When George Cukor was preparing The Women, I was so eager to play in it that I called him on the quiet after Dema Harshbarger had set a price on my head of $1000 minimum, whether for a day’s work or a week’s. “Confidentially, I’d work for nothing,” I told him. A contract was drawn at a cut-down figure and sent to Dema.
She asked me into her office, next to mine. “I’d like to give you a farewell luncheon at some smart place,” she said, her dark eyes gleaming bright. “We won’t have any unpleasantness, and we’ll stay friends, but I don’t want any business dealings with you unless you let me set a value on you.” I got the point—and a revised contract.
At least two once-powerful studios, Fox and MGM, were driven into a corner from which they may never emerge, thanks to the present, overpriced star system. Rome and Madrid today are the temporary movie capitals of the world. Tokyo, London, Paris—all compete for the title. Soaring costs at home push more and more production overseas. The peccadilloes of foot-loose stars and producers who hanker for far-off places favor foreign production. Some countries freeze profits from the screening of American movies, so the money must be used to stake new pictures inside those countries’ frontiers. Then, too, the big screen demands the real locations; you can no longer paint a mountain on a piece of glass and make it look like the Rockies.
So pictures like Lawrence of Arabia and Ben-Hur are made anywhere except in Hollywood. William Holden won’t come home from Switzerland for reasons of taxes—and his pictures get picketed by our town’s movie unions. Even Tom and Jerry are refugees now. They were made at Culver City before the animation studios were shut five years ago. Now Tom and Jerry are drawn in Italy, Popeye is a Yugoslav sometimes, and Bullwinkle comes to life on drawing boards in Mexico. Walt Disney remains one of the all-Americans.
MGM prayed it would be helped out of its Mutiny hole by the oil well that started to flow on the back lot at Culver City at about the time that Brando was stumbling through the final scenes of the picture in Hollywood.
Twentieth Century-Fox went in for sterner stuff, very late in the day. They tried to hurry Cleopatra production to a conclusion by cutting off the salary in Rome of Walter Wanger. They fired Marilyn Monroe and sued her for $500,000 for absenteeism from the set of Something’s Got to Give after she had given five days of performance in seven weeks of shooting.
The Fox counterrevolution against stars found her colleague, Dean Martin, in the line of fire next. He’d promptly announced after Marilyn was dismissed that so far as he was concerned it was Monroe or nobody. He walked out; the picture was shut down. Equally promptly the studio threw a record-breaking suit for $5,678,000 at his head, claiming breach of contract, and Dean’s attorneys filed countercharges.
He was no hero to the unions, though they sat back and did nothing. An official said to me: “He’s putting people out of work at a time when we’re all faced with unemployment due to runaway production. He’s certainly demonstrating his unconcern for his co-workers.”
When a star got out of line, the crew used to have a peculiar way of handling the situation. Jack Barrymore would be performing his heart out when out of the blue a crystal chandelier came crashing down, missing his head by inches. If his behavior didn’t improve, the next one fell even closer.
If the handful of stars still left to us disappears, who will replace them? Who’s in sight to give Hollywood the color and excitement that it needs to live? Where are the newcomers to be discovered and how can they be trained? The answers, so far as the eye can see, are Nobody and Nowhere. Opera has been stirred by new names in the past decade—Joan Sutherland, Birgit Nilsson, Maria Callas. The concert stage has its Van Cliburns. Politics has its Kennedys and Nixons. The movies have virtually nothing at the top except the same names that were shining in lights ten years ago—Bob Hope, Burt Lancaster, Cary Grant, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and the rest politely called “middle-aged.”