Not so Quiet on the Set: My Life in Movies During Hollywood's Macho Era

Contents

Foreword

We’ve Got To Make Something

ACT ONE  Welcome To Hollywood

Send Me The Dumbest Son Of A Bitch You’ve Got

Don’t You See The Seams?

Now You’re Learning

Was That Take Good For You?

Crept Into A Few Hearts That Time

Making A Killing

Wait Until It’s Right

There Are Frankie Avalon Fans Everywhere

Real Doesn’t Work

They Are Hunting Americans

Boston Replaced By Memphis

If You Die, I’ll Kill You

My Bird Has Been Poisoned!

A Fawn In The Forest

A New Suit Of Clothes

ACT TWO  Hollywood Exposed

Where’s My Thing?

You Really Have To Learn To Relax

I Don’t Have Time To Put Up With Hollywood Bullshit

I Wanted To Say This To Your Face

Don’t Let The Lack Of A Formal Battlefield Fool You

No One In Their Right Mind Wants To Direct

ACT THREE Hollywood Undone

You Guys Managed To Blow It

This Is Career Suicide

No Clever Twists, No Perfect Endings

Epilogue: Power Shift

Robert E. Relyea: Career Milestones

Glossary: The Players

Foreword

One by one they arrived at my father’s home—his inner circle of friends gathered in an unspoken show of support as they always did when one of their own was mired in a battle.

It was the summer of 1968 in Los Angeles—a typically hot, smoggy afternoon. Robert Relyea’s secluded house overlooked the San Fernando Valley from the hills of Coldwater Canyon, a few miles north of Hollywood. Late in the day, Steve McQueen, my father’s friend and business partner, motioned for me to follow him outside.

We stood at the edge of the front yard with the valley fanned out below us, a relief map of stucco and billboards cloaked in a burnt orange soup that thickened as the sun collapsed against the horizon. McQueen didn’t speak at first. Still, he got my full attention—his stare was capable of drawing you in because you immediately sensed there was something there, deep within his eyes, within all that blue chrome and ice, something real and true and at the heart of the matter.

Finally, McQueen spoke. You’re lucky.

Lucky?

That morning, in a lawyer’s office that reeked of mildewed carpet and dimestore air fresheners, my mother vowed to disown me. I committed an unforgivable sin—I told her I wanted to live with my father.

She didn’t care that this was my best chance—maybe my last chance—to get to know him. Seven years after their divorce, my father and mother were battling for custody of their three sons; today was the official start of the war. I just turned fourteen.

You’re lucky, don’t forget that, McQueen continued. When I was your age, everyone fought to get rid of me. You’ve got people fighting to keep you. He put his hand on my shoulder, then walked away to rejoin the others.

Until that moment all I could do was feel sorry for myself. As McQueen’s words sank in, the haze lifted and my inflated sense of self-pity began to lose air.

It was a moment I’ll never forget.

All of us punctuate our childhood memories with unforgettable moments. Mine are not particularly unique—except for the fact that I grew up with a father who worked in the movie business at a time when Hollywood was more exclusive, more innocent, more daring and more magical than it is today.

I remember traveling to Mexico on location for The Magnificent Seven when I was five. My brother and I spent our weekdays as the only Americans in a tiny, rundown school in Cuernavaca. Neither of us spoke Spanish. I’d pass the hours drawing on the dirt floor of the classroom with my shoe tips. I remember watching Charles Bronson dive off cliffs into the ocean. Bronson was bigger than life, cocksure, chiseled from stone, the type of man my father seemed drawn to throughout my childhood.

I remember exploring the rooftops of London (633 Squadron), yelling from the crest of the Mayan pyramids in the Yucatan Peninsula (Kings of the Sun), galloping out of control on a barebacked Appaloosa in New Mexico (The Hallelujah Trail), watching glass doors shatter late into the night at the airport in San Francisco (Bullitt), helping the prop team wet down asphalt roads at sunrise in France (Le Mans), darting around a water tank with a pair of frisky dolphins in the Bahamas (The Day of the Dolphin).

