Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [226]
Perhaps the main reason he commuted so faithfully to Westport was a teenage actress named Janet Landgard, who played a sexy ex-babysitter. (One of the main padding devices in the movie is a long, lyrical interlude in which Lancaster cavorts around the countryside with Landgard and therefore feels, at least for a while, young and vigorous again.) “She was a nothing actress and not very pretty,” Mary Cheever observed of the young woman—whose career had begun with The Donna Reed Show and pretty much ended with The Swimmer—but Cheever thought she was marvelous, and was thrilled when the Perrys asked him to do a “talismanic” cameo opposite her and Lancaster. The scene was a poolside cocktail party, and the prop man had been filling Cheever's glass with Scotch for almost four hours before he finally got his call. As he wrote Weaver, “What I was supposed to do was to shake hands with Lancaster and say ‘You've got a great tan there Neddy.’ Things like that. I was supposed to improvise. …
So we rehearsed about a dozen times and then we got ready for the first take but when this dish [Landgard] came on instead of shaking hands with her I gave her a big buss. So then when the take was over Lancaster began to shout: “That son of a bitch is padding his part” and I said I was supposed to improvise and Frank [Perry] said it was all right. I asked the girl if she minded being kissed and she said no, she said I had more spark than anybody else on the set. … Lancaster heard her. Anyhow on the second take I bussed her but when I reached out to shake Lancaster's hand the bastard was standing with his hands behind his back. So after the take I said that he was supposed to shake hands with me and he said he was just improvising. So on the third take I kissed her but when I made a grab for Lancaster all I got was a good look at his surgical incision in the neighborhood of his kidneys. We made about six takes in all but our friendship is definitely on the rocks.*
Shortly after shooting ended in August, the whole project got “into very deep and stormy water,” as Cheever put it. Spiegel saw the rough cut and was flummoxed: What the hell was the man's motivation for swimming across the county? It made no sense! When the Perrys defended the arty ambiguity at the heart of Cheever's vision, Spiegel gave them the sack and hired a young Sydney Pollack to shoot a few “mop-up” scenes on the Coast. These included a long, tempestuous confrontation between Neddy and his mistress (played by Janice Rule), and a “Teamster's Union hose-type rainstorm” at the end; Spiegel also hired Marvin Hamlisch to compose the score, which one reviewer said “would sound overly passionate in a Verdi opera.” Among these complications, Cheever was principally worried about his paycheck: he'd gotten a measly ten thousand dollars up front, and would not receive the fifty-thousand-dollar balance “until 120 days after they made a final print.”
Almost two years after the initial shooting in Westport, The Swimmer was somewhat grudgingly released in May 1968. Cheever was furious when Mary refused to attend the New York premiere, and considered taking Mrs. Zagreb instead (“in her limegreen Thunder-bird”), but finally went with Spear and sat between the Perrys, who got screen credit after all. “It is not a great picture but it is faithful to the story and at the end when he returns to the empty house grown men weep,” Cheever wrote Litvinov the next day; as for Lancaster,