I gave my eardrums to MGM. And it's true: I really did.
During the late '50s, I had worked on the script of Ben-Hur in an office next to that of the producer Sam Zimbalist.
My Writers Guild of America card is one of my proudest possessions. I was given it after being invited to write the script for a film of my last novel, 'Me Before You,' which is being made by MGM. Whenever I look at it, I think, 'I'm a Hollywood writer!'
I'm from Chicago, my family started a chain of movie theaters in Chicago that were around for 70 years and then one of them became the head of Paramount and the other was the head of production at MGM and we all came out of Chicago.
Well oddly enough, I liken the years at MGM, and I was there for about eight years, to doing stock, what we used to call repertory or stock, playing a whole bunch of different roles.
As a kid, I just was a contract player at MGM Studios. They put me into goodness knows how many different roles.Some of them were wonderful and some of them were very just distasteful and awful because I was playing out of my age range and I was thoroughly uncomfortable, let's put it that way. So it took me many years to find my acting feet.
I kind of go for the MGM version of every musical style.
I first saw 'West Side Story' on stage in 1958. I was in the army, having been conscripted while under contract to MGM. I caught the musical in New York, fell in love with it, bought the album, and memorised the whole thing.
Our world was Northern, black and white, so it was a great thing for my sisters and me to sit down at Christmastime and watch these fabulous MGM musicals. All that color, all those beautiful costumes.
Nobody could emerge from a childhood at MGM unscathed.
In those days, I auditioned for everything MGM made while I was under contract. Not for the roles Elizabeth Taylor eventually got, of course.
I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle.
