George Axelrod

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Axelrod

George Axelrod (June 9, 1922 – June 21, 2003) was an American screenwriter, producer, playwright and film director, best known for his play, The Seven Year Itch (1952), which was adapted into a movie of the same name starring Marilyn Monroe. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his 1961 adaptation of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's and also adapted Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate (1962).

Contents [show] Early life and family[edit] Axelrod was born in New York City, New York, the son of Beatrice Carpenter, a silent film actress, and Herman Axelrod, a Columbia graduate who had worked on the school's annual Varsity Show and who later went into real estate.[1] His father was Russian Jewish and his mother was of Scottish and English descent.[2] He is the father of lawyer Peter Axelrod, painting contractor and writer Steven Axelrod, actress Nina Axelrod and stepfather of screenwriter Jonathan Axelrod (who married the actress Illeana Douglas). He is also the Grandfather of Taliesin Jaffe.

Radio and Broadway[edit] After serving in the Army Signal Corps during World War II, the New York-born Axelrod found work writing scripts for radio programs, including The Shadow, Midnight and Grand Ole Opry, eventually branching into television. He said he contributed to or collaborated on more than 400 TV and radio scripts and wrote for top comedians, including Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin before earning breakout success with his 1952 stage comedy, The Seven Year Itch, a risque social satire about a middle-class man who has an affair while his wife and children are on vacation. The Seven Year Itch was first presented by Courtney Burr and Elliot Nugent at the Fulton Theatre, New York City, on July 15, 1952.

Television[edit] Axelrod's overnight success prompted him to write a seriocomic teleplay, Confessions of a Nervous Man, starring Art Carney as a playwright waiting anxiously in a Theater District bar for the newspaper reviews of his first play to hit the streets. Based on his own experiences on the opening night of The Seven Year Itch, the one-hour play was presented as the November 30, 1953 episode of Studio One. He appeared on television himself occasionally as a guest panelist on What's My Line?

Films[edit] The Broadway success of The Seven Year Itch led to the successful 1955 film directed by Billy Wilder and starring Marilyn Monroe. The plot was altered so that the husband (Tom Ewell) only fantasizes about having an affair.

Axelrod's next stage hit was Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, a Faustian comedy about a fan magazine writer (Orson Bean) selling his soul to the Devil (in the guise of a literary agent) to become a successful screenwriter. It ran for more than a year on Broadway in 1955–56 and received much attention in the national press thanks to its star, Jayne Mansfield. It was adapted for a film, but 20th Century Fox had director/screenwriter Frank Tashlin change the story to a satire on television advertising and throw out all of Axelrod's characters except Rita Marlowe (with Mansfield recreating her stage role). Axelrod was contemptuous of the 1957 movie, saying he didn't go see it because the studio "never used my story, my play or my script."

In 1959–60, Lauren Bacall starred in his comic play Goodbye Charlie which ran for 109 performances, followed by a film with Debbie Reynolds. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Axelrod was one of the best paid writers in Hollywood, and he was nominated for an Academy Award for his 1961 adaptation of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. He was highly regarded for his adaptation of Richard Condon's novel for director John Frankenheimer's Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate (1962) starring Laurence Harvey and Frank Sinatra. Axelrod, who co-produced, considered it his best screen adaptation. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, the movie was taken out of circulation and wasn't re-released until 1988, when it became a box office hit and was deemed by critics to be a classic of American cinema.

Axelrod wrote the original screenplay for How to Murder Your Wife (1965), directed by Richard Quine with Jack Lemmon, Verna Lisi and Terry-Thomas. In 1966, Axelrod directed Lord Love a Duck, and two years later, he directed The Secret Life of an American Wife (1968). After a decade hiatus, he returned to films in 1979, providing the screenplay for an unsuccessful remake of The Lady Vanishes. Subsequent contributions include the scripts for Frankenheimer's The Holcroft Covenant (1985) and The Fourth Protocol (1987).

Novels[edit] Axelrod was also an author of three novels: Blackmailer, a comic mystery; Beggar's Choice, a comedy of role reversal; and Where Am I Now When I Need Me?, a humorous overview of the Hollywood scene.

Death[edit] On June 21, 2003, at the age of 81, Axelrod died quietly in his sleep. He was at home, under hospice care after a lingering llness. His body was cremated.

Filmography[edit] Phffft! (1954) (screenplay) The Seven Year Itch (1955) (play) Bus Stop (1956) (screenplay) Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957) (play) Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) (screenplay) The Manchurian Candidate (1962) (screenplay, producer) Goodbye Charlie (1964) (screenplay) Lord Love a Duck (1966) (director) The Secret Life of an American Wife (1968) (director, screenplay)

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George Axelrod: Irony!

Interview by Pat McGilligan

Good comedy, George Axelrod once said, is bitter; great comedy, angry. He should know. In the Hollywood of the fifties and sixties, it was mostly comedies that put him at the top of the screenwriting profession: Phffft!, The Seven Year Itch, Bus Stop, Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Manchurian Candidate —as ferocious in its political satire as in its paranoid-thriller plot—and the cult classic Lord Love a Duck. His name became synonymous with craft and sophistication. He became a hyphenate, a living legend, and an entry in most film encyclopedias. Then it was mostly downhill, and admittedly, Axelrod has been off the A list for twenty-five years.

His comedy could be exceedingly angry. His sex-obsessed farces aggressively attack the sacrosanct. Extramarital affairs are seen not as illicit so much as aphrodisiac prescriptions for stale marriages. Monogamy is dull. Sex is fun, not sinful. The Production Code Administration and the Catholic Legion of Decency—Axelrod's twin nemeses in his golden years—didn't think his humor was very funny, and relentlessly lobbied to water down his scripts. Hardly anybody thought The Manchurian Candidate was funny when it was first released; it was pilloried across the spectrum by groups ranging from the American Legion to the Communist Party. It took time for people to realize just how funny it was. But the anger came through.

Axelrod had not only a wildly prominent but also a prematurely aborted, misunderstood career. The playwright-gone-Hollywood never experienced one of his plays happily transferred to the screen: Working with Billy Wilder was a joy, but The Seven Year Itch, a hit on Broadway (and in summer stock forever after), was half a botch on film. The Frank Tashlin movie of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, based on Axelrod's play of the same name, Axelrod has never seen; ditto Vincente Minnelli's version of Goodbye Charlie. The films in which Axelrod enjoyed the highest degree of success were not his trademark "boobs and boobs" comedies, and they tend to show the writer in a different, more complicated light.

― 44 ― Bus Stop, an adaptation of a William Inge play, provides the cinema's fondest window on Marilyn Monroe. Axelrod viewed Monroe, a close friend, tragically, and so does the movie. Among the actress's dramatic vehicles, only The Misfits approaches its insight and compassion. But Bus Stop also has Axelrod's wicked sense of humor. Breakfast at Tiffany's, loosely drawn from Truman Capote's novella, was another triumph of adaptation, a heart-on-its-sleeve romantic comedy that revealed the rarely indulged flip side of Axelrod's cynicism. Tiffany's is usually given short shrift in discussions of the scriptwriter's career, as if it were somehow an impersonal project. Capote, too, was a close friend, and staying faithful inside of the restrictions of the day without bowdlerizing the source material was a challenge that whetted the writer's appetite. Axelrod's reteaming with Audrey Hepburn, Paris When It Sizzles, turned out to be "Paris When It Fizzles," but the sweetness, sentimentality, and high-toned comedy of Tiffany's stands the test of time.

The Manchurian Candidate —well, how many movies enjoy a revival and national re-release twenty-seven years after their first exhibition? How many movies of that era were so far ahead of their audience that their comedy and politique are still on the cutting edge today? Richard Condon's novel was a pet project, ingeniously adapted, then cast and coproduced by Axelrod and the director John Frankenheimer. Its polished blend of black comedy, high-octane thriller, and cautionary political parable remains unique.

It may be as novel to appreciate Axelrod as a first-rank adapter as it is to call him romantic and compassionate—but that is how it stacks up. Lord Love a Duck, his screen directorial debut and his Waterloo, is also an adaptation, Axelrod's co-script of the Al Hine novel is unromantic, dispassionate, yet distinctively Axelrod, and in many ways a category unto itself. Perhaps Axelrod, viciously satirizing almost everything he could think of—teenagedom, mother-sonhood, pop religion, laid-back California culture—bit off more than he could chew. Perhaps the coarse, black-and-white, handheld camera rubbed salt in wounds. Perhaps, as with Manchurian, Axelrod was too far in front of the demographics. Perhaps the movie is not as slashingly brilliant as cultists think. ("His best script," declares David Thomson in A Biographical Dictionary of Film. ) However, isn't it more the point that Axelrod really relished the risk taking and saw courting risk and rejection as part of the job?

Axelrod's life story, far from happy go lucky, tells us where the edge and risk taking came from. While he was growing up, there was misery. Then, grindingly hard work paid off, as he turned thirty, in over-the-top success. (After Axelrod's first play was written, in 1953 the New York Times reported that his taxes that year would rise close to $100,000, "almost single-handedly paying the President's salary.") Hollywood offers followed, and unlike some ― 45 ― image [Full Size] George Axelrod in New York City, 1995. (Photo by William B. Winburn.)

writers—though he continued to live on the East Coast for a long time and later shifted to London—Axelrod embraced Hollywood, became well integrated in the community (a fabulous host and party giver), loved the lifestyle (and loved ridiculing it). And then came a series of professional heartbreaks and missteps, long spells of ill-advised work, and years of too much Russian vodka on crushed ice.

George Axelrod (1922— )

1954

Phffft! (Mark Robson). Story, script.

1955

The Seven Year Itch (Billy Wilder). Co-script, based on Axelrod's play.

― 46 ―

1956

Bus Stop (Joshua Logan). Script.

1957

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (Frank Tashlin). Based on Axelrod's play.

1958

Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys! (Leo McCarey). Uncredited contribution.

1961

Breakfast at Tiffany's (Blake Edwards). Script.

1962

The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer). Coproducer, Script.

1964

Paris When It Sizzles (Richard Quine). Coproducer, script.

	 Goodbye Charlie (Vincente Minnelli). Based on Axelrod's play.

1965

How to Murder Your Wife (Richard Quine). Producer, story, script.

1966

Lord Love a Duck (George Axelrod). Producer, director, co-script.

1968

The Secret Life of an American Wife (George Axelrod). Producer, director, story, script.

1979

The Lady Vanishes (Anthony Page). Script.

1985

The Lady Vanishes (John Frankenheimer). Co-script.

