Ernest Lehman: The Reluctant Screenwriter

Lehman was born on Manhattan's Upper West Side and grew up in Woodmere, a leafy Long Island suburb. By his own description, a "shy, quiet, and withdrawn" math whiz, he entered the College of the City of New York intending to be a chemical engineer. "Whatever the hell that is," he says. Gravitating instead to writing courses, Lehman graduated with a degree in English Lit.

With his childhood friend, future movie producer David Brown, Lehman began to co-write magazine profiles. After occasional freelance story sales to Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Collier's, and Liberty ("a very precarious way to make a living," he recalls) and a stint as a copy editor for a financial journal, Lehman, still under his parents' roof, became a $25-dollar-a-week assistant to Broadway publicist and columnist Irving Hoffman. His unsentimental education in the world of "press agents, columnists, and hat-check girls" produced a lacerating novella, The Sweet Smell of Success, about a power-mad Walter Winchell-like gossip columnist. "It's hard to believe now, but people lived in fear of columnists like Winchell, Ed Sullivan, and Dorothy Kilgallen," says Lehman. "But I was living dangerously."

The book caused a stir in Hollywood. An earlier Lehman tale, "The Inside Story," had already been made into a movie by veteran director Allan Dwan, but, says Lehman, "everyone was afraid of making The Sweet Smell of Success." His second novella, The Comedian, was inspired by Lehman's observations of the "miserable" relationship between comic Milton Berle and his brother; shortly after Mickey Rooney starred in a "Playhouse 90" adaptation of it, Lehman's agent called with an offer from Paramount to come west for movie work. Lehman accepted--but as a hedge against his skepticism, Lehman and his wife kept their Manhattan apartment for the next 15 years.

Within days, Lehman found himself at MGM (having been borrowed from Paramount) locking horns with the imperious John Houseman, the producer (and later, actor) who had cut his teeth making films with such titanic talents--and egos--as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli, Nicholas Ray, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz. It was Houseman's involvement that lured Lehman to work on adapting Executive Suite from the Cameron Hawley novel about the struggle for control of a corporation. "I'd never written a picture and this was John Houseman, a tough, brilliant guy, and MGM. John invited me to his office to go over the script with [director] Bob Wise, but when he came to a certain scene, I said, 'Skip that because I'm rewriting it.' Houseman slammed shut the script and said, 'Lehman, you are a barbarian going at the Hope diamond with an axe! Go back to your office where you belong!'"

Despite the contentiousness, Lehman was vindicated; MGM's all-star movie of 1954 (featuring Fredric March, William Holden, Barbara Stanwyck, June Allyson, and Shelley Winters), made money, won four Oscar nominations, spawned a TV series, and vaulted Lehman to the top of the "A" list of writers. Director Billy Wilder, damning with faint praise, judged Lehman "a noble salmon swimming upstream against the tide of a dreary subject."

Before MGM released Executive Suite, Lehman was already entrenched in adapting Sabrina with Wilder at Paramount. Fans recall that 1954 movie as a soufflé, but Lehman recalls the "agony and disaster" of his and Wilder's "sadomasochistic relationship"--a tug of war that finally took its toll. "I got my first whiff of what a nervous breakdown feels like, right on the set in the middle of production," Lehman says. "I started weeping. Billy came over, put his arm on me and said, 'Ernie, nobody ever worked harder on a picture. Just go home.' " After Wilder suspended production, Lehman rapidly recovered. Apparently, the director had reached his own breaking point by that time. "At about 9:30 on the night we had to finish--or else," Lehman recalls, "Billy finally got a take of the [final] scene we needed, looked up at the ceiling and said: 'Fuck you!' A very strange way for him to end the shooting of Sabrina."

Later at Metro, Lehman once again enraged John Houseman by walking out on The Labor Story in a classic case of "creative differences": the writer had envisioned a populist, rousingly cinematic film, while Houseman had in mind Something Important. "My typical behavior pattern was always to leave every other picture I worked on," explains Lehman, who left Houseman to write instead Somebody Up There Likes Me, based on boxer Rocky Graziano's autobiography. Lehman spent two I weeks in New York hanging out with the boxer at Stillman's Gym, going to his first prize fight at Madison Square Garden ("Which I hated," he admits), haunting Graziano's old neighborhood, and talking with his wife.

In one of the earliest of the perversities that mark his career, Lehman originally suggested that another writer tackle a scene that was to become a highlight of the Robert Wise-directed movie. "I called the producer, saying 'I've come up with a scene between Rocky and his father that is a key to who he is. You ought to get Arthur Miller to write it.' I thought of Miller because of the great father-son stuff in All My Sons." The producer refused. Lehman wrote the scene. "It's my favorite scene," he says, "in one of my favorite scripts." Stepping into the Rocky role intended for the late James Dean, Paul Newman became a star.

Lehman was understandably shaken when he was replaced in 1957 by Alexander Mackendrick as director of the movie version of his story, Sweet Smell of Success. "The producers felt I wasn't experienced enough, and, after I was removed as director--a very big blow--I developed a tremendous pain in the gut. The doctor said, 'You're not only leaving this picture, you're leaving the country.' I wound up flying over the central Pacific, writing a note telling the world I would never forgive it for forcing me into this position. Nobody would accept me unless I was successful. And, in order to be successful--I guess I meant within this community--the things I had to do, the man I had become, had given me a spastic colon."

While Lehman thrashed out his existential angst in Tahiti, playwright Clifford Odets worked on his screenplay and would later receive first position in the credits as Lehman's co-writer. Corrosive, stylish stuff--perhaps the definitive New York movie--Sweet Smell of Success did nothing but good for Lehman's reputation.

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