Glenn Ford: A Life

13. "Hard to Say"

13 “Hard to Say” O n March 27, 1966, Glenn Ford and Kathryn Hays were married at the Westwood Community Methodist Church. I was the best man. The matron of honor was Kathy’s friend Betty Murray, Don Murray’s wife. Kathy’s six-year-old daughter, Sherri, was the flower girl. Robert Goulet sang the Lord’s Prayer. Among the guests were Edward G. Robinson, Don Murray, Rod Taylor, the Van Heflins, Elke Sommer, Oscar Levant, and Andy Williams. As Photoplay in June 1966 reported, “Kathy was beautifully dressed in an empire A-line gown in a daffodil color, the bodice of reembroidered lace encrusted in diamondette paillettes and caviar beads, with a matching double-tiered capelette.” The reception immediately followed at the Oxford Way residence. Andy Williams serenaded the newlyweds back at the house and dedicated the Hawaiian wedding song (“Ke Kali Nei Au”) to the happy couple. Photographers and reporters from several news media and movie magazines were among the invited guests. The newlyweds went on a grand tour of Europe, culminating at the Cannes Film Festival in the south of France. My father intended to dazzle Kathy with his international star status, and he did a pretty good job of it, I’m told. Everywhere they went photographers were in abundance. In London they went to see the new Noël Coward play, and Dad took Kathy backstage to meet Mr. Coward himself. And at a reception hosted by Dad’s 234 235 old friend Joan Crawford they were introduced to Lord Mountbatten, the famous admiral and member of the royal family. To everyone’s delight, Lord Mountbatten professed his great admiration for one of my father’s old westerns, The Sheepman. “He was,” Dad recalled for me, “fascinated by a fast-draw trick I had done in the film and had to know how it was done.” The trick—flipping a poker chip in the air from a glass, shooting it, and having it land back on his hand—was a very elaborate combination of skill and movie trickery involving a wire and a small amount of buckshot to make hitting the chip a certainty. On the Riviera the honeymooners attended Princess Grace’s Red Cross Ball, and in Nice they had dinner with Dad’s old friends and fellow actors Alec Guinness and Jack Hawkins. Everywhere they went they were trailed by press writers and photographers. Although Kathy was suitably impressed, she was a down-to-earth person with a great sense of fun and refused to take the pomp and circumstance too seriously. “That’s one of the reasons Glenn liked me,” she would recall. “When things seemed silly to me I’d laugh . . . or I’d do something silly myself and make Glenn laugh.” Of course, the problem with honeymoons is that they don’t last forever. When Glenn and Kathy returned to California they were almost immediately separated for long periods by their professional obligations. Kathy learned that a pilot she had shot with Barry Sullivan and Glenn Corbett was being picked up by NBC for the fall season, and the producers needed her at once. A starring role on The Road West, a weekly television series, meant exhausting work and long, long hours. My father had been attracted by her charisma and talent—it’s no surprise that performers find an easy rapport with other performers—but he had not given much thought to her career. My father didn’t have any intention of altering his own ambitions , for Dad’s generation believed that the man was the breadwinner and the wife, whatever her talents, was there to take care of him. In June, while Kathy was busy in Los Angeles, Glenn headed out to Kanab, Utah, to shoot a Civil War era western, A Time for Killing, which reunited him with producer Harry Joe Brown. He and Dad had made another western, The Desperadoes, in that same rugged location in the early 1940s. Inger Stevens, Paul Petersen, George Hamilton, and Max Baer Jr. were also in the cast. But young maverick director Roger Corman tangled with the producer from the start. Corman was trying for an epic feel and the look of a John Ford film, shooting lots of vistas and grand compositions in Zion National Park. Producer Brown wanted to economize, stick to the story line, and make a basic chase picture. Corman left the...