CHAPTER 17

Split, California

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KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: Oh yeah, he knew how to manipulate women—except for me [laughs]. … Women were always drawn to him, and vice versa, I suppose.

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JOAN TEWKESBURY: It was a tough time between Bob and Kathryn. They were going to get divorced and all this stuff was going on. This was while we were prepping for Thieves.

POLLY PLATT (art director and producer): I guess he saw The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon, and he wanted me to come work for him as an art director. At that time I had the highest respect for him. I adored McCabe. He invites me to New York to talk about working on Thieves Like Us.

The minute his wife went home he had the door open between our two rooms and wandered between our rooms and started talking about why I should sleep with him.

I did not sleep with him. I had already been married to a director, Peter Bogdanovich. So I didn’t want any director in my life at all. I never slept with a director after Peter. They don’t interest me. They’re all alike—egotistical and used to having every word listened to. They’re spoiled. The very nature of the job spoils you for personal relationships.

Then I didn’t do the picture. I passed.

RENÉ AUBERJONOIS: It never seemed to me to be a big deal. In this business, on location, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. I’ve been on so many locations and there’s so-and-so leaving so-and-so’s room, and these people are happily married to other people. Bob’s just a guy, you know, with all the weaknesses of any guy on location.

Robert and Kathryn Reed Altman

ELAINE KAUFMAN: I’m not gonna go into this. Let the guys do that. It’s a guy thing. Although I saw more than I wanted to, and they all looked like Kathryn. Shit. You know, those kinds of things go with the job. But Kathryn was always there.

LILY TOMLIN: I’m sure he was a womanizer in many ways. You can’t judge anybody on one facet. People are too complicated. Maybe I was just more forgiving of things like that because of Bob and the way he was.

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KONNI CORRIERE: He told me that he loved how my mother sacrificed her whole life for him. He will always just adore her for giving up her life to make his happen, and to make him comfortable, and to take care of him the way she did.

LAUREN HUTTON (actress): Kathryn was half the team, for sure. I used to call her Kathryn the Great because she was like a queen. Queen Kathryn. She was incredibly gracious to everyone and knew everything that was going on. She had this weather eye and could see, you know, behind her head as well as from all sides. And could be blind when she had to be.

MARK RYDELL: Kathryn Altman is one of the most magnificently loyal supporters of Bob. You know, Bob was a very, very quixotic fellow. She hung in. She was his supporter. She rode through all kinds of crises with him. She was the leveler. She was the loving one. She moderated his behavior, his excessive behavior. She was the perfect, beautiful, loyal, decent, intelligent, witty wife. And he knew that. I’ll tell you that. He knew it, he hung on to her, despite many crises in their lives. She was the absolute cornerstone of his career. He could never have done what he did without Kathryn Altman. She deserves as much credit as a filmmaker as he does.

JENNIFER JASON LEIGH (actress): She’s so effortlessly graceful and easygoing, and she can party with Bob till dawn and she’s so loving. For so many women it’s hard when the guy is the center. It can be hard on a marriage. With them it felt completely natural. I’m sure they had been through it, but they came out the other side in such a gorgeous way. She made it possible for him to be that free and trusting because he always had her.

STEPHEN ALTMAN: I know he loved her. Some people have a personality about having to be in control or having to be in charge. I think she has the type of personality that didn’t have to be those things. “Why aren’t you taking me here, why aren’t you doing this?” I never heard that. She liked her life and liked what he did and trusted him and let him do his thing and they both loved each other. But love is not enough. You got to give each person their space, and she had her own life, too. They gave each other their space and then enjoyed each other’s company. I mean it’s not like they didn’t get into it—“Oh Bob, what are you doing?” Or, “Goddamn it, Kathryn!” It’s not like that didn’t happen. But jeez, for fifty years. You could have more arguments with your cat than they did with each other.

