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  It was a gray, muggy day and off to the left of the highway, surfers were waiting out beyond the summer combers. The beach and the sand and the water put Pasternak in mind of Esther Williams and he began to ruminate about the pictures he had built around her. “I used to keep her in the water 99 per cent of the time,” he said. His lips curled in a tentative smile. “Wet she was a star.”

  The Sweet Ride location was on Point Dume, three miles past Trancas. The Studio had built a road from the highway down to the beach-house set it had rented for two months. The road was necessary to accommodate all the trucks which hauled out equipment from the Studio every day. (Under union rules, nothing could be left on the location overnight. Even the cast could not drive out to the location in the morning; they had to report to the Studio and be driven out in Studio cars.) The script had called for two houses on the beach, but when such a site could not be found, the Studio rented a large house trailer and installed it next to the most suitable house available. The lot behind the house was filled with equipment trucks, portable-dressing-room trucks and portable-bathroom trucks. Cables covered the ground. The crew sat around in chairs reading the trade papers. Pasternak studied the slate-gray sky. “Most days you want sun,” he said. “But if you get weather like this, you hope it stays this way all day. The sun comes out now, it’s a bad match. And a bad match costs money.”

  Pasternak picked his way through the cables and between the lights down to a sundeck where The Sweet Ride’s director, Harvey Hart, was setting up a shot. “You’re running late,” Pasternak said.

  Hart did not look around. He was sitting in a director’s chair decorated with red hearts. He waited until the lights and camera were in the proper position and then gestured wearily up toward the house, where Tony Franciosa was standing, smoking a cigarette.

  “Tony showed up an hour late this morning,” Hart said. He still had not turned around. “He said he was sick. What can you do? It gets the day off to a bad start.”

  Pasternak put his hands in his pockets and gazed out at the ocean. “You know Tony Franciosa doesn’t draw flies at the box office,” he said.

  Hart did not move.

  “But he’s a good actor,” Pasternak said, almost to himself. “You’re not buying box office any more. You’re buying talent.”

  He turned around and stared up the steps toward the house. Jacqueline Bisset was standing at the top of the stairs. She is a young English girl in her early twenties. She saw Pasternak looking at her and slowly came down the stairs.

  “Good morning, Mr. Pasternak,” she said.

  “It’s afternoon,” Pasternak said. The day was going too slowly for him. He looked at her and then smiled. “This girl I love,” he said.

  Jacqueline Bisset smiled hesitantly.

  “That bikini you were wearing yesterday,” Pasternak said. “Was it yours?”

  “Yes, was something wrong?”

  “It looked baggy in the rushes.”

  “It’s not really. It fits.”

  “Doesn’t fit tight enough,” Pasternak said. “Get one from wardrobe.”

  “It fits when it’s dry,” Jacqueline Bisset said. “It’s just that I got such a pounding when I was in the water. It’s a terribly long scene.” She laughed. The scene called for a wave to wash the top off her bikini. “I had my arms over here”—she crossed her arms over her bosom—“and I couldn’t pull the bottom up. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so modest. But that’s why it didn’t look tight. Honest.”

  “Okay,” Pasternak said. He looked at her for a long time without saying anything. She began to fidget under his gaze, pretending not to notice.

  “You got youth on your side,” Pasternak said finally. “Doris Day, she thinks she doesn’t get old. She tells me once it was her cameraman who was getting older. She wanted me to fire him.” The memory seemed to satisfy him. “Ha,” he said.

  Well, she’s fashionably lean,

  And she’s fashionably late,

  She’ll never rank a scene,

  She’ll never break a date;

  But she’s no drag, just watch the way she walks,

  She’s a Twentieth Century Fox, she’s a Twentieth Century Fox.

  No tears, no fears, no ruined years,

  No clocks; She’s a Twentieth Century Fox.

  She’s the queen of cool,

  And she’s the lady who waits,

  Since her mind left school,

  It never hesitates;

  She won’t waste time on elementary talk,

  She’s a Twentieth Century Fox,

  She’s a Twentieth Century Fox;

  Got the world locked up inside a plastic box;

  She’s a Twentieth Century Fox.

