Kiss and Tell with Marianna Hill

Fans of Westerns shot in Spain most fondly remember Marianna Hill for her role in EL CONDOR.

From: HOLLYWOOD IS A FOUR LETTER TOWN

by James Bacon

One day I had lunch at the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel with a fetching young actress by the name of Marianne Hill. As is often the case when a young actress lunches with a columnist, she tried to give me news.

"Guess who I had a date with last night?" she said. I couldn't guess. "Henry Kissinger."

I knew she wasn't kidding. This was when the secretary of state, between marriages, was in his Hollywood starlet phase. He was in town because the president was in residence at San Clemente. Remember when that was the Western White House?

So I started asking her questions about Henry as a lover, not a diplomat. Suffice it to say that on a Richter scale of ten, she rated him below five. In fairness to Henry, Marianne said that Secret Service men were always present and didn't lend themselves to romantic dalliance.

"I think," she said, "that if Henry could function alone, he would be all right. But it's very hard to make love when someone is standing around holding a lantern."

I couldn't use those exact words in my column because I do write for family newspapers, but I somehow got the meaning across. By the time the column appeared in print, President Nixon and Henry were back in Washington. I knew Henry was going to hear about the column because three of Henry's other girl friends called me. All of them, as if in a chorus, all said the same thing: "Marianne Hill is just a fill-in date. Henry took her to dinner at Chasen's that night, nothing more. He promised me that he wouldn't see her again. I am his one girl out here."

I was impressed by Henry's prowess with the ladies and began to think that Marianne had prehaps downgraded him too much.

His most publicized date out here was Jill St. John, but that was a publicity front. Jill, at the time, was the mistress of someone even more powerful than Henry, and her lover liked the publicity the Kissinger dates gave her. It took the heat off at home with his wife. And, as the lover once assured me, there was no action.

Jill was not one of the three girls who called, by the way. They were all starlets whose names today would mean nothing to the general public. At least one of them told me that she had read the column over the phone to Henry in Washington.

The next night when I came home my wife gave me the astonishing news that the White House had called and would call back. To show you the ego of gossip columnists, I never dreamed it was Kissinger. I immediately assumed it was the president. Before long the phone rang; it was the White House switchboard.

"Just a moment, Mr. Bacon. I'll connect you."

The voice that came on sounded like Conrad Veidt - unmistakably Kissinger.

"Could I talk to you as I talk to the White House press?" he asked. I assured him that he could.

"It's true," he said, "that I took out Marianne Hill, but I won't again. She is the first one who ever talked about me like that. I assure you that that one date will be the only one. As you know, my job requires that I have a certain amount of dignity. The Marianne Hills don't help."

I then pointed out to Henry that he dines with some of our most beautiful actresses in the really chic places to be seen, such as the Bistro. It's bound to get in the columns.

"I like the Bistro and Chasen's," he said, "because I am known there. I don't know where else to go in Beverly Hills. It's not my town," he replied. "I don't object to your writing that I dined with Joanna Barnes at the Bistro, where you saw us the other night. I just object to Marianne Hill getting so explicit. Could I ask you to just write about my dates with Joanna and Jill St. John? It would help keep my job dignified. After all, it is very important to our country."

Since he put it on a patriotic basis, I complied.

The Time an Ulcer Won the Academy Award

From: HOLLYWOOD IS A FOUR LETTER TOWN

by James Bacon

Whenever there is talk about Hollywood's classic westerns, the name HIGH NOON always comes up. But did you know that when HIGH NOON was first sneaked in Riverside, it was one of the great disasters of all time? It was so bad that even the producer, Stanley Kramer, wanted to forget about it.

I know because I saw that first sneak. The picture was way too long because the director had a crush on a new actress by the name of Grace Kelly. About half the picture was close-ups of Grace. She may not have known that Fred Zinnemann was in love with her but that's the word of Elmo Williams, now a producer, in those days a cutter. Elmo won the Oscar for editing HIGH NOON.

The original version stressed the love story between Grace and Gary Cooper - a co-plot with the tale of the killers arriving in town to kill the brave sheriff. But those close-ups of the future princess were too much. Incidentally, whenever you see a preponderance of close-ups in a movie you can always be sure that the director is in love with the star.

