The Light's on at Signpost (19 page)

I
KNEW THAT
Burt Lancaster and I were never going to be soul-mates the moment he suddenly exclaimed: “What the hell d’you think we’re paying you for?” Annoyed, I hesitated between “You’re not paying enough to take that tone,” and “Up yours, Lancaster!”, but discarded both: I knew his knees were hurting him, we’d had a long hard session in which my ideas had risen farther and farther over the top, I didn’t want to walk out on an excellent project on the spur of the moment, and even at the age of sixty-four he looked as though he might still be able (in his own words) to “throw Ernie Borgnine out the window.”
*

So I took my time and replied: “For ideas which you don’t seem to like. So d’you want me to quit? I might as well if you’re going to start talking that way.” He growled: “Ah, for Christ’s sake!” and we resumed our search for a plot for a sequel to
The
Crimson Pirate
. Perfectly amiably, but with no intention on my side of prolonging our association beyond the next few days, which he had paid handsomely for in advance. I was still prepared to write him a screenplay if our discussion went well and the price was right, but I wasn’t going to commit myself to working with him on set and location for three months, which was what he wanted; that, I realised after the momentary exposure of his hairy heel, would inevitably end in strong language, explosion, and me on my way to the nearest airport.

It wasn’t that we didn’t get on; quite the reverse. In the time we had already spent discussing the project, I’d found myself closer to him where ideas were concerned than to his partners, Harold Hecht and Jim Hill. He was the one who really wanted to make that sequel, he was intelligent and well-read (surprising me by his admiration for Mervyn Peake) and was not only an anglophile but a romantic one: in childhood he had devoured Jeffery Farnol, “Lady Charmian and Black Bartlemy’s Treasure, the whole lot. Used to buy ’em for ten cents from a stall in Little Italy, sell ’em back for seven, then buy another for ten.”

It was easy to understand why, although he had built a reputation as a serious actor with an Oscar to his credit, he had made good old-fashioned over-the-top swashbucklers like
The Flame and the
Arrow
and
The Crimson Pirate
, and having read
Flashman
he had decided that I was the man to write his sequel for him.

I was enthusiastic, but I guessed before we met that he would not be the easiest man in the world to work with. His screen persona suggested a formidable, probably overbearing character, and I recalled seeing a quote in which he had said: “If I’m working with frightened people, I tend to dominate them. I’m no doll, that’s for sure.” Never mind frightened people, he’d have tried to dominate the Duke of Wellington. Indeed, he’d given me a hint of this at our first meeting. “You fight your corner,” were the words he used, stabbing a forefinger. “Don’t mind me. It’s your ideas we want, so you be a stubborn Scotsman, Georgie—a stubborn Scotsman, right?”

I assured him I would be—and prepared myself for script-conference brawls. They didn’t happen, and he never “exuded the physical menace” which one writer discovered in him. His irritable demand to know what he was paying me for was the nearest we came to a quarrel, but that, my doubts about his partners’ enthusiasm for the project, their apparent lack of agreement on how it should be developed, and Burt’s own tendency to talk about a script’s “kinetic values”, gradually persuaded me that by and large I might be happier doing something else.

Which was a pity, for
Crimson Pirate
II could have been great fun on screen (if no doubt hell to make), and he was a most interesting man. For that matter, Hecht-Hill-Lancaster was a most interesting outfit, with a remarkable track record which included
Marty, Separate Tables, The Devil’s Disciple, Vera Cruz, Sweet Smell
of Success
, and several Academy Awards. Yet they operated out of a small office on Pico Boulevard, a most modest set-up by Hollywood standards, with only a single secretary so far as I could see, a quiet and efficient young lady who ruled the place and ferried me to and from my hotel in Lancaster’s BMW. “Ah, you’re a hard-working Jewish girl, Sandy,” he would say. “We’ve got to find you a nice Jewish boy, with blue eyes.”

