“I was making twenty and you were making eighteen,” Harry Cohn snarled.
Harry Ruby never saw Harry Cohn again.
I had seen Harry Cohn at several dinner parties. The first time we met he was saying disparaging things about writers and how lazy they were.
“I make my writers come in at nine o’clock every morning, just like the secretaries.”
“If you think that’s going to get you good scripts, you should be in another business,” I said.
“What the hell do you know about it?”
And we began to argue. The next time I saw him at a party, he sought me out. He enjoyed confrontations. He invited me to lunch.
“Before I hire a producer, Sheldon,” Harry Cohn told me, “I always ask his golf score.”
“Why should that interest you?”
“If he has a low score, I don’t want him. I want producers who are only interested in producing for me.” Another time he told me, “Do you know when I hire an expensive director? When he’s just had a flop. His price comes down.”
One day, when I was in Harry Cohn’s office, the voice of the studio manager came over the intercom.
“Harry, I have Donna Reed on the line. Tony’s regiment is being sent overseas and Donna wants to be with him in San Francisco until he leaves.”
Tony Owen, Donna’s husband, was a producer. “She can’t go,” Cohn said, and turned back to me.
A minute later, the studio manager came on again. “Harry, Donna is very upset. It may be years before she sees her husband again, and we don’t need her now.”
“The answer is no,” Cohn said.
The studio manager came on for the third time.
“Harry, Donna is in tears. She says she’s going anyway.”
Harry Cohn grinned. “Good. Put her on suspension.”
I looked at him, stunned, and wondered what kind of monster I was sitting with.
I read a brilliant novel by George Orwell called 1984, which predicted the future of Russian dictatorships thirty-five years ahead. It was a horrific scenario. I decided it would make a wonderful Broadway play. I sent Orwell a letter asking for the stage rights and he agreed.
I went to Dore Schary and told him that I was going to do 1984. Dore, the liberal, said, “I’ve read it. It’s a good book, but it’s anti-Russian. You shouldn’t do a play like that.”
“Dore, this can be a very important play.”
“Why don’t you write Orwell and tell him that you don’t think it should be anti-Russian—just anti-dictatorship? In other words, it can apply to any country.”
I thought it over for a moment. “All right, I’ll do that.” I wrote to Orwell and he responded:
Dear Mr. Sheldon,
Many thanks for your letter of August 9th. I think your interpretation of the book’s political tendency is very close to what I meant. It was based chiefly on communism because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism, but I was trying chiefly to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office. What I most particularly did not intend was an attack on the British Labour Party, or on a collectivist economy as such. I have no doubt you do not need telling, but I emphasise this because I see that part of the American press has used the book as a sermon on what Socialism in England must lead to.
Dore kept me so busy that, in the end, I had to abandon 1984.
CHAPTER 21
Kenneth McKenna assigned me to write Rich, Young and Pretty, a musical that was to star Jane Powell, Danielle Darrieux, Wendell Corey, and a young singer named Vic Damone. A very talented cast.
It was a story about a young woman who falls in love during a trip to Paris. A story that had to keep moving quickly and required a light touch.
One morning, Jules Stein called me. “Doris and I are having dinner with you tonight. Do you mind if I bring someone with us?”
“Of course not,” I said.
One more person wouldn’t matter because there was never enough room for everybody, anyway.
That evening, Jules and Doris arrived with a handsome young man.
“I want you to meet Fernando Lamas. He’s going to be in your movie.”
Fernando had a South American accent and turned out not only to be a charming man, but a very intelligent one. Once, when he appeared on The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson started to make fun of Fernando’s accent and Fernando stopped him.
“When someone has an accent,” he informed Carson, “it means he knows one more language than you do.”
The studio audience applauded.
I was on the set of Rich, Young and Pretty the first day of shooting. I had written the script with Dorothy Cooper, a wonderful contract writer. It was Vic Damone’s first movie and he was understandably nervous. The director was Norman Taurog, a tough old pro.
“All right. This is a take,” Taurog called out.
Vic Damone said nervously, “Excuse me, Mr. Taurog. Could I have a drink of water first?”
Norman Taurog glared at him and said, “No. Roll ’em!”
Rich, Young and Pretty began shooting.
The movie was a modest success at the box office. That same year I also wrote a musical comedy, Nancy Goes to Rio, starring Ann Sothern, Jane Powell, and Barry Sullivan. It was the story of a mother and daughter who fall in love with the same man. When I finished the screenplay, I wrote No Questions Asked, starring Barry Sullivan, Arlene Dahl, and George Murphy.
A studio executive had been on a flight to New York when he encountered Pug Wells, a stewardess who fascinated him. She was cheerful and effervescent, and when the executive started to question her about her life, he became even more fascinated. When he returned to the studio, he suggested to Dore that we make a movie based on her character. That was my next assignment.