Kiss and Tell - from a bathchair

Their average age is 76. Now they're spilling the beans. And not from their plastic soup-bowls, either.

Seven veteran actors are publishing their autobiographies over the next few months.

Hot on the heels of Sean Connery’s Being a Scot comes Roger Moore’s My Word is my Bond. Amongst his recollections include violent spats with Grace Jones on the set of View to a Kill.

Robert Wagner is also set to launch forth before Christmas. He recalls his romance with actress Barbara Stanwyck and writes that dating Elizabeth Taylor 'was like sticking an eggbeater in your brain'.

Tony Curtis preferred the more chemical form of eggbeater. He discusses how he turned to cocaine as a sex-enhancement aid in the 1980’s.

Youngest of the crew is George Hamilton, 69, who, in Don't Mind If I Do, tells how he witnessed a suicide attempt by Judy Garland

A Voice from the Past - Jules Dassin

I met Jules Dassin in 2002. The man was a legend - surviving the McCarthy purges of 1950's Hollywood, he ended up happily living in Greece, a national hero and a man who always followed his conscience.

Ushered upstairs in a stuffy Piccadilly Hotel, I find myself alone with the ninety year-old director of Rififi whose life story itself sounds like something out of a movie. I’m torn by the desire to quiz Jules Dassin frivolously and endlessly about his terrible experience directing Joan Crawford in Reunion in Paris (1942), and discussing far more weighty and solemn matters, in particular his being blacklisted by McCarthyite stooges in the early 1950’s and a summons to the Senate Committee on UnAmerican Activities. He’s certainly not averse to chewing the fat about politics especially since he married a politician, the spirited actress Melina Mercouri who was similarly exiled from her native country by the Greek Government Junta of 1967. She later became the Greek Minister for Culture and a woman of considerable political clout in Europe before her death in 1994 (memo to Glenda Jackson: only be ‘Oscar-nominated’ like Mercouri for a successful political career – gold statuettes in the loo won’t appeal to the green-eyed Millbank set). Till his death Dassin lived in a street named after her in Athens, a man used to exile, and seemingly not much bothered by it.

Julius Dassin was born of an exile, on December 18th 1911 in Connecticut, his father a Russian Jewish barber and first generation immigrant, who moved his family of eight to Harlem in New York soon after Jules was born. Jules subsequently attended High School in the Bronx and debuted as an actor in New Yorks legendary Yiddish Theatre in 1936 after drama studies in Europe. After writing radio scripts he found himself briefly under the wing of Alfred Hitchcock at RKO during the shooting of Mr and Mrs Smith, and was snapped up by MGM. In 1942 he was in the thick of production-line film-making with three movies in that year alone, the third of which was Reunion in France with Joan Crawford in the heroine of the French Resistance. It also featured John Wayne as a pre Pearl Harbor American pilot applying to join the RAF.

It was Wayne who saved him from the full wrath of Joan Crawford when the rookie director first went onset. ‘Making it was hell,’ he admits, in the sweet tone and benign countenance that is the most striking thing about him. ‘I managed to get a meeting with the MGM executives because I was concerned about the casting and the script,’ he tells me. But they only wanted to talk about one thing. Hats. Hats were important. Joan Crawford is the heroine of the French Resistance and is sacrificed for their existence in the movie – I mean, she’s captured and stripped of all dignity. And yet they wanted to dress her ‘for the fans’. And this was talked about for hours. Finally I got a word in and said I thought the script was bad. And one of the executives took me over to a window overlooking the parking lot and said: which one is your car? And I had this little old car at the time. And he pointed to his automobile, one of those big new things. And he said: that’s my car and that’s your car, and I say the script is good’.

