Ernest Lehman: The Reluctant Screenwriter

At Metro in 1957 under a two-year contract, Lehman was chastised by studio bosses for refusing 14 consecutive projects, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. (Lehman says he knew the studio would make him remove the play's homosexual subtext, and "I didn't want to write this movie with one of Tennessee Williams's hands tied behind my back.") Finally, MGM pressured Lehman, who would not be paid until he accepted a screenwriting assignment, by reminding him, "We have more money than you do, Ernie."

North by Northwest grew out of his and Alfred Hitchcock's realization that The Wreck of the Mary Deare could not be turned into a movie. Once Hitchcock and Lehman abandoned that Hammond Innes seagoing novel, they instead concocted a breathless cross-country cat-and-mouse game in which spies mistakenly pursue a Madison Avenue ad exec, eventually played by Cary Grant. Although Lehman recalls numerous attempts at "trying to quit North by Northwest in despair," he provided Hitchcock with the most immaculate story blue-print of his career. Lehman's mournful eyes brighten when he speaks of the suspense master: "There is a Robert Louis Stevenson quote I could apply to myself, as well as to Hitch: 'Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.' Hitch had a lot of personal handicaps. He was shy, sensitive, and fearful, and, later, became corpulent. With certain directors, I was so busy trying to get a feeling of safety that I couldn't spend enough energy on the work. When Hitch and I sat together in a room, all defenses vanished. We forgot to be afraid of each other."

Several years later, after their triumphant collaboration, Lehman intrigued Hitchcock with an idea for another original about a newly-sighted jazz musician, surgically implanted with the "eyes of a murdered man. Six weeks into story conferences," recalls Lehman, "I got into that mood of 'The hell with this,' and told Hitch I wasn't going to go on. I quit and [the story] was my own idea!" Hitchcock, angered by Lehman's behavior, dropped the idea entirely.

Fifteen years after North by Northwest, Lehman and Hitchcock reunited for Family Plot--Hitchcock's curtain call, released in 1976--and, again, on The Short Night, a spy-romance the director never filmed. However, recalls Lehman, the septuagenarian Hitchcock "certainly wasn't who he was when we did North by Northwest. I wasn't the person I had been, either. I felt great deference toward him, which was a terrible danger. Once Hitch became a believer in everything the auteur theorists wrote about him, I could no longer deal with him the way I had on North by Northwest." During a story session on The Short Night, Hitchcock casually informed Lehman that he had only been hired at the suggestion of MCA president Lew Wasserman, to replace a previously assigned writer with whom the director had not clicked. "Fearful people can only indulge in covert hostility," Lehman observes, then laughing ruefully, paraphrases an old car ad slogan: "Ask the man who owns one."

Despite Lehman's outstanding originals, his renown rests on a series of adaptations of gilt-edged Broadway blockbusters. He embarked in 1956 on five such assignments, beginning with The King and I and continuing through West Side Story, The Sound of Music, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Hello, Dolly!, Robert Wise, director of two of them, praises Lehman's "rare, absolute brilliance" in adapting books and plays that lead audiences to remember several of the originals as "better than they actually are." But it is also those adaptations that lead writer Richard Corliss in Talking Pictures to scold Lehman for abandoning original scripts to become "Curator-in-chief of the Hollywood Museum of High-Priced Broadway Properties."

"People think that something like The King and I must have been a piece of cake," Lehman says, shifting in his chair and looking slightly dyspeptic. "Well, it could have been a matzoh ball." Indeed, such non-Lehman footlight-to-klieg light adaptations as Carousel, South Pacific, Guys and Dolls, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Mame, Camelot, 1776, Man of La Mancha, A Little Night Music, Annie, and A Chorus Line attest to that possibility.

The King and I is certainly sexier than it was on the stage. Lehman's screenplay suggests a screen-filling close-up of the king's dark hand slipping around his mistress's slim waist as the two ponder the musical question: "Shall we dance?" Although The King and I won five Oscars out of nine nominations, Lehman's name was not among them. "Quite often," he says, with a dismissive shrug, "the screenwriter of a musical is not even nominated."

Before attempting to tackle the rule-breaking Bernstein-Sondheim musical, West Side Story, Lehman reprised his Somebody Up There Likes Me m.o. by spending months on New York's mean streets sniffing out psycho-social causes for juvenile delinquency, absorbing street argot, and talking with N.Y.P.D. gumshoes. "Look, Ernie," director Robert Wise finally told him, "we're not doing the definitive study of juvenile delinquency in New York, we're making a musical, and we've already got something pretty good to start with." Associates describe Lehman looking "stricken" while watching the shooting, taking them aside and whispering: "It doesn't sound right." Observes musical director Saul Chaplin, "He tends to be pessimistic that things are going to work. Not in the script, in the actual filming itself."

Samuel Goldwyn Jr. recalls encountering Lehman after an early Hollywood screening of the movie. "The audience had been absolutely riveted," he says. "But Ernie was terribly upset; no one had gotten a joke in the third reel. He's never happy. He always knows that somewhere, it could be better." West Side Story became one of the few great date movies to sweep ten Academy Awards, including best picture of 1961. Although Lehman was nominated for his screenplay, he bet fifty bucks that he would lose to Abby Mann, nominated for Judgment at Nuremberg. And did.

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