1985

The Fourth Protocol (John Mackenzie). Adaptation.

Television credits include numerous script contributions to episodes of The Colgate Comedy Hour, The Boris Karloff Mystery Playhouse, The Peter Lind Hayes Show, and others. Plays include contributions to Small Wonder, The Seven Year Itch, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and Goodbye Charlie.

Novels include Beggar's Choice, Blackmailer, and Where Am I Now—When I Need Me? Academy Award honors include an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium for Breakfast at Tiffany's. Writers Guild honors include nominations for Best Script for Phffft!, The Seven Year Itch, and Bus Stop. Axelrod won Best Written American Comedy for Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Tell me a little bit about your background . . . Let me say a couple of things first—worries that I have about your books. Sometimes what I don't like about the interviews is they are so self-serving. I cannot stand self-serving in anybody—particularly writers. Screen writers.

― 47 ― I guess I'm proud they are self-serving. In your world, the world of screenwriting, they must look extremely self-serving. But in the larger scheme of things, in and out of Hollywood, I hope they redress some balance. Redress the great wrongs? (Chuckles. ) An example of which: Just last week, during the Academy Awards, they saluted the people behind the camera in a montage at the beginning of the show. They showed only one writer, and that was Robert Redford, typing at the typewriter in a scene from The Way We Were [1973]. That was the only writer!

In the larger scheme of things, there aren't too many books like the Backstory series. I know they are self-serving for screenwriters, and I'm proud of that. I like the sameness of the stories: people saying, "I really thought of that . . . the director is the one who screwed it up . . . and it would have been great if only they had done it my way. "

That sounds so childish. On the one hand. On the other hand, these are time-honored complaints from writers about Hollywood . . . not just clichés.

It's the nature of the job. In the theater, the writer is God. You can't change a line without the author's permission. But that's because in the theater, you're given one set, five characters, and two hours; and you've got to hold the stage with just talk. Here, talk is considered kind of more wordage.

Another problem I have with your books is that everybody out here [in Hollywood] is so literal. When people say something ironical in one of your books and it comes out in cold print, you can't convey any irony. I'm always misquoted in books, and the irony doesn't show up.

Irony is a dirty word out here. Just the other day, a kid agent, one of these intense lunatics from CAA [Creative Artists Agency] who regards agenting as a religious calling—they go on retreats and everything nowadays—asked me why I was doing something [in one of my scripts]. I said it was ironical. He tried to bring me up to date and launch me into the new world. He said, "We don't do irony anymore. It's elitist."

He said that with a straight face? That's depressing.

Terrifying. So, irony is difficult to do out here, and it's difficult to do in one of these interviews.

For example, I might say to somebody, and there's a germ of truth in this, "I'm no longer interested in seeing movies about anybody less socially well placed than myself. I don't want to see poor people or sick people. I want to see rich, beautiful people saying witty things and screwing." When you print that out flat, it looks godawful. But it's kind of funny when you say it. I don't actually mean it—I'm just trying to convey the idea that I prefer old-fashioned high comedy.

Which almost doesn't exist anymore. Except maybe from [the writer-director] Blake Edwards.

― 48 ― God, no. Comedies of manners don't exist because there are no more manners, and drawing-room comedies don't exist because there are no more drawing rooms. And Blake Edwards, God love him, doesn't have a clue about high anything. What he does, and does brilliantly, is slapstick.

Just to balance the scales, what I love about the books you are doing are the specifics. I am interested in the process of screenwriting. Is that what people who buy these books are interested in? Or do they just want to hear gossip— you know, what was Marilyn Monroe really like?

Let's try again. Back up. Start with a little biography.

Very briefly, I was born in 1922. I was born in New York City in a hotel, the Cambridge Hotel. M'y mother was a movie starlet, although they didn't really call them starlets then. Her name was Betty Carpenter. She appeared in a series of films called the Sunshine Comedies, a rival group to Mack Sennett's bathing beauties. She was in one picture with Slim Summerville, the comedian, a short called A High-Diver's Last Kiss [1918], in which she was a high diver on a diving board, and he comes along in an autogiro, as they were called then—a helicopter—and her bathing suit gets all tangled up in the blades.

So you yourself are a child of slapstick . . .

Kind of. My mother had pretensions as well. She made a couple of serious pictures with Dick Barthelmess and Buster Collier. Then she married my father, Herman Axelrod. He was Russian Jewish; my mother was Scottish English—kind of a heady mixture. My father had gone to Columbia University with Oscar Hammerstein. They had written varsity shows and other material together. He and Larry Hart, who was their age—Dick Rodgers was the young kid of the group—were all in the same circle. Like them, my father was going to make his career in the theater.

His father, my grandfather, was a domineering, tyrannical, very interesting man—a self-made millionaire who arrived in this country with only a pair of glasses, and made millions building buildings and buying real estate. When my father wanted to marry this blond, Hollywood shiksa, my grandfather said, "Okay, but I'll make a deal with you. You've got to join the business and not screw around in the theater." So my father copped out and made a deal which ruined his life. He and my mother had to make enormous sacrifices to this little tin god, my grandfather. Shortly thereafter, my mother and he were divorced. Oh, there were disastrous goings-on.

I had no respect for my father whatsoever because of that decision. So what I did in my career was partly related to the tense feelings I had about him.

Reaction against him?

Showing him, shoving it at him. Interestingly enough, I suppose, although I don't hold with Freudian stuff—it's too simpleminded—when he died, finally, in 1967, I sort of lost interest in my career. I lost the drive. I had nobody to show anymore. I haven't really done a lot since then, only odds and ends.

― 49 ― In your mind, you really make that connection?

Either that, or it's a remarkable coincidence.

Were you raised by your mother?

Sort of. I lived with her. She was pretty haphazard.

You didn't see your father very much. No, not often.

Did you reconcile with him before he died?

Unfortunately not. I'm sorry about that. When I'm uncomfortable sometimes in a situation and I hear myself saying truly stupid things, I recognize my father's voice. So I know that he must have been uncomfortable most of his life, in any special or interpersonal relationship. He couldn't deal with people, yet he had a great surface charm. He was a very complicated man.

He must have had a wellspring of creativity that was all bottled up. He was a big man at Columbia. He was the editor of the humor magazine The Jester. He wrote and starred in two of the college varsity shows, and earned a letter as a high jumper in track, which was a feat for this Jewish boy, in those times when there was quite a bit of anti-Semitism. Later on, he was a lieutenant officer in the First World War. He started off in life like a firecracker, then just fizzled.

Did he become a dull, gray businessman? And a bitter one.

So you never witnessed any demonstration of his youthful, show-business flair? He was a hanger-on to Oscar Hammerstein's behind for years. As a friend, kind of.

As an investor in shows, too? As a friend. He was too chicken to invest. He was too chicken to do anything. I've actually made money investing, which is a rare boast. Mr. [George] Abbott once asked me if I would write the book for the musical 7½ c [based on Richard Bissell's comic novel]. I read it and went to a meeting with Mr. Abbott. I said I didn't know how to write a musical about a strike in a pajama factory. But I felt guilty about it, so I put some money into the production. I still get money from Pajama Game. Oh!

Leland Hayward, who I worked with and who produced a play of mine called Goodbye Charlie, told me once that a little piece of Sound of Music was dropping out. He said, "You could have that if you want." I said, "I'll take it, provided I never, ever, have to see it in any form." I put some money in, and I never have seen it. And I am still getting money.

The idea of The Sound of Music is too schmaltzy for you?

Oh! Also, I have a lifelong hatred of Oscar Hammerstein, which is all mixed up with the feelings for my father.

His reputation is a saintly one. ― 50 ― I know! Beware of saints. Beware of the arrogance of the do-gooder. Saintly?!! Oscar Hammerstein was a miserable son of a bitch, at least I thought so. He was terrible to my father, and he was kind of snotty to me too. What a sanctimonious guy!

Later on in life, when I was going to do The Seven Year Itch in London, I had Howard Rhineheimer as my lawyer because I did not know any better. He was Oscar Hammerstein's lawyer as well. He convinced me, because Rodgers and Hammerstein had blocked money in England, to let them coproduce Itch there with Binky Beaumont and H. M. Tennant. I said, "Why not?" I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't realize there is too little money to be made producing shows in England to split it with anyone. The production was kind of botched, anyway. It ran a year in London, but it was not the hit it should have been. Oscar told me, "Don't worry, kid. You'll write another play someday." He was so patronizing about it. I had a smash goddamn hit, which ran 1,141 performances on Broadway. Talk about self-serving! And I had to take crap from Oscar Hammerstein—urban, Jewish guy writing rural stuff. "The corn is as high as an elephant's eye! . . . " For Chrissake.

Did your mother pass on a love of show business?

She gave show business up altogether and didn't do anything with her life for a while. She had a series of gentlemen friends who contributed to her general well-being. Later on, she got into the wallpaper business and proved herself a driving and ambitious lady. I made peace with her toward the end, but I got out of the house as fast as I could.

After high school? Actually, I'm prematurely Holden Caulfield. I got kicked out of Hill, Lawrenceville, Collegiate . . . I never finished high school. And you never went to college? Nah. What did you end up doing?

In the summer of 1940, after I got kicked out of Collegiate, through a kind of nepotism I was introduced to [the director-producer] Dick Aldrich, who ran the Cape Playhouse at Dennis, Massachusetts—a good summer theater, one of the best. I got hired on as an apprentice. Mel Ferrer was the stage manager that season. But, by the end of the season, I had become the stage manager because Mel was playing in a production of Kind Lady with Grace George, which Bill Brady, the producer, then decided to bring into New York as a revival. So, at the age of eighteen, I became an assistant stage manager on Broadway.

Then I did some summer stock and went into the Walgreen's kid-actor business for a while. What I really wanted to be was a writer. I knew that. But I also realized that nobody wanted to read anything an eighteen-year-old boy wrote, so acting would be my way into show business. What made you decide to be a writer?

― 51 ― I have no idea. It never occurred to me to do anything else. I guess I realized I could make a living as a writer during the period when I was miserable at the Hill, a boarding school in Pennsylvania. One afternoon in the winter, when I was supposed to be in the gym, I was goofing off in the library and pulled down a book I had also seen on my father's bookshelf—[Ernest Hemingway's novel] The Sun Also Rises. I read it in two afternoons, two sittings, and it changed my life. I said to myself, "My God, writing is about conversation. Is this how you do it? I could do this . . . " It was a revelation.