I remember the touch football games my father and his filmmaking friends played on weekends at a public park in North Hollywood. Those games were practically to the death, because these guys were the toughest sons of bitches you ever met (to use one of his signature descriptions). Didn’t matter if it was a game of checkers and you were their invalid grandfather—they’d kick your ass to win. It was like playing football with Sergeant Rock and his Howling Commandoes. I once got hit so hard I did a complete three-sixty in the air, which moved McQueen to take a swing at the guy who tackled me. Next thing I knew, my father and these larger than life characters were pummeling each other. The park manager saw this happening from his office window a quarter mile away; we were banned from the park grounds—for life.

Although I grew up loving films, I did not love filmmaking because I watched the filmmaking business take my father away. It took him away from us when he would shoot nights and sleep days for weeks on end. It took him away when he would fly off to distant locations for months at a time. It took him away when he would sacrifice everything to complete a film, to the point where there wasn’t much left for anything or anyone else. There were times when I was convinced the filmmaking business would take my father away for good, because it often drained his health to dangerous extremes. His frequent lectures about staying out of the movie business were unnecessary—I got the message early on.

It wasn’t until I was much older that I came to understand that if Robert Relyea had chosen a career in the military, or in politics—which he nearly did, both being much closer aligned to a career in filmmaking than one might think—he still would have been away for long stretches of time, still would have labored through the night, still would have allowed himself to be consumed by his work. Because that’s who he is. I have also arrived at a truer understanding of the filmmaking business: it is a much more relentless and devastating business than I accused it of being in my childhood.

Robert Relyea is something of an enigma in Hollywood. He has been in the film industry for more than a half century, held some of the top production posts in town and routinely works with the most famous celebrities in the world. Yet he has always been at odds with the glamorous side of the business. I don’t think he has ever dined at Spago. He would rather enjoy delivery pizza and watch a ball game at home. He has always been more interested in avoiding premieres and parties than attending them. He has never been attracted to Hollywood’s elitists—those whose lives are governed by an inflated sense of their own talent. He would rather hang out with the stunt guys. That small circle of filmmaking friends I met in my youth—a combination of famous actors and not so famous crew members—shared a common code that goes something like this: real respect is earned from rolling up your sleeves and simply doing the job, without grandstanding or showboating. The reward isn’t in the display; it’s in the doing.

In spite of my father’s warnings and my childhood observations, I eventually gravitated to a career in the entertainment industry. And although he and I have disagreed over the years on many things, we always found common ground in our passion for movies. Even during the years when our visits were infrequent and scattered, I selfishly steered the conversation so I could hear more about what possessed John Wayne to direct The Alamo, or how the jigsawed structure of The Great Escape was pieced together on index cards during shooting outside Munich, or why Solar Productions—a dream he and McQueen realized for a brief period—fell apart, along with their friendship. My appetite for hearing these stories has increased over the years, in part because my father helps define a dynamic period in Hollywood’s history that seems more distant with each new conglomerate-studio merger. And because—in an industry ripe with self-proclaimed creative geniuses who could bore a rooster back to sleep at sunrise—he remains one of this town’s best storytellers.

In 1994 I got my hands on transcripts of a seminar my father conducted while he was a production executive at Paramount. Seeing several of his stories appear in transcript form gave me an idea: would he let me help him chronicle all of the anecdotes in his arsenal into a book about his life on the set? This was an uneasy proposition for a man who values action over anecdotes and maintains a pit bull vigilance over his privacy. Ultimately he agreed—because the purpose of this endeavor isn’t to add more gossip to Hollywood’s lexicon, but rather to help illustrate how movies are really made, and, perhaps more importantly, provide a revealing portrait of Hollywood’s loss of innocence.

In the dozen years since he agreed to let me intrude on his invaluable free time, my father and I have spent countless hours discussing the films he has been a part of, the famous and infamous people he has been involved with, and the industry he has come to understand as well as anyone possibly could. The process has been difficult at times, but it is the realization of a dream for me. And it has kept my appetite for our discussions about movies and Hollywood well fed.

Growing up, I was concerned the filmmaking business would keep me from knowing my father.