In was a depressed bunch who came back from that sneak in Riverside. One other major fault of the movie was Cooper's ulcer. It kept burping in key scenes. I had been on the set at the Columbia ranch in 1951 during the making of the movie. Coop told me his ulcer had been giving him unusual trouble.

"Jesus, I don't know whether I'll make it through the picture," he said one day over a glass of tequila at the China Trader, a restaurant near the ranch in Burbank.

As I say, Kramer was so disgusted that he was all for writing off the movie. You would be amazed to learn how many movies made are never released. Elmo the cutter begged to have one weekend with the movie, a request that was granted.

"I worked night and day for the whole weekend cutting that movie. I took out most of the love story and about 99 percent of the close-ups of Grace," Elmo recalls. "I confined the action of the movie to the actual hour of high noon. There were shots of the town clock. I inserted more, ticking off the time.

"As the picture was cut, I could see that Coop's ulcer, a liability in the love scenes, was a huge asset in the suspense. Three killers were out to kill Coop and he was getting no help from the townspeople. It was terrifying situation and the burp only accented his terror.

"Towards the end of the weekend, I knew I had a good movie. I also had a short movie. There was no exposition of the plot. I hit upon the idea of putting a song in front and over the titles. It had never been done before. I tested it with a recording of Vaughan Monroe singing 'Ghost Riders in the Sky.' That was just temporary until I could get a song in there. On Monday I talked with composers Ned Washington and Dimitri Tiomkin and told them that I needed a song that would both set the mood and also tell the plot before the picture got started. They came up with 'The Ballad of High Noon.'"

Now, if you listen to that song even today, you don't have to see the movie to know what it's all about. The whole plot is in the song. Elmo said that he knew just the right voice to sing it - that of the old cowboy star Tex Ritter, who wasn't doing too well at that time. Tex jumped at the chance to sing the song.

George Glass, who was a member of the Kramer company at the time, says that it was Kramer who inserted the close-ups of Cooper and his ulcer and the town clock. "Stanley took over the final editing," says George, "giving the movie the sense of urgency that made it, especially the inserts of the town clock."

And Carl Foreman, the writer, says that Coop's not accepting credit for his acting was due to "Coop's characteristic modesty." It's true that Coop would downgrade even an Oscar, but I saw him right after he won it and this was his aside to me: "First time in the history of the Academy an ulcer ever won an Oscar."

As for the editing, I believe Elmo's version. After all, he won the Oscar that year. And the other editors who do the voting know who did the work. I am sure that Kramer oversaw Elmo's work and heartily approved. Who wouldn't approve a cutter who had turned disaster into triumph?

Whatever happened, it is still one hell of a picture. And now you know why studios have sneak previews. Only the audience can make a hit.

[You'll notice that Bacon doesn't mention the fact that Carl Foreman was also the producer of this picture and left early to move to England because of the House Committee Un-American Activities "Hollywood Red Scare". Foreman's producer credit was taken off the picture.]

Lee Van Cleef on Gene Autry's "Cowboy Code"

From: The Story of Hollywood "The Western"

A BBC TV Production In Association with Turner Broadcasting Systems, Inc.

Lee Van Cleef: Never kick dogs.

I'll never hurt a child.

I'll never slap a woman.

The three things I won't do on film.

Now you saw me do it in one film, but I didn't do it. I refused to do it. So, the director pulled a stuntman in and had him do it.

Sophia and Clint

From: HOLLYWOOD IS A FOUR LETTER TOWN

by James Bacon

Sophia and I run into each other all over the world.

Once she was making a movie in Paris with Paul Newman. She took me aside on the set one day and asked: "Do you know a cowboy in Hollywood by the name of Clint Eastwood?" I told her he was an old friend. "Well," said Sophia, "he is the biggest box office star in Italy, bigger than Mastroianni. He made a picture called A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and at every theater where it's playing the lines are four blocks long and four abreast. I have never seen anything like it."

