The Books: “John Huston: A Biography” (Axel Madsen)

Daily Book Excerpt: Entertainment Biography/Memoir:

John Huston, by Axel Madsen

Axel Madsen (who died last year) is one of those writers I envy. I would love that kind of career. He wrote in-depth biographies of John Jacob Astor, the Marshall Fields, Billy Wilder, Simone de Beauvoir, Coco Chanel … the list goes on and on. The man had a wide scope of interests and he poured his focus into whatever subject he had at hand … what a marvelous way to spend your life and career. He’s a very good writer, too. There’s a straight-forward-ness to his prose, a lack of judgmental pooh-poohing (a common failing in many biographers), and a real understanding of the topic. He understood context, and is, at all times, interested in providing that for his readers. To understand John Jacob Astor, we must understand the world he lived in. The bigger picture. Madsen is marvelous at that.

His biography of John Huston came out when Huston was still alive. Interestingly enough, it came out before Prizzi’s Honor (wherein Huston became the oldest person ever to be nominated for a Best Director Award – he was 79) – and also before his swan song, James Joyce’s The Dead – a project he had dreamt about since he was a young man). So it’s strange to read the book – without those fantastic at-the-end-of-the-day elements … When Madsen wrote the book, Huston seemed to be in the true twilight of his years. And he was, age-wise, but he was about to burst back into popularity and fame – not to mention the fact that his daughter, Anjelica, hit it HUGE (finally) in Prizzi’s Honor – and won an Oscar for her performance.

John Huston directed both his father (Walter Huston) and his daughter (Anjelica) in Oscar-winning performances – making the Huston family a dynasty like no other. Not even the Barrymores had Oscars in every generation. Also: to be directed by your father, or by your son … into an Oscar-winning performance … Pretty amazing. The last chapter of Madsen’s book is lovely, with an elegiac tone … Who could be faulted for not realizing that Huston had one last burst of creativity and power in him? The man was old. He directed The Dead hooked up to an oxygen tank. Extraordinary.

I love, too, that Huston had been trying for years to direct James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, one of his favorite books. He lived in Ireland for huge chunks of his life, Anjelica was born and raised there … and his desire to see James Joyce turned into cinema was always there for him. But, naturally, James Joyce is a hard sell. The fact that The Dead was Huston’s final project is so moving to me. It was a true labor of love. Everyone knew it would be his last film. And the theme of the film – of all of us “becoming shades”, of moving “westward” into death, or accepting mortality … was palpably real on the set of the movie. Anjelica has spoken about it eloquently. It was one of those rare moments in filmmaking when the experience OF making something absolutely mirrors the true essence of the thing being made. That rarely happens.

The film The Dead, of course, can’t compete with the source material – which is one of the most interior pieces of literature ever written … but Huston gave it his best shot – and there are a couple of moments (particularly the one when the old auntie sings an Irish tune) when Huston found a way to tell the interior moment visually … It’s a different medium. You can’t have a voiceover come in and drone, “Here is what this moment means.” (although plenty directors do that, and it’s awful, unimaginative, insulting to audiences). So how do you express what happens inside Gabriel when he hears the old auntie sing? How do you show that?

The passage in “The Dead” is so subtle that you might even miss it. It’s not a grand climax. It’s not cathartic. It’s tiny.

A murmur in the room attracted his attention. Mr. Browne was advancing from the door, gallantly escorting Aunt Julia, who leaned upon his arm, smiling and hanging her head. An irregular musketry of applause escorted her also as far as the piano and then, as Mary Jane seated herself on the stool, and Aunt Julia, no longer smiling, half turned so as to pitch her voice fairly into the room, gradually ceased. Gabriel recognised the prelude. It was that of an old song of Aunt Julia’s – Arrayed for the Bridal. Her voice, strong and clear in tone, attacked with great spirit the runs which embellish the air and though she sang very rapidly she did not miss even the smallest of grace notes. To follow the voice, without looking at the singer’s face, was to feel and share the excitement of swift and secure flight.

