Myra Goes Hollywood

When 20th Century-Fox asked me to play the part of Myron--Raquel Welch's alter ego--in the film version of Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge, I showed the prescience to be very, very wary. I knew there had already been a great deal of trouble setting up this project--not surprisingly, since there are bound to be a few minor problems involved, even today, in adapting to the screen a novel about a transsexual who rapes a young man with a leather dildo and then runs off with his/her victim's girlfriend. First of all, there was the problem of casting: Would they get a man or a woman to play Myra? Vidal had talked of signing an international acting name like Vanessa Redgrave or Jeanne Moreau. Then Fox started testing for the part an extremely motley assortment of sexually ambiguous young men from all over the country. The studio was being pretty schizophrenic, though, because at the same time, it sent a script to Elizabeth Taylor; and whatever else Miss Taylor may be, she can't be mistaken for a man of any variety. When she wisely refused, Raquel Welch signed for the part. Raquel wanted the part so badly that she even tested for it, like some struggling beginner. Fox was so desperate to get Mae West, on the other hand, that it paid her $350,000, which was a great deal more than Raquel got for the picture.

In accepting a part myself, I realized I was inviting trouble from my fellow film critics; I know them all personally and everyone thinks I sold out by doing this movie. But most of the critics writing today know very little about the technical side of making films and if they are ever offered the opportunity to work in one, they should accept; they might learn something. In any case, I knew I was likely to be murdered when the reviews came out, so I wouldn't agree to do the movie unless the studio let me approve my part of the script before filming. Under no circumstances was I interested in playing a homosexual who has an operation to make him into a woman. They agreed to all my demands and assured me that the film would be like a Danny Kaye movie--a Walter Mitty fantasy: Myron, instead of undergoing a sex change, would be involved in an accident and dream that he was the alter ego of Myra Breckinridge, giving advice to her. The two of them would be living together at Château Marmont and there would be lots of sex between them; I'd be a sort of carnal Jiminy Cricket to Raquel's erotic Pinocchio. I didn't object too strenuously to that.

But I had my doubts about the script. Vidal hadn't managed to produce a satisfactory screenplay and Michael Sarne, the director, had tried his hand at a rewrite with equal unsuccess. Then Vidal had rewritten Sarne's rewrite and still nobody--except Vidal--was satisfied. So I wanted a few assurances that we'd have a script to shoot. I was told that a third writer was being hired to completely redo the screenplay, and it was true. David Giler came in and really shaped it up; he made it into a movie instead of just a lot of scribble. So far, so good. But Sarne was so offended because Fox had called in another writer that he wouldn't shoot half of what was there, even though they demanded that he approve the script as rewritten. He would agree to do a scene, then when we got to the sound stage, he would use a line out of his own script and a line out of Giler's; and most of the time, he just shot all kinds of things that had nothing at all to do with the movie.

The whole experience turned into an absolute nightmare. Sarne would have done anything with us if we hadn't been protected. There was a scene in his script, for instance, in which I was supposed to run naked down Wall Street at midnight, chased by the entire New York police force. When I get to the foot of the Stock Exchange, I look up and, instead of the lady with the scales, there is Raquel with a machete in her hand. She proceeds, of course, to castrate me in front of thousands of people--but instead of blood and genitalia, out come rhinestones, pearls, rubies and sapphires. Rather understandably, I said, "No power on earth could get me to play that scene." Raquel didn't have the legal protection I had; so every time Sarne wanted her to do something she refused to do, she would lock herself in her dressing room. There would be hours of conferences on the set, while everyone sat around drinking coffee at great expense to the company. That's the way she ended up protecting herself.

Everything went horrendously wrong. From the beginning, there were endless personality conflicts--mainly because our director had no experience in instilling faith in anybody. When Sarne made Joanna--his only previous feature film--he worked with a lot of people who were like a very happy, nutty, freaked-out family, and they did whatever he told them to. But he had real pros working with him in Myra Breckinridge, people who weren't willing to do any damn thing he wanted them to. We all had our own ideas of how the movie should be done. Raquel isn't a stupid girl; she knew exactly what she wanted. So did Mae West, God knows. And John Huston is no fool, and neither am I. I was really looking forward to meeting Huston and working with him. He had been friendly with two of the people I admired most--James Agee and Carson McCullers--and he's also made some pretty damn good motion pictures. He brought with him to the film a great deal of enthusiasm and excitement. He thought that to play Buck Loner, this old Gene Autry type, would be a gas and he had a lot of ideas on how to do it.