It didn’t get any better either. ‘On the first day we rehearsed and John Wayne – a very interesting man, extreme right-wing but really just a nationalist – was going through the script with Joan Crawford. It wasn’t going well, so of course I said cut. And the whole set just froze. My assistant panicked and pretended to call up at some imaginary guy, telling him to be quiet. John Wayne took me to one side and muttered ‘Never say cut to Miss Crawford.’ You just give a hand sign. I thought this was just nonsense. But when I said cut again Joan Crawford walked off the set, and Louis B Mayer called me to the office and fired me. But then she rang me at my house that night, and asked me to come to dinner. I came to this mansion and the door was opened by her two little girls wearing long white gloves. It was the longest dinner ev-er! And she asked me into the library, where she had thousands of books, and she said: Mr Dassin, do you think I’m a bad actress? And I said, no, I don’t. And she said don’t ever say cut to me again. Just do this.’ Dassin pauses to draw two fluttering fingers across his brow, like a diva having a neuralgia attack. ‘So that’s what I did’.

I was fascinated to hear his account of the creepy and spotless realm of Mommie Dearest, because of course one of those two little girls who opened the door to him was Christina Crawford – that same Christina whose biography of her mother passed into legend as the most spectacular hatchet-job in Hollywood history. Was she the witch of repute? The scariest mother in known history? ‘I suspected those white gloves,’ Dassin nods sagely. ‘I suspected the silence from the children’

But the problems didn’t end after this rapprochement, which saw him rehired. Quite quickly Dassin discovered that Crawford was busy avoiding her Dutch co-star Philip Dorn – he was an embarrassing ex-fling and she’d just got re-married. He began to notice La Crawford mysteriously kept moving out of frame when she was in scenes with Dorn, so the camera would never capture them together. ‘I got so mad,’ recalls Dassin, who was perched on a weighted camera crane at the time, ‘I jumped off the crane and the crane flew up – and I yelled ‘I’m gonna punch you on the jaw’. And then that whole New York gangster thing came out in her, and she took off her hat, and she put down her purse, and she pointed to her jaw, and said GO AHEAD!’

Now I don’t want to misrepresent Jules Dassin, who considered his encounter with fearsome old Mommie Dearest a very small part of his early life as a director, and who soon after made a name for himself with moody film-noir classics like Brute Force (47), The Naked City (48) and Night and the City (49). Night and the City was the actually last movie he managed to shoot for Hollywood before being blacklisted, shortly after fellow director Edward Dmytryk identified him as a communist and his life collapsed around him. It wasn’t until the Parisian heist movie Rififi – the mother of all ‘heist gone wrong movies’ right up to and including Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs – that he found work five years later. He was rehabilitated in the sixties but by that point he was married to Mercouri and settled in Greece and Switzerland. I can’t help noticing that several online US biographies of the man still refer to his ‘self-imposed exile’ after his apparent rehabilitation, as if he was in some way being an awkward cuss in not returning to America, despite the vicious campaign waged against him by his own countrymen, a campaign that included the US embassies in countries like Italy and France successfully sabotaging his movie career abroad from 1949-1954 (Zsa-Zsa Gabor and producer Jacques Bar were explicitly told that none of their films would receive a US release if they worked with Dassin).

Dassin famously never talks about his time on the blacklist. It’s painful, even today. He had several post-Hollywood successes after Rififi, including the movie Topkapi (64) which won Peter Ustinov an Oscar and was apparently the inspiration for the Mission Impossible tv series and recent Tom Cruise franchise (the first of which namechecks the Dassin original). His final film Circles of Two (80) has an elderly Richard Burton as a painter falling for fourteen year-old nymphet Tatum O’Neal.

However I did manage to squeeze a few words out of him about the McCarthyite blacklist. Looking at the campaign waged against Robert Altman (still being conducted in certain US movie magazines) after his post September 11th comments, I ask Dassin if he could ever see the blacklist returning to haunt America in a new guise.

