The Sweet Smell of Success

Burt Lancaster
An American Life
by Kate Buford
Knopf, 447 pp., $ 27.50

Here is how movie stars were born in the old days. In September 1945, Burt Lancaster, a thirty-one-year-old former circus acrobat and soldier who had just returned to Manhattan after the war, went up to the Royalton Hotel in his soldier's uniform to ask his girlfriend's boss, a radio executive, for a job. While he was riding up in the elevator, another passenger stared at him, "putting the mince pies" on him. Lancaster walked down the aisle to the office and the man followed behind and then disappeared.

As soon as Lancaster entered the office and met the executive, the phone rang. The caller was the man in the elevator, a scout for a Broadway producer. The scout was looking for an actor who could play a sergeant in a Broadway play, and the pool of available actors was at a wartime low. On November 21 Lancaster opened on Broadway in A Sound of Hunting. He immediately received seven contract offers for the movies. He went with Hal Wallis at Paramount. By April Lancaster was hired by producer Mark Hellinger for the filming of Heming-way's The Killers. The film made him a star.

Who that has ever seen Lancaster can forget him? "Lancaster had an imperial romantic aura," Pauline Kael wrote. "The voice, the rhythm of his speech had a welcome authority: There's nobody else in the world with a voice like that, the smoothness with the remnant of roughness underneath." He appeared larger than life, an invulnerable colossus of a man, with his rugged frame, handsome face, and huge teeth. He spoke with a precise diction unlike that of any other actor. And he had charisma in spades: He was the actor the audience could not take their eyes off of. George Tyne, a cast member of A Sound of Hunting, remembered that in the middle of an important line of what Tyne hoped would be his break-through role, "he looked out at the audience expecting a sea of rapt faces. Instead, all eyes were focused on the tall, blond, iconic newcomer, silent in the corner." He was the ideal movie hero.

But soon the story takes a twist, and this is the point that Kate Buford's Burt Lancaster: An American Life is very good at elucidating. Lancaster's active, discerning intelligence shaped an evolving career at odds with standard Hollywood hagiography. Lancaster kept reaching, playing against type, looking for "stretch roles" that would let him grow as an actor. It was a bait-and-switch strategy, playing the super-hero in one film, then playing roles the audience did not anticipate of him, confounding their expectations. He chose scripts that were often uncommercial but had a special intelligence and quality. He did not want to be stereotyped and he did not want to be bored. Over a lifetime he chose a roller coaster of roles. An autodidact, he wanted to know everything and be everything: producer, director, and writer as well as actor. "Stars have a persona that stays the same; therefore they must be uninteresting monoliths that never change," director Alexander Mackendrick said. "Burt was better than a star. He had a moral courage at playing roles that are quite against any star image."

He made some huge mistakes. He turned down the chance to play Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway, the role that made Marlon Brando famous, and in later years he relinquished the chance to play the lead in the film Patton. His lawyer, Leon Kaplan, noted that "he complicated his professional life by being too partial to intellectual, loser-type causes." In late life he took (when, admittedly, the offers were not very plentiful and it was a way of staying afloat for him) a series of anti-American roles (usually playing right-wing conspirators), including one screwball-left film, Executive Action, based on a book co-authored by leading conspiracy theorist Mark Lane. (Recent disclosures of Lane's support in his later career by the anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby and how useful the KGB found him to be are not mentioned by Buford and were not known in Lancaster's day.)

But overall, in this incisive, nearly novelistic biography, Buford successfully conveys a life of chance-taking, bravura, and integrity, a life of inner change brought on by introspection and self-honesty. Lancaster did not try to stay young, he did not become an alcoholic or a drug addict as some other stars in middle age did, and he became less abusive in his relationships as he aged. A rags-to-riches story, it was a rare life. Lancaster knew it, and did not waste the opportunity.