By the end of the story – with its vision of flying westward over Ireland, watching the snow falling on fields and cemeteries and the “dark mutinous Shannon waves” – that moment when Aunt Julia sings, with its sudden startling vision at the end of taking flight – is like a gong has sounded at the bottom of the ocean. The end of the story, and Gabriel’s revelation, is predicted in that moment. Huston was brilliant in how he solved the problem of making that moment real to a viewer – who may not be familiar with the short story. Because, let’s be honest: if you just stay on the surface, then the moment of Aunt Julia singing isn’t all that important. If you just film the surface of it – an old Irish lady dressed in lace singing on a snowy night – you could end up with a scene either frightfully sentimental or tediously boring. Huston understands “The Dead”, and Huston understands the deeper themes flowing through the thing, and so he chose that moment to make them manifest. Slowly, slowly, slowly, as she sings, he begins to insert quiet still shots of objects throughout the house – unused, in closed-up rooms, we have moved out of the primary room where all the action is, and the camera seems to wander around the empty house – all the while we hear the old auntie singing. Everything is filmed in a dark soft glow, often with the snow falling outside the window. We see a lace doily on a table. Pictures in frames. A silver-handled hairbrush. All of the objects we accumulate through our lives. Things we love, things we cherish – things that have meaning. Perhaps the objects have been passed on by those who are now dead, who are “shades” – but while we are here on this earth, these objects have meaning and utility. I can’t even describe how effective this moment is in the film. The only way I can describe it is to imagine an ineffective or too-obvious handling of the scene: for example, a close-up of Gabriel deep in thought, perhaps tearing up in the eye … In other words: focusing on the event itself in a literal way – or a way that focuses only on the emotions it supposedly brings up in Gabriel – as opposed to going for broke, and actually bringing a symbolic and deeply spiritual moment into life – which is what “The Dead” is all about. Huston moves his directing eye away from the literal – and into the metaphysical … He focuses on inanimate objects as opposed to the human lives gathered in the parlor … and in that way he comes very very close to actually articulating James Joyce’s thoughts in that section of the story. Brilliant.

Huston’s career was extraordinary, starting out as a writer, and then segueing into directing. Yeah, if you want to be a director, you can’t do any better than directing The Maltese Freakin’ Falcon as your first picture. My God! Because of his background as a writer, he was always so so good with structure – he was such an intelligent man, a voracious reader, someone brought up in a storytelling tradition, someone who knew how to tell a story.

I chose an excerpt today about the filming of Beat the Devil – which has become a cult classic – but at the time was nearly incomprehensible to reviewers (as well as the cast members themselves. Bogart hated the film.) I love Beat the Devil – it reunites Bogart and Peter Lorre, it has exotic To Catch a Thief locations … it makes no sense … you really feel that the entire thing was an improvisational romp, no end goal in sight. You also feel, in ways that you don’t in other location movies, that the actors are all having a blast after-hours. Their hangovers are sometimes apparent, Bogart’s especially. They seem cranky (but in a funny way), and the characters are broad and absurd. It’s not a remake of Maltese Falcon, but it references it left and right, in a winking-at-the-audience kind of way – I mean, with Peter Lorre and Bogart walking down the street, what else are you going to do? The film has grown in stature over the years, and many people adore it. It’s that true delight: a 100% silly movie. It has no pretensions whatsoever, it does not try to be serious in the last 10 minutes … nothing it has is unearned. It’s SILLY and I actually wish there were more truly silly movies made. Like Smokey and the Bandit. Or Ocean’s 11. Movies like these really have their shit together – in ways that many more serious movies do not, because the serious movies are trying to make points, or be relevant, or have some specific effect on an audience. But gloriously silly movies? They know who they are, they know what they want to attempt, they don’t try to do much. This is harder than it looks!

Beat the Devil was a crazy shoot – with writers being fired left and right – and Truman Capote being flown in to fix the script, and joining the mega-macho atmosphere of Huston and Bogey. Bogart was hostile towards Capote until Capote beat him in an arm-wrestling match. Bogart’s response to his defeat, “I was beat by a fairy!” From that day forward, they were friends – Bogart got a kick out of Capote, and Capote loved teasing and flirting and queening it up right in Bogart’s face because he knew it made Bogart uncomfortable. Bogart would shake his head and laugh … and all was right with the world. But Capote came in and basically put his own Breakfast at Tiffany’s spin on the script – which was totally inappropriate and didn’t fit at all … but it gives the whole thing a lunatic atmosphere of fantasy and daydreaming and madcap hilarity that is hard to describe unless you’ve seen it. I highly recommend it – it’s a lot of fun!

The excerpt I chose today is the one that deals with Beat the Devil. Axel Madsen has a nice specific style, and it makes me want to read all of his books.