He heaves one of the most terrible sighs I think I have ever heard. He’s already found his letters to the New York Times ‘cleaned up’ of criticisms of the Bush Government. ‘Could it ever happen again?’ he says after a great and pregnant pause. For the first time in the interview he looked every one of his ninety years and his genial manner faded into sadness. ‘Somebody asked me that the other day. I always used to say – never! It is remembered with shame. But this present government scares me. Impose another blacklist? It might be possible. I believe it may happen again.’ It was a sombre note on which to end.

Richard Widmark - The Cowboy who Never liked Guns

Richard Widmark died earlier this year. Here's his obituary in the London Times. He was one of the great survivors from the Golden Years of Hollywood, and first appeared on Broadway in 1943. He's also one of the few actors to have an airport named after him. I met him in 2002, when he had arrived in London prior to a season of his films at BFI Southbank.

For a man who doesn’t like to drink and absolutely hates handguns, 86 year-old Hollywood legend and tough-guy Richard Widmark has done an awful lot of onscreen carousing and killing over the years. In his earliest roles he played killers and losers in a slew of classic late noir movies, leading one breathless expert in the genre (Eddie Muller in Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir) to proclaim him ‘one of the true noir artists’. That insane giggle as he pushed a woman in the wheelchair down the stairs in Kiss of Death (47) has passed into cinema legend, his mere fifteen minutes of screen-time completely eclipsing its actual star Victor Mature and earning him an Oscar-nomination to boot. ‘Imagine me in here,’ his psychotically breezy character Tommy Udo chuckles to a sullen Mature in the police cell they share. ‘Big man like me getting picked up, just for shoving a guy’s ears off his head! Traffic ticket stuff’.

Still, that traffic ticket stuff did serve him well in the early days. Widmark has worked for well over half a century since blithe and chilling Tommy Udo first skittered cross the silver screen with his flop of blonde hair and petulant snarl (incidentally spawning a dozen Tommy Udo fan-clubs amongst antisocial teen boys, with even real-life Brooklyn gangsters imitating him). Over the years the famous roles have included top spots opposite icons like John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe (‘It surprised me she became this icon – she was always frightened, you couldn’t calm her down’). He’s been directed by Elia Kazan, John Ford, John Sturges, Samuel Fuller, Vincente Minelli and Otto Preminger. Indeed, he’s just about the last big star left over from the era of Hollywood when the old-fashioned studio system of the Golden Years still ruled the roost. People are sincerely awestruck to meet him. It’s not really surprising he received a standing ovation, simply for walking onstage for an interview, at the National Film Theatre last Sunday afternoon.

I’d met Widmark some days earlier in his London hotel, the one off Grosvenor Square he’s been using for the last thirty years whenever he comes to the UK. For all his kudos as a noir god, I don’t think he was ever entirely comfortable in its exaggerated style. He quickly left his noir roots behind him in the fifties and always looked comfortable in dusty buckskin and cavalry garb, as in Cheyenne Autumn, or crisp military uniforms, as in Panic in the Streets. He even made a good senator in his last movie Primary Colors. ‘The seedy underworld has never appealed to me,’ he confided as we began to talk. ‘I always wanted to be Douglas Fairbanks Jr – I fancied myself as a gay blade!’ He laughs with gusto. He’s as sharp as ever. No wonder he never quite bonded with John Wayne, or John Ford, or Santa Barbara neighbour Robert Mitchum (who would only ever come round for the yearly Easter Egg hunt with the kids): he wasn’t too keen on the sauce. ‘I never caroused with me boys,’ Widmark tells me with a wink, talking in that immaculate Midwestern drawl that reminds me of Wayne himself. ‘I didn’t like the taste of booze’.

