The man who wrote West Side Story, North by Northwest, and The Sounds of Music has rebuffed all screenwriting offers for 13 years. Has Earnest Lehman become the J. D, Salinger of Hollywood?
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HOLLYWOOD 1953. Novice screenwriter Ernest Lehman and veteran director Billy Wilder are struggling to wrench a movie script out of a play, Sabrina Fair, as Wilder's next production. Lehman, fresh from New York where he had been a journalist and press agent, and Wilder, famous in Hollywood for his feisty disposition, argue over just about everything. When Lehman refuses to write a bedroom scene between a middle-aged tycoon (who'll be played by Humphrey Bogart) and the dewy young chauffeur's daughter (Audrey Hepburn), Wilder calls him a "middle-class Jew." Lehman complains of being cold; Wilder counters by saying that he cannot work unless it is cool, so Lehman, who calls himself "antagonistically cooperative," retaliates by reporting for work bundled in overcoat, hat, and scarf.
When the film (now shortened to Sabrina) goes into production without a finished script, Lehman and Wilder are forced to write scenes hours before they are to be shot. Lehman suffers a nervous collapse. Wilder suspends production so that Lehman can recover under a doctor's care, but Paramount forces the issue: the movie, already way over schedule, must be finished within days. Lehman recovers virtually overnight. The writer goes on to win an Oscar nomination and begins to congeal the modus operandi that would prompt one colleague years later to remark, "If you looked up the term 'passive-aggressive' in a psychoanalytic dictionary, you'd find Ernie's picture."
Lehman boasts a resume few Hollywood writers can surpass. He wrote the original screenplay for North by Northwest and adaptations for Sweet Smell of Success, Somebody Up There Likes Me, The King and I, West Side Story, The Sound of Music, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, among others. But as famous as Ernest Lehman is within the Hollywood community for his remarkable body of work, he is also notorious for the much greater body of work he has turned down over the decades. And while Lehman may be considered a difficult man to work with (he's hardly alone in this in Hollywood), the real trick is getting him to work for you at all.
Lehman, whose last produced screenplay was 1977's Black Sunday, is constantly on guard against the moment when one of his Prominent Industry Friends nails him with the inevitable: "So, Ernie, what are you working on?"
Says Lehman, a wry, diffident, every-hair-in-place type who occasionally looks--and sounds--like a Jules Feiffer creation, "When somebody asks me an embarrassing question like that, I have to think to myself: how do I account for the last 13 years? It's like you need a cover story. But too many people do too many movies that they shouldn't because they can't stand not being in action."
Since his stream of '50s and '60s successes slowed to a trickle after 1972, when he produced, adapted, and directed a major debacle, Portnoy's Complaint, Lehman's output has consisted of co-writing assignments on three Oscar ceremony shows, two novels, occasional magazine pieces, and a published collection of essays based on acerbic columns he wrote for American Film. The prolific screenwriter who tops everyone's list for screenplay adaptations, the man who could thrust and parry with the best in the business, has become to movies what J.D. Salinger is to novels.
Samuel Goldwyn Jr. calls Lehman "brilliant, anxious, and frustratingly un-seduceable," after having been rebuffed by the writer on several proposed movie collaborations. "He is meticulous and particular in the extreme," says Robert Wise, director of four Lehman screenplays, who adds that "interesting, exciting material of the sort that attracts him just hasn't come along."
Perched on an antique barber's chair in his home in L.A.'s affluent Brentwood, where he and his wife Jacqueline have lived for 35 years, Lehman--wary and instantly likeable--listened intently to questions, then often asked me to precisely define my terms before loping into long, richly embroidered answers.
"With me, there has always been an element of 'If you stay down in the valley, they can't shoot at you,' "he says. "The minute you start saying, 'Hey, notice me,' you'd better be ready to be noticed. My tendency is to say no to everything. I wait until something sort of backs me into a corner where I find I can't say no."
