Robert Altman Read online

  ALSO BY MITCHELL ZUCKOFF

  Ponzi’s Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend

  Judgment Ridge: The True Story

  Behind the Dartmouth Murders

  (with Dick Lehr)

  Choosing Naia: A Family’s Journey

  For Suzanne

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Prologue

  ACT I: 1925–1969

  1. Kansas City

  2. Into the River

  3. 307th Bomb Group

  4. Making Pictures

  5. The Calvin Company

  6. The Delinquents

  7. California

  8. Kathryn

  9. Cheese

  10. No Milk

  11. Countdown

  ACT II: 1970–1980

  12. M*A*S*H

  13. After M*A*S*H

  14. McCabe

  15. Fatherhood I

  16. Mirrors

  17. Split, California

  18. Nashville

  19. Diamond Cutter

  20. Active Verbs

  21. Scotty

  22. Popeye

  ACT III: 1981–2006

  23. The Wilderness

  24. “I Made This”

  25. The Player

  26. Short Cuts

  27. Heart in a Cooler

  28. Mr. A and the Women

  29. Home Stretch

  30. Fatherhood II

  31. Boots On

  32. Not a Tragedy

  A Note on Methods

  Cast of Characters

  Filmography

  Awards and Honors

  Acknowledgments

  List of Illustrations

  “I don’t think anybody remembers the truth, the facts. You remember impressions.” ROBERT ALTMAN

  INTRODUCTION

  ROBERT ALTMAN drew you in, enlisted you in his schemes, took what he needed and gave what you asked. He trusted that you’d be good, right for the part he’d cast you in, and unless you screwed up he’d give you free rein. He pulled you onto his pedestal, passed you a joint, then rocked so hard you’d fall off together in a happy heap.

  Bob did all that with me, a writer he met near the end of his life, someone with whom he could talk movies, baseball, the glory of a well-turned female leg, movies, politics, family, friendship, and movies. At first, Bob was cool to the idea of a book. His medium was film, and he considered it dangerous and distracting to publicly analyze himself. He relented under the condition that I’d help him write a memoir of the art and craft of filmmaking, a book that would focus on his work and pay little attention to his personal life. He said his motive was a healthy paycheck from the publisher, and he meant it—Bob was far better at spending than saving. But he also knew he’d have a chance to talk about his movies, something he loved almost as much as making them.

  The deal was that when we were working, we’d talk film, not life. He didn’t want stories of his past deeds or misdeeds to fog the lens, and he didn’t want anything to hurt his family, especially his wife, Kathryn Reed Altman. His one concession was a chapter that would sketch the broad contours of his past.

  We began talking in long sessions at his homes in Malibu and Manhattan and at the New York office of his last company, Sandcastle 5 Productions. It soon became clear that the lines between his life and his work weren’t just blurry, they were almost nonexistent. After he returned from flying bombers in World War II, planning and making movies defined nearly everything he did. The films he eventually made weren’t overtly autobiographical—not even Kansas City, which is a sepia-toned memory of a world he glimpsed as a boy. Not The Player, either; there’s no evidence that he ever killed a writer, though he might have fantasized about it. He didn’t need to make movies about himself because the entire process of filmmaking was his adult life, a stage for his passions, his rages, his triumphs, his humor, his visions, his failures, his gifts.

  We talked more, and I secretly fretted that the limits he’d set would make our book a clinical rendering of the outsized, extraordinary, flesh-and-blood man I’d come to know. Me: “Why’d you film the gun-fight in McCabe in a snowstorm?” Bob: “Because it snowed that day.”

  My concerns got worse one night when we attended the Malibu Celebration of Film for a showing of his last movie, A Prairie Home Companion. The film had been out for months, and I can only guess how many times he’d seen it. But when we returned to his home, Bob was fuming. We’d sat in the second row, behind a couple and their antsy twelve-year-old son. “If that fucking kid got up one more time,” Bob growled, “I’d have strangled him and his father.” Separating the man from his film, physically or otherwise, wasn’t a good idea.

