Chapter 21
Man on a String (1960)
New decade, old director.
In 1960 I did a film based on the true exploits of a double agent. He was originally an agent for the Soviet Union until the United States found out about him. They said, “You’re going to turn around and be an agent for us,” and he did. I played the spy, Boris Mitrov, and dear Kerwin Mathews was my American contact. We shot the picture in Berlin.
When we started, André De Toth, the director, told us to be very careful because people were being taken off the streets and whisked away into East Germany, where they were never heard from again. He took me into East Berlin before the wall went up.
One day I was doing a scene with a guy on Berlin’s old Embassy Row, where my character asked him, “Can’t we just get out for a minute and have a smoke?”
He said, “Okay.”
So we got out of the car and since I was handcuffed, I asked him for a cigarette.
He gave me a cigarette and I was able to work my lighter, which was actually a small-caliber gun. A pellet went into his neck, he dropped, and I started to run. Across the street were about ten Russian soldiers. Watching the scene, they wondered what the hell was going on. As I started to run, one of them pointed his gun. I stopped and said, “Nein, nein, schauspieler, schauspieler,” which meant “actor” in German. Luckily they understood. It was Vera Cruz all over again! I’m fortunate to have survived my chosen profession.
In the same picture, we had an airplane that was supposed to be from Russia. It had CCCP on the side and all that. Well, they rolled this phony Russian plane out of the hangar. Now, alongside this airport was a row of trees and in those trees the Russians had built supposedly secret observation posts so they could watch the comings and goings of the British personnel who ran the field, and could see into the rooms where the British put information on blackboards. Naturally, they put up a lot of false information for the Russians to copy.
Well, out came this airplane. I swear to God you could actually see the trees trembling like crazy because everybody was going nuts. I could almost hear them saying, “My God, did we take over? What’s happened?”
We were supposed to taxi and take off, but suddenly the British commander came running over to De Toth.
“Excuse me a minute, sir, would you look up there?” the officer said, pointing.
De Toth looked up, and so did I. A Russian fighter plane was circling.
The commander said, “They apparently think we’ve stolen one of their aircraft and are taking it somewhere for study. Your plane wouldn’t get fifteen feet off the ground before it would be dead meat.”
De Toth changed his plans.
Kerwin was just a honey of a guy. Some of you may know him for his three big fantasy films, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, The Three Worlds of Gulliver, and Jack the Giant Killer. He liked acting but never got the breaks that you need to become a star. Not long thereafter he retired and opened a flower shop in San Francisco. He died a few years back.
Soon after we shot our picture the Russians put up their wall. When I returned to Berlin some years later, I climbed a ladder to look over. It was a horrible thing. They had put rollers along the edge so that would-be escapees from East Berlin couldn’t get a grip on the edge They added ball bearings on top in case someone did get on top, and past the barbwire there. The minute you hit the ball bearings you’d make a racket. If you didn’t get shot, you’d slip and fall back.
Seeing that, I swore to myself I’d never complain about the hardships of my chosen profession. And if I haven’t said it before now, let me state for the record: God bless America.
Pay or Die (1960)
This was another true story, about Giuseppe Petrosino, who had been a lieutenant in the New York police force. He had done such a good job cleaning up the Mafia in New York that Teddy Roosevelt and the King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel, thought that they’d like him to take on the Mafia in Palermo.
It’s funny how little things can undo you. Here was this guy who was so careful while he was undercover. He wore a disguise and the gangsters didn’t know what he looked like. Well, evidently, he was heading for the post office box to send off a message to the United States and these Mafioso knew that he was in town. They carried shotguns and went around yelling “Petrosino, Petrosino.”
Without thinking, he said, “yes,” and they shot him full of holes on the Piazza Marina in March of 1909.
The highlight of Pay or Die—which were the words the Italian Black Hand (the forerunner of the Mafia at the turn of the twentieth century in America) would print on a piece of paper and hand to their extortion victims—was when I get pushed in front of a subway train barreling into the station. People still ask me about that scene today.
Pay or Die was one of the great pre-Godfather Mafia movies.
Go Naked in the World (1961)
This melodrama starred Tony Franciosa and Gina Lollobrigida. Tony was all right, but we hated Gina. She was difficult to work with. It got to a point where, one time, Tony ran her right into a post at the bottom of the stairs. I mean, he ran her right into it. Kaboom!
That poor director, Ranald MacDougall. He wanted to make a shot of her walking on the beach as the sun was going down. Everyone kept saying to her, “Come on, come on, the sun is setting.” But she said, “I have to paint my toenails first.” Of course, they lost the shot. And they never would have seen her toes. I guess she needed that to get in character or something.
Gina didn’t know that I could speak Italian. Her husband was telling her in Italian, “You have to give it more, this guy’s got too much balls for you.” But as she cranked it up, so did I. I knew exactly what she was doing.
I never said a word. Then one night after work, I said to her in perfect Italian, “Senora, di buona notte, era il mio piacere funzionare con voi!”—“Good night, senora, it was my pleasure to work with you.”
She turned white down to her painted toes.
Barabbas (1961)
I hadn’t worn a toga in a while. I guess producer Dino De Laurentiis thought the world needed another dose of that when he phoned and asked me to appear in his biblical epic starring Tony Quinn as the criminal who was freed when Jesus was sent to the cross.
There wasn’t much of a part for me. They already had Jack Palance as the bad-boy gladiator and Arthur Kennedy as Pontius Pilate. My then-wife Katy Jurado had been cast, and my old buddy Richard Fleischer was directing. Those were all good reasons to do the picture. I told Dino I’d consider it.
He said, “We’ll give you $25,000.”
That was damn good for what amounted to three-quarters of an hour’s work. I could tell Dino really wanted me, and I decided to push it. I happened to be thumbing through a magazine that had pictures of Ferraris.
Man, I thought, that’s a good-looking car.
I said, “I’ll do it for $25,000 and a Ferrari.”
I could hear Dino gulp over the phone two or three times. But, you know, it meant a lot to pictures in those days to have an all-star cast looking out from those big billboards like the one in Times Square. I was betting he’d bite. And he did.
He said, “Okay, and a Ferrari.”
My American agent said to me later, “Jesus Christ, I think I’m going to have you as my agent!” Yeah, well—you know what I think of agents.
Barabbas came out at the tail end of the biblical cycle, after Ben-Hur and King of Kings had covered that territory in big, hugely popular style. There was no room for an epic but reverent, relatively subdued film about this tortured man who finally discovered Christianity. The movie was a box-office disappointment. I felt bad for Tony, who did some great work, and particularly for Katy, since a hit would have bumped her up a few notches in terms of popularity.
That’s show business. Sometimes, even God can’t help you.
After Barabbas I stayed in Rome to do another Italian-language picture starring Vittorio Gassman, the Italian actor who was married to Shelley Winters. It was called I Briganti Italiani (The Italian Brigands was the American title).
Life imitates art—Katy played my wife in the picture. Our marriage was starting to disintegrate around this time. The pressures of trying to sustain a marriage when both of us were off working were taking their toll.
My most vivid memory, though, had nothing to do with us. One day I was doing this big scene, giving this impassioned speech to a bunch of people under a tree. Suddenly, I stopped.
The director, a pleasant man named Mario Camerini, said, “Why did you stop?”
I said, “When he gets through picking his nose, I’ll go ahead.”
So help me Christ, Gassman was actually picking his nose on camera!