  A song sung by The Doors. Words and music by The Doors. Copyright © 1967, Nipper Music Company, Inc.

  Richard Zanuck was late. The dailies were about to begin and he still had not arrived at his private projection room in the basement of the Studio’s administration building. Zanuck watches the dailies—the unedited film shot the previous day on all the Studio’s feature pictures—immediately after lunch every day, always in the company of the same executive quintet—Harry Sokolov, his executive assistant, a doughnut-shaped little lawyer and former talent agency vice president; Stan Hough, head of the production department, a rangy, rawboned man with a deceptively open, country face whose father had the same job at the Studio under Darryl Zanuck; Owen McLean, head of the casting department; James Fisher, West Coast story editor; and Barbara McLean, a small bird-like woman who is head of the Studio’s cutting department.

  It was nearly two o’clock when Zanuck walked into the screening room. He had played two sets of tennis during lunch and he was tieless and carrying his coat over his arm. A trickle of shower water ran down the side of his face. He hung his suit coat neatly on a hanger and began knotting his tie. Flopping into an overstuffed leather chair, he pressed the buzzer notifying the projectionist to begin. The room went dark.

  “What have we got, Bobby?” Zanuck asked Barbara McLean.

  “We start with the Joanna test, Dick,” Barbara McLean said. Joanna was a picture that the Studio was preparing to shoot in England later in the summer, a contemporary comedy about a provincial girl entangled in the mod morality of London. The picture was being filmed under the Eady Plan, a program by which the British government helps finance a foreign film provided that it is made in the United Kingdom with a predominantly English cast and crew. The enormous success of Darling, Alfie, Morgan and Georgie Girl had not been lost on the Studio. All had been made with stars then virtually unknown in the U.S., and, instead of trying for mass appeal, all had appealed primarily to the under-thirty audience. The promise of high return for low investment was irresistible, especially with the Eady Plan covering part of the action, and the Studio had seven low-budget contemporary English pictures in preparation. Like the others, Joanna would be filmed with comparative unknowns both in front of and behind the cameras.

  The film on the projection room screen was of a girl testing for the title role. The girl was tall and angular and she smiled and pulled on a lock of her hair for the camera, shifting back and forth from one foot to the other. Off camera, the director began asking her questions: What was her father like? “Clark Gable.” Did she like Clark Gable? “Oh, no, I like my father,” the girl said. She brushed the hair back from her face and wet her pouty lips. “He was the best poker player in the Royal Navy. That’s what he and my mother got married on.” Was her father a gambler? “No,” the girl said, “he’s a vegetarian.”

  Zanuck stirred in his seat. A scowl slowly began to rend his brow. He turned to Owen McLean. “I don’t care if her father’s a vegetarian or not,” he said. “Isn’t she going to play a scene? What have we got this for?”

  “I don’t know, Rich,” McLean said in the darkness. “I thought she was going to do something from the picture.”

  “She’s in every scene,” Zanuck said. “I’d like to see what she looks like d
oing a scene.” His head swiveled around and there were murmurs of agreement.

  “Jesus, this is ridiculous,” Stan Hough said. “There’s a lot of money at stake.”

  The girl on screen kept wetting her lips. She did a Charlie Chaplin imitation, then sinuously made love to a poster of Clark Gable, her lips synchronized to a Judy Garland record of “You Made Me Love You” playing in the background. Zanuck was getting visibly irritated.

  “Don’t they have a script over there, Owen?” he said.

  “Sure they do, Rich,” McLean said.

  “Ridiculous,” Stan Hough said again. “This girl’s in all but ten minutes of the picture.”

  “They got a script and she’s doing Chaplin,” Zanuck said.

  “And singing Judy Garland records,” Hough said.

  “It’s a goddamn subterfuge,” Zanuck said.

  “Ridiculous,” Hough said.

  “I hate this crap,” McLean said. He knotted his fingers under his chin. “It’s a subterfuge. The girl’s the whole picture. Why doesn’t he give her a scene to play?” He peered through the darkness. “You know why?”

  “I know why,” Hough said.

