I want to thank you for being such a good friend . . . I want to thank you for your faith in me . . . I want to thank you for giving me an opportunity like this . . . I’m counting on you to give me all the help you can. I know you won’t let me make a fool of myself . . . Working with you is going to be wonderful . . .
Cary walked in, smiling.
“I understand you found our princess in London,” he said.
“That’s right. She’ll be great.”
Cary sat down, and I heard myself saying, “I have to talk to you, Cary. There can only be one director on a picture. I want us to be clear on that before we begin. Agreed?”
I had had no intention of saying any of that to one of the biggest stars in the world, who was also my friend. At times, without any warning, you will lose control of your words and actions. Cary could have had me fired from the movie in about ten seconds.
He sat there, looking at me, without a word. Then, after a few moments, he surprised me by saying, “Right.”
Wrong.
The trouble began before we even started shooting.
Cary walked onto the soundstage one morning and stopped before one of the sets.
He shook his head. “If I had known it was going to look like this, I never would have agreed to do the picture.”
When I cut three unnecessary lines from the script, Cary said, “If I had known you were going to cut those lines, I would never have agreed to do this picture.”
He saw the wardrobe he was to wear. “If I had known they expected me to wear this, I never would have agreed to do this picture.”
The night before we began to shoot, Deborah Kerr called me.
“Sidney, I just want to tell you that Cary said the two of us should gang up on you. I told him I won’t do it.”
“Thank you, Deborah.”
What have I gotten myself into?
When shooting started the next morning, Cary flubbed his first scene.
I said, “Cut—” and Cary turned on me.
“Don’t ever say ‘cut’ when I’m in the middle of a scene.”
Everyone on the soundstage could hear him. The harassment went on that way, and in the late afternoon, I said to my assistant director, “This is the last scene. I’m quitting.”
“You can’t quit. Give it a chance. Cary will calm down.”
Cary did, but every day he managed, in little ways, to try to test me.
In a scene between Cary and Deborah, she was explaining to Cary that they could not have dinner together because she had to go to the Middle East on State Department business. Deborah started to say her lines to Cary, and she began to laugh.
“Cut,” I said. “Let’s try it again.”
The camera began to roll.
“I’m sorry I can’t have dinner with you,” Deborah said. “I have to go to—” She began to burst into laughter again.
“Cut.”
I walked up to the two of them. “What’s the problem?”
Cary said, innocently, “No problem.”
“All right,” I told him. “Do the scene with me.”
We began the scene. I said, “I’m sorry I can’t have dinner with you but—”
Cary was looking at me with such overpowering intensity that I began to laugh.
“Cary,” I said, “don’t do that. Let’s get this scene.”
He nodded. “All right.”
From then on, that scene went well.
We finished the day’s shooting and I was happy with the result. Deborah was enormously talented and she and Cary were wonderful together.
Cary was married to a young actress named Betsy Drake, with whom he had done a movie. Every evening, after each day’s shooting, as Cary and I left the soundstage, Jorja and Betsy would be waiting outside for us. Cary would take Jorja’s arm and begin complaining about what I had done that day. I would take Betsy’s arm and complain about Cary’s behavior.
One day, while shooting a scene with Walter Pidgeon, Cary moved his eyebrows up and down like Groucho Marx.