Chapter 25
Contrary to popular wisdom, being on TV didn’t prevent me from going back to movies. See, Hollywood has this idea that if audiences can see you for free at home, they won’t pay to see you in the movies. That didn’t stop Bruce Willis or John Travolta from making the jump, but it’s still “common wisdom” out here.
While I was still doing McHale’s Navy I shot The Flight of the Phoenix outside of Yuma, Arizona. Bob Aldrich directed and Jimmy Stewart starred. It was a taut picture about a bunch of guys trying to get out of the desert after a plane crash. It was a clever movie, not only in terms of plot but also character: every crewmember personified the attributes of a nation that had been involved in World War II.
Jimmy Stewart was just wonderful. Like all the old pros—Spencer Tracy, James Cagney, Gary Cooper—he knew his lines and even when he wasn’t on camera, he was there to act with you. A lot of stars just go to their trailer and let a script girl read the lines. Not him. He was always hanging around; you couldn’t go too far because it was the middle of the desert, but I’ve heard he did that on every movie he made. God, I envied him, though: he made it look so easy. I know it wasn’t. He studied his lines and he rehearsed with the rest of us. But when it came out, it was as though he were saying the lines for the first time.
It was great to be working with Bob Aldrich again. However, something happened between us that hadn’t happened before or since. I was doing a scene with Peter Finch, whose character was about to set out across the desert. My character wanted to go with him. He said I was needed at the wreck and I went a little nuts, starting to fight everyone. Finally, they held me and I settled down.
When we finished the scene, I heard a kind of a strangled cry: “Cut!” I looked over at Bob and he was crying like a baby. The scene had really affected him.
He said, “Would you mind trying it again?”
I said, “No, not at all. Is there anything you want me to do?”
He said, “No. It was just so goddamn good I have to see it again.”
So we did it over and he cried again. It was amazing.
I have to say, I don’t get it when men are bashful about showing emotion. I’ve had it happen many times in my life, where I’ll be talking about someone who did something kind or brave, or someone who is no longer with us, or who did some incredible piece of work. I’ll get choked up and start to weep. Often, I have to stop what I’m saying because everybody else gets all choked up too, because they’re right there with me.
I believe in showing emotions, showing that you have a heart. I cried doing that scene in the movie because that’s how I felt. When you can make your audience—which includes your director—feel it, too, you’re doing what an actor is supposed to do.
What a person should do.
The Dirty Dozen (1967)
Some of the most fun I’ve had on movie sets was with my buddy Lee Marvin. When it was Lee and Bob Aldrich, with Charlie Bronson thrown in for good measure, it was pure heaven.
Need I say it? The Dirty Dozen was pure heaven—though not at first.
I was on an airplane coming back from New York, where I’d been doing some promotional things for McHale’s Navy. My agent at the time, Ronnie Lief, had come with me.
We were going over some business when Ronnie said, “MGM is going to be shooting a picture called The Dirty Dozen over in England and I’m going to see if I can get you on it.”
I said, “That’s great, who’s directing?”
He said, “Bob Aldrich.”
Ronnie didn’t have to do any arm-twisting to get me into the picture. Luckily, the shoot was scheduled during a McHale’s Navy hiatus. What a project that was. Lee played an army major who had to assemble a team of cons, real misfits, for a suicide mission during World War II. It turned out to be my most successful film to date. If anyone needed proof that audiences could accept me as something other than Quinton McHale, The Dirty Dozen was it.
I’d married Donna Rancourt in 1965. In the summer of 1966, I took her and our two young kids, Sharon and Cris, with me to England.
I’d never advise anyone to travel that way, carrying your family with you when you’ve got to work. I had costume fittings and lines to learn and rehearsals, starting at once, but I also had to find an apartment for them, close to stores and museums and theaters. I was nearly burned out before we started!
Unlike the States, you’re allowed to drink on movie sets in England. Because of that, I saw a side of Lee Marvin I’d never seen. Lee was drinking up pretty good from noon till night. He said he was still celebrating from having won his Best Actor Oscar as the drunk gunfighter in Cat Ballou. I don’t know. That had happened about three or four months before. I wondered if he was taking that part too close to heart!
He and I were standing near a wall talking when a crew member went by from our group and said, “I wonder what two Academy Award winners have to say to each other?”
Without missing a beat, Lee looked up and said, “You’ll never know,” and went right on talking.
I was flabbergasted. I’d never seen Lee cut someone down like that. The poor guy just died right on the spot.
It got worse.
We were rehearsing one day and we got through with my stuff so Aldrich called to have Jim Brown brought onto the set.
Lee said, “Yeah, bring in the nigger.”
Well, there was a long silence and then Aldrich said to Lee, “Would you mind stepping into my office for a moment?”
Lee was feeling pretty good and he said, “Sure.”
The two of them went to the small production office in the corner of the soundstage. They came out about ten minutes later. Lee was absolutely sober from that minute forth. Never a demeaning word or anything on his breath when he was working. I don’t know if Jim ever heard about what Lee said. Probably not. The former football star was not someone you wanted to cross.
After Bob Aldrich screened the movie for the execs at MGM, he was told that he could win the Oscar for Best Director for the film if he cut out the scene of Jim Brown dropping hand grenades into the bomb shelter. The scene had a lot of the suits uneasy—it ispretty brutal and they were afraid the critics would crucify him. Aldrich, God bless him, never cared much what the critics had to say. The scene stayed in the picture.
Things went fine after that and we all had a ball. It shows in the finished film. Even though most of the cast ends up under a pile of rocks, audiences remember the movie fondly and it’s one they always want to talk to me about, a real classic.