  “Jesus, it’s clear to me,” Zanuck said.

  “She’s got to be the director’s girl friend,” McLean said. “She’s got to be.”

  “Got to be,” Hough said.

  “He would have given her a scene otherwise,” Sokolov said.

  “Ridiculous,” Hough said.

  Zanuck flicked on the light by his chair and finished knotting his tie. He got up and took his coat off the hanger. “Goddamn waste of time,” he said.

  The Sweet Ride was still shooting at the beach. One morning shortly after he arrived on the location Joe Pasternak was accosted by Bob Denver, a loose-jointed young actor who was playing a hippie jazz musician in the picture. Denver was not a piano player and his numbers in the film had been pre-recorded by someone else. Dissatisfied with the pre-recorded piano track, the actor had brought a pianist friend down to the beach and recommended to Pasternak that his friend re-record the piano numbers.

  “We’ve already recorded,” Pasternak said. He eyed Denver warily.

  “But it’s rinky-dink music,” Denver said. “It’s not in character.” His friend hung in the background. Pasternak turned and looked at the pianist, then back at Denver, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

  “Is this guy in the musicians’ union?” Pasternak asked.

  “No,” Denver said.

  A triumphant smile creased Pasternak’s face. “Then he can’t do it.”

  “This guy’s good,” Denver said plaintively.

  “The guy I got was good,” Pasternak said.

  “He’s got the wrong sound, Mr. Pasternak,” Denver said.

  Pasternak plucked at the collar of his blue checked shirt. He patted Denver on the arm. “You’re a good boy, I’ll see,” he said. Pasternak watched Denver and the musician stroll off. “Never say no to an actor,” he said.

  Back at the Studio, Star! was in the final stages of its book, or non-musical, shooting. At the conclusion of the book shooting, the company was going to close down for two weeks to rehearse the big musical numbers. An additional two or three weeks had been allotted to shoot the musical numbers. The frame of Star! was a time-worn Hollywood storytelling device: Gertrude Lawrence (as played by Julie Andrews) sits in a projection room watching a black-and-white small-screen documentary of her life which periodically dissolves into widescreen, color and stereophonic sequences of what really happened. The projection room sequences were all that remained to be shot before the shutdown and Robert Wise had set his cameras up in one of the Studio’s actual screening rooms, Projection Room 3-A.

  “You know, I really didn’t want to make the Gertrude Lawrence story,” Wise said as he waited for the shot to be set up. “What I really wanted after The Sound of Music was a star vehicle for Julie. It’s a touchy business with stars. They want to see scripts before they commit themselves.” He cleaned his glasses with a handkerchief. “But I didn’t want to hire a writer, buy all the properties about Gertie’s life, and then have Julie turn it down. Leaving me stuck with the Gertie Lawrence story. So I had my associates do a tremendous amount of research into Gertie’s life, interviewing people, getting anecdotes we could use, an insight into her the books didn’t have.” He stepped aside as a brace of arc lights were wrestled into position, waiting until they were properly placed before he continued. “Then we explained our concept to Julie. She said she’d do it and that was all we needed to get a script together.” He smiled. “Of course, we had to buy all the books then to cover ourselves against a lawsuit.”

  The shot was finally set up and Julie Andrews was called from her dressing room. She was wearing a long, tailored purple coat with a velvet collar, matching skirt and shocking-pink blouse, as well as two diamond bracelets, a diamond pin and a double strand of pearls, part of the jewelry on loan from Cartier’s and worth approximately $100,000. As she arranged herself in a seat in the front row of the projection room, she picked at the full sleeve of her blouse. “My God, how did they ever wear anything like this?” she said.

  “They did, Julie, they did,” Wise said soothingly.

  The shot was a closeup of Julie Andrews.

  NARRATOR:

  … One can imagine the poignancy of this reunion.

  As the narrator is speaking, we hear a sudden loud, joyous peal of feminine laughter. The adult GERTIE (in color), who has been watching the small-screen documentary, gets up into frame, moves toward the screen, the back of her head in the projector’s throw, hiding the black and white picture. We are in:

  21 INTERIOR—PROJECTION THEATER—NEW YORK—1940—DAY

  As Gertie appears, the screen opens out and we are in “our” picture—in widescreen color. The black and white picture of the small screen stops, holding the frame of the Music Hall as Gertie turns to face camera, still laughing.