This experience proved the opposite to be true.

—Craig Relyea

"We’ve Got To Make

Something"

September 27, 1966.

Hollywood’s press corps filled the studio commissary on the Warner Bros. lot. The atmosphere was electric. Jack L. Warner, President of Warner Bros. Pictures, stood at the podium and announced a six-picture deal with Steve McQueen’s newly formed Solar Productions.

I felt on top of the world for the first time in my career.

As members of the press broke out their cameras, McQueen set the tone for our partnership in Solar by insisting no photos be taken without me by his side. That was the kind of class act I came to expect from Steve.

After the last of the reporters packed up their gear, the top brass from Warner Bros. and the William Morris Agency joined McQueen and me for a celebration in our temporary offices on the studio lot. In the midst of the exuberance and champagne, I asked for silence and raised a glass.

Steve and I are bad losers, I declared, referring to our failed attempt to make a racing film called Day of the Champion. So I’m telling you here and now, somewhere down the road Solar is going to make the ultimate racing picture! The assembled group thrust their glasses in the air and roared their approval.

And when we do, I continued, glancing at McQueen, it will probably destroy our friendship… along with our company.

There was a short, uncomfortable silence. Then everyone laughed.

Steve McQueen was enjoying his usual spot in my office—reclining on the black leather couch, feet elevated, chomping into an apple as if the fruit had wronged him somehow—when my assistant buzzed through.

It was the head of the studio, Jack Warner.

You and what’s-his-name have only been here a week and you’re already causing me grief! Jack barked into the phone.

His name is Steve McQueen, I replied. You should at least know the guy’s name when you’re paying him that kind of money.

From the couch, McQueen raised his hands in the air as if demanding an explanation. I shook him off. What’s the problem, Jack?

Your secretary wants some new fangled typewriter, Jack said. An Underwood. In all my years as head of this studio we’ve always used Corona typewriters.

I can’t believe you’ve got the time… I mumbled into the phone.

Bob, I’m a reasonable man, so I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do.

Here it comes…

I’ll get her the damn typewriter, Jack continued, if you and what’s-his-name do me a favor.

His name is Steve McQueen, I reminded him again.

McQueen stopped attacking the apple and glared at me from the couch; again, I shook him off.

On the other end of the phone, Jack said, I’d like you both to sit on the dais of a political dinner I’m throwing.

That’s all? I was relieved. The last time I heard that tone in Jack’s voice he was lowering the guillotine on our racing picture. No problem, I said. Just don’t expect any speeches or endorsements.

Good, Jack said. I’ll get the details to you. And make sure what’s-his-name wears a tie.

His name is Steve McQueen, I said again. I waved a reassuring hand at McQueen, who now looked genuinely concerned. By the way, who is this political dinner for?

Ronnie Reagan, Jack said.

He couldn’t be talking about Ronald Reagan the actor…

Yeah—that Ronnie Reagan, Jack said. I’m going to help him become Governor.

Governor of what? I asked.

California.

He had to be kidding.

All of California? I asked.

What’s the matter with you—there’s only one Governor of California! Jack growled before slamming down the phone. What was that about? McQueen asked.

Jack Warner says he’s going to help make Ronnie Reagan Governor, I told him.

The actor? McQueen blurted out.

Yeah, I said.

Governor of what?

California.

Steve’s eyes narrowed. All of California?

I really don’t like to act.

Steve McQueen

January of 1967 was an exciting time. Steve McQueen and I were hard at work evaluating projects to green-light as Solar Productions’ first film. The splashy press conference held four months earlier announcing our new company led to hundreds of screenplays and manuscripts flooding our offices on the Warner Bros. lot.

But nothing was good enough.

McQueen came up with every reason imaginable to reject each script, treatment or novel that crossed our desks. Among the rejected scripts was a nice little thriller called Play Misty For Me. Steve was worried about playing opposite such a strong female lead (It’s her film, he said), so we passed. It soon became clear that if the screenplay for Gone With The Wind landed in our hands, Steve would say it lacked sufficient drama. Maybe he was still recharging his batteries after a long tour of duty filming The Sand Pebbles. Whatever the reason, he didn’t seem interested in returning to work.

