Hollywood Heyday
75 Candid Interviews with Golden Age Legends
Fans of the glamorous Golden Age of Hollywood are in for a delicious treat with the release of the new book/memoir Hollywood Heyday: 75 Candid Interviews with Golden Age Legends. Featuring up-close-and-personal conversations with iconic movie stars from the pre-talkies 20s to the fading glory of the 90s, two impudent teenaged film lovers from St. Paul, Minnesota, somehow managed, against all odds, to snag in-person interviews with over 250 of the once-giant celebrities. The illustrious list reads like the cast credits from the 1974 film That’s Entertainment: Lucille Ball, James Cagney, Bob Hope, Angie Dickenson, Gregory Peck, Robert Wagner, Mickey Rooney, Debbie Reynolds, director Frank Capra, composer Stephen Sondheim, and our favorite smarty-pants interviewer this side of Carson, Dick Cavett.
The story behind the making of this dishy delight is almost as fascinating as the intimate conversations with the legendary stars themselves. High school buddies, Dave Fantle and Tom Johnson grew up in the Twin Cities loving old films. Upon graduating, the two decided to try their hand at interviewing some of their celluloid heroes. But where to begin? Why at the top of the “classic” Hollywood food chain, of course. So with a suitcase full of questions, the two intrepid teens flew to Hollywood to conduct their first interviews with screen legends Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly—not a bad place to start. Too young to rent a car, the valiant young men relied on buses and their own two feet to meet these once-treasured matinee idols.
PROVOKR spoke with co-author Tom Johnson, about his and Dave’s adventures in La La Land, and got the scoop on whom, of this luminary group, was the coolest, sexiest, and most provocative. And why this Tinsel-town tell-all is more pertinent than ever.
You’ve interviewed so many stars, who was your favorite?
Probably our sit-down with Fred Astaire. He and Gene Kelly were our first interviews when we flew out to L.A. in the summer of 1978. We weren’t legal to drive, couldn’t rent a car and had to walk to Astaire’s Beverly Hills office and Gene’s Rodeo Drive house for the interviews. Being green high-school graduates, the visits didn’t serve up the most memorable anecdotes. We were a couple years away from really getting those probing skills down, but the sheer fact that we were able to meet Astaire opened many doors to other stars that would have remained closed. The advantage of having met Astaire can’t be overstated; he was an exemplar that cut across every tier of show business. For instance, in the mid-‘80s we interviewed Stephen Sondheim in his townhouse in the Turtle Bay section of Manhattan. Sondheim was a man of such formidable genius that we quaked with nervousness just conversing with him about his Broadway career. He told us flatly that he wasn’t a fan of Hollywood musicals and that the only one he liked was The Wizard of Oz. But when we name-dropped that we had met Astaire, Sondheim’s eyes widened. ‘What was he like?’ he asked, sounding more like a bedazzled adolescent who just heard a tale out of school than the most respected composer/lyricist of the last 50 years. Not to be one-upped he confided that Katharine Hepburn was his next-door neighbor and that sometimes he saw her taking out her trash.
Who was most provocative or dare we say, sexiest?
Angie Dickenson’s voice, and how she carried a conversation, had a kind of cognitive dissonance to it, like she was caught between sly bemusement at the ridiculousness of most, even small, things but was also utterly sincere about discussing them. We never knew from one moment to the next which element was in play. We only knew that the full effect was bewitching – a charm onslaught – and that if Angie narrated audiobooks, untold numbers of drivers would hit the guardrail, lulled by her purr into a state of tranquil, somnambulistic bliss.
She also had us engage in a taste-test in her home. When we visited Angie (star of such movies as Rio Bravo with John Wayne, Ocean’s 11 with Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack and Point Blank with Lee Marvin), it was a hazy day. Long Beach (or any beach) wasn’t in sight so we consoled ourselves by popping a cork (or was it twist-cap?) of a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc from Trader Joe’s. “I can see in your eyes that you think this’ll be rotgut,” she said, laughing,“but trust me.” Although “two-buck Chuck” is a vintner’s country mile from Chateauneuf-du-Pape, it didn’t exactly rot the palate either, but then that probably speaks volumes about the remedial education of our particular taste buds. You see, Angie at 81, didn’t put on airs. She liked what she liked, spoke her mind and made no excuses about any of it. And no one appreciates unadorned directness more than a reporter. As Sinatra might have said back in the day, “She’s a gas!”
Anyone else light your fire?