  Wise stood by the camera reading Julie Andrews’ cue line—“One can imagine the poignancy of this reunion.” After each take, Wise asked for one more: a strand of hair on Julie Andrews’ wig had fallen out of place; the projector flickering in the back of the shot was not lit. “Fine, good,” Wise said. “I like it. Let’s have one more.”

  Julie Andrews experimented with gestures and business. “It started off funny, but I thought it picked up in the middle,” she said after one take. “But my eyes were so damn busy.”

  “That’s okay,” Wise said. “We picked up that business with the eyes. I like it. Let’s use it again in the next take.”

  The shot was finally completed and the stand-ins moved to their places so that the lights and camera could be positioned for the next setup. Julie Andrews flopped into a chair in her dressing room outside Projection Room 3-A. A makeup woman wiped her face with a piece of Kleenex. The unit publicist knocked on the dressing room door and asked if she were free for an interview with a visiting journalist from Chicago.

  “Just a minute, luv,” she said. “Those damn lights. I’ve got to catch my breath.”

  “It will only be a short one, Julie,” the publicist said.

  “Only till they set up the next shot,” Julie Andrews said. She pressed her hands against her eyebrows. “These damn interviews.”

  “This one will be twenty minutes at most, Julie,” the publicist said.

  “Well, if it will help get back ten million dollars,” Julie Andrews said, “what’s twenty minutes?”

  Richard Zanuck settled into his chair to watch the dailies, and the lights in the screening room dimmed.

  “What do we have?” he asked Barbara McLean.

  “Star!, a Tony Rome trailer, and Walter Doniger wants you to take a look at a scene from Peyton Place.” Doniger was one of the three rotating directors of the television serial. It was rare that Zanuck watched any television rushes. “It was a tough one and he thinks it came off pretty well.”

  Zanuck grunted. The Star! footage flickered on t
he screen. It was the projection room sequence shot from a variety of different angles. No one in the small room spoke. The phone rang and Zanuck picked it up. It was his broker.

  “What’s it up to?” he said softly into the telephone. He listened while the Star! footage ended and the trailer (or coming attractions preview) for Tony Rome, a detective thriller starring Frank Sinatra, came on screen. “Shall we dump it at the opening?” Zanuck said to his caller. He listened again. “Okay, let’s hold it for a couple of days and then we’ll see.”

  He clicked off the phone and turned his attention back to the screen. The Tony Rome trailer had a narrator’s voice-over, and the sound of it made Zanuck fidget in his chair.

  “I hate that guy’s voice,” he said. “It’s terrible. Change it.” He turned on a table light and glanced at his watch. “I’ve got an appointment at three o’clock. What’s left?”

  “The Peyton Place stuff Doniger wanted you to see,” Barbara McLean said.

  Zanuck hesitated for a moment. “Tell Walter I saw it and thought it was great,” he said. He picked up his coat and headed for the door.

  Stan Hough laughed. “Maybe what he wanted you to see was a mile-long negative scratch.”

  “Jesus,” Zanuck said. “You don’t think.” He smiled and disappeared through the door.

  Zanuck’s appointment was with Paul Monash, executive producer of both Peyton Place and Judd, another television series. A handsome, nervous man of fifty, Monash was also producing his first feature picture for the Studio, a thriller called Deadfall, starring Michael Caine. The film was being made in Europe and Monash actually did not have much to do with it. All he could really do was watch the dailies when they were shipped in and, when something caught his eye, talk occasionally to the film’s director, Bryan Forbes, on the telephone. It was not a very satisfactory arrangement but, for Monash, Deadfall was at least an entree into feature film production. At the moment, he was concerned with Giovanna Ralli, an Italian actress who was Caine’s co-star and love interest in Deadfall and who was having a great deal of trouble with her English. Much of her dialogue would have to be “looped,” or dubbed, in post-production.