Very shortly thereafter, I encountered the short stories of William Saroyan—the early, wonderful ones where he's in a hotel in New York, with his hair freezing because there's no heat, with all the romance of being a young writer in New York. I thought, "Christ, that's for me . . . "

When I was eighteen, I wrote a play that actually Dick Aldrich considered for a while. It wasn't any good, but it had something . . . and I spent some time trying to write short stories for preposterous magazines. Then I sold a half-hour radio play when I was twenty, the first big thing I sold and the first thing I wrote for radio.

I knew a guy in an ad agency who produced radio shows, and he let me go to a rehearsal. I had never seen a radio script before I got a copy of one. The phrase "music up and down" is how they used to do the bridges. That was the "fade in and fade out." I read that and thought, "Oh, that's how they do that!" I went home and wrote a radio script, and I sold it.

Were you being supported at all by your parents at this point? Were you well heeled?

No. My father and grandfather survived the Crash very well, but what put them out of business was rent control. They owned these apartment buildings where the rent had to be frozen. My grandfather had elevator boys and doormen and all the facade—he was not going to give up the service and the elegance, right to the end, though he kept losing building after building after building. He was down to his last one—he lived to be ninety-one—and at ninety-one, he jumped off the roof of his last building.

Oh, really?

If I ever digressed like this in a movie script, I would have lost the audience already.

So you sold your first radio script when you were twenty . . .

I sold maybe a half dozen of them. I wrote a couple of The Shadows —they paid me $250 each. The ones I couldn't sell here I sold to Canadian Theater of the Air, where they would pay $100. Then, of course, the war came along and three years in the army. I wrote a novel while I was in the army, which Simon and Schuster was going to publish if I would revise it. I typed a lot of the first draft at Camp Crowder [in Missouri], where they had a typewriter in the recreation hall, which you could use if you put a quarter in. But I was in a foxhole in Normandy, and there was no ― 52 ― way I was going to be able to finish rewriting it. I kept getting letters from Simon and Schuster and notes from the editor while I was stuck in this foxhole. My rewrites were in V-letter.[*] It was a mystery-spy story actually, and part of the premise was cracking the code. Hilarious! I said to myself, "I can't just say, 'He sat and sweated all night and cracked the code.' I have to show people how he cracked it." So first I had to figure out a code. I sent some revisions off to Simon and Schuster, and along came two guys in a jeep to where the foxhole was and brought me back to a place called Ramrod Advance. Because they were censoring the mail, and had figured out I was developing a code. Try to explain you're writing a mystery novel for Simon and Schuster! I feared I would be shot out of hand. Was it a comic mystery novel?

No. It was deadly serious. I wasn't sure about the comedy yet. Comedy kept creeping in. The only good stuff in it was the funny stuff. But I was just feeling my way. One of the reasons I knew I could make people laugh—in person—was because that's how I survived the war. I was in with a bunch of hillbillies in the Signal Corps—with those Bell Telephone Company guys who were officers. Oh, boy! During the Battle of the Bulge, when I found myself out in the snow with those guys, I figured, "Jesus, I'm not going to make it through this one . . . "

I had this one horrible sergeant—Sergeant Gilstrap was his name—I'll never forget Sergeant Gilstrap. His brother was a sheriff down south in Georgia who was famous for beating a black guy to death with a lead pipe, and everybody in my unit thought that was pretty neat. I used to say, "Sergeant Gilstrap, you need me out here because I'm the only guy who can walk through this snow and not leave tracks . . . " "You what?" "My ass is dragging so low it wipes them out." Ho, ho, ho! Sergeant Gilstrap'd slap his thick knees and repeat my jokes to everyone. I realized I could make him laugh—rather primitively, albeit. Those kinds of jokes stood me in good stead later on when I wrote for the Grand Ole Opry.

No kidding?

For two years. That was my Guggenheim Fellowship. At a certain point in my career, indeed toward the very end of my radio and television writing career—I'm jumping ahead of myself—I had to write forty cow jokes a week for Rod Brasfield and Minnie Pearl.[**]

This was when you were back living in New York? ― 53 ― In New York, sending them down to Nashville. Rod was wonderful to write for. It wasn't really writing; it was anthologizing, because Rod really wouldn't do jokes that he didn't know and love, so you had to keep finding new ways of doing the old jokes. I know more cow jokes than any living human being. "Why did the cow jump over the moon? The farmer had such cold hands" kind of jokes. "What is a cow's favorite song? 'The Yanks Are Coming.'" I would try to slip some of my own in occasionally. I could write pretty good ones, but he wouldn't do them if they were too uptown. I remember one wonderful, uptown cow joke. "Did you hear about the cow that swallowed a bottle of blue ink and mooed indigo?" Rod would say, "That's too uptown . . . " In a way, that's the story of your life. Yeah, I'm too uptown. Irony! Anyway, to get back chronologically, then came the turning point. When I finished the manuscript of the mystery novel I had written at Camp Crowder, I sent it to Frannie Pindyke, whom I had heard of—she was running Leland Hayward's literary department. Frannie loved it, so I became a client of Leland Hayward's office. Then Leland sold out to MCA [Music Corporation of America], so I became an MCA client. This was approximately 1947. MCA absorbed Leland's literary clients; they had two departments at MCA in those days—talent and writers. Then, this is what happened: CBS was attempting to build some in-house comedies because they were always being forced to buy packages and getting screwed on the deals, and also because they felt tyrannized by Arthur Godfrey. So they had a double mission: create in-house comedy packages while building a new star that would threaten the tyrannical powers of Arthur Godfrey, who was bleeding them of money and had become a total monster running rampant. They wanted to create a countermonster, a house personality.

In a flight of sanity, they hired a guy named Goodman Ace, from Easy Aces, an old strip radio show,&astric; who was a comic genius—a true, natural comic genius—as the head of a development program of young writers. By "young," they meant "inexpensive." They had a name for the new star; they wanted to call him Robert Q. Lewis; and they had several candidates for the guy that they were going to build into the countermonster. Written by a bunch of kids that Goody Ace would teach how to write comedy. The whole thing was going to cost nothing, and it was going to be a triumph.

Well, about one hundred kids came in—college kids, all types of young kids. Word had gotten out that there was going to be an opening. Goody Ace was going to pick ten guys—five guys to work on a strip, an across-the-board show for this Robert Q. Lewis that we were going to discover; and five guys to work on big Saturday night specials. MCA sent me in. Goody gave us assign- [] ― 54 ― ments: "Write a telephone conversation. Robert Q. Lewis gets a telephone call from a fan. One page, no more." What kind of personality was Robert Q. Lewis supposed to have?

We didn't know yet. That was part of what we were going to create. So, maybe one hundred guys wrote a one-page sketch, and out of these submissions, Goody picked Doc and Danny Simon as a team; Paddy Chayefsky, who had not written anything at that point; Ernest Lehman; a guy named Bobby Cohen, who was killed in an accident—he was maybe the most talented of all—and four or five other people. Goody hit paydirt with five, six counting me, which suggests he was a rather perceptive personality.

Goody was a primitive, in a way. He had been a general critic on a Kansas City newspaper, and used to review the vaudeville acts that came through town. He began selling jokes to some of the vaudeville acts, and among other people, he sold a joke to Jack Benny, when Benny was in vaudeville. I remember the joke, because he told it to me proudly. In those days, vaudeville had to have acrobats to open. Usually Oriental acts. Jack Benny had a Filipino tumbling act. Goody's joke was: "I thought we had to have Japs or better to open." Benny bought this joke, and that started Goody on his career.

Goody started writing for early radio. Then he brought his wife in, Jane Ace, who was a kind of thinking-man's Gracie Allen. Jane did exquisite malaprops. Goody and Jane developed a strip show, fifteen minutes daily, five times a week. They moved to Chicago, then to New York. Easy Aces was the show. It was hilarious. I grew up on it. I was a big fan. During the war, for example, Jane would get a job in a war plant, but somehow or other, her knitting instructions would get mixed up with bombing plans, so she'd be knitting this thing that grew bigger and bigger, which developed wings on it. Meanwhile, the war plant was turning out thousands of tiny aluminum sweaters. Wild ideas! I was hired with Doc and Danny to work on the Saturday night special. R. Q. Lewis was selected. It came down to two disc jockeys, including one named Bob Goldberg, who became R. Q. Lewis. We labored for eight months, ten months a year, on those Robert Q. Lewis special shows and for two or three years on the strip, and Robert Q. Lewis never did become a household name, I tell you. We did not succeed! So they abandoned Robert Q. Lewis, and Goody went on to do a half-hour version of the Easy Aces called Mr. Ace and Jane of the "Easy Aces." I worked on that one. What were you learning, working with Goody? How to write comedy. Comedy is so delicate. The words have got to be in the right order, or it's not funny. I learned a lot from Goody. At the same time, I taught him a lot, because he had never heard of irony, which I seemed to know about, or satire. He started to do parodies of stuff, which—parody—he had never heard of before. Talk about self-serving! ― 55 ― Are there a million practical suggestions for writing comedy? Absolutely none. But you can learn by doing. Funny is really built in the way you think. A really pompous thing to say is "I think funny." But most things do strike me as funny. How did you go from writing jokes and being funny in person to learning structure and storytelling for an entire script? By degrees, I guess. Trial and error. But I was born with a pretty good sense of structure. You never took classes or workshops? God, no. I never spoke to other writers except when I was working. Were you sometimes writing with other people? I was never a very good collaborator. Sometimes we used to do round-table stuff on the big comedy shows, but mostly I worked alone.

When you're working alone, how do you think up the jokes? I tell you, I think funny. I sit there and laugh—if it's going good. Paddy Chayefsky used to say, "I sit there and cry, with tears streaming down my face." You never come up empty?

Yeah. A lot, over the years. But you make it on the percentages.

Did this illustrious group continue for very long with Goodman Ace? Doc and Danny branched off to Sid Caesar; Chayefsky started writing for real; Ernie Lehman, who had been a press agent selling jokes to columnists, went on and did great adaptations out here and one terrific, original screenplay, Sweet Smell of Success. Meanwhile, while I was still doing radio shows, I started doing early, early television . . .

At that time I was extremely disciplined and always doing two or three things at once, radio and television. I was married by then, with a child, a son. So I also needed the money, boy.

