CHAPTER 7
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REZA BADIYI: The next day we drove all the way to Las Vegas. This is 1956, during the convention of the Republican Party in San Francisco. We were listening to that on the radio, and Bob was analyzing what was happening in the country and reciting the speeches of Winston Churchill. I realized at that moment that Bob is a Democrat. He had such an ear for politics, and such respect for Harry S. Truman. And he was troubled by seeing an Army man in the White House.
Ahead of time, before Las Vegas, we stopped at a place to eat. Bob called long-distance to a lady that was in our movie, Helene, and a few other friends to meet us in Las Vegas. We went to the hotel that he wanted to stay in, and there wasn’t any room. We went to second hotel, third hotel. He was very unhappy. So we went to a motel and Bob told me to take a shower and get ready—“Get your good suit out and send it to be pressed.” Bob went out and shopped for a few things that included dark sunglasses for me and a cigarette holder, a black one with a silver end. Then Bob put me in a suit and tie and said, “Reza, let’s see if we can do this.”
He called the Sahara, and he says, “This is Robert Altman. Is our suite ready? It’s Prince Reza Badiyi from Tehran, from the State Department. Is his suite ready?”
And they ask, “Who?”
Bob said it again and they said, “Would you please hold?” They came back and said, “Yes sir, it’s ready.” So he sent the car to be washed and we went over. He told me, “Never talk to anyone but to me.”
We arrived and I’m having my cigarette holder in my hand and I have my tie and a carnation. And it was just too much. It was like a bad high school play. I was graduated out of the Royal Academy of Drama in Iran. I won the gold medal from the king. And now I’m playing somebody that Bob imagined!
Working with his first writing partner, George W. George, the son of cartoonist Rube Goldberg
The elevator door opened and Bob didn’t allow anybody to go in but me and Bob. We went up to our room—fabulous! Champagne, the beautiful fruit baskets and everything. We were not there ten minutes and management called. They say, “You are invited tonight to have dinner and a show.” Bob was in hog heaven. And the call came from his friends, all these guys that he knew from before and Helene. They arrived, so it became an entourage for me.
Judy Garland was entertaining and her daughter Liza was ten years old. They came on the stage for one end of the show. Then they came down to be introduced to me! I got up and did my impression of being great and I kiss her hand and so forth and then they took pictures of us. Great. Now, of course there wasn’t any bill. Bob tells me, whispers—“Under the table.” With no one seeing, he hands me a one-hundred-dollar bill. He said, “When we get up, drop it for the boys who clean.”
This is what I did. It was like a bomb—“The man threw a hundred-dollar tip on the table when he left!” So this whole play is being written by Bob, and he is of course starring in it.
Second day, third day. I’m getting tired. I sit at the gambling table with Bob. Bob is playing craps, and he says, “Push the entire stack on number eight.” And he wins!
Helene is staying in the suite with Bob, and I have a separate room. She comes to me and says, “Bob is winning so much. You know, Reza, he’s going to lose it all. You know that’s the nature of Bob.” She had started gathering anything that was not a dollar or five dollars—ten dollars, twenty dollars—gathered all of that and put it in one of the drawers. The next night she was going to go back to California. She had one of those heart-shaped hatboxes. It was something like twelve grand in there, and she left.
Bob came back and now he was losing, and he says, “What happened?” So now we are coming to the end of our drama, and all of a sudden there’s a telephone call from management. And they said, “Prince Gholam-Reza from Iran has arrived. We told him Prince Reza is here, and he is very anxious to meet him.”
Oh shit, now what? Bob says, “We run for it.” I said, “No, no, no. When I was on my soccer team, he liked me very much. After I became a cameraman for the palace, he was saying to me, ‘Why don’t you play more soccer?’ So maybe he recognizes me.” So I called his room and in very polite Farsi I said, “Hello, I’m Reza Badiyi. I do not know if you remember me from the soccer days. The fact is, we wanted to come stay here, and there was no room and my friend and sponsor said I’m a prince.” He laughed. He says, “You’re kidding me! This is good, I like those things. I like those things.” He says, “Tonight, you come with me.” So we went down with his entourage. The two princes, arm in arm, we walk in and the cameras are taking pictures. I didn’t know it, but he paid for our room, without me asking for anything.
