Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel

23. The Slugger’s Wife

The Slugger’s Wife 276 I guess the idea of losing is enough to turn most people, especially men, into full out idiots. In sports it’s better. You don’t like to lose, but it’s okay if you do. You’re trained for it in sports. Crowds will boo, hiss, put you down for losing, but they’ll keep coming back for the wins. It doesn’t work the same way in life—when you lose, you’re a loser. You can’t keep getting up like they do in football. Actually, you can, it just doesn’t seem like it. —Hal Ashby Producer Ray Stark was a fan of Hal Ashby’s, having twice gone to the trouble of writing him to say how much he admired his work. He had told Ashby he’d done “a damn good job” on The Last Detail.1 Later, he mentioned in a letter that Peter Sellers had told him about Being There while they were shooting Murder By Death (1976), adding: “[Sellers was] very lucky . . . that [he] didn’t make the film [Being There] with me. I never could have contributed to the making of a film from a book which I wasn’t quite knowledgeable enough to know how to dramatize.” Ashby, he said, was “a remarkable talent with a remarkable range and I hope someday we’ll have the privilege of working together.”2 Though a latecomer to filmmaking, Stark had established himself in the mid-1960s as one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood, starting with initial hits Night of the Iguana (1964) and Funny Girl (1968) and then consolidating with a string of films with Neil Simon, arguably the most respected comic dramatist of the period. Stark’s dominance as a producer was fueled by a desire to control everything: his telephone conversations began “Are you alone? . . . Are you sure? . . . And what we say will go no further? . . . Swearzy?”3 Though the bedrock of his success was his close and highly lucrative relationship 23 The Slugger’s Wife 277 with Simon, the pair had fallen out after making Seems Like Old Times (1980), a film based on Simon’s marital problems with his wife, actress Marsha Mason. In 1982, Stark and Simon were reconciled, by which time Stark had produced the infamous flop Annie (1982) and Simon was on a run of uncharacteristically mediocre films, including I Ought to Be in Pictures (1982) and Max Dugan Returns (1983), that were ever more thinly veiled ponderings on his own life and relationships. In 1983, Simon and his muse, Mason, announced their divorce; however, Simon received a welcome boost when Stark proposed they recommence their partnership on Simon’s latest script, The Slugger’s Wife, a soppy romance about a baseball player’s strained relationship with a pop singer. Stark had a reverence for anything Simon wrote, while Simon respected Stark’s absolute authority as a producer (because it was used to grant Simon immense authorial control), and the two were excited about working together again, convinced that this latest collaboration would be the hit they both needed—despite the fact that, in retrospect, the confidence in Simon’s screenplay seemed like a case of the emperor’s new clothes. Initial whispers in Hollywood suggested that Stark had pulled off a coup by getting Warren Beatty (who had not acted since directing himself in 1981’s Reds) to play the male lead in The Slugger’s Wife. Though he saw potential in the script, a cautious Beatty prudently decided not to take the role of home-run hitter Darryl Palmer. He wasn’t willing to be just an actor for hire and wanted a creative role on the film if he were to be involved at all. “The problem with The Slugger’s Wife was Doc Simon,” he recalls. “Doc Simon always had complete control—Neil and I didn’t agree, so I just didn’t do the movie.”4 Stark had hired Martin Ritt, the veteran director of Hud (1963) and Norma Rae (1979), to direct, but health problems forced Ritt to pull out; instead, he acted in the film as Burly DeVito, the wily manager of Darryl’s team. (Ritt was ultimately relieved not to have directed the film for Stark, who he declared “has no taste.”)5 In mid-November 1983, Ashby was announced by Stark as Ritt’s replacement, with Michael O’Keefe unveiled at the same time as the film’s...