ROBERT REED ALTMAN: She’s always been like the queen mother in charge. She always made sure everything was running smoothly, that Bob was happy, that he could throw his parties and his gatherings with people. He’s the guy whose job is to bring total strangers together, find out the ones that work and get rid of the ones that don’t. It was a continuous job for her, all the parties, all the entertaining, all the things to remember. She’d help Bob remember all the stuff on the social front, which was really the base to everything. Even though Bob had his office and the people who worked for him, there was also the whole other side, which she definitely took care of and made sure was running smoothly. Every time we’d move from one house to another to go on location she’d find the right house, she’d get all that stuff together, make sure it was good for entertaining, that it had what we needed. She kept this whole family together. Because like we said earlier, Bob was always just making the movies. She really had to run everything. She’s like the grease between all the metal gears that kept everything running smooth and perfect.

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KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: In October of ’72, when we were in post-production for Long Goodbye, a whole group of us were at the Lion’s Gate office one night. We were all drinking and they were smoking dope and carrying on. A telephone rang. There were two extensions—one on one side of the room and one on the other. I picked it up and a woman asked for Bob. I didn’t know who she was, but I could just tell something was up when I saw him pick up the other extension from across the way.

Before the night was over, it all kind of broke that he was having this encounter with Faye Dunaway—she was the one on the phone. She had been at the house a couple of times. She was a real smart-assed bitch and I really didn’t like her.

Well, we had a pied-à-terre attached to the offices because we were between owning homes at that point. He stayed there and I went back to the house we were renting, which was the beach house in The Long Goodbye. When it all broke, then everybody started opening up about what happened when I wasn’t around. I got a version of what happened in Ireland, what went on in Spain, what happened elsewhere.

We were separated about two weeks. Bobby had just started boarding school. Matthew was so little he didn’t know the difference. Konni was already off on her way. I was devastated, and so one dear friend, Johnny Williams’s late wife, Barbara, suggested I go see this family therapist. I had never been to a therapist before. I liked him. He was saying things like, “Well, he’s on a roll, he’ll probably get over this, he’ll get it out of his system.”

Bob was saying, “You’re going to a therapist and you’ll probably leave me.” He consented to go see him, but something about how he said it bothered me. I didn’t understand what he was getting at.

I said, “This isn’t going to work.”

I don’t know where it came from. I will never know where it came from. I was heartbroken. I was hurt and I was mad and I was scared. I thought I was too old to have another life. Somehow or other I got very strong and I invited two or three of my girlfriends to The Long Goodbye house on the beach. Before they got there, Bob called me and said he had been to see the doctor. He said, “Listen …”

He was not going in the right direction.

Out of the blue I said, “This is October. I don’t want to have any contact with you until after the first of the year. I’ll take care of the boys. I’ll have our business manager take care of the money for me. And that is really that. If you need to tell me something, Bob Eggenweiler can be the liaison. I can’t go on like this. I don’t care what it is you want to do or don’t want to do. Call me after the first of the year.”

JOAN TEWKESBURY: I think he sat down and really thought about it. I mean, how are you going to replace Kathryn when you’re a working director who has six kids in various places and stages and ways of growing up? Plus the fact she’s as smart as you are, she’s very attractive, she gives a hell of a party, and she’s great at mixing people together. Give me a break.

KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: The girlfriends came down and we boohooed and got loaded, and one of my friends, Helen Colvig, stayed all night with me. About six thirty in the morning, he called and said, “Could I please come home?”

I said yes.

My girlfriend Helen jumped out of that bed [laughs]. And he came in. He didn’t want to talk much but he figuratively got on his knees asking to come back and begged forgiveness and all that stuff. He said all the right things. It was like a little boy who had done wrong and knew it and wanted to make amends.

JOAN TEWKESBURY: I think what saved him was Bob’s good sense. I remember saying to him at one point, “You know, if you’re going to do this philandering and all, just get a divorce and do that.”

He said, “You know I can’t do that.”