In fact, Lancaster was a man of inner violence who was drawn in 1962 to the role of the convicted murderer, Robert Stroud, in The Birdman of Alcatraz. During forty years of solitary confinement, Stroud became an expert on caged birds, the author of Stroud's Digest of the Diseases of Birds and the owner of more than three hundred canaries in his prison cell. Lancaster felt that Stroud "took a miserable, unnatural existence and yet made it a meaningful thing." The actor even conducted his own doomed, Mailer-like crusade to get Stroud released -- though Stroud's wife later wrote that "his only reason for having birds was [to] destroy them and thereby in a small way satisfy his desire to kill."

The Birdman of Alcatraz was one of Lancaster's characteristically uncommercial projects. After all, it was mainly about birds and about self-transformation. Almost nothing happens, in movie convention terms, and the film is very long. Two thousand canaries were flown in from Japan. Lancaster spent two weeks working with them as well as with sparrows, taping birdseed to his finger and patiently waiting for the creatures to hop onto his hand. It encompassed his curious nature, his defiance, and social rebelliousness: "Stroud will not kowtow," Lancaster commented. "He will not make amends for what he has done. He will not say 'Daddy.'"

"It was his masterwork, a creation out of the prison of his own self," Buford writes. "Never before and never again would he, an obsessive by nature, be obsessed to this level with a movie. If Elmer Gantry was who Lancaster really was, Stroud was who he wanted to be." Even though Lancaster was known for his protectiveness toward the weak, he never denied his own inner demons.

He told Michael Munn, author of a book about Lancaster published in England in 1995: "It's true that I'm a very emotional person -- even a violent person. But there's a part of me that doesn't like what goes on inside of me, so I try to control it." Lancaster earned his third Oscar nomination for The Birdman of Alcatraz. Then, in 1968, came yet another reach and an even odder choice: The Swimmer, based on a story by John Cheever. The Swimmer follows a Connecticut suburbanite swimming home one afternoon through his neighbors' swimming pools in an alcoholic haze. When he reaches home, he finds it is locked and deserted, his wife and kids gone.

Lancaster took the role partly so he would have to learn to swim. He was afraid of the water, and he recruited the coach of UCLA's water polo team to teach him. The film died at the box office. According to Buford, it was "so much the reality of its time that it was unbearable, unwatchable." Typically, Lancaster would balance this out with one of his biggest box office bonanzas, Airport, in 1970.

He did it all from the top of the heap. He was handsomer, bigger, rougher, more competitive, more virile, and more ferocious than anyone else. And he was a risk-taker throughout his life. He had black rages, and it is clear he could be brutal. In Lancaster's independent production firm, Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, the offices had an atmosphere of snarling intimidation, alcoholic frenzy, and promiscuity. The executive bathroom was furnished with a purple velvet sofa, gold plumbing, onyx features, and "HHL" embroidered in real gold thread on special hand towels.

James Hill, an added-on partner, recently told Vanity Fair: "People were frightened of Burt, and he never did anything to make people unfrightened of him." The atrium of hundreds of twittering canaries and finches would reportedly stop twittering when Lancaster entered the double-story entrance foyer. Buford says Lancaster once yelled at his partner Harold Hecht: "You dirty little Jew bastard, I ought to step on you and squash you like a f -- ing bug!"

He grew up in Italian Harlem, a neighborhood rich with energy and vitality, the child of Protestant Irish immigrants. As a young man he participated in sports and theatricals at the Union Settlement House, a church-run institution. It was probably at Union that he imbibed his "progressive" politics, which meant for him taking the side of the underdog both personally and politically. To Buford, this dimension of her subject is a big plus, for Lancaster fits the bill of political correctness. She even makes a fuzzy case for his "bisexuality" by citing unreliable FBI gossip (probably because that would make him perfect in her eyes).

What differentiated him from his radical chic Hollywood compatriots, however, was his lack of grandstanding: He kept a low profile, he wanted no credit, and his instincts were often in the service of common decency. He employed many blacklisted writers and actors, and was a principal speaker for the Hollywood contingent at the March on Washington in 1963. In this regard, he comes off with far more integrity than his rival Brando. But in terms of the second and third stages of his career, the contrast with the vegetating Brando is even more striking. Lancaster stayed alive and vital.