EXCERPT FROM John Huston, by Axel Madsen

John suggested they get Truman Capote to work up a new script. “Instead of trying to do Casablanca and Maltese Falcon over again we’ll make a picture with heart and humor.” Capote, who was in Rome anyway, was hired, as was the new Italian sensation, Gina Lollobrigida, for the part of Bogey’s wife. Legend has it that Bogey cabled his agent to the effect that Lollobrigida at least was not flat. In reality he was not, as he said, “a tits man” and Bogart and Lollobrigida never got along too well.

While Capote began working on the script, and Robert Morley joined the cast, John went to the hills above Amalfi in the Bay of Salerno where he wanted to shoot the picture. The production was headquartered at Ravello’s Palumba Hotel, which had only one telephone.

When Bogey flew down, John was there to greet him at the Naples airport. Bogart climbed into John’s rented limousine and the Neapolitan driver started the climb toward Ravello. The chauffeur was a man who apparently hated to make decisions, for at a fork of the road, he chose to go neither left nor right, but straight into a three-foot wall. Bogey crawled out of the wrecked car with two loose teeth and a split tongue. John was unharmed. “Drove us smack through the wall,” he said, shaking his head. “The Italians are an amazing people, eh, kid?”

While Bogey had his teeth fixed Capote came down. He left his pet raven in Rome and when the bird refused to talk to him on the telephone, the writer got John’s permission to go back to Rome to see if the raven was ill or just sulking.

When Angela and Robert Morley arrived in their stately car, having driven all the way from London, the production manager told them Capote was in Rome, Huston in Naples, and Bogey at the dentist. A few days later, however, everyone was there, including Capote, whose raven had died, and a cable went off to Mrs. Selznick to join Beat the Devil. Jennifer Jones had originally agreed to do the picture without reading the story because it was to be directed by John, with Bogey as her co-star. She arrived in Ravello to find she was to play an English girl wearing a blond wig and married to an Englishman.

As Capote remembers the writing assignment, “John and I decided to kid the story, to treat it as parody. Instead of another Maltese Falcon, we turned it into a wild satire on this type of film.”

Morley remembers Capote writing the script page by page and reading it aloud to the assembled cast, page by page every morning. “He never seemed to manage to write very much on any one day, but then as we didn’t film very much either, it didn’t matter,” says Morley. “The dialogue was at least always mint fresh.”

“We sort of lost Helvick’s novel along the way,” admits Huston. “But we had a helluva lot more fun making the new version.”

The evenings at Ravello were given over to poker and the main victims of John’s and Bogey’s hands were Capote, who lost 200,000 lire to them, and John’s photographer pal Robert Capa, hired to do special photo layouts. “Capa was the worst poker player in the world,” says Huston. “Even worse than Capote. He didn’t cost us anything. We won his salary back each night.”

John was inevitably the target of a number of David Selznick memos. David now devoted himself to his wife’s career and although he had no business in Beat the Devil began firing off wires from New York. After the third memo, John sent back his answer, numbering the sections “Page 1”, “Page 2” and “Page 4”. The rest of the Selznick correspondence was largely concerned with what happened to page 3.

But even from New York, David managed to interfere. One day Hubert de Givenchy arrived from Paris, saying he had been summoned by Selznick to redesign Miss Jones’s wardrobe. In one evening, he and his assistants fashioned the cotton dummies, wrote down all measurements. The next morning the Givenchy task force had disappeared. As Morley remembers it somewhat laconically, “Miss Jones played her role dressed entirely in white. The Story was that Givenchy produced the toiles of her dresses for the fitting and that they were mistaken by David for the finished product.”

Peter Lorre joined the cast. He had not been in a film for six years, was still recovering from a lengthy illness, and had to be given special consideration on the set. The character he played was both saintly and sinister – a German from Argentina who has changed his name to O’Hara but pronounces it O’Horror.

In the script Capote improvised day by day, Bogart and his wife, Lollobrigida, are on board a ship sailing for British East Africa; their traveling companions are Morley and his gang of uranium swindlers, and a creative liar, Jennifer, turns up, married to a bogus British lord (Edward Underdown). Then there’s a shipwreck … With her fractured English, Lollobrigida had a hard time understanding the humor of the script – and of her director – but Bogey had to admit she was a trooper. She was always punctual, went to bed early, and arrived on the set groomed and alert.

Work with The Monster was Bogey’s delight again. The unit called Bogart “Mr. President” in deference to his status as bankroller. “Having money in the film makes matters a trifle confusing for the other players,” he said. “They never know whether I’m speaking as actor or executive. No one takes much notice, anyway.”