And Bob lost everything that he had. We got back to our car and started driving. When we got very close to L.A. we were out of money, out of gas. I find something like five dollars and that put gas in it, just enough to get there. We went to Helene and she had a dinner for us. After dinner, Helene went and brought the hatbox and put it in front of Bob. Bob says, “What’s that?” She says, “Let’s open it.” He opened it, sees all the money, and says, “Where did that come from?” She explains and he says, “Goddammit, that’s why I was losing! You took my seed money away.”
He picked up the money and flew back to Vegas from Burbank. He lost it all that night and came back. That’s how Bob and I came to Hollywood.
LOTUS CORELLI ALTMAN MONROE: When we went back to California, Bob’s with Helene, so he finds an apartment for me in Brentwood. Bought all this furniture and for about two months couldn’t decide between me and Helene. He’d go back and forth.
I told him once, “You should get a large apartment building for all your women.” He laughed and said, “But you have to remember, seniority doesn’t count.”
Lotus Corelli Altman with her sons, Michael (left) and Stephen Altman
One night I got a babysitter and when I got back Bob was with the kids and he’s in a rage—“Where have you been?” I said, “I’ve been to the movies.” He was so furious. This was the first time he was violent. He pulled the phone out of the wall, and this was one with a heavy base. He swung it and hit me in the back and broke two ribs. I called the police and the doctor, and I was running out in the driveway and he realized he’d better get out of there. When the police called him, he said, “You woke me up. I haven’t been anywhere.”
JOAN ALTMAN SARAFIAN: Bob was in California, editing The Delinquents. I had to go to California with him. I did not want to. I had to go with him.
I called his apartment the largest ashtray in L.A., and I was the only one who did the cleaning. All the young Hollywood kids would come over. Reza’s friend would fix a pilaf that would melt in your mouth. I’ve never been able to match it. And who was in Easy Rider? Dennis Hopper, yeah, he would be there. He would come and all these girls who were really, really ultra, little shiksas, I call them, wandering around. Every night there was a party. One day I was upstairs cleaning the floor, a red-and-white linoleum floor, and Reza came in. He sat down and he always thought he was in love with me. I said, “If you really cared about me, Reza, you’d pick up a mop and help me!” He was always so cute, though. He was sweet.
B.C. kept sending me tickets to come back, but Bob needed to cash those in and use them, which he did. The last one, I said, “No, I’m not going to give it to you.” He stood at the door, and I can see him today. I said, “You know, Bob, you have a red hue around you. It’s like looking at the devil. I’m not giving you the ticket. I’m going to go home. I’m in love with Dick Sarafian.”
Bob did not like Dick. He told me, “Don’t marry him, he’s”—what was the word? Not a user, but some word like that. I was pregnant, but I didn’t marry him because I was pregnant. I didn’t know I was pregnant.
Anyway, I went back to Kansas City and Bob stayed in California.
HARVEY FRIED (friend): After Bob left Kansas City, SuEllen and I saw him a handful of times in those early years in California. Bob was always a very generous guy, even when he was down on his luck. Trying to take us out to dinner, have us up to dinner, that sort of thing. He was frequently short, financially.
He insisted we go one evening to a small stadium to see tennis matches, because Pancho Gonzales was playing. He didn’t have the tickets when he got there. So I got tickets and we saw the tennis. I kind of felt sorry for Bob at that time because I think he was having financial difficulties.
SUELLEN FRIED: One time we went to a tennis match with them, in California. The marriage was kind of coming apart at this point. Lotus confided to me that evening when the guys were into the tennis that she was very concerned about their relationship. They got divorced, and the next time we saw him he still hadn’t become famous yet. He was living off the Hollywood strip. He was sharing a place with two other men, and so we offered to take Bob to lunch. He suggested the Brown Derby. Harvey can tell you how many martinis Bob had, which was kind of shocking to us.
HARVEY FRIED: He just had a series of martinis for lunch. Four or six martinis and that was all. “Is this the way Hollywood types have lunch?” I asked him. He chuckled. I thought it was strange. It didn’t seem like a wholesome lunch.
SUELLEN FRIED: Then he said, “Why don’t you have dinner on me?” We said, “That sounds great.” He told us to be back and meet him at this little place that he was sharing. He went to a delicatessen and got a roast chicken and some pickles, and this was dinner. These were the days when he was trying to find his place in the sun, and it hadn’t happened yet.
We were living here in the middle of the world in Kansas City and here was Bob out in Hollywood, with all these irons in the fire, and it was very exciting to us. For us, it was worth the cost of the thirteen martinis or whatever it was.