It’s pretty darn clear he’s really just an old-fashioned Connecticut gentleman underneath, with an education in politics and law, certainly nothing like other hungry noir legends of the same vintage (genuine street-savvy hustlers like Mitchum and Robert Ryan). I already knew he was a committed Anglophile (George Cole – in the audience at the NFT – is one of his unlikely oldest friends) and so asked him about the first English-based movie he ever starred in, the crime melodrama set in bombed-out post-war London, Night in the City (1949). He plays a two-bit yankee wideboy with a line in big suits called Harry Fabian; he’s got a scheme to remove lucrative all-in-wrestling shows from the hands of the Greek Mafiosi. ‘I was always running, the whole sixty days of the shoot; I musta lost twenty pounds’, he told the NFT audience. Earlier he’d told me another reason for the weight loss. ‘There was rationing, you couldn’t get an egg. I had food-parcels sent over from America. At the end of the shoot we went to Paris and had a steak. Man, we were hungry!’

Was that the first time he’d been in London, after the Blitz and during the austere postwar years? ‘No, I was passing through in 1937 on my way to Germany with a friend. I had a professor who was very interested in the German situation and got me all fired up about it. We got permission to film the Hitler Youth camps for ten days. There were these little kids from about five years old in uniform and they’d spend all day saluting’. Was it kind of creepy? ‘No it was just like a boy scout camp.’ With your Aryan schoolboy looks, did they try and convince you to join up? ‘We knew it was all baloney and they didn’t try and convince us, but they did put on special events for us to film’. Were you surprised by what you found? ‘We travelled round Germany and saw soldiers on the train and the factories in the Ruhr were belching smoke night and day. Everything was in movement. It was pretty much what we had expected’.

I was interested in the subject of Widmark’s politics. I don’t believe he’s ever discussed them in interviews. After all, he’d played an enthusiastic leading role as a nazi prosecutor in Judgement at Nuremburg (61). He’d been famously mortified having to play a racist opposite Sidney Poitier in No Way Out (50), and kept rushing over to apologise between takes. They went on to become friends. I’d heard he’d also not shared John Waynes view of the world, though he insists he respected him professionally. It can be no particular coincidence that he’s friendly with arch-liberal Tim Robbins, who offered him the post-retirement role of Randolph Hearst in his movie Cradle will Rock. He won’t be much drawn on politics. But then his suddenly says something very interesting. ‘I contribute to an organisation to get rid of handguns,’ he tells me, just like that. Really? ‘I think our second amendment is ridiculous and in my opinion it should have been repealed years ago.’

I’m fascinated. He begins to quote the second amendment of the US constitution. ‘A strong militia being necessary for a free state, the right of the people to bear arms shall not be abridged’.. He finishes the quote, with a kind of Vidalian patrician-liberal flourish. ‘Now to my mind that means in a militia, not as individuals. And that has usually been the interpretation of the Supreme Court. But this current administration has submitted a brief to the Supreme Court that the individual is supported. That’s the Bush administration! You know, it’s ridiculous’. So you don’t agree with Charlton Heston? ‘Oh god, I think he’s an idiot!’

Suddenly it all makes sense. Now we know why he pointedly stopped eccentric director Sam Fuller from firing a handgun to signify ‘action’ on the set of Pickup on South Street (53) and how truly ironic his take on Madigan (68) was. Don Siegel’s remake of the Akira Kurosawa film Stray Dog was virtually made-to-measure for Widmark’s sensibilities: a cop embarks on a 72 hour odyssey to retrieve his stolen gun from the hands of a murderer. Yes, it all makes sense. Widmark’s real life has been quite different from his screen roles: a marriage that lasted sixty years, a private life of gentleman farming on a Californian ranch, always a consummate professional with a clandestine liberal slant, a life in fact given over to gentle nurturing, reading and mild athletic enthusiasms. How about movies, does he still watch movies I ask him before we end the interview?

‘They don’t interest me,’ the legend of the silver screen says of his own industry, his mind perhaps still fixed in the notion big machines happily grinding up handguns. Movies don’t interest you, I ask weakly? ‘I think I made too many,’ he says with a solemn smile. ‘So they kind of bore me’. Traffic Ticket stuff, I can almost hear him say.