  A month later, Bob died. My concerns were trivial in context and swallowed by sadness. Academic, as well: Our work was unfinished. But a new idea emerged. Our talks, Robert Altman’s final sustained interviews, would form the backbone of a book about his work and his life, rough edges and all. Kathryn agreed, recognizing that to understand the films Bob made and the man he was, the man she loved, meant examining the whole remarkable, complicated, combustible package.

  What followed for me was an Altmanesque tour from birth to death. Scenes took place in Kansas City, California, and New York, with side trips to such places as Burlington, Vermont, and Plum Island, in Massachusetts, and phone calls throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, South America, and even to a movie set in Morocco. The cast was huge and varied, from A-list stars to complete unknowns, many from the world of film but some purely from the world of Altman.

  Bob told me that he and his cowriters created forty-eight characters in A Wedding only because that was double the number in Nashville. It was a conceit, a caprice; he wanted to see how many individual voices he could establish in a celluloid choir without drowning the audience in cacophony. It took nearly four times as many characters to survey his life. Their thoughts, reminiscences, opinions, regrets, praise, criticism, and in a few cases their dreams, are presented here in something approaching chronological order.

  That’s not to say the result is a neat, complete tale, with a moral and a point and a bow on top. That isn’t Bob. He didn’t think much of linear storytelling, and he wouldn’t have wanted his life rendered that way. In fact, he disliked the word “story,” believing that a plot should be secondary to an exploration of pure (or, even better, impure) human behavior. He also hated the ventriloquism of a single writer’s voice emanating from many diverse characters, as if a baker and a surgeon, or a phone-sex worker and a grieving jazz singer, would use the same syntax. See Short Cuts again if you doubt that. He loved the chaotic nature of real life, with conflicting perspectives, surprising twists, unexplained actions, and ambiguous endings. He especially loved many voices, sometimes arguing, sometimes agreeing, ideally overlapping, a cocktail party or a street scene captured as he experienced it.

  Bob was no more conventional when he wasn’t behind a camera, and I tried to reflect that, too. As James Caan says, in Hollywood “Trust me” is code for “Fuck you.” Bob didn’t speak in code. In a world of air kisses and backstabbing embraces, he spoke his mind. No, he roared his mind. He believed that every capitulation large and small was tallied somewhere, each one a new link in a chain that choked off creativity. His refusal to play along cost him, personally and professionally, but he wouldn’t complain and he wouldn’t change. He lived the way he made movies. At times it was messy, but it was completely of his own design.

  There’s no way to replicate in print what Bob accomplished on film and in life, but an oral biography seemed the next best thing. I hope he’d agree.

  In the transcripts of our talks, there’s a passage that I’ve reread more times than I care to admit. It’s an interruption, really, the s
ort of thing a transcriptionist usually omits. But for some reason it’s there, embedded in a discussion about viewing an artist’s work through the prism of his life.

  “Excuse me,” Bob says, reaching for a ringing phone. It’s his producer, Wren Arthur. “Lemme call you back,” he tells her. “Mitch is here on the floor next to me. I’m lying on the couch and he’s sitting on the floor, and our heads are next to each other.”

  I’ve held on to that moment, trying to keep my head next to Bob’s, to fairly yet fully explore his work and his life.

  Mitchell Zuckoff, Boston, 2009

  Prologue

  *

  Announcement from the Academy headlined “Robert Altman to Receive Honorary Academy Award,” January 11, 2006: Director-producer-writer Robert Altman has been voted an Honorary Award by the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Award, an Oscar statuette, will be presented at the 78th Academy Awards Presentation on March 5, 2006. The Honorary Award will be given to Altman to honor “a career that has repeatedly reinvented the art form and inspired filmmakers and audiences alike.” Altman has received five Academy Award nominations for directing—for M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts and Gosford Park—as well as two additional nominations as a producer of Best Picture nominees Nashville and Gosford Park—but has never taken home the Oscar. He has directed 37 films, produced 27 and written 16 of them. “The board was taken with Altman’s innovation, his redefinition of genres, his invention of new ways of using the film medium and his reinvigoration of old ones,” said Academy President Sid Ganis. “He is a master filmmaker and well deserves this honor.”

  * * *

  Presentation of Oscar for Lifetime Achievement, 78th Academy Awards, March 5,2006

  LILY TOMLIN (actress and comedienne): Boy, I didn’t think we’d get past security out there.