Lehman perfected his character stance early on. "I would never even have an interview with any producer or director unless they said: 'We want him,' "Lehman recalls. "I would never see anyone as if I were auditioning. It would have been too painful for me to be turned down." Lehman, who describes himself at the time as "feisty, troublesome, and tenacious," outlines the cautious approach he's followed throughout his career: "I have to look for the dangers in a project. The decision to make a certain picture rather than to say 'no' to it is where the die is cast. Whenever somebody sends [material] to me, the first hat I always put on is the one of the head of the studio, and I ask myself, 'Should this picture be made?' In the '50s and '60s, I not only turned down projects but became very resentful when I read that someone was going ahead with it." He adds, with a laugh, "Don't they realize that if I say it can't be done, don't do it?"
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.
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.
Four years later, Lehman and William Wyler began work on a movie version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music, but the irascible veteran director of Jezebel and The Best Years of Our Lives fled the treacly project. Lehman recalls Wyler's aversion as typical of Hollywood's. "When Burt Lancaster ran into me in the Fox commissary and asked what I was doing and I said, 'Writing The Sound of Music,' he said, 'Jesus, you must need the money.' Bob Wise, too, turned down the movie at first. I remember thinking, 'So, you think this is a piece of junk? I'll show you.' "
Released in 1965, the fantasia of singing nuns, eerily blonde children, and photogenic Nazis became a worldwide phenomenon that took five Oscars--including Best Picture--and proved to be one the of ten biggest money-makers ever. Many writers of Lehman's calibre would have shunned the assignment. Although it seems hard to believe now, the Broadway musical was successful only with audiences; critics considered it syrupy, substandard Rodgers and Hammerstein. Twenty-five years later, the cash cow continues to provide Lehman, who received 2 percent of the net for writing the screenplay, with substantial--and regular--checks.
Lehman won full producer's stripes on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Edward Albee's lacerating walpurgisnacht of warring couples. Although Albee suggested Bette Davis and Henry Fonda (or James Mason) as Martha and George, Lehman "lived dangerously" by hiring Hollywood's fun couple from hell, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to star, and also by assigning an "unfilmable property" to a novice movie director, Mike Nichols. "I was astounded by the size of the guns that were suddenly trained on me," Lehman says, referring to his collaborators, "who fought back in ways I wasn't used to."
Lehman spent nine months writing six different versions of the script that eventually retained 11 never-before-heard-on-the-screen "goddamn's," seven "bastard's," five "son of a bitch's," plus "screw you," "hump the hostess," "up yours," and "monkey nipples." The movie, which proved to be 1966's third biggest money-maker, won 13 Academy Award nominations and took five top honors. That same year, 20th Century Fox head Richard Zanuck signed Lehman to a five-picture, writer-producer deal.
According to the literary portrait painted of Lehman at the time by John Gregory Dunne in The Studio, a scathing study of the tottering 20th Century Fox, the new mogul was given to '60s fat-cat ornamentation: a thin gold, custom wristwatch that boasted the 12 letters of his name instead of numbers, an office decorated with a portrait of Barbra Streisand painted by Claire Trevor, and an inscribed silver frame from Mike Nichols. For his maiden production, Lehman chose the Broadway money machine, Hello, Dolly!
Passing over such war-horses as Elizabeth Taylor, Shirley MacLaine, Doris Day, and stage star Carol Channing, he hired Barbra Streisand in the title role. Lehman Thought Big. Directed by Gene Kelly ("a killer," Lehman says), the movie ran amok of its 89-day shooting schedule and $19 million budget. Movie audiences came expecting to be wowed but emerged wondering what anyone--particularly Streisand--was thinking of. The sets and production overwhelmed (2,500 extras crammed the screen in one number); the movie lumbered. After its New York premiere, Lehman made a midnight confession to producer Zanuck: "I feel as though a part of me died and was buried tonight."
"I was like Eisenhower planning an invasion," Lehman says. "I need another building here, another hundred troops there." Lionel Newman, on winning the Oscar for the musical scoring of Dolly with Lennie Hayton, thanked Lehman "for being so goddamn beautifully difficult."
