Yul Brynner crashes car during production of INDIO BLACK.

From: YUL BRYNNER

THE INSCRUTABLE KING

by Jhan Robbins

Brynner's next role was a laconic soldier of fortune in a spaghetti Western called ADIOS SABATA (1971). The movie was short on plot but long on violence - a goldplated, sawed-off repeating rifle and a triple-barreled derringer got a great deal of practice. Yul made good use of both of them.

Alberto Grimaldi, the producer, had loaned him a sleek cherry-red convertible to ferry him to and from the set. Initially, Brynner made the trip in half an hour. Each day he managed to reduce his time. He had it down to twenty-one minutes when the car got out of control and crashed into a stone embankment. Fortunately, Yul wasn't hurt. However, the car was reduced to rubble. When he requested that it be replaced with another sports car, he was told that it would be best if he was driven by a chauffeur.

"Yul gave me his version of the accident," Jean Levin said. "According to him it was entirely the automobile's fault - defective breaks. In all the years I knew him, never once did he take the blame for anything. It was always somebody else's fault. Even the breakup of his marriage wasn't due to something he did. He and Doris were having lots of marital problems. I suppose the chief one was his continued interest in other women."

Yul Brynner on VILLA RIDES

From: YUL BRYNNER

THE INSCRUTABLE KING

by Jhan Robbins

In his next screen venture, VILLA RIDES (1968), Yul was cast as Pancho Villa, the famous Mexican revolutionary. Soon after the film was released, Arthur Godfrey read a rhyming review on his NBC television program:

VILLA RIDES is filled with so much rot,

Authentic Mexican history it is not.

So what else has this wacky movie got?

Yul. And these days he's not so hot.

Brynner was in a Paris hotel when he was told about Godfrey's uncomplimentary appraisal. He stayed up all night composing a rebuttal. As soon as it was finished he sent it to NBC and demanded equal time.

"I'd served a hitch in the Navy, and I thought nothing could embarrass me," Godfrey said. "But I have to admit that I blushed when I read Yul's reply. Practically every other word was obscene."

Brynner defended VILLA RIDES. "It was a wonderful screenplay," he said. "The director whom I had personally approved had to bow out because he was needed on another film. He was replaced with a director who had very little movie experience. When it came out, everything looked flattened and the performances were meaningless. Added to that sorry mess, the film had been cut in the wrong way. It was a bloody shame, because it's so rare to get a good script. Damn few picture makers really know anything about the film industry. To get a cushy movie job you have to be an accountant, a lawyer, or a stockbroker. It's very uncommon to have risen from the ranks!"

Brynner preferred making movies outside the United States. "Foreign countries still regard the actor as somebody," he said. "In Hollywood, the actor has become just another businessman - seldom a true artist."

Brynner, McQueen and RETURN OF THE SEVEN

From: YUL BRYNNER

THE INSCRUTABLE KING

by Jhan Robbins

He was the only one of the original band of gunfighters to appear in RETURN OF THE SEVEN (1966), a successor to THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. Once again he donned his black cowboy costume and resumed the role of Chris, a mysterious shoot-to-kill philosopher-gunfighter. Yul urged Steve McQueen, whom he regarded as his protege, to also repeat his part. McQueen begged off because of another commitment. "I'd sure like to," he said. "But I'm too busy." Privately, he admitted the new plot was absurd.

At a party given by Jack Benny and Mary Livingston, Brynner and McQueen insisted on serenading the guests with a medley of cowboy ballads. They both had been drinking heavily, and when it came time to leave, they began whistling for their horses. They were disappointed when their chauffer-driven automobiles appeared in the driveway.

"Where's mah horse?" Yul asked drunkenly.

"Thar must be a horsethief in th' crowd," McQueen replied.

He had promised Yul that he would appear with him in his next movie. A month later Brynner signed a contract to star in TRIPLE CROSS (1967), a spy thriller that was made in England and France. Again, McQueen reneged. This time he offered his excuse in a cablegram: "I'M TRULY SORRY THAT I CAN'T BE WITH YOU BUT MY HORSE REFUSES TO SWIM THE ATLANTIC."

Yul Brynner in THE TESTAMENT OF ORPHEUS and SOLOMON AND SHEBA

From: YUL BRYNNER

THE INSCRUTABLE KING

by Jhan Robbins

As a favor to Cocteau, Brynner did a guest bit in LE TESTAMENT D'ORPHEE, a movie that was a tribute to the French surrealist author. It was written by Cocteau, directed by Cocteau, and had Cocteau playing Cocteau. Brynner claimed that he had helped fashion the perplexing story line: Cocteau's spiritual search for himself in a world full of phantoms and symbols.

Yul's part was that of a tuxedo-wearing gateman who guards the entrance to hell. His assistants were also clad in tuxedos and had completely bald heads. Other cast members were artist Pablo Picasso, bullfighter Luis Cominguin, writer Francoise Sagan.

"Jean was very interested in hell," Yul said. "So am I. We purposely chose Les Baux-de-Provence for the setting of trhe movie because Dante had lived there when he wrote the INFERNO. It gave you an eerie feeling of the devil at work. One of the many troubles with Hollywood studios today is that they allow accountants to choose the area where the film is to be made. Damn little thought is given to the historical significance!"

Brynner attended a special Hollywood screening of LE TESTAMENT D'ORPHEE. Midway through the film the audience, composed largely of high-ranking motion picture executives, started booing and hissing. Yul ordered the projectionist to cease running it. Then he hopped on the stage and shouted, "Cocteau was right when he told me that this movie should be forbidden to imbeciles!"

This diatribe didn't prevent him from being hired by MGM for SOLOMON AND SHEBA (1959). As bad as many of his films were, none rivaled this big-budget flop. It is well up on lists of the worst movies ever made. Yul's friend Tyrone Power had originally been selected for the leading role. When Power suffered a fatal heart attack, Brynner agreed to substitute. Because he arrived on the set after the film was in production he didn't have sufficient time to learn his lines. The result was that he often looked as if he were reading them from cue cards - as he was. "But it really didn't matter," he said. "Even by Hollywood standards the script was ludicrous."

Dean Reed in the late 1960s.

From: COMRADE ROCKSTAR

The Search For Dean Reed

by Reggie Nadelson

In Moscow, after the peace conference at Helsinki, Dean arranged to interview Valentina Tereshkova for Argentine television. The first Soviet woman in space, she would not kiss Dean and was embarrassed. Back in Buenos Aires, where he was then living, Dean was questioned by the police and, when the military took over the country - the sequence of South America coups is always hard to keep up with - he was expelled. In 1966, still married to Patty, he went to live in Madrid, made a couple of pictures, and moved on to Rome.

For the next half dozen years, Dean commuted between South America and Europe and the Soviet Union. Deported from Argentina, threatened by the Right, he tried to get in again by travelling to Uruguay. He was arrested. The the world who knew him, he had the glamour of a political cowboy, moving faster and faster, and he wrote it down in his autobiography that was printed on the crappy paper. So did the FBI and the State Department. It took two years for Dean's file to arrive on my desk, courtesy of the Freedom of Information Act. But when it did, the account of his exploits in South America, was, so far as I could tell, absolutly accurate.

After an illegal entry, a policeman in Uruguay, who had previously arranged his deportation, recognized him. 'Hello, Dean, I always suspected we would meet again,' said the policeman.

By 1967, Dean was living in Rome where he made Spaghetti Westerns (This wasn't a life, it was a mini-series!). He made eight altogether: in 1967, there was BUCKAROO; in 1968, 20 STEPS TO DEATH, THE THREE FLOWERS and ADIOS, SABATA. In 1969 came DEATH KNOCKS TWICE, PIRATES OF GREEN ISLAND and my favourite, MACHING GUN BABY FACE.

Sometimes, late at night, you could still catch ADIOS, SABATA on television. In it, Dean worked with Yul Brynner. Dean was taller than Yul, but Yul was the star. Dean played their scenes standing in a hole on the beach that had actually been specially dug for him. Dean told the story for the laughs, but it clearly got up his nose that he was less important than Yul.

When Dean went to Santa Domingo to get the divorce from Patty, he laughingly told the press about how he was taller than Yul. Next thing he knew, he saw a story in the paper that Yul had arrived in Santa Domingo.

And in 1970, when Dean applied for a new passport - his old one had expired - his height was listed not as six foot one, as it was on his original document, but as six foot four, but then, by 1970, perhaps Dean felt he had grown taller.