Finally we made our first purchase, securing the rights to Whit Masterson’s novel, Man On A Nylon String. Double page ads in the Hollywood trades announced the thriller as The First in a Series of Motion Pictures to be Produced by Solar Productions!

But McQueen wasn’t ready to make that film.

A month later we purchased the rights to a second book, The Cold War Swap.

But Steve didn’t feel the time was right for that project either.

By then, we had reviewed over five hundred projects. During the next several months, we poured through another five hundred.

Then another.

Over two thousand projects evaluated—and none of them were worthy of being the first Solar film green-lit into actual production.

Meanwhile, truckloads of screenplays were sent back to their original address with a standard rejection notice from our office, including one from a wannabe musician—an ex-con named Manson who lived outside of Los Angeles with his family in a place called Spahn ranch.

As summer approached, McQueen finally went back to work—but not for Solar Productions. He began filming The Thomas Crown Affair, fulfilling a prior commitment to Norman Jewison and the Mirisch brothers.

After finishing Norman’s picture, Steve returned to the Solar offices and we continued pouring through script after script, until I became convinced we were reading the same stories over and over.

Finally, I walked into McQueen’s office, closed the door and stood over his desk. Steve looked up with the face of a kid who knows it’s the last Sunday of summer vacation.

Jack Warner keeps reminding me that these offices aren’t cheap, I said. And they’re only a fraction of what the new offices will cost. Not to mention the lucrative development salaries we’re drawing.

McQueen frowned.

As much as you hate the thought, I said, we’ve got to make something. I pointed out that we had rejected every script from every writer and agent in town. I’m not leaving this office until you choose a project.

It’s not like I haven’t been thinking about this! McQueen stood from his desk and started pacing the room. He was hoping I’d magically disappear if he paced long enough, but I wasn’t going anywhere. Finally, he said, Let’s make the cop thing—you know, that novel…

’Mute Witness’?

Right—let’s make that, Steve said.

I opened his office door to leave. Congratulations, I said. Solar is now a real production company.

As I walked back to my office I thought: a cop movie? With Vietnam and civil rights and all of the anti-police sentiment in this country? If we want to keep Steve’s younger fans, it might not be the best time for him to play a symbol of the establishment…

For $25,000 we secured the rights to Mute Witness, a marginally successful crime novel by Robert Pike that had been optioned by producer Phil D’Antoni. I called Jack Warner’s secretary to schedule an appointment. She replied with, How about now?

Nice to see you, Bob, Jack growled as I stepped into his office.

We’re ready to move forward on a book, I said. The one about the cop.

Why would what’s-his-name want to play a policeman? Jack asked.

His name is Steve McQueen, remember? The guy you’re building very expensive offices for…?

Whatever. Doesn’t he watch the news? A cop? Is he trying to commit career suicide?

Steve thinks he can do something different with the character, I said. Unique things with wardrobe, movement, attitude—we’re going to put a twist on it, make it interesting.

Cost? Jack asked.

Four-and-a-half to five million, all in.

How soon can you start?

Eight weeks.

Can I have the picture by the end of the year?

We’ll open in the fall.

Without hesitating Jack said, Go ahead.

End of meeting. That’s not a synopsis—that was the entire meeting.

No one else was involved. Just Jack Warner and me talking face to face in his office for less than five minutes.

That’s how Solar Productions got its first film project, Bullitt, approved by the studio.

In the days of autonomous studio heads, that scenario wasn’t particularly unusual. But it had become a rarity by 1967—the Hollywood that gave rise to men like Jack Warner had been put out to pasture years earlier. All that was left was for stubborn Old Hollywood to wheeze its last breath and get it over with, make it official.

I may have received a green-light for Solar’s first picture, but if I had listened hard enough that day I would have heard the plug being pulled in the back room.

ACT ONE

Welcome To Hollywood

Oklahoma! • The O’Henry Playhouse • A Lawless Street • Kismet • The Swan • The Opposite Sex • Meet Me In Las Vegas • The Teahouse Of The August Moon • Something Of Value • Gun Glory • House Of Numbers • Until They Sail • Don’t Go Near The Water • Jailhouse Rock • The High Cost Of Loving • Green Mansions • Never So Few • The Alamo • The Magnificent Seven • West Side Story • The Children’s Hour • Kid Galahad

I remember a cramped, cottage style house within earshot of Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica. It was the house my father, Robert Relyea, grew up in.

It felt a bit damp, smelled a little musty. I was just a kid—not even double figures in age yet—so everything seemed old: my grandmother, the carpet, the dishes, the furniture, the all-night diners nearby. It all seemed to be from an earlier time, a different city—the Los Angeles of palm trees, muted colors and Humphrey Bogart. My grandmother would bring toys out of the closet. They were old, too: dominoes, marbles, jacks, poker chips and playing cards—the same toys my father played with when he was a kid. But the house was clean and it was warm. At the time, my grandmother, the house and those toys were the only connections I knew of between my father and his childhood.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned any real details of his past.

He grew up in Santa Monica, graduated from Santa Monica High School and attended UCLA. He was tall, lanky and athletic. He played several sports. His favorite was basketball.

He never knew his father—the man left before they were introduced. When I was in high school, a call came from a distant relative informing us that the man had passed. My brother and I went with my father to the man’s funeral. It took place in a small church within an arm’s reach of a liquor store in Santa Monica. There was a waitress from the neighborhood diner, a uniformed mailman, a detached pastor who couldn’t come close to pronouncing our last name and a few relatives I didn’t know existed. There was an open casket, and it shocked me to see the man lying there looking like an older version of my father.

Robert Relyea represents the third generation of his family to work in the movie business. His grandfather, Emile Frenchy De Ruelle, made a name for himself as one of Alfred Hitchcock’s early editors. De Ruelle even produced a few silent films. My father received a memorable piece of advice from his grandpa based on the old man’s experience with crank operated cameras: Never mind the cameraman’s eye—just make sure his wrist is strong.

Robert Relyea’s uncle, Harve Foster, was the father figure in his life. Harve was an assistant director, one of the best in the business. As a kid, my father appeared as an extra in a few movies for Paramount, where Harve worked. In the 1944 classic Double Indemnity, my father is the runt playing baseball in the driveway when Fred McMurray first drives up to the house to meet Barbara Stanwyck. He kept getting the bat in the way of the car, screwing up the shot and pissing off director Billy Wilder. It was his first exposure to pissed off directors, and to the concept of retakes. It wouldn’t be his last.

He studied political science at UCLA with the vague intention of pursuing a career in politics. But Harve got him a part-time job as a gofer on a television show called The Gloria Swanson Playhouse. He met the star, got the adrenaline of on-the-set production work in his blood, and was hooked.

He married, and by his senior year of college Robert Relyea had his first child. He named him Steven Wayne Relyea—a nod to his admiration for the tough guy actor, John Wayne. To help support his family, he enrolled in the officer’s training program, providing an additional twenty-eight dollars a week of income. When the Korean War broke out it was the military’s turn to collect: he was shipped off to Ft. Benning, Georgia within hours of completing his last class at UCLA.

Fortunately, my father never made it to Korea—he served his military time training recruits at domestic bases throughout the United States. When he was ready to return to civilian life, he received a call from Harve.

What are you going to do now? Harve asked.

My father had no idea. He liked production work, but knew nothing about the movie business and had no practical training. He left the military knowing how to operate a fifty-caliber machine gun, but little else—he thought. What he knew, and didn’t realize it, was how to evaluate and motivate men, how to organize a crew, how to map out and accomplish seemingly impossible objectives and how to push himself and others beyond perceived limits.

Harve knew this.

He suggested my father try working in what he called our business.

The motion picture business.

—Craig Relyea

"Send Me The Dumbest Son Of

A Bitch You’ve Got"

Back in the days when movie studios were more like glorious castles and less like office parks, there was a theory in Hollywood that the guards working the studio entrances led far more interesting lives than the movie stars.

Of course it was only a theory, and in this town it’s easier to get abducted by Martians, transported to their home world and crowned as their king than it is to avoid someone’s latest theory on the entertainment business.

But I like this theory, so I’ll continue.

Studio guards occupied a mystical spot in Hollywood’s hierarchy—like the bouncers who allow only a select few past velvet ropes into the world’s most exclusive nightclub, or the stocky sentinel behind the door to Oz who could turn out to be the man-behind-the-curtain after all, or a Yoda-like grunt who nods as if he alone can propel you to success, or doom you to failure.

The guard that manned the gate at the old Goldwyn Studio in the 1950s and ’60s was rumored to be a millionaire; according to legend, he got rich as a bookie to the stars. If you wanted to put down a hundred that Koufax’s next pitch would be a strike, all you had to do was walk to the studio gate and this guy would arrange it. They say he maintained the same job, appearance and humble demeanor for decades while living in Malibu and amassing a fortune off the gambling habits of his employers.

Then there was the guard that manned the Thalberg gate at the old Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios who worked that post for thirty-five years.

Thirty-five years.

Everyone called him Hollywood.

In 1997 I was promoted to president of production for MGM and United Artists Pictures. I thought about many things as I drove to MGM/UA’s high-tech offices in Santa Monica for my first day of work in the new post. I had come a long way since starting out as a second assistant for this same studio over forty years earlier. I thought about Harve Foster, John Sturges, Steve McQueen, Bob Wise, Frank Mancuso and many others who had a profound influence on me. I thought about spending five decades in the motion picture industry—it seemed impossible to have survived that long.

But as I pulled up to the gate, one image came to my mind: the old studio guard, Hollywood.

He was at his post when I walked onto the MGM lot for the first time in the summer of 1955. The guy was straight out of a Frank Capra movie: thick black hair, square jaw, healthy paunch centered on a stocky frame, always flashing a smile and offering a greeting. Decades later, when we last saw each other at the old MGM lot, Hollywood hadn’t lost any of his thick hair or his good-natured attitude. Maybe he really was the man-behind-the-curtain. Hollywood winked at me as if we were co-conspirators, pointed to the Irving Thalberg building that was home to the studio heads and said, We’ve seen a lot come and go over the years, but damn if you and I aren’t still here.

"When you look at things from the bottom up,

they seem more wonderful than they really are."

Elvis Presley

It was the spring of 1955.

I returned to Los Angeles from my last military assignment without a clue of how I’d make a living. My uncle, Harve Foster, went to the Directors Guild and fought to get me in the union so I could work as a second assistant to the director. That was the lowest position in the union—there were no third assistants or even production assistants at that time.

To join the Directors Guild in 1955 you had to be the son—not the child, the son—of a Guild member. I wasn’t technically Harve’s son, but he was a persuasive man and managed to get me in. Years later, when I was on the Guild’s council, we changed the rules of admittance to avoid a lawsuit by Otto Preminger; he wanted to bring in a second assistant on Advise and Consent who wasn’t the son of a member. The Guild told him absolutely not. After talking with congressmen and senators while preparing the film in Washington D.C., Preminger said, My friends here tell me I can nail you guys on this issue. So we changed the rules—which desperately needed changing—and created the trainee program.

Preminger was right: he would have crushed the union on that issue. Ironically, Otto ended up firing that second assistant anyway.

Being a union member was one thing; getting a job in Hollywood was another thing all together.

I rounded up a handful of nickels—the price of a call back in 1955—camped out in a phone booth and dialed every head of production in town. All of them gave me the same line: Glad you called, we can use young second assistants for our big physical pictures. As soon as you’ve got a few films under your belt, let us know. Thanks for calling.

I started with the first production company in the phone book, Allied Artists, right through to the last, Ziv Productions. Nothing. It took a few months to dawn on me, but I began to get the message: because I didn’t have any experience, I couldn’t get a job. And because I couldn’t get a job, I’d never get any experience.

Welcome to Hollywood.

Around this time I remember walking out of the Fireside Inn on Ventura Boulevard after taking my wife and two sons out to