My Life as a Mankiewicz (39 page)

I'll tell you how loyal Natalie Wood was as a friend. This was the late seventies. There was a New Year's party. Natalie was back with R.J. I told her, “I'm feeling a little philosophical, and I think I'm going to stay in on this New Year's.”

She said, “Fine, okay.”

About an hour later, Margot Kidder was in town, and I had been with Margot during
Superman.
She said, “Mank, come on down to the beach. We'll have a New Year's thing.”

And I said, “Sure, okay.” I don't know why, and I went down.

The next morning, New Year's Day, I was still down at the beach with Margot, and Natalie called my house and there was no answer. She called again, and she said to R.J., “I don't like it. Something's wrong. He was depressed.”

R.J. said, “Oh, I'm sure he's fine. He's probably out.”

She said, “He wouldn't be out. It's New Year's Day.” She called again. Then she called my business manager. She said, “I'm worried about him. Can you get into his house?” Then she called the alarm company. I came home about eleven o'clock in the morning and there were police cars in front of my house, and my business manager was in there, and the alarm company had opened the front door. That's how fiercely loyal she was to her friends. I adored her.

Years later, after William Holden died, I was going out with Stefanie Powers, who was in
Hart to Hart.
Robert Benton came down to visit me on the set, and he talked to Stefanie, and I said, “See, I'm cured. There she is.”

He said, “No, you're not. But you're getting better.”

Hart to Hart:
TV Repair

Television has the most repeated concepts in the world. When I was a kid, there was Dr. Ben Casey and Dr. Kildare. The lawyers were
The Defenders.
And it was
Medic
, with Richard Boone. Now it's
Grey's Anatomy, ER, Law and Order.
Law, medicine, and cops are the story lines that keep going. I was at Warners fixing everything. The studio asked, “Could you do a new series with James Garner?” He was thinking about it and hadn't done one since
The Rockford Files.
He was huge. It was going to be called
MVP
, an ex-most valuable player who is now a detective. We had a meeting. Garner said, “You know, I'm in such bad shape, I wear a girdle. You know that scene in every show where somebody slides a note under the door? If I lean down to pick it up, we shut down for six months. We've got to be very careful with me.” I liked him a lot. He said, “Is there any way I could just be in ten minutes of every episode?”

I said, “I don't think so; it's the Jim Garner show.”

He said, “You know, these wusses today, they shoot twenty-two episodes, twenty-two hours. By the seventeenth hour, their asses are dragging. When I did
Maverick
, we shot thirty-nine. I was in fights in saloons, I was hopping on horses. That's where my back problems started, all those years as Maverick.”

MVP
never happened.

I'm blessed and cursed by being the fixer, by being Dr. Mankiewicz. Leonard Goldberg and Aaron Spelling were huge, successful television producers. I knew Leonard socially, and we got along well. He called me one day and said, “Listen, I know you want to direct.”

I said, “Yes, I do.” My favorite cartoon in the world is Bimbo the Talking Dog, sitting on a stool talking to his agent. On the walls, it says, “Bimbo, Box Office Smash in Chicago,” “Bimbo Sells Out in New York,” “Bimbo Talks!” And he's saying to his agent, “Of course, what I really want to do is direct.”

Leonard said, “We've got this old script of Sidney Sheldon's called
Double Twist:.
Basically, it's
The Thin Man
, but we haven't been able to sell it. If you can rewrite it so we can sell it, we'll let you direct the two-hour movie.”

I said, “Great.” So I started rewriting like crazy. Sidney Sheldon's “script” had the couple as car burglars living in a Century City condo with a John Gielgud butler. It was for a small slice of the audience. So I made it
Hart to Hart;
the couple lived in a sprawling ranch house, she was a professional writer, he owned something called Hart Industries, which was anything we said it was. They had a butler/housecleaner, Max, an ex-prize fighter. We made it that you wanted to have dinner with the Harts. I did a wholesale rewrite.

Fred Pierce was the president of ABC; a big, tough guy. I went to see him with Leonard Goldberg after I had rewritten the piece. What bothered Pierce was franchise; you are a detective, you are a doctor, you are a cop, a lawyer. Everybody's got a franchise. We didn't want to make them detectives. My mind was racing like crazy in Pierce's office. I said, “Fred, you know the little dog, Freeway?”

He said, “I love that little dog. That's a wonderful touch, that dog.”