Jacqueline Bisset was another sexy beauty we spoke to. Back in 1996, when we met Bisset for the first time, Hollywood didn’t quite seem to know what to do with her. Bisset, like Audrey Hepburn, was trained in ballet and it’s what accounted for elegant carriage in films like Bullitt with Steve McQueen to guest spots in TV series like Rizzoli & Isles and Dancing on the Edge. ‘I’ve never liked to be part of any formula or cookie-cutter recipe when it comes to selecting projects,’ Bisset told us. ‘I like to find an interesting story, and, hopefully, it will become popular. I’m not against success, of course, but who’s to say exactly what is a ‘big’ or ‘small’ film? If it fills the screen and packs some emotion, then it’s big by my standards.’ At 52, Bisset was striking with what had to be the squarest jawline and highest cheekbones this side of Mount Rushmore. Her auburn hair was tousled and her most prominent feature; her light, slightly translucent jade-green eyes seemed to shimmer in whatever ambient light was reflected whenever she moved her head. She was willowy and wore black leather pants, a cotton pullover top and no makeup – not that she needed even a smidge.
Who was your most fascinating interview?
Perhaps the most compelling we ever did was with Rod Steiger on the patio of his Spanish style villa in the hills overlooking Malibu. It was in the late afternoon and we’d be there still if WE didn’t call an end to it; Rod could’ve talked for days. On meeting Steiger, we quickly learned one salient fact about the man: he was a fighter who had been waging the same titanic battle ever since he left the mean streets of Newark, New Jersey at the age of 16 to join the Pacific Fleet during World War II. In those days, with the vicious murmurings of his classmates cutting into him like a razor, Steiger would be called out of school on a regular basis to pick up his inebriated mother from whatever neighborhood saloon she had just passed out in. Steiger’s struggle then, as it was when we met him in 1995, was for respect. It never changed or wavered. He said the anger and rage that didn’t find an appropriate outlet a half century ago, makes money for him on the screen. “If I didn’t fall into acting,” he said, “I probably would’ve been a mean drunk who ended up with a knife in his ribs after a barroom brawl.”
Dressed in a flowing white-striped bathrobe, wearing sandals, and a token of a “little prince” hung on a chain around his neck, Steiger, with his bald pate gleaming in the late afternoon sun, conjured images of a groovy West Coast shaman about to impart to us the healing mysteries of the universe instead of acting anecdotes. Steiger did however confide that for years he suffered bouts of debilitating depression that waxed and waned without warning. He said that medication and the writings of Antoine de Saint-Exupery were helpful in combating what fellow sufferer Winston Churchill called “the black dog on my back.”
An alumnus of the Actor’s Studio in New York, Steiger hit Hollywood right on the cusp, when the old guard comprised of actors like Humphrey Bogart started to cede power to the avant-garde led by the protean talent of men like James Dean and Marlon Brando. Steiger worked with them all. We asked him to reflect on Brando, James Dean, Bogart and Gary Cooper. Steiger took the request literally and did something we had never experienced before during an interview. Before speaking about each actor, he told us to turn off our tape recorder. After an intense Zen-like period of contemplation that sometimes lasted almost a minute during which he’d close his eyes, he’d come out of his meditative trance and tell us to flip the recorder back on.
On Brando: “In On the Waterfront, we didn’t get to know each other at all. He always flew solo and I haven’t seen him since the film. I do resent him saying he’s just a hooker, and that actors are whores.”
On Dean: “Jimmy was a friend of mine and extremely talented. But he hadn’t quite got his technique together. At the time of his death, he was working too much on instinct. He’d be brilliant in one scene and then blow the next.
On Bogart: “In The Harder They Fall, Bogey and I got along very well. Unlike some other stars, when they had close-ups, you might have been relegated to a two-shot, or cut out altogether. Bogart didn’t play those games. He was a professional and had tremendous authority. He’d come in exactly at 9 a.m. and leave at precisely 6 p.m. I remember once walking to lunch in between takes and seeing Bogey on the lot. I shouldn’t have because his work was finished for the day. I asked him why he was still on the lot, and he said, ‘They want to shoot some retakes of my close-ups because my eyes are too watery.’ A little while later, after the film, somebody came up to me with word of Bogey’s death. Then it struck me. His eyes were watery because he was in pain with the cancer. I thought: ‘How dumb can you be Rodney?’
On Gary Cooper: “I had great respect for him as a survivor. Acting had moved on a little bit from where Cooper was, and in the interim his career had gotten a little shaky. To publicize our movie, The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell, we did a live scene on The Ed Sullivan Show. He was as white as a piece of chalk; perspiration was dripping out of the cuff of his uniform. A couple of times during the scene he got lost a little bit, but he had the guts of a lion. Of course the other side of Cooper was every time we had a scene to shoot during the movie, I had to pound on Elizabeth Montgomery‘s dressing room door to get him out of there!”