CHRISTINE ALTMAN (daughter): When he went to California, I missed him a lot. He would send me things on my birthday. And he would, I imagine, try to get me out there as much as he could in the ragged lifestyle that he lived at that time. He was getting divorced here and married there and having kids here and having kids there and not knowing how to pay child support. It was really kind of a mess. I’ll give everybody ninety percent credit for at least trying to make it work. There were a lot of people involved to deal with when he was young.
DR. MARTIN GOLDFARB (friend): I was at a poker game up in the Hollywood Hills. I knew a few of the people there, mostly just Bobby Altman. I had met him a few times but I didn’t really know him. So about two in the morning I’m home in bed. I had a little house right at the top of King’s Road, toward the end up in the mountains, so it was pretty quiet. Suddenly somebody threw pebbles at my window. I’m thinking, “Who in the hell is doing this?” We were too dumb in those days to become afraid of anything. So I walked outside and there was Bobby Altman throwing pebbles at my window.
I said, “What the hell are you doing here, Bobby?”
He says, “Well, you know, the cards didn’t run with me tonight, and I broke up with my girlfriend, Helene, and she doesn’t want me to come home, at least not now. Can I stay with you for a while?”
I said, “Sure.”
He said, “I don’t have any money.”
I said, “I don’t care, you can stay as long as you want.”
So he stayed two years.
Robert Altman in 1958, trying to get his career rolling
Why’d he come to me? I was there. And it was free. And I never begrudged him anything. I was a cardiologist, and anytime I could help him I would. If had to slip him a few bucks I did, and that was okay. He was paying his way just by being around, telling stories and laughing and making fun and introducing you and bringing people by. Worth his weight in gold. You could tell right away he was going to be a big winner. It was a pleasure to see a meteor about to take off.
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The James Dean Story (1957)
Bosley Crowther, review in The New York Times, October 19, 1957: What should be an effective contribution to the perpetuation of the legend of the late James Dean is achieved in “The James Dean Story.”… This eighty-two-minute memorial … is edited into a sort of cinematic elegy, with a commentary that throbs with deep laments. Obviously, it is angled to that audience that found in young Dean a symbol and sanctuary for the self-pity and self-dramatization of youth. It says he was wracked with doubts and torments, nursed a childish belief that he was “bad” and did reckless things as rebellion against the insecurity and loneliness in his soul.
GEORGE W. GEORGE (writer and producer): One day I sat in my apartment and nothing was happening. I was desperate to make a living. I had some money, so I didn’t need to be desperate, but I was. Suddenly I saw that James Dean got killed in his car. That was it. I called up Altman—he had given up the motion-picture business by then, he had gone back to Kansas City, but now he was back in California, trying again. I knew a guy at Warner Brothers who I thought could help us.
I said to Bob, “You want to do a picture about Jimmy Dean? Have you thought about it?”
He said, “That’s a good subject.”
He hadn’t made a documentary. I hadn’t made a documentary. I didn’t even know what a documentary was.
He said, “Do you know Jimmy Dean at all?”
“No, I never met him. What about you, you know him, ever have a meeting with him?”
Bob said, “No, I never met him.” Then he said, “Let’s go do it.”
Which is just like Bob. Fearless. If I had been by myself I wouldn’t have done it. It would have been too much. I would have figured out a reason not to do it. You find out in life most things in life are not done. Fear of failure, fear of stupidity, fear of some shortcoming on your part. Luckily, we were all there at the right time, including Jimmy Dean.
We made the picture. We went to Indiana—everybody else was talking to his representatives. We went and did it. We went and made the picture.
ROBERT ALTMAN: After Calvin, I had the experience of being able to make these documentary films. George still wanted to be the director. I said, “I’m the director now.” So we shared—written and directed by—together.
George fronted the money for The James Dean Story because we took a trip to Fairmount, Indiana, and interviewed Dean’s uncle and aunt and little brother and the farmer down the road, all that stuff.
GEORGE W. GEORGE: I got the guy who wrote Dean’s movie Rebel Without a Cause to do our screenplay. Stewart Stern. That was the making of our picture. It gave it a point of view. Our picture dealt a lot with his loneliness. Our picture in a sense grew out of their picture.
STEWART STERN (screenwriter): I was, I think, the first after Henry Ginsberg who heard about Jim’s death. Henry had produced Giant and was a close friend of my cousin, Arthur Loew, and an acquaintance of mine since childhood. The phone rang and it was Ginsberg looking for Arthur. He said, “The kid was killed an hour ago,” or something like that. He had just had the call from the head of publicity at Warner Brothers.
This was an odd situation. Jim’s death was a terrible personal loss to me, and I felt it as I had felt no other death in my life. I almost can’t explain why because it was such a short relationship and so scattered. But he was an absolutely unique human being. He was an astonishing person, and given the background he had—which never would have pointed in that direction—it was a kind of visitation. You couldn’t account for it any more than you could account for the genius of Mozart as a child.
They began calling me, various producers in Hollywood. “Hey, we got to make this documentary. Got to document Dean’s life because he’s such an icon and it’s just going to build.” When all these offers came I really didn’t want to do it. I really didn’t want to contribute to what I felt was a kind of quick-buck mentality, to make profit out of a relationship with Jimmy. I didn’t like it. So I turned down two or three.
Then I had a call from George George, who said, “I know what your feeling is about doing this, but it’s not going to be that kind of film.” He said, “At least come in and talk with us. I have a partner I like—Altman.” So I did and he convinced me. He said, “We will not put anything in that you do not want in. You’re going to be the writer and you will have access to all the interviews that we shot with people. You can write your script and I promise you that script will stay intact.” That sounded safe to me.
I made it poetic because I felt that Jim was poetic. It was succulent. It was purple. It wasn’t nice, crisp, uninvolved, objective storytelling because I didn’t feel that way. I wanted to be very sure that Jim came across as human, flawed, searching, lonely, complicated, all those things. But I didn’t want to get into anything that I didn’t know about and I didn’t want to add to the unhealthy side of the legend.
GEORGE W. GEORGE: When we were making it, one incident was pure Bob. You know Dean got killed on the road, running into that car. So Bob said, “We’ll get that for the picture.”
I said, “How the hell are you going to do that?”
He said, “I’ll figure it out.”
Well, son of a bitch, he goes and figures it out by lashing a camera onto the end of a long piece of wood and putting it on the bumper of his car. And driving down the road that Jimmy Dean had taken that day! It looked like Bob was going to have a crash, but son of a bitch, he missed crashing by about two feet. He was driving the car!
I said, “Bob, you’re crazy.”
He said, “Yeah, I guess I am.”
STEWART STERN: I tried in the worst way to get Marlon to do the narration. He said, “I’ll only do it if it’s for free, but nobody else can take any money either.” I said, “Well, that’s not the way it’s going to be.” There was too much money in the movie and they needed to make it back. Then I said, “Dennis Hopper. You need to have a young voice. It’s a young subject.” They came to me with the idea of Martin Gabel. He was a great narrator with a deep, booming voice. I said it would ruin the film to have that voice, and it did. You might as well have Rabbi Magnum. I had no power. They got him, and whatever was pretentious about my script, the narration only added to it.
I liked Altman very much personally. He was going through analysis at the time. I forget who it was with, but Altman absolutely worshipped him. He used laughter, humor, the analyst did, and Altman so respected that. It made it possible for him. He never felt judged. He felt freed and better, and it was really all he talked about. I was being analyzed too, and so we shared that in odd moments. But we almost never talked about Jimmy or the picture. I don’t know what he did or when he did the work. It might have been in the editing room with George. When I finished the script that was it for me. He liked the script very much because even if it didn’t mention analysis, it certainly was talking about the movements of the psyche. We just found that in common. I was even thinking of going to his analyst. Altman might have been encouraging me to try. He was so smitten with him.
I had no idea that he was a talented director until years later, when that first movie came out, That Cold Day in the Park. That was a revelation to me.
ROBERT ALTMAN: When we got it all together, we met a guy named Lou Stoumen who had this method of shooting stills where it was like animation—it was ahead of its time, really. I hired Lou Lombardo, who had been a cameraman on the set, and I taught him editing, and he became a rather famous editor. It came together pretty well, I think.
STEWART STERN: Afterward, the only thing I kept saying is “When am I going to see any money?” I never got a red cent out of it. After finally battering George George, I think I got fifteen hundred dollars out of all the profits. It just seemed to pass from hand to hand and nobody saw anything, at least not according to George.
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Robert Altman, to David Thompson, from Altman on Altman: My agent at the time showed The Delinquents to Alfred Hitchcock. I went and had a meeting with Hitchcock, who had liked the picture. He thought it was different. He hired me to go to New York to produce on Suspicion, a series of hour-long shows.
