Stanley Donen: State of Grace

MW: What about Audrey Hepburn? You made three of her best films: Funny Face, Charade, and Two for the Road.

SD: She's wonderful. Frederic Raphael and I worked out a little outline of Two for the Road based on his notion of a married couple meeting each other, at various ages, in the vacation spots they always visit. And we went to see Audrey in Switzerland and she read it and said, "I don't think it'll work." She had just had a flop with Paris When It Sizzles; it had this tricky film-within-film construction and she was leery about doing something experimental again. But we said: "We're going to write it anyway." So, when we did finish it, we brought it back--and she thought it was great and we made it.

MW: Peter Cook and Dudley Moore?

SD: I saw Peter and Dudley on a weekly TV show on the BBC-- and they were so funny and so good. I rang them up and said: "You don't know me from a hole in the head, but I'd like to make a movie with you." They had a script ready--a "Faust" story, which wasn't very good to begin with--but we eventually turned it into Bedazzled. We didn't keep much from the original: just the basic idea... and the bouncing nuns on the trampolines! You know, the devil's last speech in Bedazzled: How he's going to make the world so disgusting, with freeways and exhaust fumes and Frosti-Freeze and plastic bars... That's twenty years ago--and it's not too far off the mark.

MW: Judy Holliday?

SD: She was probably the brightest person I've ever known. Just amazing intelligence; she soaked up everything like a sponge. She was my girlfriend for a while; we had a brief liaison around the time she was playing in Shore Leave [which Donen later directed as Kiss Them for Me, with Jayne Mansfield in Holliday's part]. She loved jazz; that's why she called herself "Holliday"--she was crazy about Billie Holiday.

MW: Alan Jay Lerner?

SD: Alan Lerner and I didn't get along at all; not even on Royal Wedding. He had the feeling I had to make the picture the way he saw it. It's as simple as that. He thought I had to please him. And I didn't think that way; we had two basically different points of view about how to make a movie. On The Little Prince, I wanted a more up-tempo score, less Viennese schmaltz and I wanted Saint-Exupery's ending. And Lerner didn't. He was really the only writer I couldn't get along with.

MW: You made two films with Astaire. What was the relationship between Astaire and Kelly?

SD: Kelly was the new boy on the street, but I don't think Fred had any envy about it. I think he was quite happy to have somebody around. And there was no reason for Gene to be envious: Fred Astaire was already a star when Gene was still in school.

MW: If Astaire and Kelly were the two king performers of that whole period, you and Vincente Minnelli were the two top directors.

SD: Fortunately or unfortunately, my take on musicals is a bit different from Vincente's. I'm a very earthy fellow and his musicals have a certain off-the-ground quality. They're very light and dreamy. And the stuff I do--Seven Brides for Seven Brothers or Singin' in the Rain--is more down there, in the dirt.

MW: Speaking of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, is it true that it was the biggest hit of your career?

SD: Yes, it was a huge hit, the biggest financial hit I've ever been connected with. And the studio was dead against it; I'll never forget it. I said I wanted all the brothers to be dancers. And they said: "What: Dancers? You're gonna have a bunch of fags up on the screen, for backwoodsmen? You'll ruin this picture!" "No, I won't; they'll be very virile. You don't know what dancing is, if that's the way you think." Tremendous struggle. And that's what made that picture, in my opinion. The dancers and the energy. I desperately wanted to shoot the picture in the mountains, but I just couldn't win that battle. I must say, in the studio's defense, what I wanted to do was extremely expensive. Now it's hard for me to look at the picture. It's so phony looking.

MW: When you look back on the MGM period, do you appreciate being part of it all?

SD: I appreciated being a part of all those wonderful talents. In a funny way, there was this part of it which in retrospect, I realize was not unlike--and I'm not suggesting we were artists of equal stature--but it was not unlike the Impressionist period when the artists were feeding off each other, meeting in cafes, talking to each other, looking at each other's pictures. We had that. And that was wonderful.

MW: What was it like to socialize in Hollywood then?

SD: A lot of fun. I'll tell you a story. One night there was a huge party at Gene Kelly's house. The doorbell rang, and it turned out that a man had come along earlier trying to sell Gene pressure cooking pots--which were a brand new idea at the time--and the man had said to Gene, "Let me come back and describe how this cooking works to any number of dinner guests you like. You provide the food, I'll bring the pots, give the speech, cook the dinner, and then you can all eat it." So Gene had taken the man up on this offer and--this is what Gene's sense of humor was like--he then invited over this incredible group of people. Judy Garland, Cole Porter, Noel Coward, Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan, John Garfield, Roger Edens, Arthur Freed. Even Greta Garbo was there.

Well, the man walked in with his chart, his easel, two or three suitcases full of pots, and when he saw this cast of characters that he was going to have to do his speech in front of, he very nearly had a coronary in front of us all. But he pulled himself together, and though we could hardly keep from laughing, no one embarrassed him as we listened to this extremely boring, boring presentation of pressure cooking pots. Then he invited us all into the kitchen to watch him cook the dinner. It took forever, standing around the kitchen as this man told us how the food cooked in its own juices, you didn't need to add spices, it was all terribly healthful. Eventually, we all sat down and ate what he'd cooked, and it was terrible, just terrible. But the punchline to the story is, Greta Garbo--who was a health nut--bought the entire line of pots, and the poor man made the biggest sale of his life! So the story has a happy ending.

Funny things always happen at parties now, too. Eight or ten years ago I was invited up to San Francisco for a museum's evening honoring Richard Avedon, the photographer. They were going to show scenes from a movie he and I had worked on called Funny Face, so he called me and said, "You don't even have to stay overnight. I'll have a car greet you. The drinks are going to be served at Francis Coppola's house. You'll be there ahead of us because of the airline schedule; Francis says you can go use his bedroom, and when we're all ready for the party, you'll just come downstairs." I thought, I'll be clever, I won't even bring a suitcase. The car met me, they let me into Francis's house, they sent me up to his incredible Victorian bedroom, there I found a collection of rare and exotic cinema books the likes of which I've never seen. I took off my jacket and started reading, and eventually I had to pee. In the bathroom there was this enormous Victorian chair, which Francis had converted into some kind of strange toilet, up on a platform, too high to stand up there and pee.

So I climbed up, dropped my pants, and continued to read. Well, when I got up, I saw that I had peed through the chair all over the back of my pants. I didn't know what in the world to do. First thing, I put the pants in the basin, washed the spot and made it clean. But now I had this huge water spot on the back of my pants, and I thought, I can't go down to the cocktail party like that! I noticed that Francis had a very old-fashioned gas heater in the bedroom; I lit the heater, laid my pants down, and thought, "I've been saved." Then I noticed this little singeing odor. I jumped up, yanked my pants off the heater, and though I kept them from burning through, they were now yellowed. So I put them on, put on my jacket too, and noticed that if I stood leaning over backwards all the time, the tail of my coat would just about cover the yellowed burn mark. So for the entire evening, I had to walk around Francis Coppola's house with my stomach stuck out to here, leaning backwards, to conceal my humiliation!

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