Money was always a big motivation? Oh yeah. But I wanted to write, and I loved what I was doing and felt that I was very good at it. If I went back and looked at the radio and TV shows, were some of them good, and would they hold up? We'll never know, because they were on kinescope. They didn't have tape then. It was all live television. Kind of a joke—irony! Indeed, in my first movie script, I almost left time for the costume changes, I was so used to live television. Kind of a joke—irony! The sex comedy? Was it cropping up on radio? You could do a lot on radio if you were very judicious, because people couldn't see it, and a lot of times, the insinuation wouldn't catch. It could be in the readings and it was live, so once you did it, they couldn't do a goddamn thing about it. I got a tremendous laugh from Rod Brasfield on the Grand Ole Opry once on a joke that was the closest we came ever to being rowdy. He was talking about having bought his girlfriend a pair of fall-length stockings—she ― 56 ― wanted them to be very high. He said, "They came up to her expectations. Indeed, they almost tickled her fancy." People roared, laughing. The same with early television? Could you also get away with murder? I was never in TV when it wasn't live. Oh, I did shabby stuff. I had such contempt for the sponsors and all the ad agency guys. I loathed them. In those days, and I guess still, there were shady people around who would bribe writers to get products into scripts. Plugaroos. You had to mention the product's name. The idea being, you were making the product sound like it was such a universal thing, a household word. With each mention of the product, you got either sixty dollars, or a case of scotch or whiskey. A lot of my time was spent trying to figure out how to work this scam, and the ad agencies were out to stymie it, because their clients were paying good money to be advertised in these shows. So it was a war of wits. On one of the shows, I had a running character who was a silent movie star called Maybelline Mascara. They didn't catch on to that for a long time. And I got my case of liquor every time they said, "Maybelline Mascara." Did some of the stuff from this period, some of these jokes, some of the sketches, get recycled later on? Oh, sure. A scene from a novel I never finished is intact in Itch —it's the psychiatrist scene where the guy is attempting to commit criminal assault on a piano bench. I had to fix it, so it fit into the context, but the scene itself played right out of the book. And I have jokes that have appeared in fifty different things and been cut out because they aren't any good, but I keep sticking them back in. I was doing the maddest stuff in those days. One of the shows I was writing was The Eddie Albert Show —a five-a-week show with Eddie that was broadcast all over the country but not in New York—it did not have a New York outlet. It was an early morning show, so nobody in New York ever heard it. It was a variety show which I turned into an experimental show. Nobody listened to it, so we could do anything. Real fun and free-flow stuff. We didn't have any sponsor to worry about. We were just filling in our time, and nobody at CBS in New York ever heard the show. One time I had Eddie up there inveighing against the March of Dimes. Eddie was playing in a play in New York at the time, so he'd stagger in—we had to record this show at eight o'clock in the morning—and he'd read anything you put in front of him. Anything! We had a marvelous time and invented all kinds of stuff. Oh, Eddie's a great guy! One of the fellows working on the show became a producer at [the advertising agency] William Este. One of his clients was the Grand Ole Opry. When Eddie finally wanted to get out of the show, he said to me, "Why don't you take a crack at these goddamn cow jokes? You're versatile . . . " So that's when I started writing the cow jokes, and I wrote them for two years, 104 consecutive shows, where you had to come up with forty cow jokes a week. You worked in television from '47 to?—

― 57 ― Fifty-two. I escaped in '52. They used to let one television writer out over the wall every year to keep the courage of the others up. They let Sam Taylor out first, then me. Doc Simon a couple of years later . . . but the poor schmucks—irony!—who stayed, like Norman Lear, just ended up as billionaires. Poor Norman—he was part of [Ed] Simmons and Lear at that time.[*] They were doing Martin and Lewis shows. I replaced Simmons and Lear, writing the old Colgate Comedy Hour with [Dean] Martin and [Jerry] Lewis [as guest hosts].

From '47 to '52 must have been chaotic as well as productive.

It was wild. I wrote, or contributed to, or collaborated on, over four hundred radio and television scripts, everything from the Grand Ole Opry to The Boris Karloff Mystery Playhouse to The Peter Lind Hayes Show. I remember The Peter Lind Hayes Show as being great fun—because again, like Eddie, Peter would do anything. Did you get any sleep?

No.

Did you have any quality of life?

No. Nothing. I was a lousy father to my two children by then—and a terrible husband.

Yet you look back on that period warmly?

Yes. It was very exciting. And in the mornings, between eight and nine, which is when I had to leave to go to work, I would work on my play.

You had time left over to work on a play?

That's what I always wanted to do: write plays. I was going to escape. Television was a means to support myself and learn my craft. I had the idea for The Seven Year Itch. I wrote it—not in fifteen days—but in fifteen hour, hour and a half sessions at the typewriter. I started on an Easter Sunday, when I didn't have to do anything, and finished it on the Fourth of July in '52. I'd taken cracks at plays, but I never could get one that seemed to come . . . together. This one came in one piece.

Were you going to the theater a lot?

Always. But in those days I was poor, and there were hundreds of shows—Broadway was booming—an opening every night. I never saw a first act, not for a long time. I'd go in after the first act and mingle with the crowd going into the second act. I saw a lot of second and third acts.

Consequently, your openings are always mysteriously weak . . . but your endings are strong? That's irony!

Irony! Yeah, right. We don't do irony here.

Were you an omnivorous reader?

― 58 ― Omnivorous reader. I read endlessly to make up for my lack of formal education.

You wrote Itch so quickly. Then what happened?

I gave the play to [the producer] Courtney Burr, who was a friend of my father's. Although by this time I was not without reputation—not in the theater but in my own racket. Courtney read it and liked it. I wanted Elliott Nugent to play the lead. Elliott, who was just about to play in the revival of The Male Animal, said he wouldn't be able to and, "I'm too old for it anyway." Later on, that decision drove him crazy when Itch became a hit. So Elliott enlisted his son-in-law, Johnny Gerstad, who was a pretty good actor, and who wanted to be a director. Elliott said he would oversee the production when he could. I didn't give a shit. I just wanted to get it on, man. And, indeed, I finished the play on the Fourth of July, and by September, we were in rehearsal.

Well, Nugent turned out to be a monster. Gerstad was great because he was willing to listen to me. Where my chutzpah came from I don't know, but I stood up to Nugent when he wanted to change scenes and rewrite. For one thing, he hated the title. He said he wanted to take out an ad in Variety which said he loved the play he was producing but hated the title because it was vulgar: "I think the title is vulgar, and I don't want to be associated with it." But, fortunately, he was involved with The Male Animal. Johnny Gerstad and I used to say, "Let's try to keep the grown-ups out of this . . . "

Courtney Burr was no help. I learned a lot from Courtney about how to live, but in terms of standing up to Nugent, well, I invented a dish called Chicken Courtney. I did learn how you stay at the Ritz in Boston and get the corner suite with a fireplace and send over to S. S. Perce for booze. I learned a lot about life and high living from Courtney.

We managed to bring the play in unscathed. I had not wanted Tommy Ewell for the lead, really, but he was wonderful in it. You cannot fault something that worked. My original choice, after Elliott couldn't do it, would have been Keenan Wynn, who was a good stage actor before he hardened into a film actor. I wanted Keenan, but they were firm about Tommy.

In those days, Keenan was almost good looking enough to get the girl, certainly as good looking as Tommy—a superb comic actor. I came out to see him in Hollywood when we were casting the national company, but it didn't work out. Keenan was happily ensconced at MGM, making his twenty-five hundred dollars a week. He was in a picture called Kiss Me Kate [1953], playing one of the gangsters, and I remember him sitting there on the lot, happily reading his motorcycle magazines.

That was the first time you were in Hollywood?

Yeah. I came out to talk to Keenan but also to see Billy [Wilder], because he was going to do the movie of Itch. Was that the first time you met Billy? What was that like?

― 59 ― Oh, Billy! I lobbied for Billy for the movie. When the play was up for sale, I said, "I want Billy Wilder." I longed to meet Billy Wilder. [The agent] Irving Lazar got into the act, and he put the package together and offered it to [the agent-producer] Charlie Feldman and Billy Wilder. I was sitting in my kitchen one night and the phone rings and it's Billy Wilder. He said (Billy Wilder imitation ), "You are putting me in the impossible position of bidding against Loew's Incorporated!" He said, "You will do the following: you will get on the airplane in the morning; then you will come out here and . . . " Right away, he started running my life.