Yul's son doesn't even name ADIOS SABATA in his book.

From: YUL

The Man Who Would Be King

A Memoir of Father and Son

by Rock Brynner

By now, he told me firmly, he regarded himself as a character actor, as if this were a rite of passage that the family ought to note. He was quite realistic about aging, and recognized that he had passed the point where he could play romantic leading men on the screen - such scripts just weren't proposed to him anymore. Instead, he was being offered roles as villains that, more and more often, were extremely violent. But by this time, for a variety of economic reasons, the film business was in such dire straits that even Henry Fonda was making spaghetti Westerns - and so was Yul. These were Westerns, shot in Italy and Spain, in which only the famous star spoke English; all the other characters were played by gnarly-looking Italians who merely mouthed the English dialogue, which was later dubbed. This was not the goal Yul had had in mind when he had studied with Michael Chekhov, but he regarded it as a personal insult when I pointed that out, as he noted that I myself was being supported by these awful movies.

Steve McQueen and Rock and Yul Brynner

From: YUL

The Man Who Would Be King

A Memoir of Father and Son

by Rock Brynner

"Dad, who's going to play the other cowboys in MAG SEVEN?"

"Why do you ask?"

"Well, I heard you say you were still looking, and there's this guy on TV who's really cool. He carries a sawed-off shotgun, and - I don't know, he's kind of like a teenager. His name is Steve McQueen. He'd be really good. He's already starred in one movie: THE BLOB...

"Your father's got exactly the right idea, Rock," McQueen said to me one afternoon on location outside Cuernavaca. Then he paused. "Perfectionism... you dad's perfectionism is legendary. Just learn to do one thing better than anyone else, doesn't matter if it's Ping-Pong or drawing a six-shooter real fast. Work to be best. Oh, you'll lose plenty of friends that way. Like Yul says, 'So, I won't win the Nice Guy of the Year award.' Anyway, I heard you'd seen me on TV, and put in a plug with your dad. I just wanted to thank you. You've got quite some father, Rock." And he paused again it occurred to me that my dad was a hero to my own cowboy hero. "He's gonna be a tough ol' man for you to live up to, all right." I didn't need Steve McQueen to tell me that. " 'Specially if he ever gets mean to you. He's real competitive."...

Preparations continued for a sequel to THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN called RETURN OF THE SEVEN. When Yul had first hired Steve McQueen for the original film, McQueen had promised, informally, to appear in any sequel. But when Yul sent him the script to RETURN, McQueen's agent went back on Steve's word on his behalf. My cowboy hero had backed out on his word, and the little faith I had left in heroes was shatttered. Yul had half expected him to fink out, and went about finding a whole new cast for the sequel...

In the spring of 1966, Yul went to Alicante, Spain, to shoot RETURN OF THE SEVEN. The cast was a bunch of young, interesting men, who, everyone assumed, would soon be as famous as Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, and James Coburn ever were - they were Bob Fuller, Claude Akins, and Warren Oates. There was no obvious reason why this could not be as good a film as the original - indeed, so much had been learned on the first film that the second should have surpassed it. The fact that it was shot in Spain instead of Mexico need not have made much difference. There was the great Emilio Fernandez as the bandido this time. The director, Burt Kennedy, was no slouch. Why then did it have a cut-rate feel about it? It was as if an idea that had proven itself was now exploiting itself...

One day a plump, beared customer in dirty jeans and dark shades came up to me in the sushi bar. He looked like a low-rent biker. "Are you Rocky, Yul Brynner's kid?" he asked, and when I nodded cautiously, he removed his shades. It was Steve McQueen.

In words that I can barely remember, he said he's always meant to stop by this roadside shack. Recently THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN had been shown on television, and a carpenter working on his house mentioned to him that I worked at this sushi bar - that was why he was stopping by. Trying my best to ignore his appearance, I sat down with him at a table. He explained that by disguising himself as an ugly biker type he was free to move about publicly, the way ordinary folk do. I tried to picture Yul doing that. Then McQueen told me he'd been reviewing his life carefully for some months. "Yul and I fell out over some stupid thing, a couple of years after we made that movie." He paused. "I don't remember. Maybe it was something in the press. Or the plans to make a sequel. We had an argument about The Deal. I'm sure he doesn't remember exactly either, it was such a trivial thing." McQueen was wrong; Yul remembered perfectly.
"Anyway, I stopped by so's to ask you to give him a message, next time you speak to him." He paused, but this was a different kind of pause. It was difficult for him to say what he had to say. And yet during the several seconds that he paused, it was obvious that something had happened, something had changed inside his soul.

"Ask Yul to forgive me. I was always very grateful for what he did. He transformed my career and, with it, my life. Then we had some stupid argument because I wouldn't appear in RETURN OF THE SEVEN, and I never saw him again. Well, I came here today to ask you to give Yul a message. Tell him I did wrong, and I'm sorry for it. I never stopped feeling bad about it, because there's no doubt, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN was the film that made me a star. And I never did forget that, or forget him."

I promised to give Yul the message, mentioning that Dad and I didn't talk much. I was going to say something about how unwell he looked, but then he might reasonably have asked what the hell I was doing working as a short-order cook. So I just told him that he'd been a real hero to me.

"I remember, Rock. You first suggested me to your father, because you were a fan of my TV show. I never forgot you either, all the time I was a star."

"But you're still a star," I objected. Steve McQueen didn't need me to tell him that. Then I was called back in to the office to finish the accounts, and we said good-bye. A few months later, Steve McQueen was dead.

The disappointment of TARAS BULBA

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Yul Brynner makes SOLOMON AND SHEBA

From: YUL

The Man Who Would Be King

A Memoir of Father and Son

by Rock Brynner

[After a career as one of the earliest directors at CBS-TV, Yul Brynner became a star on Broadway in THE KING AND I. This led to movie roles in THE TEN COMMANDEMENTS, THE KING AND I, ANASTASIA, THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, THE BUCCANEER, THE JOURNEY and THE SOUND AND THE FURY. However, he found, that no matter how much money he made, he spent it and now he owed the IRS.]

In the fall [of 1958], I went back to boarding school and Mom went back to heavy drinking, and life continued smoothly until Tyrone Power died in the autumn. He had been in the middle of shooting a biblical epic in Spain, SOLOMON AND SHEBA, with Gina Lollobrigida, and now the insurance company was obliged to offer a huge salary to any actor who would replace him in a role that Yul, among others, had long since turned down. The difference was that now they were ready to pay him one million dollars. The way personal income tax was structured in the 1950s, his tax bill on that million would be nine hundred thousand dollars. But there was a solution. The government allowed a total exemption to citizens who resided abroad for a minimum of five years. Yul saw this as his chance to pay his debts: one million dollars tax free was all the money he'd ever need, then he would be free to give up stardom and return to directing at last.

Virginia [Gilmore, his wife and Rock's mother] would not hear of it. It was unpatriotic, or worse. It was dishonest and immoral and unredeemable. "All you want it to be a gypsy millionaire," she screamed, since the kid was away at school, "without a care or responsiblity in the world. Well, I'm sorry, Mr. B., but you have responsibilites, whether or not you care to notice. And if you can earn money ten times faster, you better believe me, I can spend it faster still!" Or words to that effect...

Before settling down as a millionaire, Yul first had to make SOLOMON AND SHEBA. Here, for the first time since the beginning of his stardom, was a piece of unmistakable crap, on an aesthetic par with Steve Reeves as Hercules. Just two years after THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, the zenith of the genre, came this nadir. Gina Lollobrigida, with a ruby in her navel, had all the sex appeal of a fist. George Sanders, in his fifties, appeared so feeble in battle that he turned to the camera as if soliciting comfort from the audience. And Yul, as the young Solomon with Tyrone Power's hairstyle (to match previously filmed sequences), spent most of his screen time trying to keep a straight face. Both Michael Chekhov [Yul's acting mentor] and Cecil B. DeMille had died, mercifully, before SOLOMON AND SHEBA was released.

The experience of renouncing the values and loyalties that had guided him for decades was not an easy one. But at least he was out of debt at last, and putting aside a nest egg that would allow him to become the director he always wanted to be, while feeling secure that he could guarantee his son, and even his grandchildren, a college education. But the extravagance of his daily life grew as fast as his earnings: whenever he had the wherewithal, Yul Brynner was one of the all-time great spenders. "I have no respect for money, Rock, " he always reminded me. "I piss on the stuff." I took careful note of this, as part of my moral education.