He was one of the first stars to form his own production company, in 1954. The aspirations of Hecht-Hill-Lancaster were high: They actually made good films, including (without Lancaster) Paddy Chayefsky's Marty and The Bachelor Party, The Birdman of Alcatraz, Come Back, Little Sheba, and Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo -- "intelligent movies with an emotional heat [that] crossed over into art." Their writing staff included Clifford Odets, Ray Bradbury, and Ernest Lehman. In the mid-1950s, HHL triggered a new era of filmmaking, in which stars would head companies that rivaled the major studios.

His own work was totally unpredictable, from The Killers, Brute Force, All My Sons, and Kiss the Blood Off My Hands, to From Here to Eternity, Come Back, Little Sheba, and The Rain-maker -- and his three greatest triumphs, Elmer Gantry (for which he won the Academy Award), Sweet Smell of Success, and, in his twilight years, Atlantic City, which gave him his fourth Oscar nomination. Despite his massive frame, he was internally fragile throughout his life, and he was more interested in art and change than in big bucks.

The apogee of his career was his portrayal of the monster columnist patterned after Walter Winchell in Sweet Smell of Success, a film conceived, nurtured, and produced by his own company and starring himself. A commercial failure in 1957, it ranks today among the great films of all time. In J. J. Hunsecker, Lancaster portrayed a "brute force" not unlike his own. There are some immortal lines in the film, including, "Match me, Sidney" (Lancaster speaking to Tony Curtis and holding up his cigarette to be lit), and, "The cat's out of the bag, and the bag's in the river," written during the filming by Clifford Odets on a freezing Times Square morning at 4 A.M. on a typewriter in the back of a prop truck. That's the electricity of genius, and it was all generated by a one-time acrobat who swung to the top of the ring, and, balancing there, decided to risk it all on becoming a true artist.

Even by 1969, John Cheever would write that Lancaster was "lithe, comely [but] somewhat disfigured by surgical incisions." Lancaster once told a friend that the only real part of him left was his eyes. And yet he came to terms with age. This self-acceptance allowed him more triumphs as an actor: in Atlantic City in 1980 (he was in great physical pain during the filming), Local Hero in 1983, and finally Field of Dreams in 1989. Speaking of Lancaster's willingness to play an old man in Atlantic City, director Louis Malle told Michael Munn:

It was an act of heroism for Burt to allow himself to be seen so starkly as an old timer. . . . When I first saw Burt, I thought, My God! What great irony if a man, whose image is so much the opposite, should play this silly old man who is a voyeur, watching a girl undress in the opposite apartment. I did not want to make him completely ridiculous. I wanted to show something moving about him. But because he is Burt Lancaster, an actor who carried around a heroic image all his life, there is that extra sense of humiliation.

But he was anything but ridiculous. Critic Richard Schickel wrote in Time: "You can practically smell the blue rinse in his hair; the pressing of a tie, the caressing of a whiskey glass, the sniffing of a wine cork, incantatory gestures. They are supposed to ward off the new tawdriness of the gambling casinos, which is replacing the old salt-water-taffy funk of the boardwalk town. While the wrecking balls swing all around him, Lou complains that even the ocean isn't what it used to be." Atlantic City was a spectacular comeback for him, but his deteriorating physical condition did not allow him to really capitalize on it.

He did keep working until 1991, when he was felled by a stroke, and he died in 1994 at the age of eighty. In the final three years, he was an old man without speech in a wheelchair with a blanket over his lap, looking out at the Hollywood he had reigned over as few actors ever did.

Near the end, he did not want to be seen by his colleagues. But actor James Earl Jones and his wife Ceci were allowed to visit. "Wanting to be sure he recognized her" on her farewell, Ceci turned to him and slightly lifted her skirt. Jones recalled: "Burt raised up in his bed and said, 'Yeah!,' like 'I remember you, and boy, do I like what I see!' It was the first clear word he uttered without prompting or urging." He navigated the end of his life as he had navigated all the rest of it.

David Evanier, novelist and screenwriter, is the author of Making the Wiseguys Weep: The Jimmy Roselli Story.