I said, “In the morning, here's what happens. Freeway goes out to get the morning paper.”

Pierce said, “I'm way ahead of you. They get their cases out of the paper that Freeway brings. There's the case. Now, you're talking.”

Everyone said, “Terrific.”

Freeway never got the paper; not in the pilot or any other time. Leonard said, “That makes Fred happy. He'll forget. As long as we do a good show, don't worry about it.”

Robert Wagner was the biggest male television star; he'd done
It Takes a Thief
and a series with Eddie Albert called
Switch.
He was the small-screen Cary Grant. I knew him quite well. He was in the
Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre
rewrite I had done in the mid-sixties. I knew him and Natalie separately, and they were back together again. ABC sent him the script, and he said, “This is terrific. Get Mank out here; we're going to talk about it.”

I was dispatched to Hawaii, where he was doing a miniseries called
Pearl
with Angie Dickinson. R.J. and Natalie and I went to dinner at a very fancy place, the Outrigger Canoe Club, on Oahu. I said, “ABC would like to make this a long form, about ninety minutes, like
Columbo
or
McCloud
, with the Harts, and they'd love to have you and Natalie do it.”

R.J. said, “Let me tell you something. I sell soap. My wife sells tickets. But if you put me on one network and you put her up against me, I'll kill her in the ratings. On the other hand, nobody will walk around the corner and pay ten dollars for a movie anymore that I'm in, and they'll pay for her. Why don't we just do a regular series? Let's get a costar and let Natalie sell tickets. Let her do what she wants.”

I think he really wanted to wear the pants in the family. He was going to make a lot of money from this series, and she could work if she wanted to. George Hamilton was hot, and Aaron Spelling said, “You know what? The audience will resent him as Hart for being that rich. But nobody will begrudge R.J. a nickel.”

Now we're talking about who should play Mrs. Hart. Suzanne Pleshette was a big contender. Aaron and Leonard wanted Kate Jackson because Katie was a lot of trouble on
Charlie's Angels
and they thought they would move her to another series. R.J. didn't want that. He said, “There is somebody I worked with in two
It Takes a Thiefs.
Stefanie Powers. We got along great as actors.”

They said, “Absolutely not. She has no TV-Q.
The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.
, a series she was in, faded in one year. She was in a series called
Feather and Father
that flopped after six episodes.”

And R.J. said, “I think she'd be great.”

Everybody knew she was really good looking and she played comedy well. Spelling and Goldberg forgot—they didn't really forget, they just didn't acknowledge—that R.J. had costar approval in his contract. One night, we were drinking at RJ.'s house, and he called up Tony Thomopoulos, who was overseeing ABC's primetime programming at the time. He asked, “By the way, Tony, how's the thing going with Stefanie?”

Tony said, “What thing with Stefanie?”

R.J. said, “You know, the only actress I approve. We don't have to do the series, Tony.”

Stefanie read the script: it's Spelling-Goldberg, who had five series on the air, and Robert Wagner. Stefanie's agent asked for $20,000 a week. Spelling-Goldberg said, “It's impossible because the girls,
Charlie's Angels
, are getting $20,000, and they've been on the cover of
Time
magazine. This girl has no TV-Q. We're going to have to bump the Angels up.”

Aaron said to me, “Tommy, go see Stefanie.” I knew Stefanie from the sixties, we would go out. I hadn't seen her in seven or eight years. He said, “Go see her and get her all excited and then we'll come back and offer her twelve-five.”

I said, “Aaron, I can't do that. You can't ask me to get her excited to get her price down.”

So he called her up and said, “I guess you must be a little nervous about Mankiewicz, first-time directing?”

She said, “No, I think it's high time. I think he should have directed a long time ago.”

He said, “Well, you've got questions about the script. You and Tommy will have to sit down, probably.”

She said, “No, I don't have any questions. I think it's a great script. Really happy that he's directing. Couldn't be happier that it's R.J. I guess it's just about the money, isn't it, Aaron?” They finally made a deal where she got $15,000, but she got a pay-or-play
Movie of the Week
for $250,000 that would make up the difference. They knew she wasn't going to do the movie because she was going to be unavailable. It was supposed to start in February, but we would still be shooting in February.

