Just ten weeks after my family returned from our European disaster, we left for Hawaii. Kirk Douglas, Patricia Neal, and my father were starring in In Harm’s Way, directed by Otto Preminger. To Hollywood’s surprise, my father and Mr. Preminger had no blow-ups. Mr. Preminger, like Alfred Hitchcock, was a self-admitted hater of actors. While directing other pictures, he’d tried overpowering Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, and Lee J. Cobb. I knew that would never happen with my dad. Unless he was working with John Ford, my father would never be bullied by any director, or even lectured to. Having plied his craft by then for thirty-plus years, having worked again and again with not only Ford but Howard Hawks, my father felt his comprehension of cinema far transcended the standard actor’s. In fact, he was certain he understood moviemaking more deeply than many of his directors. As he told the Los Angeles Times, “I’ve worked with directors who couldn’t walk across the street without help.”
To everyone’s relief, he and Mr. Preminger earned each other’s respect. While I played with Mr. Preminger’s twins, our fathers behaved like perfect gentlemen. The only edginess I saw in Hawaii was between my parents. My father had never really stopped coughing since we left Spain. Even in the crystalline air of Hawaii, it became so torturous that some days he had to stop shooting his scenes. As she’d been doing for weeks, my mother insisted he see a physician; my obstinate father said no.
Before making In Harm’s Way, my dad had gone to the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla for the mandatory physical all stars had to pass to qualify for the expensive insurance movie companies carried for them. Since the well-respected Scripps staff pronounced him suitably healthy, he did not plan to return until late in the fall of 1964, in order to be cleared for The Sons of Katie Elder. Things changed when Mr. Preminger wrapped up In Harm’s Way early. Returning to Encino a few weeks before expected, during those broiling days of August my mother nagged my father into acquiescence.
Agreeing to move up the date of his next exam, my father drove south for La Jolla alone, in his customized Pontiac station wagon with the raised roof over the driver’s head and its special GM engine with 350 horsepower. My father adored that car, and drove it like he, and it, would last forever. Whenever we saw him sliding behind the wheel, instead of George Coleman who sometimes drove for him, my mother and I refused to sit in the front. Considering himself a terrific driver, my father brazenly zipped through traffic while my mother and I sat in back with our hands locked in death grips. He only drove slowly on our Sunday rides through the San Fernando Valley, when we had no destination, our only goal to try and relax.
That August morning, too, I suspect my father stopped racing and took his time. Between Encino and La Jolla, long stretches back then were still undeveloped, the road winding south astride jutting cliffs and crying seagulls, curving golden beaches and white-capped turquoise water. God, how my father loved the California coastline. Besides, he was driving to a hospital, and in his fifty-eight years he had learned to hate them. He always said he hated the loss of privacy most of all, but he also loathed the bottles and tubes and needles and blipping machines.
This time they kept my father at Scripps for five days, probing, draining, injecting, inserting, and possibly saving his life. Because something inside his body was out of control.