And I said, “Well, then make up your mind here, because this is sort of silly.”

LOIS SMITH (press agent): Anytime someone put a choice like that to Bob there was only one way he was going to go, and that was Kathryn. He was offered many choices over the years, but he realized how important Kathryn was to him, so there couldn’t really be any other choice.

KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: Well, Faye Dunaway started calling and saying she was coming to the house. It was a whole drama. Sally Kellerman—she’s such a dear friend—came and took Matthew to an amusement park just to get him out of the house before Dunaway showed up. It came very close but it never happened. She never came over.

We got through the night in a very healthy way, and the next morning the therapist called. And he said, “I talked with Bob. I think you’re going to have to give up on this. I don’t see any way for it to be solved” [laughs].

We had Thanksgiving at the Williamses’ house, and for Christmas we took the boys back to Kansas City to meet their cousins, and we stayed in a big suite in a hotel there. As far as I know, and I would almost stake my life on it, that was the end of that behavior.

Dunaway? I saw her a couple of times at functions over the years, and I avoided her. Then we were at a Vanity Fair party at the Mondrian for the Oscars, with Gosford Park. Star-studded to beat all. She was at one end of the table and we were at the other end. She came over and Bob didn’t acknowledge her. He was like it never happened, which is a good way of handling it. She came around to my side and kneeled down and went through this big apology to me.

I said, “You can’t take full responsibility. It wasn’t just you, Faye.” Bob was the one who should have been down on his knees.

He was feeling his oats, there’s no doubt about it. I loved the way it ended. Now I can say I’m glad he got it out of his system, and I’m glad I didn’t take a walk. It was close.

FAYE DUNAWAY (actress): I don’t have anything to say about Mr. Altman. I never worked with him. I don’t have any time to give you on this subject.

Robert Altman, Q & A with F. Anthony Macklin, Film Heritage, Winter 1976—77 (discussing whether the audience could identify with Shelley Duvall’s performance in Thieves Like Us):

F. ANTHONY MACKLIN: Shelley is not a Faye Dunaway, for instance. They [the audience] can relate to a Faye Dunaway.

ROBERT ALTMAN: Why? Because she’s not real. Faye Dunaway’s not real. There’s no such thing as Faye Dunaway.

LOIS SMITH: Kathryn was a rock. She was the hand on the tiller through all of their life, which as you’re aware was quite tempestuous at times. Everyone who knew the two of them prayed he would go first, because his life without her would not be possible.

*   *   *

California Split (1974)

Roger Ebert, review in the Chicago Sun-Times, January 1, 1974: They meet in a California poker parlor. One wins, despite a heated discussion with a loser over whether or not a dealt card hit the floor. They drink. They become friends after they are jointly mugged in the parking lot by the sore loser. … They’re the heroes (or at least the subjects) of “California Split,” the magnificently funny, cynical film by Robert Altman. Their names are Bill and Charlie, and they’re played by George Segal and Elliott Gould with a combination of unaffected naturalism and sheer raw nervous exhaustion. … The movie will be compared with “M*A*S*H,” the first big hit by Altman (who is possibly our best and certainly our most diverting American director). It deserves that comparison, because it resembles “M*A*S*H” in several big ways: It’s funny, it’s hard-boiled, it gives us a bond between two frazzled heroes trying to win by the rules in a game where the rules require defeat. But it’s a better movie than “M*A*S*H” because here Altman gets it all together. Ever since “M*A*S*H,” he’s been trying to make a kind of movie that would function like a comedy but allow its laughs to dig us deeper and deeper into the despair underneath.

George Segal (as Bill Denny) and Elliott Gould (as Charlie Waters) in California Split

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JOSEPH WALSH (screenwriter): I was a child actor, almost a child star, in New York City. I went from the incredible time as a child star, to at eighteen years old, you now are literally a has-been. It didn’t mean anything to me because I was a super-duper gambler. I was a great college prognosticator. It was a loss to my father, not to me. When I came out here—not really working—I was always gambling, keeping ahead of the curve and really getting good at that kind of thing. I realized nobody had done a real gambling movie. When I see a Cincinnati Kid it’s like a Western—“Is the hero going to win or going to lose the gun-fight at the end?” There’s nothing real about that.

