Movie Stars, Real People, And Me – Joshua Logan, 1978 ★★

Hollywood Tell-All, Take Two

Joshua Logan forged a successful career repurposing the tried-and-true into fresh entertainments. Here we get to see him work the same crafty mojo on himself.

Two years after publishing his show-business memoir, Josh: My Up And Down, In And Out Life, the celebrated producer-director returned in 1978 with another show-business memoir. This time, his focus is on anecdotes about Hollywood’s rich and famous; actors like Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, and Bette Davis; producers like Sam Goldwyn; directors like Mel Brooks.

Even Princess Margaret puts in an appearance. What’s not to love?

I think it’s the length that got to me. At 547 pages, Movie Stars, Real People, And Me is a book in dire need of editing. You get some funny stories, some unguarded glimpses at entertainment legends, and a lot of ego-stroking. When he connects with an idea, it can be a joy to read, but too soon he moves onto something else.

“If you’ve got them leaning forward, don’t ever let them sit back and relax. Keep them leaning toward you, hold them there, tie them there. I never heard of the boom-boom-boom school of theatre before you said it, but I believe in it now. If it means never bore an audience, then I say boom-boom-boom forever!”

That’s Logan talking to another famous man of the stage, Kurt Weill, in an anecdote about Logan working as a script doctor on a Maxwell Anderson play, “Anne Of A Thousand Days.” Weill had been contemptuously putting Logan down as a mere entertainer rather than an artist, and Logan ably responded as above. It makes for a great scene.

Perhaps the “boom-boom-boom school” works better on the stage than on the page. What you get in Movie Stars, Real People, And Me is a lot of boom-boom-boom featuring a full cast of big names, but no introduction explaining who Logan is or how his career took off. He must have figured everyone reading this had already read Josh and was now back for seconds. That wasn’t the case for me, and it made for an itchy read.

To be fair, Logan concedes at the outset that what you have in your hands isn’t quite a book at all: “It’s a revue – made up of long spurts and short jets, dark and light, sweet and sour, in no rigid form, except always factual. Even the fantasies are always factual fantasies.”

So if you find yourself caught short with how Logan goes from point to point, or who some of these celebrities are and why they weigh so heavily in the narrative, the fault’s not in the stars, but yourself.

Director Joshua Logan (center) on the set of one of his favorite movies, 1961's Fanny, with his romantic leads, Leslie Caron and Horst Buchholz. From reading Movie Stars, Real People, And Me, you might think this was a cinematic masterpiece, rather than a forgotten adaptation of a famous French trilogy of plays. [Image from http://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/horst-buchholz.html] 

Logan may have been justified in assuming his career was something with which everyone was intimately familiar, at least at the time this was published. By 1978, he had staged some enormous successes on- and off-Broadway, and directed some successful movies. He even shared a Pulitzer Prize for writing the play “Mister Roberts,” which he then produced on Broadway.

Yet he’s hardly the legend now that he was then.

The chapter on Marilyn Monroe details Logan’s working with her on Bus Stop, a movie milestone for both at the time but not a film people talk much of today. Likewise, his chapter on Marlon Brando centers on his experience directing Brando in Sayonara, a likewise significant critical and commercial success in its day which time has passed by.

At least the dish is good. “Marlon talks interminably,” Logan recalls. “When he gets rhetorical it’s like a tapeworm.”

Regarding Marilyn, Logan paints a largely positive but critically-eyed portrait of a beautiful woman alive to her sexuality, yet insecure both in terms of her artistry and her allure.

After months of method-acting study, Monroe was eager to show off how much she had learned:

But sometimes she acted as though she had discovered something that no one else knew. Words like “Freudian slip” and “the unconscious” and “affective memory” would appear in her conversation at the oddest time. If they didn’t fit in, she made them fit.

Other well-known names with whom Logan crossed paths make less distinct impressions. The star of Logan’s biggest success as a movie director, William Holden in Picnic, drank a lot. So did the star of the film that ended Logan’s movie career, Lee Marvin in Paint Your Wagon.

Logan does tell some funny stories. I liked especially the one that came in the form of a correction to a New York Daily News columnist who wrote that Marvin peed on Logan’s leg on the set of Paint Your Wagon. Logan wrote the columnist about Marvin’s courtly Southern manners:

Therefore, when he is sober it is absolutely impossible for him to have done such a thing, and when he is drunk, which he is once in a while I must admit, he is really drunk. He staggers and careens in such a way that he wouldn’t have the aim.

Logan does offer some seriously negative takes on other major entertainment figures of his day. Two that stand out are John Ford and Bette Davis.

Ford was the original director of the movie version of “Mister Roberts.” Since Logan had co-written the play, and directed it for the stage, he minded being passed over, even if Ford was an established force in cinema. Logan found Ford’s approach to comedy all wrong. Matters got worse when Ford slugged the production’s main actor, Henry Fonda, during a disagreement.

Logan eventually stepped in to help shepherd Mister Roberts to its Oscar-nominated final form, but expresses great dissatisfaction here with the result. This is sadly ironic given Mister Roberts is the one film people still remember that bears the Logan stamp.

Bette Davis’ case also ties into professional disappointment. In the early 1970s, Logan got her to agree to do a musical version of the Emlyn Williams play “The Corn Is Green,” only for her to bail out after a few trial performances in 1974. She pled a bad back, but apparently just didn’t feel capable or willing to do the show as written.

“Bette Davis has given close to fifty years of great performances on the screen, and yet to my mind none of these compare to the performance she gives off-screen,” Logan writes.

Sometimes, as when discussing his difficulties with Brando, Logan takes on his own reputation as “a slick lightweight.” As with his Weill confrontation, this produces some sparks and light in the direction of his muscularly-populist production philosophy.

He also talks about the joys of creative collaboration:

One co-worker’s thought sets off a skyrocket in his partner’s brain, and suddenly it is a mutually contagious creativeness, the true zest of writing together. It’s thrilling. It’s sex without sex. It’s the closest two people can get to each other without thinking of some physical satisfaction. On second thought, it’s better than sex because it can last for hours.

Much of the press attention on his prior book, Josh, dealt with Logan’s revelations of his manic depression. This struggle is explained here, too, mostly in the form of interviews he gave to the media about his condition and its successful treatment. “[B]eing a manic-depressive, which had for so many years been a shaming stigma, has become, at last, possibly the mark of wild accomplishment,” he writes.

Here is another way the “revue” approach left me short. For most of this book, we get little indication of any serious mental issues troubling Logan. Then, near the end, he brings it up as this major plot point he is in the process of overcoming, adding in “by-the-way” fashion that he had to be hospitalized twice for long periods because of it. Of course, he must have explained his condition better in Josh, but I only joined this party for the sequel.

The weakest parts of Movie Stars, Real People, And Me is when it pushes away from the first of these title entities to draw upon the other two. There’s a very tedious chapter about a swanky party he threw for Princess Margaret and Tony Snowdon; extensive ruminations about Logan’s wife, Nedda; and a long, drawn-out litany about notable paintings and other fancy things he has collected through a life of champagne-and-crudité travels.

In the end, there’s too much of this weighing down the engaging banter and amusing anecdotes to make for a good read. What you wind up with in the main is diverting, yes, but for the most part too easily forgotten.