Glenn Ford: A Life

11. "Cat's in the Cradle"

11 “Cat’s in the Cradle” T wo for the Seesaw was supposed to be next up on Glenn’s schedule, costarring the one and only Elizabeth Taylor, but she had become bogged down making Cleopatra in Rome for longer than planned. When Elizabeth found herself involved with a married boyfriend, Richard Burton, Seesaw was put on permanent hold. In 1962 the film would be made starring Robert Mitchum and Shirley MacLaine. But then Dad got a welcome offer from superagent Abe Lastfogel, who wanted to put Glenn Ford together with legendary moviemaker Frank Capra for another remake—Pocketful of Miracles. Way back in 1933 this Damon Runyon story had been a crowd-pleaser for Capra under the title Lady for a Day. The warmhearted plot concerned Dave the Dude, a glamorous bootlegger in Prohibition-era New York who decides to help panhandler Apple Annie pretend to be a grand lady of society for her visiting daughter. My dad bristled when it was pointed out by some critics that three of his last four films had been remakes. He tended to dismiss critics anyway, but this got under his skin. “Every time Hamlet is played it’s a remake, but who cares?” he was quoted. “Everyone is creating something of his own. We’re not copying the original movie.” Capra was a living legend in Hollywood, but his heyday had been the 1930s and 1940s. It was my father’s name attached to the project that got 200 201 the film financed, and Glenn’s agent negotiated a deal that would make him a coproducer of Pocketful of Miracles under this onetime company banner: Franton Productions (a combination of Frank, Capra’s first name, and Newton, Glenn’s middle name). My father was paid (or paid himself as producer) $350,000 for his work plus 35 percent of the gross profits. Old Frank arrived with memories of his Mr. Smith Goes to Washington days, when he had boasted near complete control of his projects, but he soon found that those days were long ago. In his later autobiography Capra would write with some bitterness about how Glenn threw his weight around during the production of Pocketful. The resentment began right away during casting, when Capra chose to hire Shirley Jones for the role of Dave the Dude’s girlfriend. According to my father, he didn’t realize this when he suggested that his real-life girlfriend, Hope Lange, be cast. Capra countered that my father did know about Jones but insisted on Lange playing the role. Capra fumed and protested, but the part went to Lange in the end. It wasn’t a slap at Shirley, as Dad admired her and would work with her on another film. Dad was pleased to endorse Capra’s suggested casting of Bette Davis to play Apple Annie. Dad had enormous respect for Bette as well as eternal gratitude to her for choosing him to be in A Stolen Life, and he was happy to be working with her again. (This was before her big “comeback” in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? since Bette’s career, like Capra’s, had been quietly winding down.) Beneath the surface there was plenty of tension on this production. Frank Capra suffered from on-the-job stress as well as festering resentment of my father’s influence over the decision making. During filming Capra developed terrible migraine “cluster” headaches and was taking regular injections of sodium phosphate for relief. Although my father did not recall having a particularly difficult relationship with Capra, later the director would write of the experience in Frank Capra: The Name Above the Title and complain about the compromises he had made for the sake of his star; he wrote that he had “sold out the artistic integrity that had been my trademark for forty years.” After the book came out in 1971, my father sent Frank a telegram: “What a shame you did not have the guts to say this to my face—what you said in the book.” Although Pocketful of Miracles has many fans today, it was not an overwhelming success when it came out for Christmas 1961. Whatever their differences, my father had enabled Capra to make one last film—there would be no more. Capra tried to put some other projects together in the next few years but failed, and then went into...