CONVERSATION WITH CLIFF ROBERTSON: The Oscar Winner Who Blew the Whistle
“The year you win an Oscar is the fastest year in a Hollywood actor’s life. Twelve months later they ask, ‘Who won the Oscar last year?’”— Cliff Robertson
By Gregory N. Joseph
LIKE GREGORY PECK, fellow actor and Hollywood stalwart Cliff Robertson was born in La Jolla, California, the toney upscale San Diego beach community. Ironically, on June 2, 1969, it would be Peck, then president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who would present a belated Academy Award for Best Actor to Robertson for his performance in the 1968 film, “Charly.”
At the time of the regular Oscar ceremony on April 14, 1969, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, the industry’s 41st, Robertson had been on location in the Philippines shooting the war movie “Too Late the Hero.” That film’s director, Robert Aldrich, refused his request to go to the ceremony on the grounds that it would be too time-consuming and expensive.
For Robertson, it was a harbinger of things to come in a career shaded by the unusual, and by controversy.
By the time I met him a decade and a half later, he had been blacklisted by Hollywood for his involvement in what came to be known as “the Begelman scandal,” one of the most infamous episodes in film history.
David Begelman, who began his career as an agent for Paul Newman and Barbra Streisand, had embezzled more than $61,000 from Columbia Pictures while serving as the studio’s president between 1973 and 1978 and earning more than $200,000 annually.
In addition to misusing production funds to build a posh screening room in his home, Begelman forged signatures on checks written to (but never cashed by) Robertson, “Hud″ director Martin Ritt and restaurant owner Pierre Groleau. He nevertheless kept his Columbia job and went on to run two more studios.
Robertson helped unearth the crimes when he stumbled across an IRS form reporting a 1977 $10,000 Columbia payment he never received. Begelman told the Oscar winner the check payable to Robertson was forged by a young studio employee, but the actor’s accountant found that Begelman cashed the check himself for traveler’s checks.
Robertson contacted police.
After initially trying to cover up the misdeeds, Columbia suspended Begelman for two months. The studio then reinstated Begelman, saying that he had repaid the money with interest, and ousted an executive officer, Alan Hirschfield, who had opposed the reinstatement on moral grounds.
Like Begelman, the Columbia board blamed the forgeries and embezzlement on “emotional problems.″
“David Begelman was a great agent, a very bright executive and a good friend,″ said producer Ray Stark (“Funny Girl,″ “Steel Magnolias″), a staunch Begelman supporter who campaigned for his reinstatement. “He was one of the cornerstones of Columbia’s resurgence in the 1970s.″
Columbia needed Begelman’s golden touch — he had supervised “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,″ “Kramer vs. Kramer″ and “Shampoo.″ Under his guidance, the studio moved from near-bankruptcy to dominance and he was considered among the town’s most astute deal makers.
Reinstating him “may have been a good business decision but it was a bad public relations decision,″ noted one studio executive. Within a year, Begelman was out, with Columbia Chairman Leo Jaffe saying he wanted the studio to “resume a more normal atmosphere.″
In 1978 Begelman pleaded no contest to grand theft and was fined $5,000 and placed on three years’ probation. He also made the documentary, “Angel Dust,″ about the dangers of the drug PCP, to fulfill a community service sentence.
Many thought Robertson should have handled the affair more quietly. Instead, Robertson and his wife at the time, Dina Merrill, the actress and only child of Post Cereals heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post and her second husband, Wall Street stockbroker Edward Francis Hutton, founder of E.F. Hutton & Co., went to the authorities and the press.
For those who might have missed it in the news, the scandal became the basis of the 1982 best-selling book, “Indecent Exposure.” Now the whole world knew.
Kirk Douglas, in his autobiography “The Ragman’s Son” (1988), put it in perspective from a Hollywood insider’s point of view:
“This is the town where Cliff Robertson exposed David Begelman as a forger and a thief, with the net result that Begelman got a standing ovation at a Hollywood restaurant, while Robertson was blacklisted for four years. On the bad days, you think of what Tallulah Bankhead said: ‘Who do I have to fuck to get out of this business?’”
Hollywood, of course, was no stranger to scandal.
The so-called first major Hollywood scandal came in 1921 when film comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, then the town’s highest-paid star, stood accused of raping and killing young model and aspiring actress Virginia Rappe at a party. This led to three trials featuring over-the-top coverage by the Hearst newspaper chain, and although Arbuckle was ultimately acquitted in the third, he never again attained the same level of acceptance and notoriety as an onscreen presence, thanks in no small way to the skittish reaction of Hollywood itself. He wound up changing his name to William Goodrich and working behind the scenes directing movies, and although he finally returned to acting in short-two-reel comedies, soon thereafter he died in his sleep of a heart attack in 1933. He was just 46 years old. His lasting legacy is less about his undeniable comedic talent than about a movie career that somehow had gone terribly wrong at a time Hollywood was struggling to put up a front of rectitude for the public. In sum, the prospect of putting a very large dent in box office returns industrywide helped do his career, and him, in.