I was so in awe of Billy. But we didn't really make a very good picture. In addition to having a horrible Breen Office problem,[*] the play just didn't adapt. The claustrophic element of the play is what makes it work—the guy trapped in the little apartment, his imagination soaring out of the apartment. When you open the play up, it loses its tension. Certain stories God doesn't mean to be movies. Every story has its form, its ideal form. The trick of doing an adaptation is to see if you can take the heart—the genetic code of the play—and transport that code, into another medium. Into a new code. While retaining the integrity of the original code and recoding it into a movie. I have a certain gift for that sometimes. Sometimes, I can see right into a thing and see what the genetic code is. Sometimes, you get touched on the shoulder, and then you can see how to transport it. What's amazing to me is that nowadays everybody in the world is writing a screenplay. A screenplay is the hardest single form there is. You can't make any mistakes. Because it's not like a book where you can turn back the pages and say, "Oh, that's what he said!" It's continuous, razor-edge-of-now action. You aren't allowed any mistakes, because the audience is a fantastic entity. You can have 1,100 morons sitting in the audience, but when they come together in the darkness, an almost mystical thing happens, a kind of mass unconscious that is smarter than you are. They can spot a phony a mile off. The first part of a movie has got to be not only engaging their attention in some way but building their trust. If you lose their trust, you can never get it back. They've got to feel that they're in good hands, that the guy who's telling the story knows what he is doing. They'll give you ten minutes. They'll accept any premise. They've gone out of the house—or, nowadays, rented the video—in any case, they've paid their money, and they're ready. Tell them a ― 60 ― story, and they will listen for ten minutes. Tell them Martians are about to invade, or any goddamn thing, for ten minutes— About the length of a pitch meeting— It's a pitch meeting, exactly. That's what it is. Very often, once they get the idea, they say, "Oh, I don't like that." You've lost them. But they'll give you that ten minutes . . . then, you have to be true to your premise. Any deviation, they don't know why, they're made uneasy. They're unforgiving, and they're almost always right. With Billy, you were the sitter; he was the walker? I'm the typer; he's the walker. English is Billy's third language. He doesn't physically write. He's always the walker and the talker. He can't type. I made him use the typewriter once when we finished Itch. I turned the typewriter around and said, "You've got to type The End.'" Billy has a foreigner's love for American idiom—he is a master of American idiom. But, in overall sentence structure, English is still his third language. It comes out sounding not quite right. Izzy [I.A.L.] Diamond, rest his dear soul, used to say, "I'm a $150,000 secretary."[*] Which was not true. That was irony! When I say Billy was the walker, we really walked —because Billy loves to go shopping. We'd work at [20th Century-Fox] in the mornings, then go over to Warners for lunch, because Mr. Blau, in the executive dining room, was Billy's favorite cook. We'd work a little bit in the afternoon, then go to Beverly Hills and go shopping—for anything. Billy is a compulsive buyer. I learned so much about everything from Billy. Billy was, is, a wonderful teacher. I learned about art, food, everything. I didn't learn about writing so much. I learned about real life. Culture. Look around this room. That painting . . . that one-hundred-year-old figure, which Billy gave me . . . Billy's influence is everywhere. But with Itch, we were attempting to do something impossible. In spite of that, did Billy teach you anything at all about writing? Yes. Billy has certain rules that are inviolate. Thou Shalt Not Bore. And, Anything Is Permitted—narration, anything you want to do, whatever gets the story across. Billy gave me the courage to do some of the nutty stuff we did in The Manchurian Candidate. If it works, do it. What about tricks to get past the problems? There are a lot of those. There are certain audience-delight kinds of things that you learn as you go along, like "the duchess trucks.". ― 61 ― The duchess trucks? Yeah, the audience loves it when the sinister character turns out to be lovable: "The duchess breaks into a jazz dance." There are dozens of those tricks. How long did it take you to write the script for Itch? A while. We wrote part of it in New York at the St. Regis, because we made a deal that Billy would come to New York to do part of it, and I'd come to California to do part of it. Part of it at the St. Regis, part at his office at 20th and part at his office at Warners, because he was preparing two different pictures at the same time. Itch and the Charles Lindbergh picture [The Spirit of St. Louis, 1957]. Did you realize all the time you were writing that the script was doomed to fail? Only in retrospect. We thought it was working, and that it would be wonderful. I was in love with the work and Billy was terrific and all I knew was how lucky I was. I think Billy needs friction in a collaborator. He does, and he didn't get any from me. I didn't stand up to him the way I stood up to Elliott Nugent, because I had no respect for Elliott Nugent. Not only did I have respect for Billy, but I had awe. And I just thought everything he said was hilarious. You do need friction. If you collaborate with someone, you have to have a bounce. Otherwise, what's the point? But we had such fun. We became very close friends, laughing and shopping and having lunch with Mr. Blau. Billy was thinking of doing something last year—at eighty-six. He had a funny idea, and he had the money from France to do it, but he couldn't quite solve the story. So I went in and sat with him for a couple of weeks to see if we could put it together, but it didn't work out. Also, by this time, I'm so used to working alone that I don't like to say an idea out loud, because an idea's so fragile; and Billy's hard of hearing now, so you not only have to say it out loud, you have to shout it out loud. Billy was in earnest . . . working on this new script, at age eighty-six? Very much so. Itch went on so long, playing on stage and then being developed for film, that by this point in time, you had already tucked away another picture, your first picture . . . Phffft! That was an original. But I had a sweet, dear, darling man, [the director] Mark Robson, who hadn't a clue how to do comedy. Not a clue. I had Judy Holliday, one of the finest comedy technicians in the world, and Jack Carson, another great comedy technician, and Jack Lemmon too, but the director was miscast. Judy had a terrible time. She understood how to do the material, but Mark crushed the scenes up all the time. We were fighting the director and censorship. The seduction scene with Judy and Jack Carson—a brilliantly funny ― 62 ― scene with these two masters—and Jack made it so erotic. In the case of that scene, we had it on film right. The two of them were left to their own devices with the camera. Afterwards, they cut the shit out of it. The censorship destroyed it, so it wasn't even funny. Mark was an editor. He didn't understand his own limitations. Good directors come in various ways, but editors are the worst because they are interested in editing. They don't know about story. They don't know about comedy. Or even acting. They only know about having a "match." I had no say, really. I was at Columbia with Harry Cohn and Jerry Wald. Mark Robson had done some wonderful films. I said, "Does he know how to do comedy?" They said, "Sure, comedy." I knew pretty much from the time we started that he was inept at comedy, that he didn't quite understand what was funny, but he was so sweet, and I didn't have any control over what we were doing. I was an employee. Was Jerry Wald of any use as a producer? Yeah. I learned a lot from Jerry. Some of the nuts and bolts. I loved Jerry. People tell me he was a frantic personality . . . He was frantic, but he was a fountain of energy and ideas.0 He'd say, "George, I've got a wonderful idea. No? Okay, I've got another wonderful idea . . . " And about the fifth idea would be great. He was just a dynamo. On the other hand, he gave you Mark Robson. On the other hand, he gave me Mark Robson. What Jerry giveth, Jerry taketh away. Starting with Phffft! and Itch, you developed such a reputation for sex comedy. Where did the preoccupation with sex come in for you? Wishful thinking, I suppose. I invented a name for what I used to write: Boobs and boobs. Dumb guys and sexy girls. I remember meeting Jimmy Stewart—who was going to play Charles Lindbergh for Billy Wilder—when I came out to work on Itch with Billy. Stewart was interested in doing Itch —the movie. He said (Jimmy Stewart voice ), "I'm in the boob business, you know. You wrote a pretty good boob. I can play the hell out of that boob." It was totally wishful thinking. Not an extension of your private life? Wishful thinking. Itch is really heartfelt in a way. It was written seriously. It was a comedy, but I was madly in love with a young actress while I was married, and I used to go through agonies about it. I took a lot other dialogue, her chatter, almost word for word, and put it into the play. Later, this lady played Itch on a national tour, and she told me, "God, that dialogue is so real." She had no idea it was stuff she had said. In addition to being self-serving, these interviews have a lot of cop-outs. I'll give you a real cop-out. The bulk of my sex-comedy career was done with this enormous handicap: not being allowed to have any sex. I was trying to write these so-called sex comedies in the fifties when we had to deal with the Breen Office. The Seven Year Itch was a funny, funny play that still plays ― 63 ― today. It plays all over the world today. I make quite a bit of money in royalties on it—it's been translated into a number of foreign languages. But the premise of Seven Year Itch is that a guy has an affair with a girl while his wife is away, and [he] feels guilty about it. And the guilt is funny. In the movie, he couldn't have the affair, but he felt guilty anyway; so the goddamn premise didn't make any sense. Okay, self-serving. In the case of Bus Stop, I believe the movie of Bus Stop is a better movie than the play of Bus Stop is a play. Because Bus Stop is not a particularly good play of Bill Inge's, but it had two unforgettable characters—the chanteuse and the cowboy. The play just plays in one set, at the bus stop, and I had to open it up. I had a brilliant scene in the screenplay for Bus Stop, which the Breen Office just murdered. In the play, the cowboy is bragging about how literate he is—that he can recite the Gettysburg Address. In the movie, I had him break into the girl's room in the morning, while she is asleep, just to prove how literate he is. As he's screwing her, he is reciting the Gettysburg Address. It went on and on: "We are met on a great battlefield . . . " The longer it went on, the funnier it was, but he has to be screwing her while he's doing it. Hilarious scene. But, of course, the Breen Office didn't allow them to screw. So it was a botch. Whatever deluded you into writing it? Perversity. I hoped Josh [Logan] would figure some way to make it work—film it on their faces, or something. Were you hoping for a breakthrough in the Production Code? The breakthroughs weren't anywhere near. Years later, with Lord Love a Duck, they still hadn't broken through. The last scene, where Roddy [McDowall] goes off triumphantly, screaming? I had him mouth "Fuck you!" and they cut it out. Did these things drive you crazy? Oh, mad. Not only did I have to cope with the Breen Office, but I had the Legion of Decency. Frank McCarthy, who was in charge of getting stuff through the Legion of Decency at 20th, used to say, "George, for Chrisake, why do you fight the system? Monsignor Biddle"—who was the movie guy for the Legion of Decency—"will be more than happy to sit down and write the scene with you . . . " (Laughs. Long pause.) Irony? Irony! The fact is that I would not sit down with Monsignor Biddle to write sex comedy scenes. Then, unfortunately, after you wrote them, he went ahead and rewrote them. Yeah, he just blue-penciled them out. You told me that Itch was inspired by a real person. How often do you do that—take dialogue from real people? I do listen to people. Almost all my original stuff is based on a real person; most, loosely. Almost everything starts with a person. Something about that person which gets me thinking—and, mostly, it's a woman. ― 64 ― Why? I don't know why. A lot of stuff was written for Marilyn. I had a big, professional, emotional hang-up with Marilyn. When did you meet Marilyn? When I first came out and started working with Billy in '53. She was rehearsing a musical at 20th—I remember she was doing a dance routine image [Full Size] Axelrod and Marilyn Monroe on the set of Bus Stop , directed by Joshua Logan.

(Courtesy of George Axelrod.)

