John Baxter's Adventures in the Movie Trade (6) - REX LIPTON. FORGOTTEN BUT NOT GONE.

Americans were not so common in Australia during the nineteen-sixties that one was likely to meet them often, but once I joined the Australian Commonwealth Film Unit, they seemed to be everywhere. 

Rex Lipton was another of the lost souls cast up on this alien shore. Married, unhappily, to an Australian torch singer named Kathy Lloyd, he’d followed her from Hollywood, only to find himself stuck in a messy divorce. Given a CFU contract as much out of charity as need, he languished at Lindfield for a few months before being swept away again, smiling resignedly at this latest set-back in a life made up of little else.  

But Rex and I found an instant rapport, He was to me that must interesting of all persons, a Hollywood insider.  He’d started as a sound editor, had even laid sound effects on Stanley Kubrick’s early film The Killing. That his best friend was the cowboy actor Rory Calhoun placed him pretty low in Hollywood’s hierarchy, but to me he trailed fairy dust.. 

Lew Lipton, Rex’s father, had been a minor producer, and a friend in the nineteen-twenties of men like Edgar Wallace when the prolific British novelist was toying with the screenplay he called “The Beast”, soon to be King Kong, In an old movie book, I found a picture of Lipton and Wallace at the races;  prosperous men in ice-cream suits and those Panama hats so finely woven that one could scrunch one up and stuff it in your pocket.

Michael Curtiz

Rex studied the picture with his customary sad smile.

“Yeah. That’s the old man. Used to love the track. Went down to Caliente a lot with Mike Curtiz.”

“Michael Curtiz !?” 

“Sure. Mike came up to the house all the time. His son and I were pals since grade school.”

“That was his stepson with the screenwriter Bess Meredyth? Calls himself John Meredyth Lucas?”

Rex looked at me oddly. “Yeah,” he said uncertainly “Johnny Lucas...”

John Meredyth Lucas

At a time when Australian TV survived almost entirely on a diet of American series, the name of John Meredyth Lucas was hard to avoid. I’d seen his credit as director on episodes of Mannix, Maverick, The Fugitive, Ben Casey, even Star Trek. When it came to six degrees of separation from Hollywood, I was suddenly some hundreds of points closer.

“I envy you,” I said. 

To Rex, there was clearly nothing enviable about  knowing a minor Hollywood TV director. He didn’t see the moment as I did – a glimpse behind the veil, a brief lifting of the magic curtain.

 “We used to sneak into the house when his old man was away,” he went on. “We stole his scotch and got into his porn collection. Jesus, that taught me a lot. Guy had some incredible stuff.”

The director of Casablanca collected pornography? 

Rex didn’t have a car, so we took to driving back into town together. News of his divorce appeared occasionally in the papers, he and his ex-wife slinging mud at one another and bickering over the fate of their son. Kathy always grabbed the headline. Rex was “American TV editor,” which made him seem more eminent than he was. Talking about Hollywood was a relief from the scandal and I was a willing listener.

Our friendship moved up a notch when Barry Bowden, a sound editor at the Unit, invited me to a dinner party, supposedly to celebrate Mexico’s national day. He and another friend, classical music expert and broadcaster Martin Hibble, had just returned from a round the world trip in which visits to gay clubs and steam-rooms figured prominently. Those in Mexico City were particularly memorable, a fact Barry was keen to celebrate. At the foot of the elegantly printed invitation, however, were the ominous words “Dress formal. Decorations Will Be Worn.”

I didn’t own a dinner jacket but, as Rex and I were the same size, he lent me his. It was a while since he’d had cause to wear it, and fashion had moved on. Its midnight blue worsted, padded shoulders and satin lapels, wide enough to land a 747, made me look like the cousin of movie actor Sheldon Leonard, who played Harry the Horse in Guys and Dolls. The other dinner guests were impressed, however, though Martin stole the show by turning up with a florid gilt object pinned to his lapel. Closer examination revealed it to be not the Royal Order of the Elephant, First Class, but a Grand Prix du Disque label peeled from a Deutsche Grammophon LP of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. 

Sheldon Leonard (r) Guys and Dolls

The Film Unit had its methods of dumping people who didn’t measure up. They were handed a project recognised as a poisoned chalice, and, like the disgraced officer left alone in a room with a loaded revolver, invited to destroy themselves. Most accepted their fate with the weary resignation shown by Socrates when offered hemlock. Rex was no exception.

A few years before, true to the stubborn conviction of producer-in-chief Stanley Hawes and his mentor, John Grierson, that a true film-maker should be able to undertake every task in the making of a documentary, from camera operating to screenwriting, he had sent one of the Unit’s best cinematographers to winter over in Antarctica. He’d returned with multiple reels of icebergs, blizzards, scientists, and animals slithering or waddling in and out of the sea. Skilled cinematography, careful documentation, a faithful fulfilment of the requirements set out in the contract with the sponsoring government department didn’t make up for the fact that none of this would cut together. There was no story, and, therefore, no film.

Various editors tried to “lick” the material, always without success. Rex’s solution – a Disney-esque travelogue, including comic voices for the penguins and seals – could not have accorded less with Stanley’s dour philosophy. His contract wasn’t renewed. The project passed to another editor, Josephine Willis, and she and I finally knocked it into releasable shape. Rex was long gone but I wrote him with the news. He never replied. Australia must have been a low point in a not terribly distinguished career on which he was glad to shut the door. 

John Baxter

John Baxter is an Australian-born all-round writer, scholar, critic and film-maker who has lived in Paris since 1989 with his wife Marie-Dominque Montel and daughter Louise. His Wikipedia entry  details the many books he has written which include the first  ever critical volume devoted to the Australian cinema as well as studies of Ken Russell, Josef von Sternberg, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, Federico Fellini, George Lucas, Robert De Niro and Luis Bunuel. His most recent book, one of a number of studies of Paris is A Year in Paris, described by the New York Times thus "In “A Year in Paris,” (Baxter) strings together the beautiful beads of the French everyday, all held together by the invisible act of imagination that makes a country cohere and endure."