I Hated to Do It: Stories of a Life by Donald C. Farber Read Free Book Online

the city and the other boroughs filming for his adaptation of Kurt’s novel. He filmed in Central Park, he filmed on the Manhattan Bridge, he filmed Morley Safer, the regular on the TV news program
60 Minutes
, in the basement of the Algonquin Hotel, he traveled to Boston and filmed Mark Vonnegut. He decided that he would film Annie and me in our apartment in the city, so I volunteered to make him a pizza. Wouldn’t you know it, he wanted to and did film me making the pizza, with the pizza stone, the works. Only problem was he brought more of a crew than anticipated so I ended up making three big pizzas.
    JJ finished the film. Went back to Chile and spent so much money on the film, but it needed a lot more work, so he started over with a new concept and a new partner. That’s showbiz.
    Nick Nolte in Mother Night
    When Nick Nolte was in town for the
Mother Night
movie based on Kurt’s book, I gotta admit I was a little proud to be walking down the street with a real movie star. I should have been used to it by then because Annie and I were the best friends of Joan Bennett, a genuine movie star who made seventy-four movies before her then-husband Walter Wanger shot her friend Jennings Lang in the Paramount Pictures parking lot. As such a close friend to Joan, we had many great times drinking and dining together and, of course, talking and attending movies and theatre. I always got a kick out of it when we would get into a cab with her and the cab driver would say, “You look exactly like Joan Bennett,” and I could proudly retort, “She looks like her because she is her.”
    Kurt was fond of Nolte, and my only meeting with him was a quick scheduled lunch, which he had to leave and miss the lunch, but we talked and I was impressed. He played the part of Howard W. Campbell, a double agent. Kurt left me puzzling about a lot of things in his writing and in his personal life, and most of the time I could figure it out. But when it came to Campbell, Kurt was playing a game with me, and I think he played the game because he didn’t know the answer either, or didn’t want to furnish an answer.
    In the end of the book, it is not clear just whose side Campbell was really, really on. Was he a loyal American spying on the Nazis for us, or a double agent working for the other side? So you know me, shortly after we parted from Nick, I boldly asked Kurt whether Campbell was a loyal American or not. His answer was so Kurt. He simply said, “Don, what do you think?” And when further pressed by me insisting that was not responsive, he made it even more confusing for me by inquiring, “What would you like to believe?” To this day, I don’t know whether Kurt had an answer to the question, and I think he wanted the reader to come to his or her own conclusion, which was the right conclusion for each reader.
    Joan Bennett
    I represented Tamara Geva, George Balanchine’s first wife, who was referred to me by Richard Barr, the producer who produced
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff
and a whole lot of very important other plays by Edward Albee and other important playwrights.
    Tamara Geva decided to sublease her apartment on West 81st Street, and a young man, Zia Mohyeddin, who was starring in
A Passage to India
on Broadway came to our house after the late performance at eleven thirty p.m. to sign the sublease. He left at three thirty a.m. because Annie and I and Zia had so much to talk about. After the opening of
Passage
, the reviews for Zia were so great they put his name above the title, even on the marquee. We became close friends. In the meantime I got involved in the divorce between Tamara and her husband, John Emery, a tall, handsome, serious dramatic film and stage actor. John had taken up with Joan Bennett when he and Tamara split, and it was incumbent upon us to meet Joan, with whom he was living.
    I have to admit that the first dinner when we were invited to Joan’s house was memorable. She was such a beautiful, kind, gentle,