Jorja was still in bed when I returned. She saw the trade papers and smiled. “Read the reviews out loud. Slowly. I want to enjoy them.”
I handed Jorja the papers. “You read them.”
She looked at my face and quickly started reading the reviews.
“First, Variety . . .”
Part of the review read: “. . . highly contrived piece of screen nonsense. Able performers helped to carry the script’s silliness through the frenetics, but director Sidney Sheldon let the action slop over into very broad slapstick too often. This loose handling reflects occasionally in the performances, most notably in Grant’s.
“Dream Wife was made under the personal supervision of Dore Schary, and Cary Grant is on hand to get laughs where it isn’t always possible to find them in the script. This uneven mixture of sophisticated humor and downright slapstick amounts to little more than a fairly amusing comedy. Sidney Sheldon has gone out of his way for comic situations and not succeeded too well.”
The review in the Hollywood Reporter was worse. I was devastated.
Howard Strickling, the head of publicity at MGM, called me and said, “Sidney, I have some bad news for you. I have orders to kill the picture.”
I was shocked. “What are you talking about?”
“Dore pulled the picture out of the Music Hall. We’re not going to give it any publicity. We’re just going to let it die.”
“Howard, why—why would you do that?”
“Because Dore’s name is on it as producer. As head of the studio, he tells the other producers what they can or cannot make. He can’t afford to have his name on a flop. He’s going to let Dream Wife fade away as fast as possible.”
I was furious. There would be no previews, no bookings or interviews or merchandising. The ship had sailed and the cast and crew had drowned in a sea of ego. It was Dore who had suggested that he put his name on the movie and because of that, he was going to destroy it.
I called Jorja and told her what had happened.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “That’s awful for you.”
“Jorja, I can’t work for a man like that.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to quit. Is that all right with you?”
“Anything you want to do is all right with me, darling.”
Fifteen minutes later, I walked into Dore Schary’s office.
“I want to get out of my contract.”
The man who, a few months earlier, said he didn’t want me to leave to run another studio, now said, “Fine. I’ll talk to the legal department.”
The following day I got a formal release from MGM.
I was not concerned about getting a job. After all, I had an Oscar and a list of wonderful credits. I was sure that any studio in town would be happy to get me.
As it turned out, I was wrong. The elevator had stopped at the bottom.
CHAPTER 25
I rented an office on Beverly Drive. When Groucho heard about it, he said, “What are you going to do, become a dentist?”
I called my agent, told him I was available, and sat back and waited for the calls to pour in.
The phone never rang.
In the theater, a playwright is judged by his best play, no matter how many failures there are after that. In Hollywood, a writer is judged by his last movie, no matter how many hits he might have written before. I was being judged for Dream Wife. I had gotten a release from my MGM contract at the worst possible time, when the film business was going downhill. The end of block booking was hurting the studios.
Block booking was the practice that the studios had for putting their movies into theaters. If they had a picture coming out with a popular star, the theaters that were eager to acquire that picture were forced to also take four minor movies from the studio, so there was always a block of five. When the exhibitors filed a lawsuit, the government stepped in and stopped the practice.
There were other problems, as well. During the war, people were starved for entertainment and they would flock into theaters. Now that the war was over, they were more particular. Television had become a new form of entertainment and its popularity was costing the theaters money. One more problem was added to the mix: Foreign income had always been a big part of a picture’s gross. Now, England and Italy and France were making their own movies, and that cut into the foreign revenue of the Hollywood studios.
I went into a deep depression. Jorja was doing an occasional television show, but not nearly enough to cover our expenses. I had not been concerned about money for a long time, but now I had a wife to support and the situation was different. The longer I was out of work, the more pressure I was under. The weeks were dragging by and there were no job offers.
Natalie would have said, “Hollywood doesn’t know talent when they see it.”
William Goldman said it differently: “Nobody in Hollywood knows anything . . .”
Clark Gable was turned down by MGM, Fox, and Warner Brothers.
Darryl Zanuck said, “His ears are too big. He looks like an ape.”
Cary Grant was rejected by several studios. “His neck is too thick.”
Of Fred Astaire, a casting director said, “He can’t act, can’t sing, he can dance a little.”
Deanna Durbin was fired from MGM and went to Universal the same day Judy Garland was fired from Universal and went to MGM. Each of them made fortunes for their new studio.
When a network executive saw Star Trek, his only comment was, “Get rid of the idiot with the pointed ears.”
A studio chief tried to sell High Noon because he thought it was a disaster. No one wanted it. It became the most successful picture United Artists ever made.