The founding father of the group, credited with discovering Lancaster, bringing him to Hollywood, and helping him to become one of the first movie stars to break away from the studio system to form his own production company, in which James Hill later joined them, was Harold Hecht. He was a tiny dynamo, an elderly and ebullient Jew who met me at LA Airport, making contact in the crowded baggage area by climbing on a pile of someone else’s luggage and bawling through cupped hands, “Mr Frayzhur! Mr Frayzhur!” (Frasers in America get used to hearing their name pronounced in the old Highland way imported long ago by Gaelic-speaking settlers, and now familiar world-wide through the
Frasier
TV show.) It was like being paged by a demented
Nibelung who seized my suitcase and used it to flail his way to the exit while he kept up a running fire of comment to me and passers-by.

He bounced about alarmingly in his seat as he drove me at frightening speed to my hotel in Pacific Palisades, of all places, cross-examining me on my movie c.v., and damning the director and producers of my last picture (“Journeyman work! Journeyman work!”) It emerged that he was a showbiz jack-of-all-trades who had been with the Metropolitan Opera (as a dancer), worked with Boleslawski and stage-managed the first American production of Bernard Shaw’s “western”,
The Shewing up of Blanco
Posnet
, been a film dance director, and produced many of Lancaster’s pictures.

Once at the hotel he harried the manager and desk clerks with manic energy, insisted on accompanying me to my room, which he inspected critically while I inhaled the familiar musty smell of American hotels and noted that the water still came out of the taps as foam, and then he shot away, haranguing the bellhop all the way to the elevator, leaving me wondering what I’d got myself into this time.

Jim Hill, whom I met next morning, was a more sober and reassuring figure, a producer and writer who had been the fifth husband of Rita Hayworth (of whom he wrote a memoir). He was to play a leading role in our talks and was plagued by acute fibrositis in his neck and shoulders.

We drove to the office on Pico, and there I met Lancaster himself, large, grave, courteous, and the most precisely controlled man, I think, that I’ve ever seen. It was not only in his movements and body language which, as his fans well know, were careful and deft and rather mannered, but in his thoughts and speech, that this curious deliberate precision showed; he would not respond immediately in conversation, but wait for a second, studying the speaker (I almost said opponent) before replying quickly and directly to
the point; it was all exact, without “ahs” and “ers” or incomplete and careless phrases, more like the written word than speech.

I’ve no doubt that this precision was a result of early professional training. He was an acrobat before he was an actor, and it showed in his disciplined physical skill. Hecht told me that, early in their acquaintance, while they were taking an evening stroll, they passed a tall building shrouded in iron scaffolding onto which Lancaster had suddenly leaped, swarming to the top at high speed and descending again in a series of swings, trapeze-fashion, from bar to bar, before resuming his walk. I didn’t doubt it. During one of our talks my cigarette lighter ceased to function, and as I clicked unsuccessfully Burt, seated at his desk across the room, with his chair tilted back, flipped a book of matches casually in my direction. He was at least ten to twelve feet away; the match-book fell neatly into the empty ashtray beside me.

On that first meeting, after checking me into a new hotel, the Century Plaza, which was handier for his office, he took me to lunch at his club. I think it was called the Hillcrest, but I’m not certain; it had a splendid-looking golf course, was luxurious in the extreme, and was Jewish—whether it was the club which Hollywood Jews are alleged to have formed when they were barred from other clubs, I don’t know, but Lancaster, the Anglo-Saxon gentile, was extremely proud to be one of the few non-Jewish members.

We had an excellent lunch (scrambled eggs and sausages for Burt, cold salmon for me) beside a picture window overlooking the golf course, and having ascertained that I played, he said we might fit in a game, adding rather hastily: “Not for money, of course.” I was under no illusion that he thought I might bankrupt him; he looked and talked like a low-handicap man, and I’m sure his concern was that he would beat the blazes out of me, bad knees notwithstanding, and win back the expense money he was paying me, which would have been embarrassing for us both.