Morley’s considered opinion on that score was that actors should only take money out of pictures, never put money in. “Actors take themselves too serious,” Morley said. “When approaching a part I incline to the principle once put forward by A.E. Matthews. There were only three questions: ‘How much?’ ‘When do we start?’ and ‘Where?'” Heaving his portly frame into a chair, he added that his own future would be safe in 3-D movies.

As filming progressed, John got the idea that the Ravello monastery, founded in 1300, was just the background they needed for several scenes. With the monks’ permission, generators and camera were moved in for shots of rough wooden tables and long rows of simple iron beds. Some of the monks looked as if they didn’t quite believe it when Jennifer and Gina walked in – through a door which no woman had passed in over six hundred years. Part of the monastery had to be “decloistered” before actors and technicians were allowed to enter, and reconsecrated when the filming was over. Bogey thought it a big laugh to be shooting a movie called Beat the Devil in a monastery.

To keep everybody cheerful, Huston rented a small freighter and for a day off invited everybody to sea. Somehow they teased Jennifer into climbing the mast. Almost at the top, she lost her nerve and climbed down again. John besought her to try again. After an argument, she left in a speedboat. Hours later, she returned, ready for a second try, but John declined her offer. “When the sun went down they decided to turn the boat around and sail for home,” Morley wrote in his memoirs. “To the surprise of everyone except the captain, who had presumably worked out that the time taken in any direction must equal the time taken on the return journey where the same route is followed, we didn’t get to bed till six in the morning. Meanwhile, there was nothing to eat or drink. All work stopped for two days, in protest.”

Judo wrestling was a setside pastime, with diminutive Capote claiming he could pin down Bogart from behind with one hammer lock and Bogey confiding to Huston he would actually squash Capote “like a bug on the wall” anytime. While talking to Morley one day after a scene, Bogart suddenly felt his arm being pulled up behind his back. He winked at Morley and began to groan. The pressure increased and Bogey let out a real howl and managed to twist himself around to see his assailant. Capote was nowhere in sight. It was John trying the armlock.

The villagers of Ravello took a liking to the movie people. Here was their own “Lollo” caricaturing herself. Here, every morning soon after seven, Hollywood’s Humphrey Bogart rode the main street to work on a donkey. When John injured his back, he rode in a sedan chair to the location for several days.

John and Bogey loved to discuss each other. “Work gives John a sense of power,” Bogey would say, “although sometimes he just lays in bed and lets them come to him. If you want to get him roused tell him something that appeals to his sense of justice or courage. ‘I’m against anybody,’ he says, ‘who tries to tell anybody else what to do.’ John often used to speak of the influence his father had on him. One day when John was a boy, his father took him walking in the woods. It was spring and everything was in bud. Suddenly his father seized a stick and started beating the tree with it. ‘I’m trying to stop spring,’ he roared. John never forgot.

“Risk, action, and making the best of what’s around is what makes him tick. When he isn’t; actually on the set, he sees his surroundings as a forest of windmills, bottles, women, racehorses, elephants and oxen, noblemen and bums.”

John underlined their differences. “I’m a notoriously bad husband – not like you, Bogey – morbidly faithful to each of your wives. I’m a much better father than I am a husband.” Bogart took his acting seriously and said he worked hard. John declared, “I hate people who claim to be hard-working. Anyone with brains doesn’t have to work hard all the time.” He advised Bogey to amass a fortune of twenty million so he could live properly. “My life span would probably be lengthened if I had that much,” Huston sighed. “It’s only trying to make twenty million that cuts short a man’s years. Spending it would be healthy.”

Visitors aarrived at Ravello and John’s Italian assistant threatened tourists and locals alike to make them appear in a crowd scene. “I’ve never seen such an example of slave labor,” John commented, shooting the scene.

After pickup interiors in London, Huston flew to Los Angeles to edit Beat the Devil for a United Artists release. It was funny to be staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel when Los Angeles had been his home since childhood, but the Kohners, the Wylers, and the Bogarts were there to see to it that he didn’t get into too much mischief.

Beat the Devil courted – and achieved, disaster. When it was released in March 1954, Bogey called it “a mess”. In self-defense, John said, “The formula of Beat the Devil is that everyone is slightly absurd.” Posterity was to be kinder to the fluke classic. Wrote Pauline Kael a decade later, “Beat the Devil is a mess, but it’s probably the funniest mess – the screwball classic – of all time. It kidded itself, yet it succeeded in some original (and perhaps dangerously marginal) way of finding a style of its own.”