The Magnificent Elmer by Pearl Bernstein Gardner, Gerald Gardner Read Free Book Online

a town where icons have lived, where you have to always be prepared for the worst and willing to settle for the best.
    If you think back on the apocalyptic scene in Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust , you know that Hollywood should have destroyed itself a long time ago—the place should have been destroyed by flames or rebellion or self-delusion. But somehow it hasn’t.
    ***
    I’ve been remembering, as I try to construct this memoir, what it felt like as a young woman to live in a town of giants. When Elmer and I first arrived in Hollywood, his personal giants were Bernard Herrmann, David Raksin, and Max Steiner. Mine were a clutch of writers, directors, and actors. I was burning with a steady passion, because I was in the same town as Billy Wilder, Clifford Odets, Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, and God forgive me, Otto Preminger and the Three Stooges. And whenever I drove down the 800 block of North Roxbury, the street where George and Ira huddled over a piano and tried to parse romance, the pavement seemed to shudder under my wheels.
    Hollywood was a land full of young movie worshippers, each depending on his wits to stay afloat, each with his own stable of giants, from Miklos Rozsa to the Ritz Brothers.
    No, it wasn’t Mecca. And unlike New York, it didn’t smell like it.
    It was Hollywood, damn it, Hollywood !
    Now, how would you like to see The Ten Commandments again, this time taking place completely on a PT-boat? You wouldn’t? That’s all, step down. The defense rests.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
TO RUSSIA WITH LOVE
    “If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.”
    —John F. Kennedy
    There were also giants on the world stage in those days. Kennedy in the White House, Khrushchev in the Kremlin, Adlai at the UN, de Gaulle in Paris. And they led us to the first great crisis of the nuclear age. In October of 1962 JFK learned from photographic evidence that Russia had implanted in Cuba missiles bearing atomic warheads. That was the start of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a confrontation between the two great nuclear powers that brought the world to the abyss.
    In July 1963, a mere eight months after we nearly had a nuclear war with Russia that brought an end to mankind, Elmer and I were off to Moscow. After coming close to Armageddon, America and the Soviets, doubtless chastened by their near-death experience, had stepped back from the brink and had contrived a Hollywood ending. We were planning, heaven help us, a film festival!
    ***
    Elmer had written the rousing score for a prison-camp movie called The Great Escape . It was thick with testosterone, and a dazzling cast that included Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, and Jim Garner, as a bunch of blow dried boys in one of the great “popcorn” movies of all times. (Years later a British soccer team paid a lot of pounds to Elmer to use his stirring theme to welcome their athletes to the stadium each week).
    But the movie was not exactly Citizen Kane . There were quite a few better American films that year. Indeed, Elmer had scored a better movie himself, a story about a scoundrel in the tradition of Sammy Glick. It starred Paul Newman, and was written by some good friends, Irving Ravitch and Harriet Frank. But the commissars of the Kremlin’s Cinema Office knew enough about the political requirements of the Cold War not to nominate Hud . They were willing to honor an escape movie in the mindless American mold, not one in which Hollywood mocked America’s capitalist spirit. They also passed up the chance to nominate other worthy American movies—Hitchcock’s The Birds and Marlon Brando’s The Ugly American . If they had a taste for kitsch, they could have chosen Cleopatra , on whose Roman set Liz Taylor and Richard Burton fell hopelessly in love.
    The Russian Film Festival was scheduled for Moscow during the second and third week of July. The invitation reached us late, so we had to pull strings to get