When I was casting the
Hart to Hart
pilot, Marcy Carsey, who later joined Tom Werner to produce
The Cosby Show
, was a fairly high-level executive at ABC, and she was very, very concerned. She said to Leonard, “Mankiewicz is casting women who are too old.” This was the time of
Charlie's Angels.
As Mrs. Hart, Stefanie was thirty-four, thirty-five, and in the pilot were Jill St. John, in her late thirties, Stella Stevens, in her late thirties, Natalie Wood, in a cameo, in her late thirties.

Aaron said, “Don't worry about this. I'll take care of it.”

We were shooting in Palm Springs. I told the women, “Marcy Carsey doesn't think you're young enough.” They said, “Ah, fuck.” I was walking by the pool at La Quinta, and there, sunning themselves, were Jill St. John and Stella Stevens and Stefanie Powers, looking like a fucking million dollars. Jill yelled, “Hey, Mank! Don't us old chicks look great?!”

R.J. wanted Sugar Ray Robinson to play Max. He knew Sugar Ray, who was so loved in this country and, pound for pound, the greatest fighter. ABC said, “No. We're worried about this. Even though he's their friend, he's also the driver, he also cleans up, and it's Sugar Ray, who's also black.” I had written the pilot, and the tag was them on safari in Africa. It was at night, there were lions roaring in the distance, and suddenly, jungle drums were heard. They're around the campfire, and the last line of the original pilot script was R.J. saying, “What do the drums say, Max?” And Sugar Ray says, “I can't tell until I hear the piano.” That wasn't going to work. ABC decided they were taking too big a risk because the Harts are very rich, and what does that look like? R.J. was going to lose that one.

We didn't know who was going to play Max. One day I was having lunch in the commissary about three weeks away from shooting. You could smoke in commissaries in those days. Standing in line for a table was Lionel Stander with a silly hat on and a big cigar sticking out of his mouth. I said to whoever I was with, “That's Lionel Stander. He was in
The Cassandra Crossing.
He looks like Max.”

The person I was with said, “That might not be a bad idea.”

I walked up to him in line and said, “Mr. Stander, my name is Tom Mankiewicz.”

He said, “Oh, I've heard of you.”

I said, “I'm doing a series, kind of like
The Thin Man
, with Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers. There's the part of Max, the butler, who's also their friend and driver.”

He said, “Here's the thing. I'd like to do the least amount of work for the most amount of money.”

I said, “I think this part is right up your alley, Lionel.” So I called Leonard and said, “I'm sending Max over.”

Lionel went over to the Spelling-Goldberg bungalow, opened the door, looked at Leonard, and said, “Hi.” Leonard called me back and said, “That's it.”

Lionel had been blacklisted in the fifties. The part was really a godsend to him because he made a lot of money and he had a stable family and a home for the first time. He would always say to me, “You know, I was a pretty distinguished actor in the thirties. I was in the Group Theater. I did Shakespeare and Chekhov. And now people say, ‘There's Robert Wagner, there's Stefanie Powers, and there's Max.' It'll be on my fucking tombstone: ‘Here lies Max.'” But he loved it. He had most of his scenes with Freeway.

Casting the dog was interesting. I wanted a mixed breed, and I worked with a great animal trainer, Bob Blair. I saw a lot of dogs, and most of them looked too purebred. One day, in walked Charlie, a mixture of five or six breeds; adorable. Bob said, “We just got him from the pound. He's smart as hell but, so far, all he can do is sneeze on cue. He's a little green.”

I said, “No, no. That's the dog.” The very first thing in the pilot, he had to be on the couch next to R.J. Charlie kept hopping off the couch before the scene was over. After a couple of takes, I said, “Jesus, what are we going to do?” We taped him on the couch with double-faced tape! If you've ever seen the pilot, the last thirty seconds, he's just straining to get off the couch.

Lionel and Charlie didn't get along. Charlie liked R.J. and Stefanie most. Stefanie was magical with animals. At home she had a German shepherd, a really tough male cat, a bush baby, which is a little monkey, and a parrot. And they lived in a beautiful ecological balance. There was a scene in the Harts' Gulfstream where Charlie was supposed to stay seated but kept hopping off. Stefanie finally picked him up by the scruff of his neck, put him in the seat, and said, “You stay there now. Stay.” And his eyes went wide. In the scene, he was right there. It was perfect. I would say, “God, I wish the actors were like Charlie.” When Lionel and Charlie did something right together, Charlie would get a treat and Lionel would get a Camel cigarette. That was his treat.