  MERYL STREEP (actress): Yeah, I know. Now we just have to get past all our insecurities up here.

  LILY TOMLIN: Okay. Hello, I’m Meryl Streep.

  MERYL STREEP: And I’m Lily Tomlin.

  LILY TOMLIN: And, and tonight we …

  MERYL STREEP: No, no.

  LILY TOMLIN: …are pleased to honor…

  MERYL STREEP: No, no.… Wait, wait a minute. No, no…

  LILY TOMLIN: To honor a man …

  MERYL STREEP: No, no…

  LILY TOMLIN: We are honoring a man…

  MERYL STREEP: A man who we honor, that’s…a man who didn’t … that’s my, you’re reading my line. A man who didn’t play by the rules.

  LILY TOMLIN: Yeah, that’s what I said. Who didn’t play by the rules or stick to the …

  MERYL STREEP: Stick to the script.

  LILY TOMLIN: I am, Meryl.

  MERYL STREEP: No, I’m agreeing with you. I’m agreeing with you. I’m just saying that Robert Altman didn’t stick to the script. He colors outside the lines.

  LILY TOMLIN: And he wants actors to do the same thing.

  MERYL STREEP: Yeah.

  LILY TOMLIN: I, I personally know …

  MERYL STREEP: He doesn’t want us to act.

  LILY TOMLIN: No, and I’m grateful for that. He, uh, he wants the kind of spontaneity that can only come from not knowing what the hell you’re doing.

  MERYL STREEP: Like, like now.

  LILY TOMLIN: Like now.

  MERYL STREEP: Right?

  LILY TOMLIN: Right. Yes. He just starts to film and we watch the dailies and, and it’s a magical point.

  MERYL STREEP: The film just starts to wake up to itself. That’s what. And you see, you see …

  LILY TOMLIN: You say, “Oh I see, I see something’s happening.”

  MERYL STREEP: Yeah, but usually you don’t know what it is.

  LILY TOMLIN: No, but, but Altman does, because otherwise it….

  MERYL STREEP: Well, I would…

  LILY TOMLIN: … wouldn’t be happening …

  MERYL STREEP: …hope so. And his moviemaking style just does seem to enhance our capacity to take in more sounds and more …

  LILY TOMLIN: more …

  MERYL STREEP: images than …

  LILY TOMLIN: layered…

  MERYL STREEP: … than we ever knew we had the, the ability to process. You know, because the movies seem to have a different metabolism than other movies …

  LILY TOMLIN: It, it, it …Well, well, he’s always been …

  MERYL STREEP: …and it’s almost as if he’s just…

  LILY TOMLIN: …been ahead of the curve.

  MERYL STREEP: He’s just kind of…

  LILY TOMLIN: And he’s able to capture the …

  MERYL STREEP: He moves out…

  LILY TOMLIN: … curve …

  MERYL STREEP: …densely layered…

  LILY TOMLIN: …on film, with floating cameras …

  MERYL STREEP: …soundscapes …

  LILY TOMLIN: …extended zooms.

  MERYL STREEP: And it’s just incredibly living, almost like it came from a parallel universe.

  LILY TOMLIN: And, well, and to some moviegoers it seems as if the popcorn they’ve just been munching …

  MERYL STREEP: Yeah …

  LILY TOMLIN: …had suddenly turned into peyote buttons. Oh, it’s just …

  BOTH: WOW.

  MERYL STREEP: I wouldn’t know. So…

  LILY TOMLIN: Well, no, I mean just…

  MERYL STREEP: Well …

  LILY TOMLIN: Figuratively speaking.

  MERYL STREEP: If, if, if you…Yes. M*A*S*H. McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Kansas City.

  LILY TOMLIN: Nashville.

  MERYL STREEP: The Long Goodbye. Thieves Like Us.

  LILY TOMLIN: Short Cuts.

  MERYL STREEP: Gosford Park. California Split.

  LILY TOMLIN: The Player.

  MERYL STREEP: Yeah, uh … Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. So many others. And television. He does plays, he does …

  BOTH:… operas.

  MERYL STREEP: It’s amazing.

  LILY TOMLIN: Oh, and you know. Did I say Nashville?