There would be more lurid stories, and headlines, that would rock Hollywood.
In 1922 came the (still) well-publicized murder of silent film director and actor William Desmond Taylor, who was found shot to death in his Westlake, Calif., apartment. Famous names and sensational media accounts, many fabricated, abounded. Mixed with a crime scene that had been compromised and a missing murder weapon, the crime was never solved and officially remains a cold case.
In 1923, silent film actor Wallace Reid, called “the screen’s most perfect lover,” died of a drug addiction at the age of 31, the result of having been prescribed morphine after being injured in a train wreck.
Then there was British stage and film actress Peg Entwistle, who, at age 24, jumped to her death from the “H” on the Hollywood(land) sign in 1932.
During Hollywood’s Golden Age, that time from the 1910's to the 1960's when movie glamour was at its peak, luminaries like Thelma Todd and Mary Astor and Errol Flynn and Busby Berkeley and Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner and William Holden — among many others — became entangled in scandals of their own involving everything from sexual escapades to murder. Of those who survived, some managed to somehow scale their way back to the top, a few with spectacular results.
Cliff Robertson, however, was not one of them.
The irony was that the scandal in which he had become enmeshed was not of his own making. He was the victim.
Even more striking, his banishment for telling the truth came at a time — the post-Watergate era — when society was supposedly more sophisticated and tolerant of whistleblowers, even celebrating them.
Robertson and I first met at the San Diego newspaper where I worked.
He was in town to attend a gala celebrating the 1983 revival of the La Jolla Playhouse, which Peck had founded in 1947 with Dorothy McGuire and Mel Ferrer as a way of sharpening their acting chops away from the glare of the New York critics. It evolved into a highly respected venue, a popular and critically acclaimed magnet for well-respected actors.
Robertson, a skilled aviator, had flown his own plane into San Diego, where he and his wife maintained a second home, which he elegantly referred to as their “domicile.”
He told his side of the Begelman story, and didn’t mince words. “I’ve been blacklisted,” he said bluntly. My article was a nuts-and-bolts retelling of the tale, as objective as I could make it.
We subsequently ran into each other again at the gala, a glittery, formal event held at a hotel on San Diego’s Embarcadero featuring a who’s who of the acting community. I had been assigned to cover it with explicit orders to interview as many celebrities as I could (with accompanying photos), a daunting task considering the scores of famous people in attendance that night. (I had already written a long profile about Playhouse co-founder Peck and recorded an oral history segment with him for a local film society after spending the day with the legendary actor at his Los Angeles home: https://gregjoseph.medium.com/conversation-with-gregory-peck-fad3d0d6b81.)
At the gala, after exchanging niceties with Robertson, thanking him for the candid interview at the paper, I broke off as graciously as I could to circulate around the room. But it seemed wherever I went, he ended up standing alongside me, silent, drink in hand, staring straight ahead. It was unsettling, and sad. But I had to keep moving.
Not long thereafter, I heard of plans for a possible sequel to Robertson’s film “Charly,” which had brought him the Oscar as Best Actor for playing a mentally challenged man who temporarily becomes a genius after radical medical treatment. I was happy for him, especially considering the circumstances, and because I loved the character, the movie and its message. In fact, having played piano since I was a child, I was moved to compose, in a very simplistic way, a possible theme song for the sequel titled, “I Have Learned to Say.” I dropped a letter to Robertson offering the tune for free in return for a contribution to an association for intellectual disability. I never heard back. I am not sure he even got the letter.
Robertson eventually returned to films, primarily as a supporting character actor in the 1980s and ’90s. His last role was as Uncle Ben Parker in Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man” and two sequels, the last of those in 2007. In 1989, he also served as a jury member of the 39th Berlin International Film Festival. But he never again attained the star status he once had held.
For a fleeting moment, he made front-page news again, but not because of his acting, or even because of scandal, or for that matter anything having to do with Hollywood; the reason was as far away from the world of make believe as one could get. And again it was all because of a twist of fate: He happened to be flying his small aircraft over the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists struck.
Cliff Robertson died 10 years later almost to the day — on Sept. 10, 2011 — one day after his 88th birthday, of natural causes, in Stony Brook, New York. His body was cremated, and a private funeral was held at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton, New York.
By that time, David Begelman had been long gone. He committed suicide in August 1995 at age 73, found shot dead in a room at the Century Plaza Hotel after becoming depressed over financial problems, an imbroglio which at one point included a petition filed by Hollywood’s three major talent guilds in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Los Angeles for failure to pay actors, directors and writers residuals in the amount of $4.1 million. He is buried at Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California.
I still have my music for the sequel to Robertson’s Oscar-winning film that never got made. I sometimes play it. When I do, my thoughts drift back to that bittersweet night at the gala when an Oscar-winning actor stood quiet and alone, surveying a packed hall and looking for someone who would talk to him.