I knew that Clint, during a hiatus in his Rawhide TV series, had gone to Spain to make the first of the spaghetti westerns. He had done it for $15,000 - peanuts. I also knew he was about to make another one for the same money. As soon as I got home, I saw Clint and relayed Sophia's message. He hadn't heard a damn thing about the picture. In fact, didn't even know it had been released in Italy. I caught him in time to renegotiate the contract so he could get a piece of the action. A series of these spaghetti westerns starring Clint made him a fortune and also made him into the number one box office star in America and a top draw around the world. Clint is now the world's richest cowboy. Last time I saw Sophia was in an Etruscan field near Rome, and we talked about the conversation in Paris some years previously.

Sophia and Clint had never met, but Clint is eternally grateful to her. He had figured that A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS was a European western and nothing more. He was convinced that he had been paid $15,000 for a disaster:

"You can't imagine the problems I had making that picture. The director and producer wanted me to wear tennis shoes instead of cowboy boots. It took me a week to talk them out of it. Then the character killed everybody in sight. He was supposed to be the hero, but he was one of the rottenest villains alive. I never dreamed it would catch on." The Europeans love violence and Clint gave it to them. "I come into town to save the place, then proceed to kill everybody in it and finally burn down the town - and be heroic about it."

Amazingly, the pictures became as big a hit in the United States as they were in Europe. Some theaters showed all of them at one time - a Clint Eastwood festival - and the lines were just as long as they were those first days in Italy.

Sophia knew what she was talking about: "I was in Rome and I saw this line trying to get in to see an American cowboy I had never even heard of. I got out of my car and introduced myself to the theater manager, who let me right in. I had to see him for myself."

Clint had director Sergio Leone over a barrel when he negotiated for that second picture. All told, Clint made millions off his spaghetti westerns - the three made with Leone, followed by three of his own American-made films of the same genre. The money is still coming in. The least Clint could do, it seems, would be to do a picture with Sophia. Those two would be dynamite together.

Sophia's English Teacher

From: HOLLYWOOD IS A FOUR LETTER TOWN

by James Bacon

Sophia Loren today speaks English like a British duchess, but there was time when she had Frank Sinatra as teacher and she spoke English that would have made George Burns blush.

I met Sophia when she first arrived in this country on a polar prop flight that took twenty-seven hours to make it from Europe. As an opening remark, I asked her how the flight was.

"It was a fucking gas," said Sophia.

Then one day after she had been here awhile, I heard her say to Carlo Ponti, later to become her husband: "Hey, Carlo, how's your cock?"

She would deliver these four-letter words with such innocence that you could see immediately that she didn't have the slightest idea what they meant. I finally found out why. When she had done THE PRIDE AND THE PASSION in Spain, Sinatra had taken charge of her English lessons. He told her that "fuck" was a form of endearment in the English idiom; that she should use it as much as possible. And "How's your cock" was the same.

I gave Sophia a little English lesson myself and told her she should have taken lessons from Cary Grant instead of the incorrigible Frank.

Jean-Pierre Melville on Gian Maria Volonte

From: MELVILLE ON MELVILLE

Edited by Rui Nogueira

Jean-Pierre Melville: The billion [francs] for LE CERCLE ROUGE was possible because I had Delon, Bourvil and Montand, and because there was a sizeable Italian coproduction interest since I was using an Italian actor Gian Maria Volonte - totally unknown in France, I might add - whom I had in mind to play Vogel after seeing him in Carlo Lizzani's BANDITI A MILANO.

But, if you want me to talk about Gian Maria Volonte, that's a very different story. Because Gian Maria Volonte is an instinctive actor, and he may well be a great stage actor in Italy, he may even be a great Shakespearean actor, but for me he was absolutely impossible in that on a French set, in a film such as I was making, he never at any moment made me feel I was dealing with a professional. He didn't know how to place himself for the lighting - he didn't understand that an inch to the left or to the right wasn't at all the same thing. 'Look at Delon, look at Montand,' I used to tell him, 'see how they position themselves perfectly for the lights, etc, etc.' I also think the fact that he is very involved in politics (he's a Leftist, as he never tires of telling you) did nothing to bring us together. He was very proud of having gone to sit-in at the Odeon during the 'glorious' days of May-June 1968; personally, I did not go to sit-in at the Odeon. It seems, too, that whatever he had a week-end free he flew to Italy to spend it there in what I would call a super-nationalist spirit. I once said to him, 'It's no use dreaming of becoming an international star so long as you continue to pride yourself on being Italian - which is of no consequence, any more than being French is.' But for him everything Italian was marvellous and wonderful, and everything French was ridiculous. I remember one day we were setting up a back-projection scene and he was smiling to himself. I asked him why, and he said, 'Because... you've seen BANDITI A MILANO? There are no back projections in BANDITI A MILANO. Everything was shot directly from a car.' 'Really,' I said, 'And did you have night scenes like this? You were inside a car filming the action going on outside at night?' 'Well, no,' he said, and it seemed to sink in that we weren't using back projection just to amuse him. He's a strange character. Very wearying. I promise you I won't be making any more films with Gian Maria Volonte.