But the second day we were shooting, some vile little underground newspaper came out with an interview with Michael Sarne in which he proceeded to demolish all of us. He said about John Huston, "He's such an old hack that I nearly walked off the picture when they told me I was going to be working with him. However, he is such an enormous fan of mine that perhaps it will influence him into giving the only decent performance of his entire career." After that, Huston hardly ever came out of his dressing room, he never said hello or goodbye to anybody, he ate his lunch alone, he was never congenial. He never refused to take direction, but he never really responded to anything Sarne did as a director. He would say, "Yes, yes," and then do the scene exactly the way he had planned to do it all along. He had a stop date in his contract, which provided that he could leave on a certain day. That morning, when we got to the studio, all of his bags were packed and outside his dressing room, with a car and driver waiting for him at the sound stage. Huston walked off the set and said, "Goodbye, everybody. You'll never cut it together!" He walked to his limousine and was sped to the airport for a flight to Ireland.

By that point, Sarne was already a long way behind schedule. He would walk around in a stovepipe hat and a Charles Dickens coat, with his hands behind his back, and he would say, "I like that, let's print it. That's a take." And the script girl would go up to him and say, "But, Mr. Sarne, there was no film in the camera; that was just a rehearsal." Doesn't exactly instill security, does it? Richard Moore, a brilliant cameraman, nearly went crazy working with him. Sarne would reject everything Richard suggested, simply because he hadn't thought of it first. He treated almost all the actors in the same way. He was on a real ego trip, and I don't think he really cared much for any of us, particularly Raquel. Every day, he would say, "Get Old Raccoon out here on the set." Of course, she would hear that and get very uptight. Sarne's concept was to use all of us as freaks to symbolize aspects of the movie industry that he personally detests. He wanted to make Raquel look masculine and tough, to bring out all the ugliness of Myra. Raquel wasn't willing to do that. She wanted to make Myra a sympathetic character and show what kind of woman she was. Of course, she needed dialog to do it, but Sarne wasn't willing to give us any. Believe it or not, he hates scenes with any kind of dialog.

He would do all sorts of things to break down the actors. He would say, "Well, Rexy, I really don't want to shoot you at all today, you look so ugly. You look so fat, you look middle-aged." That made me feel really terrific. I didn't have any experience at movie acting, so I needed all the help I could get. None of us got much help, so we all fought back in our individual ways. I ended up with my lawyers on the phone continuously. When she wasn't hiding in her dressing room, Raquel fought back by standing in front of a mirror all the time. When she senses hate from a director, the only thing she knows how to do is make herself look good. In the middle of scenes, she would stop and all her sycophants would come running with their hairbrushes, hair sprays and little portable mirrors, and that would drive everybody insane. But I don't blame her, because the least you could do in this movie was try to look good.

It was a survival course we were running. You couldn't even learn your lines, because sometimes you'd arrive on the set to do a particular scene and Sarne would say, "Oh, I'm not shooting that shit." One day he said, "Everybody go home. I have a wonderful idea; I'm going to shoot food." So Fox went out and spent $2000 on hot-fudge sundaes, pancakes, peanut butter, hamburgers, hot dogs, pickles; they put together this enormous spread of fantastic-looking food. Jell-O, cream puffs, everything. And for two days, he shot close-ups of food. Now, this is a very expensive way to play around; all that studio space was standing vacant and the cameramen, crew and electricians were all getting paid to sit around while he shot footage of hot-fudge sundaes.

There was also great tension between Raquel and Mae West. But you can't blame them. Raquel is the star of this movie, not Mae West; but Fox treated Raquel like chattel and rolled out the red carpet for Mae. They were absolutely on their hands and knees to her. Raquel was supposed to have a big musical number that they didn't let her do and they cut out all of her big juicy scenes, but they gave Mae West two songs and Barbra Streisand's dressing room from Hello, Dolly!. That made Raquel feel great. On Mae's first day on the picture, Raquel refused to act with her in a scene because there had been a problem on the costumes. The story that circulated on the set was that Raquel found out that Mae was going to be in black and white; anyone wearing black and white in a Technicolor scene grabs all the attention. Raquel didn't want to be upstaged by Mae, so she demanded that she wear black and white in the scene, too. Everybody went up the wall, because it's in Mae's contract that only she wear black and white in the movie. According to gossip on the set, Raquel said, "I'm wearing black and white in the scene or I'm not appearing in it," and she stormed off to her Rolls-Royce and went home. She had brought dozens of red roses to welcome Mae and ended up taking them all home with her. They had to shoot all of Mae's first day on the picture with the dialog coach reading Raquel's lines from behind the camera.