I was friends with Steven Spielberg, and Steven and I were going to do California Split. I worked in Steven’s home for about eight months. MGM said yes, and suddenly everything changed. Jim Aubrey, head of the studio, was the smiling cobra—and the snake struck. He said, “I want it changed. I don’t want what’s going on here. I want a straight movie. I want the Mafia to chase the two guys—they owe the Mafia money. The Mafia catches the two guys, they get away. And I want Dean Martin to be the star of it. He wears a lucky chip around his neck, and he gets shot and the chip saves his life.” He even had the title for it—“You call the movie Lucky Chip.”

You’ve got to be kidding me.

I pulled out of it with a hundred twenty-seven dollars in my pocket. People said, “You are one of the great morons of all time. You should do what they want.” But to me I couldn’t do it. My agent, Guy McElwaine, made a quick move. He sent it to London, to Bob. Within two days he said, “Bob loves this and he wants to do it.” We did it with Columbia.

I’m not that familiar with Bob at this point. I’ve seen some movies I like, some movies I don’t like. I certainly knew he was a big talent. Bob and I hit it off great—we both gambled; he loved the price, he loved the odds. But he says to me, “I am supposed to be your enemy. You know that?”

“My enemy? What do you mean?”

He says, “Writers, they don’t like me.”

I say, “I don’t know you. Why?”

Bob says, “I tend to not want to keep to what they’ve written.” I said, “We can work with that.”

It became one of those situations where Bob would come up with something abstract—“Here’s a scene. I think we’ll have twelve midgets come in and do this.”

I’d say, “What? Twelve midgets? Why in the world would you do a move like that? If you do that, they would laugh you out of the theater. Bob, it took me literally two months to find the right motivation for that scene. You can’t throw that out in one second.”

He would just look at me and storm out and slam his own door. I knew he had to be back. It was his office. He would simmer down and be back in about two minutes and he would harrumph around and say, “Okay, we’ll try it that way.”

In retrospect I knew that Bob was a great talent because he had the talent not to impose himself on the process. His trust factor was his greatest strength. Bob was in love with being surprised. He was like a great big kid in a cinema candy store. And more often than not his actors threw a sweet and wonderful party for him.

ELLIOTT GOULD: You know California Split is semiautobiographical about me and Joey Walsh, right? After Donald Sutherland and I had done S.P.Y.S., the last picture we did together, we went to see Bob, because Bob always had an idea to do a pirate movie about two guys who could take over any ship. I thought that’s way on the back burner or in a closet, but I just wanted Bob to see Donald and I were back together. We went to see him as Bob was starting to prepare California Split, and he was in the office with this old friend of mine, Joseph Walsh. Bob said, “There’s nothing in this picture for you.” And I was so hurt and embarrassed ‘cause I thought, “I’m not coming in for this picture.”

They were thinking about Robert De Niro. Then it was going to be Steve McQueen and George Segal. McQueen wanted writing that didn’t exist and he then withdrew from the project. Bob called me in Munich and asked me if I would consider playing the part we thought Steve McQueen was going to play. I said, “I’ll do it, of course, so long as it’s okay with Walsh.”

GEORGE SEGAL (actor): California Split? I couldn’t make heads or tails of the script. It didn’t mean anything to me. I didn’t know from gambling. I didn’t quite get it, but Guy McElwaine was so persuasive. And I loved Altman’s films. As a matter of fact, when I was on the film Altman said to me, “You don’t know this but you walked out of one of the first M*A*S*H screenings and you said, ‘That’s one of the best films I ever saw.’” That got back to him.

