Mark Griffin (49 page)

Casting concerns aside, Minnelli also hoped to avoid some of the pitfalls of the original theatrical production. For her performance in the Broadway version of
Goodbye, Charlie
, star Lauren Bacall had been taken to task by critic Brooks Atkinson for playing the part of the reincarnated Charlie like “a cross between a female impersonator and Tallulah Bankhead.” Minnelli decreed: “The approach, as I saw it, should have been more feminine.” As a result, the transformed Charlie would emerge as a glittering glamour girl. Reynolds would be dolled up by Minnelli’s fellow MGM expatriates—costumer Helen Rose and hair stylist Sydney Guilaroff (who appears in the film’s memorable beauty-parlor sequence). In addition to overseeing the glamorization of Charlie Sorel, Vincente would work diligently with Debbie, dictating bits of physical business and insisting on specific line-readings.
⁵

Although Minnelli missed his opportunity to work with Monroe, he did snare her
Some Like It Hot
costar Tony Curtis, who would play Charlie’s devoted but disoriented friend George Tracy. “He was one of the better directors that I worked with,” says Tony Curtis:

His and Hers: George Tracy (Tony Curtis) counsels the gender-confused Charlie Sorel (Debbie Reynolds) in
Goodbye, Charlie
. “I think the most important thing about [Minnelli’s] movies is this notion of ‘identity,’ and a person’s sexuality is, after all, the core of their identity,” says Minnelli disciple John Epperson. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST

Rising star Ellen McRae (better known as the Oscar-winning Ellen Burstyn) would remember her director, whom she tagged as “a strange bird,” with far less affection: “At this point in his career, he was a bit past his prime, married to a woman named Lee Anderson,
^aw
but his manner seemed campy,
if downright androgynous. . . . Minnelli seemed polite to everyone on the set but me. He railed at me, humiliating me at every opportunity.” When Burstyn began saying her lines, Minnelli started reciting them along with her. When she stopped, he exploded. “Say the line!” Minnelli bellowed at the frazzled Burstyn. While Farley Granger and other actors had found ways to adjust to this directorial quirk, Burstyn found it extremely challenging. “I just couldn’t imagine he wanted me to say the line with him at the same time. But that’s what he wanted. Over and over until I had his rhythm and there was nothing left of mine. I was doing his performance of the character.”
⁷

In only one genuinely hilarious sequence does
Goodbye, Charlie
hint at what might have emerged after half a dozen rewrites. Reynolds’s Charlie and her well-heeled, mother-dominated suitor Bruce Minton (a surprisingly not bad Pat Boone) are parked seaside and the trust-funder reveals to Charlie that his Maserati is “one sick little car.” The double entendres come fast and furious. “Put an overdrive unit between her differential housings,” Charlie suggests. “Have you stripped her? She’ll thank you for it.” Framed like some wind-swept, romantic interlude from
A Summer Place
and beautifully underplayed by Reynolds and Boone, the scene leaves the viewer wondering why the rest of the movie couldn’t be this deliciously sly and restrained. For in the film’s early scenes, Debbie Reynolds isn’t so much a man reincarnated in a woman’s body as an actress possessed by her previous role. With all of the mugging and caterwauling going on, Reynolds seems unable to shake her celebrated
Molly Brown
portrayal. More than once, the star seems ready to burst into a chorus or two of “Belly Up to the Bar, Boys.”

A couple of decades after Minnelli’s foray into transgendered territory,
Tootsie, Victor/Victoria
, and
Yentl
would mine the gender-bending premise for all it was worth, but
Goodbye, Charlie
isn’t really about gender politics, it’s about schtick, as in the anatomically revised Charlie’s self-appraisal: “I don’t have to see Brigitte Bardot movies anymore, all I have to do is come home and pull down the shades.”

Of course, sexual ambiguity was anything but an alien concept to Vincente, who had been described by his colleagues as everything from “epicene” to “androgynous.” Although
Goodbye, Charlie
is an especially broad comedy, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that Minnelli empathized with his gender-jumbled protagonist. And perhaps there was a moment of genuine recognition for the director when he helmed those scenes in which Charlie realizes that there’s still a man buried beneath her couture and cosmetics.

