Cybill Shepherd, Otto Preminger and me

Way back in the day, before movie people could go on the talk shows and hustle their wares, they used to go on actual promotion tours, hosting lunches for the film critics in the major market cities.

In Philadelphia, the point man for these get-togethers was a marvelous old PR guy named Al Golde, who liked the way I wrote about movies for the so-called "underground" paper, The Drummer, and got me on the coveted critics list. As a result, I saw previews of movies at the screening room at the top of the Fox Theatre on Market Street and had many great lunches with many movie stars.

I sat between James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson once (they spent the whole meal talking about how the editor was the real auteur of movies). I remember Robert Mitchum referring to himself as "an articulate flesh-prop," which was both cool and modest because he was anything but.

Another time, Yul Brynner rubbed his bald head and confessed to gulping Valium on the opening night of a play starring his son, Rock. (I had brought along my friend, Marlene, who was an old girlfriend of Rock's, which both freaked out and delighted Yul.)

Cybill as cover girl

My two most memorable encounters with silver screeners, though, were with Cybill Shepherd and the director Otto Preminger. As fate would have it, my interview with Cybill Shepherd took place during the week in 1971 when her picture made it on the covers of both Time and Life magazines for her role in The Last Picture Show. By the time of the interview, her director in that film, Peter Bogdanovich, had also become her boyfriend.

She was all of 21 years old. She'd been a model since her teen years, but The Last Picture Show was her first film, and the Time and Life covers had her walking on air. The interview took place in a hotel suite rather than at the usual luncheon, and, at first, Cybill Shepherd talked to us journalists by herself in the suite's sitting room while Bogdanovich conducted a separate phone conversation in the bedroom.

My fellow interviewers were Joe Baltake of the Daily News, a guy from the Bulletin, and two yahoos from the suburban papers. Baltake was a true sweetheart; his Daily News column was called "The Passionate Moviegoer," and he was just that. He loved movies and yet remained a fair and balanced critic. I remember he had a clipboard with a little pencil flashlight attached to it so that he could write down his thoughts in the dark Fox screening room.

Frontal nudity

Things were going along pretty smoothly with Cybill until the suburban chumps began talking about the frontal nudity scene she had done on a diving board in The Last Picture Show. They wouldn't let up. Shepherd began to get flustered. Still they yammered away about that scene. I began to get the feeling they wanted her to take off her clothes.

Bogdanovich must have felt the same kind of vibe, because he got off the phone and came into the sitting room. Before he was a director, Bogdanovich had been a prominent young film critic himself, and he simply took over the interview, basically conducting a half-hour film seminar while Shepherd listened for a while and then quietly retreated to the bedroom and shut the door. That was the last we saw of her, thanks to these two jerkoffs.

The inside dope on Preminger

My interview with Otto Preminger was one-on-one. I don't even remember what movie was involved, but my wife at the time worked at an ad agency whose creative director had once spent a week shooting photos on the set of one of Preminger's pictures and knew a lot about the guy. So before I went on the interview, I stopped at the agency and talked to the creative guy about Preminger for about an hour and got some good inside stuff.

The interview was at a hotel in Bala Cynwyd for some reason, and before I went in, I sneaked around the back and smoked half a joint of real good pot.

When I got up to Preminger's suite, he was still in with another movie critic, and the PR guy said to make myself at home and have a drink from the bar in the suite. I was drinking pretty good at the time, so I had three or four quick pops of V.O. and was loose as ashes by the time I got in to see old Otto, who had a reputation as a martinet with a very short fuse.

We talked about the film a little bit. Then I asked, "Have you seen Swifty Lazar since he hit you with the champagne bottle?"

"How do you know zis?" Preminger rasped in his Austro-Hungarian accent. (Irving "Swifty" Lazar, then the king of literary agents, had once conked Preminger with a Jeroboam of bubbly when they got into a beef at a cocktail party.)

"I'm a trained investigative reporter," I bullshitted. "Very little escapes me, sir."

His eyebrows went up, and I jumped back in with, "I understand you've experimented with LSD."

LSD screen test

I thought he was going to have me thrown out. Instead he told me this story:

When he was making the movie Gigot with Jackie Gleason, the script called for an LSD scene, and Preminger wanted to get it right. So he put out the word that he wanted to take some acid. Lo and behold, who showed up at his New York crib a couple days later but Timothy Leary himself? Leary took out a little jeweled pillbox with two tabs inside, which he and Otto ingested.

Nothing happened right off, of course, except Leary took out a bunch of candles and lit them and put them all around the place and turned off the lights, which freaked Otto out because he thought Leary is going to burn the joint down, so he threw Leary out.

Then Preminger started to really get off and took to his bed. His wife came in the bedroom and asked him what's up, only by now, Preminger told me, she was about as big as a thimble.

At this point in Preminger's narration, I remember telling myself, "Wow! This dude must really think a lot of his old lady that she shrunk to a thimble."

I wrote that in my story and Otto's PR people hit the roof when they saw it. I was afraid I'd get thrown off Al Golde's magic movie reviewer list, but he loved it. Everybody knew Preminger was a jerk, he told me. And, besides, it was a great story.♦


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