― 65 ― with [the choreographer] Jack Cole on a hot, sweaty soundstage in grungy rehearsal clothes, all covered with sweat, and she was just edible—glorious. Poor Marilyn. I did two pictures with her and got to know her pretty well. She was a sad, sad, sad creature. She was sick. In a rightly ordered world, she would have been in a nuthouse. She was psychotic. Once you got to know her, one couldn't feel sexy about her. She was pathetic, sad. You just wanted to comfort her, cuddle her, father her, say, "It's going to be all right, child." Did she ever involve herself, critically or otherwise, in the process of writing? No. Did she make script suggestions? Not that I ever heard. She would read the lines as written? If she could remember them, and she couldn't. If she couldn't, then she might do some interpolation? No. She'd burst into tears and run off. The scene on the bus in Bus Stop, where she's pouring her heart out to Hope Lange, was a nightmare to shoot. "Rear projection" wasn't as good as it is now, so they kept running out of film. We had this rickety insert of a bus, and a rear projection screen, and Hope and Marilyn with a big, long speech, and Marilyn couldn't remember the words. Josh's dialogue director was propped up just outside of the screen, feeding her the lines, which she would parrot back. She had reached a point in her neurosis where if anybody said, "Cut!" she took it as an affront, burst into tears, and ran into her dressing room. So Josh never said cut. He'd run the whole nine hundred feet, keep running it and running it while he talked to her. He was a huge man. Josh, so most of the time the screen was filled with Josh's behind and Marilyn's face, with this voice coming from the sky reading the lines that Marilyn would parrot. It took four days to shoot this scene, but it cut together like a dream, partly because Hope Lange is a professional actress and we'd cut to her. Little pieces of what Marilyn would do were inspired, magical, but interspersed with tears and "oh, shit!" and "what the fuck!" and getting her back together—all of it with the camera running because you couldn't say cut. God, the goings-on! Is there any way to compare working with Josh Logan to Billy Wilder? They were both very strong, very powerful idea people, and Josh again was a writer of sorts—again, a writer who never actually set words to paper. He dictated. He dictated scenes to Joe Curtis, his assistant, the dialogue director whose voice was heard coming from above Marilyn on the bus. He was Josh's writing tool. Was Josh involved at all in the adaptation of Bus Stop? Oh yes. He took my first draft, and we really worked on it together for another two to four months. He was very important to that script. He channeled it. ― 66 ― Tell me about Frank Tashlin. I never knew Frank Tashlin. I never worked with him. I had nothing to do with the film of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? I never saw the movie. Not to this day. Why not? They didn't use my story, my play, or my script. You know that without having seen it? I know what they did. I made it about the movies—they made it about television. So, why did they buy it? I was hot as a pistol. Buddy Adler bought it. Buddy and I were good friends, socially. He was the producer of Bus Stop, as well as being head of the studio. He was very supportive. He was going to be the producer of Rally 'Round the Flag —which is why I agreed to do it—then he got [the director] Leo McCarey, who chose to produce it himself. Were you angry about Rock Hunter? I'm never angry. Just saddened. Why do I want to torture myself by seeing it? Are there other movies of yours you have never seen? Well, I don't think I ever sat through the movie of Goodbye Charlie. I saw a couple of minutes of it on television once. Why? . . . Hmmm . . . Debbie Reynolds? But on the other hand, Vincente Minnelli [as director] . . . I like Vincente, but they completely changed Goodbye Charlie right from the start. And I know I never saw Rally 'Round the Flag, after I took my name off. What happened in the case of Rally 'Round the Flag? Leo was a kind of genius, although I caught him at the end of his career. Rally 'Round was a very hard book [Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys! by Max Shulman (New York: Doubleday, 1957)] to beat, and I was never really able to beat it; neither was anybody else. I had a radical way I wanted to do it, and Leo went along with it for a while, but the studio wouldn't hear of it. The novel was not very good, but it did have the author, Max Shulman's, voice, as the narrator of the book. I thought the author's voice was so strong the picture should be narrated by somebody like Fred Allen, someone with a really dry, intelligent voice, and then we could do the film like an old Pete Smith specialty.[*] It worked very well that way, I thought, and Leo liked that approach. But Buddy Adler and the people running Fox at the time wouldn't hear of it. They couldn't understand my script. To them, it was all talk, talk, talk. Leo ― 67 ― eventually had to go the other way. I thought the final script had nothing to do with what I wrote, so I took my name off. Did Leo actually write? He wrote in the Billy Wilder sense. He also never touched a typewriter or a pen or any writing utensil of any kind. They both liked to talk. Oh, sure, Leo was a writer. A writer-director. He worked so closely with writers that he was very much a writer. His writing credits are usually co-credits. He was a verbal guy—one of the great Irish charmers of the world, a salesman. He was famous for going in and selling The Cowboy and the Lady to Goldwyn without having written a word. Goldwyn said, "I love it." They made a deal, and Leo left it to someone else to write. Two, three years went by while they were trying to figure out how to make The Cowboy and the Lady. Finally, they did manage to do it with Gary Cooper. McCarey hadn't been driven too crazy by his paranoia about Hollywood communists by this time? "Jesus and Mary and Leo McCarey" was his nickname, actually. Because of the Catholic films he did, he was always besieged by priests. Like everyone else in the world, there is no priest who hasn't got a screenplay under his frock. My impression is that by this stage of his career, he was pretty dissolute. Oh, he was pretty beat up. But interestingly beat up. No, Leo was a nice guy, and our differences were quite truly artistic only. We became good friends. When he was compelled to change the script, there was no reason for me to keep my name on it. He wanted me to keep my name on. I had to plead to get it off. And you weren't angry about that experience, either? Not angry. Even then, I was beyond getting angry about any of those things. It wasn't that important. It was only a movie. I'll tell you a worse tale. I was working for Hecht-Hill-Lancaster[*] around the time Ernie Lehman was writing Sweet Smell of Success. [Clifford] Odets worked on that too. I know, because [the producer] Jim Hill had Odets locked upstairs, and me locked downstairs. Ernie was going to write and direct Sweet Smell, but he panicked and went to Hawaii. I was working on another one of those projects that never came to fruition, an adaptation of Jim Thurber's story "The Catbird Seat." I was never allowed to write; I became a frustrated writer. Jim Hill—the middle name of Hecht-Hill-Lancaster—loved to have story conferences. I used to sit in his office and ― 68 ― bullshit with him, endlessly. He used sports analogies. "Now, you see, in the first scene"—he acted out the pitching—"you throw the fastball and dust him off . . . " I eventually brought a golf club in and practiced my chip shot over the couches. Never did a goddamn thing all summer. I finally gave back what I had collected by that time, around $175,000. I gave it all back. I said I'd never write another screenplay unless it was written into the contract that I never had to speak to Jim Hill again—even at a party. By this time, I wanted to kill him. Kill, kill! What did Harold Hecht do in that partnership? Hecht was the business guy. Kind of a genius that way and a big drunk. He liked to claim that he developed and produced Cat Ballou [1965], then opened it [in theaters]—but couldn't remember anything about it at all. Never remembered doing it! Who was the brains behind the company? Lancaster? Indicate in script "no comment." Someone had to be the brains. It was an interesting company, yes? It was. It shows you that these things are kind of self-generating. Look at the morons who are running this business today, and every once in a while, a pretty good picture comes out. So the answer is, there was no brains running the company? No discernible brains. But they also hired good people.-Ernie [Lehman] wrote stuff, and eventually stuff came out. You're saying, production companies are a dime a dozen, and what happens inside of them is sometimes a mystery? . . . I'm the least New Age person you are ever going to find, but there is something mysterious about how a movie gets made. There is a mystery. That's why I think screenplays are so hard. It's not that there are no rules; there are, but nobody knows what they are, and they change with each picture. So you're trying to play the game according to a very rigid set of rules which nobody has explained to you. Any violation, you lose. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Once you think you've got the rules, they change. It's like doing a cross-word puzzle; every day there's a new theme. This morning in the L.A. Times, the clue was "Planes from NY." The answer was "JFK's SSTs." Once you've got the idea that in this puzzle the trick is initials, it begins to come together. But if you try that with tomorrow's puzzle, it's not going to work. Each picture is like a crossword puzzle in a funny way. Every story has rules that govern it—you don't know what they are, but you've got to solve them. For a long time, you refused to settle down in Hollywood. You lived more than half of the time in New York and concentrated on theater. Did you have negative feelings about being here, at first, in the 1950s? Oh no, I loved it. I thought it was terrific. Hooray for Hollywood. It was fun in those days. I, unlike a lot of other writers, was a hit New York playwright. I went boom, bang, bam, right from the airplane into the Goetzes' liv- ― 69 ― ing room.[*] I was treated like royalty. I had it made. We gave great parties. I was an outrageous host. I'd do wild stuff . . . We had a theory—my wife and I—that if you had the head of the studio to your house for dinner to meet important people, he's going to think twice about offering you small amounts of money for your next script, because he knows it costs a lot to live like this. He'll want to help you maintain your standard of living. So . . . Harry Cohn came to dinner? Not Harry Cohn. Never Harry Cohn! The line had to be drawn somewhere. But Darryl Zanuck, Buddy Adler, Sam Goldwyn, who was like a father to me for a while . . . You'd set Sam up next to some incongruous personality? Sam was a gent. He did say those things. They were not just press agent manufactured. The very first one he ever said to me, when I was just getting to know him—he was trying to make conversation—he said, "I ran into your friend Billy Wilder the other day." I said, "Oh, where?" He said, "At my house." That's not a real Goldwynism, but it shows you how his mind worked. You never worked with him, though. He asked me to write the sequel to The Secret Life of Walter Mitty [1947] because I was the okay-dream-sequence writer for that year. We could never get it to work really, because the first picture wasn't any good anyway. In his alleged correspondence to [James] Thurber, Goldwyn supposedly said, "I hope you won't find the movie too blood and thirsty," and Thurber is alleged to have replied, "No, I was horror and struck." There are still dinner parties in Hollywood. Maybe the conversation isn't as sparkling. Were the parties so much different then from now? Oh yes. In the first place, movie stars lived here. They don't now. The producers are no longer colorful. They're lawyers and accountants and business people. They're all yuppies, and they have kids. It's a whole other world. It's still glamorous, though. It was just as inbred before. Oh yes. And it was very, very structured. It was a caste system. There were above-the-line people and below-the-line people, and they never met socially. Fortunately, you were above the line. Very much so. Irony! Can you give me an example of one of your sterling dinner party guest lists? We used to call it the Jewish A-group, although you didn't have to be Jewish. Well, you just had to be Jewish in some way. ― 70 ― Irony! Right. Gary Cooper was an honorary member of the Jewish A-group. He was always there. He was witty? No, but he was charming. Coop was a truly elegant man. The regulars would include the Goetzes and the Goldwyns. Everybody loved them. We were minor hosts compared to them; they were the great hosts. There would be Danny Kaye, David Niven when he was here, the Wilders, the Wylers, [Fred] Astaire . . . You'd pepper the group with writers and directors? Top, top writers and directors. Novelists—which were more acceptable than Hollywood writers—Hollywood writers were considered below the line. Odets might be there, for example. He was a regular guest and maybe not a very good guest, because he got loaded all the time. But visiting novelists, visiting playwrights, were acceptable. When did you break down and come out here to live? For a long time, I commuted, but my base was still in New York. I didn't come out here to live until '61. Again, Billy Wilder had an influence. I had raised hell with Blake [Edwards] about Breakfast at Tiffany's. Billy said, "Look, the time has come. You cannot sit in New York, see the finished product, then raise hell about it. If you want to be involved in the making of the picture, you've got to be out here to do it." I had a tremendous row with Blake and persuaded Audrey [Hepburn] to give us a three-day shoot [for free], so we could reshoot the Mickey Rooney scenes. I hated that Jap routine that Mickey Rooney does in the film. It was all solo stuff except the one scene at the end of the film where he brings the police in. Audrey agreed to come in for nothing to reshoot that scene with another actor. Blake violently disagreed, so Mickey Rooney's still in the picture, boy, to the great detriment of the picture. Blake said, "I love it. It gives a big lift to the picture." It's the one lapse in taste in the picture. I'd come out for crises before, but I was still doing most of my work in New York. I had plays going on. I was a playwright who took the loot and scooted, as people say. But, by the time Billy said this, the climate had changed a little bit. I had had a series of hits both as a writer and director and producer. I had Itch, then Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?; then I produced Gore Vidal's play Visit to a Small Planet, which was a hit; then I started to direct my own plays and other peoples', including Harry Kurnitz's play Once More with Feeling with Arlene Francis and Joe Cotten . . . Then, things changed. I directed my play Goodbye Charlie with Lauren Bacall, which didn't get very good notices. It turned out well over the stretch—it plays all over the world—in fact, I just got a check out of the blue for fifty thousand dollars for the Japanese television rights, so they can do the play on television in Japan. But it didn't do very well on Broadway. It got poor ― 71 ― notices. And I remember the drama critic Walter Kerr, in one of his reviews, saying it read as though it was written by a swimming pool. I said to myself, "Walter, you've given me an idea. That sounds pretty good to me." Because at the same time that Goodbye Charlie was receiving poor notices in New York, I was getting nominated for an Academy Award for the script for Breakfast at Tiffany's. I had built up enough clout that I could produce my films. Also, I thought it would be maybe a good idea not to bring the kids up in New York. Big mistake! So you weren't happy with Breakfast at Tiffany's? . . . No, it was a completely happy collaboration. Except for the Mickey Rooney scenes. Did Blake have anything to do with the writing? No, Blake was brought in at the last minute. Johnny Frankenheimer was going to direct. I developed it with Johnny. I didn't realize that. Hmm, it doesn't sound like a Frankenheimer film. No. Audrey Hepburn didn't think so either. When she became involved in the film, she had director okay, and he was not on her list. Blake was acceptable and available. Had you known Blake previously? No. Blake arrived so late he didn't touch a line. The only thing he did do was some improvisation in the party scenes. He loved the party scenes. Blake's very good. He's a student of slapstick, while I'm more word oriented. We've been tempted to work together several different times. He asked me to write the screenplay of Victor/Victoria [1982] with him. Why didn't you? I didn't like the idea. Blake Edwards did this curious thing, recently. With Switch [1991], he did the same story as Goodbye Charlie. And it was pretty good. All of Blake's films have wonderful stuff in them. Although I think he reached his pinnacle with the Pink Panther films. Some of those were really, really funny. Peter Sellers was a major artist. Sellers and I worked for about a year once, trying to get a project together. We had a very good idea. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. had a manservant, a butler who, he discovered, had been a war hero and flight commander during World War II. Also, he was extravagantly, screamingly gay. He had been a saloon singer in Marseilles in the south of France, and because he was fluent in French and German, he was recruited into MI5 and became a gay spy. He slept his way up through the whole SS and ended up screwing an SS colonel. They finally caught on to him and beat the shit out of him—which he loved. Afterwards, he became a big hero. Sellers and I were going to do his story—a gay James Bond. What stopped you? Oh, it was too outrageous for its day. ― 72 ― Was Truman Capote involved in adapting Breakfast at Tiffany's at all? No. I knew Truman before and after, because he, my wife, and I were good friends, but he had nothing to do with the script. He was quite put out because I got more money for writing the screenplay than he got for selling the book rights! I've got one funny story, which is about the only time I got the better of that very witty man. One day I had lunch with him. I said, "Tru, baby, I just want you to know this is not my fault . . . I fought this thing. I have done everything I could. But I cannot win this war." Tru said (Truman Capote imitation ), "What's the matter?" I said, "It's the goddamn title! Truman, you know how they test these things. Nobody outside of New York knows what Tiffany's is. And Breakfast at Tiffany's . . . what does that mean?" Truman said, "They're going to change the title?" "Yeah." "What are they going to call it?" "Follow that Blond." He screamed and screamed. I had him going. Truman didn't have much to do with the film. Again, it was such a loose adaptation. I tried to keep the gene pool of the novella. I couldn't use the structure at all, because it's the same story as I Am a Camera [The dramatization of Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin by John Van Druten], just a homosexual or asexual man observing a sexy girl. You can't make a love story out of that—and they wanted a love story. You couldn't mention the homosexuality either. Nor, in those days, could you mention the homosexuality. So I just eliminated it. The trick was to find a hero and some reason why they just didn't fall into bed, or the picture would be over. What I came up with was the idea that he was in the same line of work: she was a hooker, he was a kept man, and they couldn't afford each other. The parallel lines couldn't meet until the end. That worked, kind of. How did you meet Frankenheimer? I met him when he was going to do Breakfast at Tiffany's . . . when I finally managed to get myself hired to write the script. First I had to sell myself to [the producer] Marty Jurow. That's a project you went after? Actually, Breakfast was something Josh [Logan] and I wanted to do, but for a long time, we couldn't figure out how to do it; then, one morning, I figured it out. It started with Josh, moved to Frankenheimer, and ended up with Blake Edwards. Yes. But you had to sell yourself as the screenwriter? . . . Marty Jurow, for some reason, didn't think I was uptown enough. What was his idea of uptown? Audrey Hepburn, not Jayne Mansfield. He associated me with Jayne Mansfield, because I had launched Jayne. She was in the play Will Success ― 73 ― Spoil Rock Hunter? As a matter of fact, I directed her first screen test, and sold her contract to 20th. It sounds as though you were always a very good businessman as well as writer. I did very well. Tell me more about how you put Manchurian together. Johnny [Frankenheimer] and I had become friends and were looking around for something else to do. I read a review of The Manchurian Candidate in the New Yorker and bought the book [by Richard Condon (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959)] the next day. I thought, "Jesus Christ, what a fucking movie!" There was a lot of resistance. It was everything the studios didn't want—political satire, worse than regular satire. It was not easy, but [Frank] Sinatra made it all possible. Sinatra agreed to play [Bennett] Marco, and that's the only way United Artists would let us do it. I was good friends with Frank anyway. I met Frank through Goody Ace. He had wanted to do Seven Year Itch, back when his career was on its ass. I had known Frank for years. We were very close friends. image [Full Size] "The best adaptation I ever did": Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate , directed by John Frankenheimer.