How did Minnelli feel as he set up the sequence in which George tenderly caresses a distraught Charlie until he remembers that his friend may physically be a
she
but in every other way is still very much a
he
. Did the content
of that scene—in which George experiences a moment of homosexual panic (“We were practically necking!”)—strike a personal chord with the man directing it? “You know, I felt that when I was doing it,” recalls Tony Curtis. “It seemed that there was some dilemma between Vincente and the part and then a dilemma between myself and him, which made it possible for both of us to be in tune with each other. . . . It was interesting and it worked.”
⁸

For many Minnelliphiles,
Goodbye, Charlie
offers an intriguing variation on the director’s favorite theme. “I think the most important thing about his movies is this notion of ‘identity,’ and a person’s sexuality is, after all, the core of their identity,” says Minnelli disciple John Epperson:

Although
Goodbye, Charlie
wasn’t anywhere near Minnelli’s best work,
Films and Filming
still liked what they saw: “A director’s quality can best be gauged when his material is taxing. . . . Therefore, in any thoroughgoing assessment of Minnelli from here on in it will be impossible to overlook
Goodbye, Charlie
, a victory of décor over dialogue, of pace over pawkiness, and of directorial control over a script that is wild as all get out.”

Others were far less forgiving. As Judith Crist noted for the
New York Herald Tribune
, “
Goodbye, Charlie
hasn’t lost a bit of its bad taste in transition to the screen. In fact, all the smarmy creepiness and sleazy smuttiness inherent in a comedy about a lecherous man being reincarnated as a sexy female, with his masculine mind making the transmigration intact, has been expanded about as far as it could be—and then a half hour beyond that, as is the wont of today’s fun-loving filmmakers.”

Upon its release in November 1964, the title
Goodbye, Charlie
proved prophetic, as the comedy quickly disappeared from movie screens. Minnelli’s latest was certainly not the
Some Like It Hot
-sized smash that Fox executives had hoped for. Tony Curtis believes that the movie had something to say before audiences were ready to hear it: “It was way ahead of it’s time. I really felt that. But if I may be so bold, I’ve always felt that about the movies I’ve made. I’ve always hoped that they would be just a little sharper than the average movie.”
¹⁰

“ONE OF THE MOST TEDIOUS, inane and ludicrous films ever made” is how writer Eleanor Perry would sum up
The Sandpiper
. The movie, which Perry christened a “$5.3 million sleeping pill,” was supposed to be about a Big Sur bohemian—the conspicuously unwed mother of an illegitimate son—who falls in love with a married minister.
¹
Of course, what the movie was really about was Liz and Dick. Like
Cleopatra
and
The VIPs
before it, the entire film seems like an excuse to cinematically eavesdrop on Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and cash in on their monstrous celebrity. How else to explain all those ravenous, can’t-get-enough close-ups of the couple? To say nothing of the cinematic ogling of that other, equally famous couple—the heaving, omnipresent Taylor bosom, which throughout the ’60s seemed to enjoy a high-profile career all its own.

For sudsy trash,
The Sandpiper
boasted a classy pedigree. Blacklisted writers Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson (who had scripted Taylor’s magnificent
A Place in the Sun
) were engaged to write the screenplay based on producer Martin Ransohoff’s “original” scenario. William Wyler was initially approached to direct, but he wisely turned the offer down and made the Oscar-nominated
The Collector
instead. This left the field open for the Burtons’ second choice: Minnelli, who had misgivings but proceeded anyway, knowing that a Taylor-Burton enterprise not only would generate a tidal wave of publicity but virtually guaranteed impressive box-office returns.

It’s to Taylor’s credit that she attempted to enliven
The Sandpiper
with a bit of nontraditional casting. For the role of her lover-sculptor Cos Erikson,
Taylor suggested Sammy Davis Jr. Although an interracial romance might have perked the picture up considerably, Minnelli and Ransohoff agreed (for perhaps the first and only time) that it would simply be too much. “There was no time to work on the script because all our preliminary time was taken up with whether or not Sammy Davis should play the part of the sculptor,” Minnelli recalled in the notes for his autobiography. “I objected to him. It was just a spectacular effect—a bid for trying to fit a black man into a niche not right for him. It put a different onus on the story. He dropped out and Charles Bronson played the part.”
²

The Burtons insisted that the film had to be shot in France so they could receive a tax break. So although production launched in September 1964 with some stunning location work at Big Sur, much of
The Sandpiper
would be filmed at Billancourt Studios in Paris. The highly entertaining Liz and Dick show (which at times seemed like a variation on their roles in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
) was performed daily for the supporting cast, crew, and visiting members of the press. There were lover’s quarrels, an ever-present entourage, and drinks for everyone. “Wine flowed as if Jesus had turned all the water in Paris into vin du pays,” visiting reporter Liz Smith noted.
³
In fact, there was so much imbibing behind the scenes that
The Sandpiper
often looked more like a Metrocolor remake of
The Days of Wine and Roses
.

“Elizabeth and Richard liked to sip champagne all day, which is a nice way of putting it,” recalled MGM publicist Robert Crutchfield:

When not functioning as the production’s designated driver, Crutchfield also had an opportunity to observe the lack of chemistry between Minnelli and producer Martin Ransohoff, an unlikely duo whom he describes as “the real odd couple”: