (2017).
2. Hal Wallis, with Charles Higham, Starmaker: The Autobiography of Hal Wallis (1980).
3. Kati Marton, Great Escape (2007), in which Michael Curtiz is one of nine case studies of Hungarians who left Hitler’s Europe.
4. Don Siegel, A Siegel Film: An Autobiography (1996).
5. Casey Robinson interview, Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden Age (1986), ed. Pat McGilligan, 306–8.
6. Julius J. Epstein interview, Backstory (1986), 185.
7. Ibid., 189–90.
8. Harmetz, Round Up the Usual Suspects, 138–60.
9. Hal Wallis to Steve Trilling, February 5, 1942, Inside Warner Bros, 1935–1951 (1985), ed. Rudy Behlmer, 199.
10. Sylvia Plath, “Daddy,” Ariel (1965), 49–51.
3. What Are Brothers For?
1. Elia Kazan, A Life (1988), 534.
2. Kazan’s ugliness is his own claim. In A Life, he says this (41): “I remember wondering what the hell was wrong with me anyway. My looks? My goddamn foreign looks? Those Anglos making the choices, what did they think? That I was a Jew boy? Yes, I looked like one. Was that it? Jews and blacks weren’t taken into fraternities at Williams in 1926. Or was it something about my character? Was I clearly a freak of some kind? Was it something I couldn’t see or understand that made me so absolutely unacceptable? My jittery sexuality—had they sensed that? Or was it something simpler, like my bowlegs, my acne, my big butt? What?” All those questions pile up in the resentment felt by Cal in East of Eden.
3. Jack Warner, My First Hundred Years in Hollywood (1965), 15.
4. The family narrative is assembled from these books: Warner, My First Hundred Years in Hollywood; Cass Warner Sperling, The Brothers Warner: The Intimate Story of a Hollywood Studio Family Dynasty (1998); Richard Schickel and George Perry, You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros Story (2008); Bob Thomas, Clown Prince of Hollywood: The Antic Life and Times of Jack L. Warner (1990).
5. This aphorism has many sources or versions, from La Rochefoucauld to Gore Vidal, and from Somerset Maugham to Francis Coppola (whose sense of brothers animates the first two parts of The Godfather).
6. Leo Rosten, from his Columbia Oral History, quoted in Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (1988), 121.
7. Joshua Logan, Movie Stars, Real People, and Me (1978), 1. Benny had evidence: The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945), for Warners, starring Benny, had been a famous flop.
8. Gabler, An Empire of Their Own, 147.
9. On Lina Basquette, Sperling, The Brothers Warner, 343; Lina Basquette, Lina: DeMille’s Godless Girl (1990).
10. Sperling, The Brothers Warner, 207.
11. Mel Gussow, Don’t Say Yes Until I Finish Talking: A Biography of Darryl F. Zanuck (1971), 36.
4. Family Dinner
1. The dinner is described in Cass Warner Sperling, The Brothers Warner: The Intimate Story of a Hollywood Studio Family Dynasty (1998), 29–31, and it is referred to by Jack Warner, My First Hundred Years in Hollywood (1965), 52–54.
2. Sperling, The Brothers Warner, 31.
3. William Wyer said, “To get the full impact of the revolver being fired, I thought everything should be very quiet first.” See Axel Madsen, William Wyler (1973), 203.
4. David Weddle, “If They Move . . . Kill ’Em!”: The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah (1994), 362.
5. Mustache
1. Jack Warner, My First Hundred Years in Hollywood (1965), 53.
2. Ibid., 283–84.
3. Ibid., 87–88.
4. Ibid., 61.
5. Norman Mailer, The Deer Park (1955), chapter 20. Mailer spent time in Hollywood when his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, attracted movie interest. After several missed chances, including a Charles Laughton script, it ended up, directed by Raoul Walsh, as a Warner Bros picture in 1958.
6. Jack Warner to Hal Wallis, March 8, 1934; Inside Warner Bros, 1935–1951 (1985), ed. Rudy Behlmer, 15.
7. Warner, My First Hundred Years in Hollywood, 129.
8. John McCabe, Cagney: A Biography (1997), 89. The story goes that Jack Warner and an associate were once talking about Cagney in front of him, unaware that the actor understood some Yiddish from several years in show business. So, ever after, Cagney relished calling Jack the shvontz. The story is irresistible, but it requires that we believe Jack really could speak Yiddish or Hebrew. In My First Hundred Years, he boasts that as a boy he “had no interest in studying the history of the Hebrews or their language” (17). Harry could speak Hebrew, but Jack pulled the beard of the rabbi meant to teach him, and never saw the man again.
6. For Liberty?
1. Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (1988), 129–31.
2. Cass Warner Sperling, The Brothers Warner: The Intimate Story of a Hollywood Studio Family Dynasty (1998), 60–65.
3. Ibid.
4. Jack Warner, My First Hundred Years in Hollywood (1965), 90.
7. Rinty
1. Mel Gussow, Don’t Say Yes Until I Finish Talking: A Biography of Darryl F. Zanuck (1971), 16.
2. Ibid., 17.
3. Ibid., 21. See Darryl Francis Zanuck, Habit and Other Short Stories (1923).
4. Susan Orlean, Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend (2011), 62.
5. Ibid., 11.
8. Mama, Darlin’
1. Jack Warner, My First Hundred Years in Hollywood (1965), 181.
2. Ibid., 179.
3. Scott Eyman, The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution, 1926–1930 (1997), 129.
4. Quoted ibid.
5. Cass Warner Sperling, The Brothers Warner: The Intimate Story of a Hollywood Studio Family Dynasty (1998), 125.
6. Ernst Lubitsch to Harry Warner, January 29, 1926, Inside Warner Bros, 1935–1951 (1985), ed. Rudy Behlmer, 336.
7. Harry Warner to Jack Warner, January 25, 1926, ibid., 37.
8. See Gene Fowler, Good Night, Sweet Prince (1944); Margot Peters, The House of Barrymore (1990).
9. The Memoirs of Will H. Hays (1955), 390.
10. Ibid. 391.
11. Warner, My First Hundred Years in Hollywood, 174–75.
12. See Alban Emley, Mistah Jolson (1951), 47.
13. Eyman, The Speed of Sound, 11–22.
14. Mel Gussow, Don’t Say Yes Until I Finish Talking: A Biography of Darryl F. Zanuck (1971), 41.
9. Now
1. Casey Robinson interview, Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden Age (1986), ed. Pat McGilligan, 297–98.
2. Darryl F. Zanuck, The Hollywood Reporter, December 1932, quoted in Inside Warner Bros, 1935–51 (1985), ed. Rudy Behlmer, 9.
3. I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, screenplay (1981), ed. John O’Connor, 35–36.