Reviewers on both coasts savaged Lehman's next, Portnoy's Complaint--which he produced, directed, and adapted--as the worst picture of 1972. Lehman, failing in his breakthrough to directing features unlike such other screenwriters as Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz, had scored the clumsiest debut movie by a first-class writer since Ben Hecht in the early '30s. Today, Lehman recalls his notion to film Philip Roth's book about a mother-dominated masturbator as "a dare-devil, crazy, self-destructive stunt. I was pursuing the Peter Principle before Peter was born. [But] I've seen a hundred _Howard the Duck_s come and go since then. I made a $6 million flop. So, what about it?"
Black Sunday, the 1977 thriller about terrorists taking over a stadium, was Lehman's third misfire, and his last produced screenplay to date. Days after producer Robert Evans and director John Frankenheimer received Lehman's screenplay ("They told me they had never had such an exciting experience working with a writer," Lehman recalls, laughing ironically), Lehman's agent informed him that Evans already had Kenneth Ross, another client, doing rewrites. "I wasn't outraged," Lehman explains, "I wasn't shocked. What had happened to other writers over the centuries was just a new experience for me." Samuel Goldwyn Jr. comments: "Ernie was in the center of a game of egos where one guy had to rewrite another just to prove that he was macho."
After serving from 1983 to 1985 as president of the Writers Guild of America West (Lehman likens that experience to "the slaughter in Azerbaijan"), two consecutive disasters befell him. First, the producers who had hired Lehman to write a movie based on Brenda Strr, the comic strip, were federally indicted for income tax swindles. (The long-shelved Brooke Shields movie of the same name is unrelated to Lehman's version.) Then, the Robert Wise-Saul Chaplin movie musical version of Zorba the Greek, based on what Chaplin calls a "miraculous" Lehman screenplay, folded when Cannon Films, the project's backer, went on the ropes.
"So, why the hell am I not writing a screenplay?" Lehman says, repeating the question he knew was coming. "It's probably too bad that I had a piece of some very successful pictures that I wrote. It makes it possible for me never to write again. But there must also be unconscious devices so completely buried that I'm no longer aware of the fact that it seems ridiculous that I don't. Even in the privacy of my own home. Lack of confidence? Yeah, but I never had confidence. But, in the past, nobody came at me with something that wasn't going to be made, nothing that was only 'in development.' What people don't understand is that I need somebody pressing me to do a movie... Today, you're not excited by knowing that Cary Grant or Hitchcock is going to make this movie."
Many charge that Lehman, who was recently the focus of a career-long film retrospective at the University of Southern California, is a victim of an industry often distrustful of any screenwriter past puberty. "Can you imagine a hot-shot studio executive demanding a writing sample of Ernest Lehman?" asks an indignant associate. (I can, and apparently, they have.)
When the producers of The Hunt for Red October hoped to enlist Lehman to doctor that ailing script, the writer's two-page analysis of the script's maladies prescribed a complete rewrite. Lehman also declined his friend Robert Wise's offer that they team on a biopic about hellraising country singer Merle Haggard. "Sometimes too much knowledge scares you," says Sam Goldwyn Jr., who has offered Lehman an executive position with his company and admits that the writer's advice cooled him on acquiring the screen rights for The Hunt for Red October and Polar Star, a sequel to Gorky Park, each of which he asked Lehman to adapt.
Although Lehman disagrees with colleague William Goldman's now-classic statement that when it comes to moviemaking, "Nobody knows anything," he observes, "I'm neither arrogant nor infallible. The kinds of objections that I might bring to a certain property aren't necessarily valued as I used to think they were. Who was that guy who stood up to Billy Wilder, dealt with Hitchcock, Jack Warner, Taylor and Burton, Mike Nichols, Bob Wise, Gene Kelly, and spent two hours nightly on the phone with Barbra Streisand all through Dolly?. I'd have to go into training before I could face that kind of thing again. But, you know what? There is always a little hope that somebody's going to send me something irresistible. And, if somebody said, 'You have to do it tomorrow,' I would."
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Charles Oakley, a writer and explorer, was last seen on a tour bus heading for Mt. Rushmore.