But the most incredible scene was filmed last November first. When we got to the studio that morning, what greeted us was unbelievable. There were naked women everywhere. People from all the other sound stages were coming over to get a look. Raquel canceled two fittings and a hair appointment just to watch what was going on. Of course, the set was closed, but it was the hottest thing in Hollywood if you could get in that day. There was one girl walking around, a suit drawn on her body, with four sequins pasted on for buttons. A man in an Indian hat had pinned an enormous fur contraption over his genitals. A singer named Choo Choo Collins wore nothing but a polka-dot bikini painted on her body. There was a man in a jockstrap with a fingerlike thing hanging down from his crotch. A group of nudes stood around a grand piano singing The Star-Spangled Banner and there was one man in a bra and panties and another in a half-slip.

It was Michael Sarne's idea of a Hollywood party. I never went to a party in my life in Hollywood or anywhere else that looked like that. I asked the extras if they had ever been to anything like this. A naked man was riding through the scene on a pogo stick and he said, "Oh, yeah, at the last party I went to, there was a man in a wheelchair and he pulled off his pants and a girl went down on him right there, at the party. If you stick around this set, maybe you'll get invitations to a few of them." One girl, who considers herself to be the high priestess of a witchcraft cult, said, "I think I should play Mae West's part. I had a very strong soul transfer with her and I feel that she's got a heart attack coming on. I've been told by the gods that I will end up playing her part." Mae, of course, was in her dressing room during all of this, getting made up and feeling fine and dandy. She was not originally supposed to be in the orgy; but when she heard about it, she insisted on making an appearance. She now has an entrance in which she walks in and everybody applauds. She looks over the banister, fluffs up her hair and says, (concluded on page 155)Myra Goes Hollywood(continued from page 80) "Ohhh, this must be what's called lettin' it all hang out." Then she turns and exits. Sarne had told the extras to say anything they wanted to. One girl was asking, "Do you masturbate in the shower?" Another said, "Let's burn all the pubic hair off her body with lighter fluid." And one extra, who used to come to the studio regularly in a catatonic state, and never spoke, finally broke her silence. She stood up in the middle of the group and asked, "Do you fuck or suck?" Richard Moore said, "That's the first thing she's said in three days. Would somebody get that down?"

The studio had taken away the budget for all of Sarne's other pranks, so this orgy was going to be it for him, his big Fellini moment for the whole picture. The producer, Robert Fryer, was standing there watching, with two of the executives from Fox, two of the little gray people who survive all the administrations because they never make a commitment to anything. One of them said, "Well, it's a today picture," and Fryer said, "Bullshit! Midnight Cowboy didn't have pubic hair and filth in it." Here was the producer seeing what he was seeing; the movie was going to have his name on it, and he was unable to do anything about it. Incredible!

But finally, even Richard Zanuck got fed up with all the expenditure and all the insanity that was going on and he told Sarne, "You must shoot everything you have left to shoot by the 19th of December, because this movie ends on that date. It's over. If you have to work all night that night, then that is what you will do." On the 18th, even the stand-ins were coming up to me and asking, "Is it true? Are we really going to stop shooting tomorrow? Is it really all over?" And I would answer, "You've got me. A quarter of the picture is still unshot and there's still no ending." As of this writing--in late May--there still isn't. But Fox is waiting for Sarne to give them a finished cut. God only knows what they're going to get.

Sarne is crafty, though. He knows the release date for this picture is coming up fast. He also knows he has a contract that says Fox can't fire him until he gives them the first cut, so he keeps cutting and cutting and cutting. He figures if he gets them up against the wall and he still hasn't delivered the first cut in time for release, then the movie will have to open with whatever he puts together. It will be too late for them to reassemble it. But they're very crafty, too, because they won't allow him near the negative. They have it locked up in a vault and he can't even get in to see it. They know that no matter what he does to the picture, they can go back and get the footage he's cut out, if necessary. There was a rumor that he cut Mae West out of the movie to such a degree that she was only a bit player. Zanuck said, "What are you doing? You must be out of your mind! All the people are coming to see Mae West, not Michael Sarne." The word is that Mae West's footage was reinserted.

I got a call from Fox that broke me up a few weeks after I returned to New York. The caller said, "You know, there are still some things about the movie that don't make sense." I said, "No kidding!" Then he said, "Michael is now going to write narration so he won't have to shoot anything more. You will recount off-screen all of the things that never happened in the movie." So I had to go back out there for more work. It's been one endless battle to get this film out. I can hardly wait to see it--when and if it's ever released. My make-up man summed it all up best. He said, "You remember the old Hollywood line, 'Who do you have to screw to get into this picture?' Well, on this movie, everybody's asking. 'Who do you have to screw to get out of it?'"