Our relationship was warm, mutually respectful, and a little distant. I wasn’t in his rhythms. Gambling, I don’t know. I guess I was more middle-class than he would have liked. Different sensibilities. He was living a seventies lifestyle and I was a little bit behind in that area. He’s Kansas City and living by the seat of your pants and making this totally innovative movie, M*A*S*H, changing the rules, and I’m a rule player. Elliott was also an antirules guy and a freewheeling guy, or that was at least his persona. That was Bob’s persona too, and I was always a kid from Great Neck. I brought an innocence, and he didn’t have time for that. Risk was not a part of my persona and it was a part of his.

Elliott and Bob barely talked. He talked much more with me. They barely talked because they were already inside each other’s heads.

If you would look at him while his actors were acting, he had kind of an ecstatic look on his face. He was thrilled that these actors were fulfilling his dreams. That was a childlike thing he brought, and it was infectious. It was without guile.

*   *   *

ALAN RUDOLPH (director): Jack Cashin, the sound man, somehow was associated with this organization called Synanon. They had this big building down in Santa Monica. The people there were all ex-junkies, gambling addicts, or whatever. Bob says, “That’s where we’ll get our extras.” He would never hire Hollywood extras. We sort of broke the mold on that. He wanted real people and he didn’t want to pay them extra rates. So he said to me, “You’ll go down there and you’ll convince the people at Synanon to be extras in the movie. We’ll give a ten-thousand-dollar donation or whatever to the organization and they’ll supply us with however many people we’ll need every day.”

So I went down there one night with Tommy Thompson and it really was like one of those homeless missions. Here are all these people, and I didn’t know what to say. We had to eat dinner with all these people—and I’ll never forget what they served there: white bread and brown gravy. I then said, “Here’s your chance to be all the things you know about—but for fun. The only addiction you’re gonna get is getting hooked on movies, being in movies, and you’ll have the best time.” Well, they just lapped it up. So throughout that movie all the extras, they’re all Synanon addicts—well, most of them, anyway. Real people with real stories to tell that were just fantastic, and Bob just loved it.

JOSEPH WALSH: He didn’t film the ending I wrote. In the beginning of this movie, Tommy Thompson, Bob’s longtime friend and assistant director, told me that Bob had this kind of strange idiosyncrasy. When his movies got close to the end he had a tendency to rush them to get them over. That’s what happened.

Dinner in Las Vegas in 1974: from left, Bob Eggenweiler, Kathryn, Bob, Leon Ericksen, Tommy Thompson, and Joey Walsh

They’re talking to each other at the end and Elliott finally says, “You’re going home? Oh yeah, where the fuck do you live?” I didn’t write that. I’m sitting there and thinking, “What happened to his character?” George Segal stares at him and gets up and says, “Charlie, I got to go,” and walks out. Cut.

Elliott bolts over to me and says, “I’m sorry. I don’t know where that came from.” George says, “Bob, this is it! You must end this movie right here. I never understood it until now!”

GEORGE SEGAL: That was the point. My character won, but there was no special feeling. Now he gets it.

JOSEPH WALSH: And Bob said, “You’re right. That’s the wrap.”

Not many movies pull the movie out from under you. Audiences didn’t know how to feel about it when they walked out of the theater. Columbia said we cost them ten million dollars right there. Later on, Steven [Spielberg] said to me, “I could have made millions of dollars with the movie.” Steven would have built the climax different than Bob built it. He said, “I would have built it up to the greatest orgasm in town. The foreplay would have been so unbelievable that when the orgasm came the audience would have been on the edge of its seat.” It would have been a totally different movie. Elliott apologizes to me every year for that.

HENRY GIBSON: Joey is still telling that story, seventy years later, about how Bob changed his ending. But see, there’s only one answer to that. “That isn’t what was filmed, Joey. I love you and I know all the processes you went through—selling it, rewriting it, hanging on to it. People wanted to rip it away from you. But that’s not what Bob made, okay?”

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