He had played in pro-celebrity events, one of them at Gleneagles,
where he had encountered George C. Scott, a keen golfer and an even more dedicated drinker. On Prince and Pauper Scott had disposed single-handed of a bottle of highly expensive Highland single malt which I had given to Dick Fleischer, with the result that he’d been incapable of movement until the next day. Something similar had happened at Gleneagles, where on the morning of the event Scott had been discovered insensible on the floor of the hospitality room, where he had spent the night. He was eventually revived enough to speak, and was heard to mutter: “I gotta have a piss and I gotta get outa here.” To which one of the hotel staff had made the classic rejoinder: “Yes, sir, but not in that order.” After which they had poured Scott into a car which took him to Prestwick en route for home.

During lunch I indulged my uncontrollable urge to interview—once a reporter, always a reporter—and discovered that Lancaster was a good subject who, while pleasantly modest, had no objection to talking about himself. It was just a question of pressing a tactful button or two, and listening.

His name was Burton Stephen Lancaster, he had been born and brought up in the Italian district of New York, and his father’s family were from Lancashire, but how far back he wasn’t sure. He added, grinning, that there was a family tradition that they were descended from John of Gaunt which, taking into account the Lancaster name and the old Duke’s prodigal begetting of descendants, is not entirely improbable. But he doubted if he could prove a claim to John of Gaunt’s mythical treasure. His mother, whose name was Roberts, had come from Belfast. He was, by his own account, simply an Englishman, although I once heard him say to a fan who asked if he was of Italian descent: “No, English…English-Irish.”

His affection for Britain, no doubt fostered by Jeffery Farnol, was strong; the so-called special relationship he described as “solid”, and he had conceived an immense admiration for the British
infantry whom, as a soldier himself, he had encountered in Europe. “I remember these guys, Commandos—Jesus, great big hard men, you’d never find tougher, and it didn’t matter what was happening, action, fighting, God knows what—they had to have their tea! I tell you, they were something to see. They lived on tea!”

It was his ambition to back-pack his way round England, along the minor roads and country lanes (he was
certainly
under the influence of Farnol), “but I guess I won’t make it now; the legs aren’t so good.” He had developed knee trouble, a legacy of his acrobatics—which takes me off at a tangent to his faithful friend and helper, Nick Cravat, the dapper little Italian gymnast who appeared in many of his films and was my escort when we went to the studios. Nick was garrulous and extrovert, given to engaging perfect strangers in conversation, much of which would not bear repetition; I recall occasions, at lunch-counters and in coffee-shops, where I tried to look as though I weren’t with him. He also held strong views on the admission of very young girls to gymnastics, and the harm they would come to—this was at a time when the East European children were dazzling the world with their acrobatics.

“It’s just exploitation!” Nick would fume. “They’ll be burned out, old women before their time! Goddamit, it’s all wrong!” He may have been right; he was certainly deeply moved. His other preoccupation, from what I saw, was to be self-appointed caretaker to Lancaster, whom he would upbraid unmercifully over such things as the car key which Burt lost or mislaid on the afternoon when we drove to a viewing theatre on the old Fox lot for a screening of
The Three Musketeers
, which Burt wanted to see as an example of my screenwriting. When we came out, he couldn’t find the key, and Cravat tore strips off him like a wife with a pub-crawling husband. Lancaster endured this in impassive silence, obviously waiting for the pay-off, which came when Nick, having rebuked
his fill, dived under the BMW and emerged with the spare key which he had attached to the undercarriage.

“Why’d I do that, huh? Cos I knew you’d lose your key! You always do! Isn’t it a good thing I put a spare underneath there, huh? Isn’t it? I always put a spare there,” he told me, “because he’s the most absent-minded s.o.b. in town, that’s why. You wouldn’t believe the things he forgets…” etc. Lancaster bore this patiently as we drove back to the office with Nick parroting his reproofs from the back seat.