Jayne ridicules herself out of the business.

From: MADE IN HOLLYWOOD

by James Bacon

I was in on the birth of the most publicity-minded of all Hollywood personalities - the late Jayne Mansfield. I was even responsible for getting her started.

I was sitting all alone at my desk in the AP office on a day before Christmas in the early fifties. All of a sudden, I felt a warm kiss on the back of my neck. It felt strange in the all-male newsroom.

Looking up, I gazed on a beautiful young blonde, twenty-one at most, with the most beautiful pair of breasts I had ever seen. They were falling out of her low-cut dress. Then she bent over and gave me a warm kiss on the lips. I kept my eyes open because I couldn't take them off those gorgeous breasts.

"Here's a present from Jim Byron," she said, and wiggled out the door.

Byron was an old friend, the press agent for Ciro's nightclub on the Sunset Strip. I called him immediately and asked who in thehell that girl was.

"Would you believe," said Jim,"this girl walked in my office off the Strip and said she was a coed at UCLA and wanted to be a movie star. I had your present on my desk so I told her to deliver it to you and I'd get your reaction. What can I do with her?"

I had on my desk at the time an airplane ticket to Silver Springs, Florida, where RKO was about to premiere a new Jane Russell movie called UNDERWATER. I couldn't make the trip and told Byron I would call Nat James at RKO and also Howard Hughes, who owned the studio and who was a great tit man.

If they agreed, Jayne could take my seat on the flight. I called Howard first. He was much easier to get on the phone in those days. After I described Jayne, he agreed on the spot.

As a matter of formality, I called Nat, the publicity man in charge of the junket, and told him what Hughes had said.

Jayne was on the flight. The other girls who went along were Debbie Reynolds, Mala Powers, and Lori Nelson, all beautiful but none with the assets that Jayne had.

Jane Russell, the star of the picture, was delayed a few days in New York. She couldn't have cared less for cheesecake shots at this stage of her career.

So, for the photographers, Jayne had a wide-open field and she handled it like O.J. Simpson. She wore a bikini that was twenty years ahead of its time and when all the photographers were focused, a strap conveniently broke. And before long, the magazines and newspapers were filled with pictures of Jayne Mansfield, a new international star who had yet to be even interviewed for a movie. Unfortunately for Jayne, that heady debut caused her to eventually ridicule herself out of the business.

I first noticed this happening at the famous reception for Sophia Loren when the glamorous Italian star made her first visit to this country. Sophia, full-bosomed, presented a threat to Jayne. Naturally, the photographers all wanted to get shots of the sexy Italian import. This infuriated Jayne, who acted as one possessed.

Every time the photographers shot the seated Sophia at her table at Romanoff's, Jayne would rush over and lean over her with her big breasts almost drooping on Sophia's shoulder. It resulted in one of the most remarkable pictures ever taken, with Sophia peering down into Jayne's hugh mammaries.

Toward the end of her tragic life, Jayne could get little work but opening supermarkets and shopping centers. But she was no dummy; her fee was never less than $5,000 a shot.

I was very fond of Jayne because, basically, she was a lovable girl. Often I would try to advise her but she would never listen.

She had a talent to make it big even without publicity, but you could never make her believe it. Only thing I ever talked her out of was when she decorated her big honeymoon mansion on Sunset Boulevard. She wanted everything heart-shaped - the bed, the bathtubs, lighting fixtures, even the toilet seats.

I told her the toilet seats wouldn't work.

"Why?" she pouted.

"Because you haven't got a heart-shaped ass," I said.

All the toilet seats remained oval.