― 74 ― Was Condon or Frankenheimer involved in the script? I worked with Frankenheimer on it from the beginning. Was he helpful? Very much so. Condon was not involved, although Dick became a very good friend. I wrote the first draft of The Manchurian Candidate in New York, in a house in Bedford Village, in the summer. Then I came out here in August or September of '61 to work with Frankenheimer, who produced Manchurian with me, and to prepare the film. I stayed here until '68, when we moved to London. For film, I do two very specifically different things. I'm a pretty good adapter, and I can do the odd original. They're two very different techniques. The very best adaptation I ever did was The Manchurian Candidate. It is a brilliant, wildly chaotic novel. Wonderful voice. To take the essence of that and try to make it so that it worked for a film was a challenge. A very good example of breaking the rules of the craft is The Manchurian Candidate screenplay: it breaks every single known rule. It's got dream sequences, flashbacks, narration out of nowhere. When we got in trouble, it had just a voice explaining stuff. Everything in the world that you're told not to do. But that was part of its genetic code, the secret of the crossword puzzle. It worked for this script. For example, one scene: When the book describes the reading matter of the hero, it says his library consists of books which have been picked out for him at random by a guy in a bookstore in San Francisco from a list of titles he happens to have on hand at the moment. What I did was transpose that, so when the colonel [played by Douglas Henderson] comes in to fire Marco, he notices that Marco has a lot of books. I had Frank read off the titles of all his books: "The Ethnic Choices of Arabs, The Jurisdictional Practices of the Mafia . . . " With Frank saying the titles, it makes an excellent scene. But it was not a scene in the book—I had to make a scene out of a piece of description by Condon. That's what I mean by transposing the gene. The main trick of Manchurian was to make the brainwashing believable. What I did was dramatize the way the prisoners were brainwashed into believing they were attending a meeting of a lady's garden society. I had the further idea of making Corporal Melvin [played by James Edwards] black and doing the whole second half of the dream with black ladies. I remember we shot for days, getting all the different angles—front and back, black and white. At the time, we weren't entirely sure how it was going to fit together. We had miles of film. It was bewildering. Meanwhile, we had to screw the [production] board all up and schedule all Frank's scenes up front. We had to shoot all his stuff in fifteen days—because he has the attention span of a gnat—to keep his interest. Then he was set to leave. He was going off to Europe or some place. ― 75 ― Before he left, he announced, "I want to see every foot of film that I'm in before I leave." Johnny Frankenheimer said, "You can see everything except the brainwashing sequence." Frank said, "Oh, no, no, no. I want to see everything, " in a voice where you felt kneecaps were going to be broken. Now, this is totally self-serving but absolutely true: I said, "Let me take a crack at it because I really understand what I am trying to do . . . " The editor, Ferris Webster, and I went back to my office, and we got the script out. I just penciled the script where the shots were—cut, cut, cut—then he went back and put it together, and we never changed the sequence. That's how it was cut, that magical sequence. Was Frank a good actor, acting out of continuity? Frank is one of the best screen actors in the world. He's magic. Like Marilyn. But you have to understand how he works. When he won't do many takes, it's because he can't. He has no technical vocabulary as an actor. Something magical happens the first time, and sometimes, he can do it a second time. After that, it's gone. But can he work out of continuity? He understands how to do each scene—what it's about. He's a musical genius, and he's lyrically sensitive. He knows that each scene tells a little story. He never tries to change a line. He has enormous respect for the dialogue. He was just a dream to work with. Did he always work in one take? We had one tragedy. In the scene where he is shuffling the cards, with fiftytwo queens of diamonds—with Larry Harvey—big, tense scene. We shot it. Frank was brilliant. We looked at the rushes. His face was soft. It was not the camera operator's fault. Frank had gone off his marks. He knew he had done it great, but he had to do it again. I was the one who had to tell him. It was all very expensive. Of course, we shot his hours—starting at eleven. Eleven o'clock, Frank wasn't there. Twelve o'clock, one o'clock, Frank's still not there. Larry Harvey was waiting. Everybody was waiting. Silence. Nothing. No one said a word. Suddenly, you felt this black cloud coming up Santa Monica [Boulevard], turning on Formosa [Avenue], coming onto the set. Frank strides onto the set. Speaks to no one. Goes into his trailer. You could hear him slamming things around. His dresser comes running out in terror. Around two o'clock in the afternoon, Frank comes out, black with rage. And Larry Harvey, who was a fearless man, speaks up: "My dear, we're having our period today? . . . " Frank started to laugh. It broke the tension. We had the shot in ten minutes. Why did you decide to become a movie director? The same reason I became a stage director—to protect my stuff. I couldn't bear having someone else mangle my stuff. I write a very delicate thing. To me. Self-serving!—like everybody. ― 76 ― Did it feel like everything had been mangled? To a point. Anything not mangled? Manchurian Candidate, Bus Stop —which Josh and I fought through. Not Breakfast at Tiffany's? Not really. It's a little off. I wanted a high romantic comedy. The Mickey Rooney stuff and other stuff brings it down. There are lovely things in it. There's an actor named John McGiver, who I then used in Manchurian Candidate as the senator, who is a genius at high comedy. My favorite scene, if I say so myself, is the scene in Tiffany's with the Tiffany clerk. That's not in the book. Oh, it's a very free adaptation. I took a little delicate part of the book, a small enzyme, and turned it into that scene. You don't get angry, but the frustration was accumulating. Yes, the dissatisfaction. You don't get much satisfaction from something you don't think is right. I love, for all its mistakes and dumbness, Lord Love a Duck. In the beginning, you said a lot of your career was about making money. So a lot of it was about satisfaction, too? Yeah. One wouldn't confess that at the time. So, ultimately, you get more satisfaction from your plays. Sure. Because you have some control. And, even then, I had the Nugent and Gerstad situation—which isn't exactly what I wanted—so little things about each play still irritate me. When I moved out, the first thing I did was become producer, so with Manchurian, theoretically I would have more control. After Manchurian, I kept control, but I got involved with [the director] Dick Quine. He was also on Audrey Hepburn's okay list. He had been a kid actor, playing Dick Powell as a child in Dames (1934). He was sweet and highly talented, but totally insane, which made him exactly my kind of person. He and I produced a totally insane picture called Paris When It Sizzles. You worked with him twice. He was a close friend. But we had a rocky time. After Paris, he talked me into letting him direct How to Murder Your Wife, which I should have directed myself. I was ready then but too frightened. I waited until Lord Love a Duck. Had Duck been a hit, my life would have changed. For the better? Differently. It wasn't a hit, because nobody understood the humor? I can't imagine why it wasn't a hit. It got no reaction. I couldn't get anybody into the theaters to see it. It was one of those pictures that died. United Artists sold the shit out of it. I went on the road with it. I got reams of press. I ran what I thought was a clever ad campaign, parodying all the other cam- ― 77 ― image [Full Size] Audrey Hepburn and George Axelrod on the set of Paris When It Sizzles.