BARBARA TURNER (screenwriter/actress/producer): The first time I met Bob he was working for Alfred Hitchcock. I got the part out here in California and I went to New York. Bob came to the hotel to pick me up in the car. David Wayne was the star. Warren Beatty had a bit part in it. It was about a guy who had a bad heart and had a new doctor and he goes to the office and gets checked out. They say, “There’s something wrong with these X-rays, there’s nothing wrong with your heart. You’re fine.” But they’ve mixed up the X-rays. So the rest of the episode is them searching for him. So he does all the things he’s never done before. And goes to Coney Island and we’re all on the same bus and the guy I’m with, Warren Beatty, sort of dumps me and Wayne befriends me. We spend the day at Coney Island and I’m supposed to be sixteen. Then we go back to the city and we sit and have coffee and he asks to see me again and I say, “Well, my folks wouldn’t like it,” or some such thing. But I thanked him for the day and I leave, and he collapses and he dies.
My first impression of Bob was that he was kind. He was kind and funny and Bob, you know? You know how much he loved actors. He just loved actors. I was very, very shy then, so I didn’t say too much and he didn’t press. He was just funny and kind.
ROBERT ALTMAN: I realized early on to rely on the people you work with. When you have a crew, the crew becomes kind of a mirror, or a barrier that you don’t go beyond. In other words, your first audience for your film is your crew. The minute we start rehearsing a scene and I say, “Well, let’s put the camera here, and so and so,” a collaboration starts.
I remember I was doing Hitchcock Presents, directing, and I did one at Universal and there was a cameraman named Curly Lindon. Curly Lindon was a big-name cameraman. I’m doing a Hitchcock with Joseph Cotten and Christine White, and Curly Lindon was the cameraman. And I went in and I said, “Okay, there’s a phone on the desk. Let’s have the phone in the foreground and you’ll see these people back there, and she’ll come in the door and he’ll be over there. And you’ve got the phone and then they’ll come over and pick the phone up.”
He kinda looked at me and said, “Yeah? What kind of lens are you going to use?”
I was asking for something that was not in the range of the tools that I had. So I was embarrassed in front of everybody, because this was out on the set and I realized that I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about.
I had a friend, an actor named Johnny Alonzo, who later became a rather well-known cinematographer, and he worked with me on a lot of things. He was a still photographer. And I said, “You’ve got to teach me how to shoot stills.” And he did, and we’d do our own developing and printing. I bought a camera, and I had a long lens on it. I had a zoom lens on it. So I spent three or four years shooting still photography. And I became pretty good at it. It was one of those things where I would take my camera wherever I went, and by doing that I think I helped myself learn the tools that I needed. I learned the responsibility of what I could do and couldn’t do. And the zoom lens got me.
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Robert Altman, to David Thompson, from Altman on Altman: I decided that television was the world I was shooting for. There were lots of opportunities at that time to do low-budget, offbeat films, but they were always bad, and I always said I would keep doing television until I got a film that I really wanted to do. I didn’t want to go out and make a feature just for the sake of it and then find out that was the end of it.
Directing an episode of Whirlybirds
From a letter to Alfred Hitchcock from Robert Altman, February 26, 1958: I want to preamble this presumptuous little note by stating that it is neither a complaint nor an indictment, but rather a vague query. Sometime ago, in a meeting at your office, you and I discussed, in the presence of Mr. Manning O’Connor, several ideas relating to the possibility of doing a television show against a ready-made realistic background of some scope, such as the building of a dam, the waterworks of the city and things of that ilk…. This is the last I heard of the matter until yesterday. My agent called me, quite upset, and said that you were going ahead with the project, but without my services. … I have no legal claim to any participation in this project and I believe that words like “integrity” and “moral obligation” are primarily used by people as a sort of dubious court of last resort. I am merely writing these facts because I feel sure that you are not aware of these events and I would like you to be informed. (No response from Hitchcock found.)
Television Directing
Alfred Hitchcock Presents—1957–58 (2 episodes); Peter Gunn—1958; Bronco—1958; The Troubleshooters—1959; U.S. Marshal—1959; Whirlybirds—1957–59 (14 episodes).
ROBERT ALTMAN: Television gave me Kathryn. I met her on Whirly-birds. She was an extra. She came out one day with her own white stockings and played a nurse.