You’re lucky if you get one of those in your career, a classic. I’ve had several. Like I said, I’m a lucky man!
The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968)
I was reunited with Peter Finch and Bob Aldrich for this one, though it didn’t work out as well as the others. Peter was playing a megalomaniacal film director and Kim Novak was his protégée, a young starlet.
Kim had to wear a purple wig in the film, for reasons I don’t remember. Well, she hated it. She didn’t like the cut, she didn’t like the color. She didn’t want to wear it. Now, I sort of understood where she was coming from. This woman’s blond hair and her great beauty were her trademarks. She was feeling a little insecure, I think, at having them disguised. Also, there was some confusion in the film. Peter’s character was supposed to be directing Kim in a film about his late wife, who was a big star in the thirties. There was some ambiguity about whether Kim was playing the actress or was a reincarnation of the actress. I know it confused the hell out of me, but I was lucky. I did my scenes and skedaddled. I can only imagine what it did to poor Kim.
Finally, one day, she decided to take it out on the wig. She just wasn’t going to wear it anymore.
Unfortunately, they’d shot a lot of scenes and those couldn’t be redone. Besides, it was integral to the story. Aldrich had to bribe her. He painted her dressing room purple and got a purple rug leading into the set just so that she’d feel she wasn’t freakish in that wig.
The picture was a stinker, one of the few Aldrich made, because no one ever did figure out what the hell the plot was about. Ultimately, though, great directors, like any artists, are remembered for their successes and not their failures. I’m happy to say Bob falls into that category.
Ice Station Zebra (1968)
This was the most expensive film I was in to date.
First of all, it was in Cinerama, the super-widescreen process that required super-large sets just to fill the screen. Second, a big chunk of it was set in the North Pole, where the heroes of the film were racing to recover a spy satellite before the Russians got it. That meant big sets that had to look like ice, which isn’t something that they ordinarily have on a back lot. Third, there were a lot of expensive special effects in the film, which ranged from outer space to jet fighters racing through the skies to our submarine sliding below ice floes.
I played a real rat in the picture, a Russian spy. I did it with an accent, though I used a trick I’d learned from a language coach. I only accented every third word or so. Audiences would think the accent was continuous, but they’d be able to understand what I was saying a little clearer.
My costars were Rock Hudson, the great British star Patrick McGoohan—of Secret Agent TV fame—and Jim Brown. John Sturges was our director.
I know I’ve said that so-and-so was a wonderful guy, or this one was a real gentleman, but Rock was all that and more. Handsome, too, and a better actor than he was given credit for. He was never temperamental, rarely flubbed a line. His private life was not exactly a secret. There were rumors that he was being watched by the FBI during the late 1950s, when they were still looking for Communists and hoped to shake them out by blackmailing gay actors who showed up at Rock’s house. I remember Burt Lancaster saying he’d gone to dinner there. Now, Burt wasn’t gay, and when I asked if he was afraid what people would think, he just laughed.
“Ernie,” he said, “I go to the opera too, but I don’t sing.”
It broke my heart when Rock got ill. Despite the way AIDS had ravaged his body—and his looks—he still went out to support his old friend Doris Day at the press conference launching her cable show, Doris Day’s Best Friends.
Like The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare, Ice Station Zebra was based on a best-selling novel by Alistair MacLean. It wasn’t as big a hit as those other movies (it’s a little hard to follow the plot at times), but it made a pot of money and nabbed a couple of Oscar nominations. I made Ice Station Zebra, The Legend of Lylah Clare, and an unremarkable western called Chuka back-to-back after the cancellation of McHale’s Navy in 1966.
I guess I was still employable.
The Split (1968)
In 1968, I made one more film with Jim Brown. It was also my last film with him.
The Split was directed by Gordon Flemyng and the all-star cast included Diahann Carroll, Julie Harris, Gene Hackman, and Jack Klug-man. It was based on a good Donald E. Westlake novel about a robbery during a big football game, after which the money goes missing. The thieves each think one of the others has the cash. Not a bad premise, right? Unfortunately, the characters are paper thin, scenes seem to be missing, and the movie is generally predictable.
I have two vivid memories of the movie. One is a scene where Jim Brown and I slugged it out. I actually got my head bashed in because he took things a little too seriously. Well, okay. Even Spence knocked out Clark Gable’s teeth. The other memory is when I hurt my foot.
We were working on a ship down at the harbor in Los Angeles. I had complained about an electrical cable laying across the path where we had to run. I said if I tripped over this thing I was liable to get hurt. I did it a couple of times, running up a gangplank and hiding behind the deck house, and everything was fine—on my end, anyway. Jim was supposed to be coming after me.
The director kept calling “Cut.”
I finally asked Mr. Flemyng, “What the hell is wrong?”
He said, in his very Scottish accent, “Well, Mr. Brown is trying to get his thing together.”
I said, “Jesus, all he has to do is run after me!”
Well, Jim was famous for running when he played in the NFL. Maybe he wanted to find a way of doing it differently, so people wouldn’t think of him as Jim Brown the fullback. I don’t know. All I know is that we did the scene again and again until finally I did step on this cable the wrong way and broke a bone in my left foot. I had to go to the hospital and Mr. Flemyng had to settle for a take that was already in the can. I had to do the rest of the picture in a cast, which the director artfully shot around so people wouldn’t see it.
Echoing my own sentiments, Mr. Flemyng—who was a wonderful, decent, human being—went up to Jim on the last day of shooting.
“If you were the last actor on Earth,” he said, “I would never work with you again.”
Directors are people, too, you know.