  MERYL STREEP: Yes.

  LILY TOMLIN: It bears repeating [audience laughter]. Um, I must say you’re, uh, you’re worried now, that I got a laugh that you didn’t get.

  MERYL STREEP: No…

  LILY TOMLIN: I can see it….

  MERYL STREEP: No, it’s okay.

  LILY TOMLIN: I can feel it.

  MERYL STREEP: It’s all yours.

  LILY TOMLIN: [Laughs] Over the years, he has fired our neurons, opened our eyes…

  MERYL STREEP: Um-hum. And bloodied a few noses.

  LILY TOMLIN: Well, yes. Even his own. Um, he’s a satirist, he’s a sage …

  MERYL STREEP: He’s examined the minute particulars of human behavior and he’s doing it right now and he’s dying for us.

  LILY TOMLIN: [Laughs] And we, we are all richer for it.

  MERYL STREEP: [Laughs] But if…

  LILY TOMLIN: …dialogue…

  BOTH: We leave his movies knowing that life is many things…

  MERYL STREEP: …at once …

  LILY TOMLIN: …at once …

  MERYL STREEP: Let’s look at the clips!

  * * *

  ROBERT ALTMAN (Recorded voice-over to Oscar audience, during a montage of film clips): I equate this work more with painting than with theater or literature. Stories don’t interest me. Basically I’m more interested in behavior. I don’t direct, I watch. I have to be thrilled if I expect the audience to be thrilled. Because what I really want to see from an actor is something I’ve never seen before, so I can’t tell them what that is. I try to encourage actors not to take turns. To deal with conversation as conversation. I mean, that’s what the job is, I think. It’s to make a comfort area so that an actor can go beyond what he thought he could do. I’ve done almost every kind of job. I love to take them and then kind of turn them over a little bit. Look at them a little differently. I purposely don’t go into a project that I know how to do. It�
��s just such a joyous collaborative art. When you start looking back, the real reward is the process of doing it and the people that you do it with. And man, it goes fast.

  * * *

  After Robert Altman’s Death, in November 2006

  ALAN RUDOLPH (director): You know he directed that thing at the Oscars, right? I was watching the Oscars on television, like ninety-nine-point-whatever percent of people. The day after, he called me, and I told him, “That thing with Lily and Meryl Streep was really the highlight for me.”

  And Bob said, “You know, I directed that. When they were rehearsing, I heard one reading her lines and then the other, back and forth. I went over and said, ‘Just talk on top of each other.’”

  MERYL STREEP: He told us, “This is a lot of horseshit. Just fuck around with it.” Of course we were terrified. It’s a big responsibility to honor this man we had admired so much. We wanted to make him laugh. That was our whole m.o.—make Altman laugh, and to hell with everybody else.

  ALAN RUDOLPH: I wasn’t surprised. These were two actresses in Bob’s latest film, playing sisters, and they talked about Bob and how he does it in a way that Bob would have done it himself. Which means he wouldn’t take it too seriously, but the truth would come out.

  ACT I

  1925–1969

  Robert Altman is born, torments his sisters, judges his parents, collects snakes, chases girls (and catches them), goes to war, tattoos dogs, marries three times, becomes a father or stepfather six times, learns how to make movies, impresses and insults “the suits,” says “cheese,” and sets his sights on Hollywood success.

  *

  CHAPTER 1

  Kansas City

  *

  ROBERT ALTMAN: Kansas City? [Starts to sing] “Everything’s up-to-date in Kansas City. They’ve gone about as far as they could go. They went and built a skyscraper seven stories high. About as high as a building ought to grow. They’ve got a big theater that they call a burleseque. For fifty cents you can see a dandy show.” [Stops singing]

  Yep, Kansas City. I think it was a rather uneventful, American middle-class community I grew up in. I don’t think it makes a hell of a lot of difference where you grow up, except if you can’t shake the prejudicial influences. Whether it was Kansas City or Bangladesh. If you grew up in an Amish family in Pennsylvania, and you’re fifty years old today, even if you shed all the main tenets of what you learned, you still retain something of that. A lot has to do with how strong the influences are, where you were placed in the world, and whether you’re inhibited by that perspective. Have I shaken these influences? I don’t know that I have, really.