(Courtesy of George Axelrod.)

paigns. "Suddenly last summer, United Artists realized it was being used for something evil . . . Lord Love a Duck! " Did you enjoy directing? Oh yeah. I adored it. I was learning to be a pretty good director. Indeed, when you see Duck now, the problems with it are in the script, not the directing. It is very well directed. I never quite solved the script. I was a little bit overconfident and thought I could wing it. How'd you solve for yourself the scary hurdle of the technology? That's a myth, a great myth, like the myth rich people foist on poor people by saying it's lonely at the top. It's lonelier at the bottom, I've got news for you. You get yourself a good cameraman . . . and of course, I'd been around for a long time. All a director has to know, only one thing, is how to tell a story, and all the rest of it you pick up as you go along. Sure, there are virtuoso cameramen, and I had a very good one—Danny Fapp, a competent one for what I did—but I didn't duck the job. I fought for black-and-white [photography]. I made it for $1.2 million in six and one-half weeks. And I loved doing it. I saw it in college, where it played over and over. ― 78 ― image [Full Size] "I adored directing": George Axelrod in the director's seat for Lord Love a Duck.

Where were you when I needed you? Gene Siskel, he was out here for the Academy Awards last year, told me, "God, I love Lord Love a Duck. " I said, "Where were all you guys when I couldn't sell any tickets?" Hollywood was kind to you, at least. You got a second chance with Secret Life of an American Wife. You get two. Then I screwed up the second one. Remember, I said earlier, that stories have their natural form. That was a play, it was going to be a play, and it should have stayed a play. It was a two-character play, two sets, in a ― 79 ― image [Full Size] Ruth Gordon, Roddy McDowall, and Tuesday Weld in Lord Love a Duck.

hotel. But I had a bust-up with United Artists, I needed a movie, and Dick Zanuck at 20th wanted to buy Secret Life and go with it. Someone says, "You can write and direct and produce"—and it's your own material? Who could say no? I should have said no. Because it was meant to be a play. Besides, I had written it for Frank Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine, and I ended up with Walter Matthau and Anne Jackson, both talented people, but not right for this film . . . which was meant to be a play. Once again, it needed more writing than directing. The directing is not bad . . . it's just that it's a play. It talks itself to death. Did its failure drive you to London? It drove me, so that nobody would let me direct anymore. How long a period of time elapsed before its failure precipitated your move to London? Very shortly thereafter. How long were you living in London? We lived in London for '68, '69, '70, '71, '72, '73, and '74. We came back for a while in '74; then we went back in '79 and '80. ― 80 ― Were you consciously giving up writing? No, I wrote another novel, Where Am I Now—When I Need Me? [New York: Viking, 1971]. I have written three novels in all. Right after the war, I wrote a novel called Beggar's Choice, which Howell-Soskin published [New York: 1947]. And some time later, I wrote Blackmailer, which I had called "Lipstick" [New York: Gold Medal, 1952]. That was done by Pocket Books, just a paperback. I settled into being an Englishman. I wrote for Punch, reviewed books for the New Statesman, wrote the restaurant column for British Vogue. You didn't miss the life in Hollywood? No. I loved London. I was tired too. I needed a break. What brought you back? The tax laws changed. When we first went over, we had a wonderful tax break, living there. We came back in '74 when they were threatening to change the tax laws. It became dangerous to live there at that point. We thought we would come back to America and touch base. Were you out of the loop by this time? Oh no. I wrote some stuff. I wrote a misbegotten remake of [Alfred Hitchcock's film] The Lady Vanishes [1938], which was a disaster; then, I did a terrible picture with Frankenheimer called The Holcroft Covenant. And with Freddie Forsyth I wrote the screenplay of The Fourth Protocol, which he then rewrote. With your track record, why did you agree to do such, as you say, misbegotten projects? I needed the money. But these films were ill advised . . . Oh yeah. I got paid for all this stuff, but I really haven't had a movie made where I could hear my own dialogue, my own voice, for a long time. Is that frustrating? Yes! At the same time, booze played a part in your downfall, right? Drink played a great big part in my life. I finally had to cool it. Did drink help you to write? In the beginning, it did. I'll tell you why. It was a method for getting inside. The real writing comes when you are getting inside. When you write and write and write, and two hours pass and you have no recollection whatever of what you have written and it's all there on the page and it's all perfect. Those golden moments that happen occasionally. It's very hard to produce the climate that produces the work. Very difficult. For a time, drink helped. It got me relaxed and ready. Even in the morning? Yes, that was the beginning of the downfall. Aren't there other ways? I used to be able to do it by just doing it—when I was younger. Later on — ― 81 ― I tried to induce it. By any means. Drink, drugs. Even speed, although speed was never any good. Speed was all right. Dexamil was something everybody took for a time, but that was no good because it had Amytal, and it made everything seem funny even if it wasn't. I have painkillers for occasional head- or backaches, which are quite effective now and then against a deadline. I understand. Although sometimes it ruins the day afterwards. Oh, afterwards. But if you get two hours inside, you're in good shape. Some people see that sort of thing as addictive, whereas writers see it as — A tool. A way to get inside. A means to an end. Writers are willing to sacrifice their health and everything else for what they are writing. Eventually, of course, it turns on you. Oh yeah, I had to cool it. I was never an alcoholic. I was a drunk. There's a big difference. Drunks don't have to go to meetings. Irony! Is that part of why your output slacked off? Why the writing went bad? Oh sure. Booze. The energy level was shot. Bad judgment. Judgment calls got crazier and crazier. I finally had to go to [the] Betty Ford [Clinic]. When did you finally kick the booze? In '87. How did the realization dawn on you? It was either that or die. It was a toss-up. I didn't really care. I used Ford to help me get through the physical addiction, because I was very sick. They used that AA method, which works with some people who like to sit around a room talking about how they used to drink. What insanity! But I desperately needed help to get through the interlude of change under controlled conditions, just to get through the harrowing, physical withdrawal. Then it took me a couple of years really, before I could function again. Getting inside is tough under the best circumstances. Some days you feel like it. Other days . . . It only happens at the typewriter. What about on a train . . . on a notepad? Metaphorically speaking, at the typewriter. Wherever you happen to work, but you have to be working. And suddenly, it takes off. That's an oppressive thought some days. And it's arduous to get to that point. Terrible sometimes, and the tricks and devices you have to use, and it's harder as you get older. Some days coffee will do it. I'm beyond coffee. What personal tricks do you have? The first and best one is the alternative of total humiliation. You've taken the money, and the deadline is now approaching. The or-else method. I func- ― 82 ― tion better if the heat is on . . . yet I hate to take the money up front, because that way you don't own anything. On the other hand, it's very hard to get producers to let you write something on your own. I wouldn't think you needed any money . . . I don't need the money, but I need it to embarrass me. Like a carrot on a stick? To beat me into writing. Also, maybe to know that the project has a chance of being real, getting made. I still have the illusion that anything I write is going to get done. It's turning into more and more of an illusion. It makes you almost a Pollyanna. The odds are tougher and tougher, Comedy dates. Comedy is very, very dated. A lot of my stuff is fifties-ish still—I can't deny it. I concede the fact that fashions change. I can't write social comedy anymore, because I don't know how yuppies talk. Do you have tricks or habits with pencils and pens? I play solitaire. Until you're ready. Until I'm ready. It's not just solitaire. It's involved with solitaire, but it's almost fortune-telling. I fantasize off the solitaire. You're getting some message from the cards? Yeah. It's also because I don't drink anymore. I don't smoke anymore. I've got to do something with my hands. I wear out decks of cards. It looks like I'm doing nothing, but my mind is going furiously. Writing is such a mysterious process for me. For example, I don't use a computer, because I like the manual feeling of building something with my hands. Someone said to me recently, "Computers are wonderful. You can just push a button and change a character's name." Change a character's name! In my opinion, you've got to go to court and throw the whole script out if you have to change a character's name. The name is part of his identity. When I want to make a change, I retype the whole page. Each time I put something through the typewriter, it gets tighter and cleaner—and better. The first half of any script of mine has been rewritten forty—fifty times. That's the way you begin to get the stuff to jump off the page. How long do you play solitaire before you start to write? Sometimes all day. How long do you do it before you give up? I'm not as persevering as I used to be. That's why a deadline is so helpful. Solitaire is a unique trick, in my experience. You'd be amazed at the number