Don Ameche--A Life Well Spent in Hollywood : He will be honored with a retrospective at the Directors Guild next weekend

Mortality has lately been running amok in the arts community--Michael Landon, Coral Browne, Lee Remick, Jean Arthur, Robert Motherwell, Isaac Bashevis Singer constituting only a partial list. In such gloomy circumstances, it is nice to be able to raise huzzahs for longevity--to the likes of Hal Roach, feisty at 99, to Helen Hayes and Lillian Gish, both active in their 90s, and in particular to Don Ameche, who at the age of 83 has just now returned from a grueling three-month shoot on a new comedy called “Folks.” He is back in the nick of time for a weekend retrospective in his honor arranged by the American Cinematheque.

The tribute, to be held at the Directors Guild theater, runs from Friday to next Sunday and will present 10 of his films, two later television roles and excerpts from his most recent screen work, including “Cocoon” (1985), “Trading Places” (1983) and “Folks,” which is due later this year.

Ameche, it is amazing to realize, made his first screen appearance 58 years ago in a short called “Beauty at the World’s Fair”--the fair being the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933. He first came to Hollywood just a bit more than 55 years ago, on March 1, 1936, a date that stays in his mind.

He enjoyed his first big success that very year, opposite Loretta Young in “Ramona.” By 1938 he was one of what became a triumvirate of stars in the company Darryl Zanuck had assembled at 20th Century Fox. “The three of us,” Ameche says affectionately. “Alice Faye, Ty Power and I. Gosh, we were making six pictures a year each, one after another, especially after Loretta left to go independent. Zanuck had to use us a lot. He couldn’t borrow stars because he didn’t have any he could afford to lend.”

The work really was continuous. Ameche remembers the wrap party after “Midnight” (1939). The party roared on until 4 in the morning, and Ameche had an 8 o’clock call that very morning to start “The Story of Alexander Graham Bell.” The first day’s shooting was a complicated dolly shot during which Ameche had six pages of dialogue to say. When the “Midnight” welkin stopped ringing in the wee hours before dawn, Ameche hadn’t had time to memorize a line.

“But,” he says, “I was young and I learned lines easily, and somehow I got through the day.” There was plenty of partying in those days, and tales of William Powell telling off a drunken interloper in a restaurant, in a tirade of such eloquence that there were words Ameche had never encountered before. “Awesome,” he says. On another occasion, one of his fellow revelers was pushed into a car at Chasen’s, went on through and fell out the opened door on the other side of the car, conflicting with the pavement badly.

For years Ameche was so famous for inventing the telephone that he and it found their way into skits and comedians’ routines. “Answer the Ameche, will ya?” was almost a catch phrase, and fans invariably mentioned it when they met him. Once or twice, Ameche says, the gibes were meaner than funny. But he remains immensely proud of the film, as a tribute to Bell himself and as an example of the filmmaking arts, including performances. “Loretta was terrific,” Ameche says.

“Bell’s daughter was on the set every day, and every shot had to have her approval. Everything was absolutely authentic.” “The Story of Alexander Graham Bell” (1939) is being shown as a Saturday-night double-feature, along with “In Old Chicago” (1938), another of Fox’s prime entries in motion-picture history.

The tribute will open with what is still Ameche’s favorite of all his films, “Heaven Can Wait,” directed by Ernst Lubitsch from a script by Samson Raphaelson in 1943. (The Warren Beatty “Heaven Can Wait” is no relation, being a remake of “Here Comes Mr. Jordan,” a 1941 film.) In “Heaven Can Wait,” set in the 1890s, Ameche was a playboy who goes to hell, or Hades as it was then known, and who reviews his sins for Satan, who, in a grand satirical gesture, sends him to the waiting Other Place.

“Lubitsich called the whole cast together on a stage the first day of shooting,” Ameche says, “and he said, ‘Sam (Raphaelson) and I spent a whole year writing this script. We spent another nine months polishing it. Please don’t change a word.’ ” And they didn’t, Ameche says. “All I had to do was learn my lines every morning and go to work. I never had to worry about what I was going to do with them. I knew I was in perfect hands.”

It was a lovely premise to begin with, Ameche says. “It must have been reassuring to a lot of people to think that a man who had lived the life he had could still get into heaven.”

He had no doubt Lubitsch was a genius, but also “a desperately unhappy man,” only truly happy when he had a chance to make his movies his way.

Ameche, devilishly handsome and with a mellifluous voice that served him well in musicals, was often as not a romantic hero. But he also had an edge of rascality, if not worse, that extended his range to do sinners as well as saints, or quite charmingly endow each with a hint of the other. In one of the innumerable remakes of “The Three Musketeers” (1939), a musical version with the Ritz Brothers as the comedy relief, Ameche was a very creditable d’Artagnan.

“Down Argentine Way” (1940), which brought Carmen Miranda to a waiting public and offered Betty Grable as Ameche’s co-star, seems to him now an absolutely prototypical Fox movie of that time. “It wouldn’t, couldn’t and didn’t offend anyone; it entertained them,” he says. “It was still the depths of the Depression, and anything that could distract people from the brutality of the times was desperately welcome. The euphoria that a film like ‘Down Argentine Way’ could produce wouldn’t last just during the picture itself, it would be there when you left the theater and it might last as long as two weeks. That was important.”

Perhaps Ameche’s closest pal within the Fox family was Tyrone Power. Ameche was best man at Power’s first wedding. “More than anything else, he wanted to be known as a good actor, but he never got that recognition, though he earned it,” Ameche says. “He tried on Broadway, he tried when he toured with ‘John Brown’s Body.’ ”

When he went into the service, Power put his money in the keeping of a relative. When he came back he found he didn’t have a penny. “Ah, well,” Ameche says with a sigh and a grin, “none of us knew what to do with our money in those days.”

One of the singular advantages of longevity is that you knew some of the performers history has decided were legends. Ameche co-starred with John Barrymore in “Midnight” (1939), a delicious Billy Wilder-Charles Brackett script directed by Mitchell Leisen and also featuring Claudette Colbert and Mary Astor, and showing Saturday at 8, twinned with “The Three Musketeers.” “Jack was using cue cards, but I don’t really think he needed to,” Ameche says.

Barrymore and Ameche were both doing regular radio shows in those days, with three hours to kill between the original broadcast and a second performance for the West Coast. “One night Jack caught up with me in the corridor between shows, and he talked to me for an hour. Wonderful talk, but I realized later that he really just needed somebody to talk to. He didn’t have anybody. Lonely man.”

Ameche and W.C. Fields did “The Chase & Sanborn Hour” with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. “Every week Bill would reject the first script as terrible. Another would be brought and rejected. Finally I would say, ‘Bill, the new one is great.’ He’d say, very affectionately, ‘Dago, are you sure?’ It was always the first script he’d rejected; he’d never read it, he was just acting on principle.”

There was a long 12 years for Ameche between the waning of what now can be called his first film career and his rebirth in “Trading Places” in 1983, a piece of ironic good fortune that became possible when William Holden failed an insurance exam.

That led to “Cocoon” and an Oscar nomination and a series of roles in films and on television that hasn’t stopped yet. Just now he has been playing Tom Selleck’s father in “Folks,” a black comedy directed by Ted Kotcheff and written by Robert Klane. Selleck plays a grain trader whose life falls apart and who flees to his parents in Florida and, pursued by his personal dark cloud, burns down their trailer home. Ameche’s character is a World War II flier now suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. The plot involves the parents’ plan (Anne Jackson plays the mother) to help the son by killing themselves so he’ll have the insurance money.

It was hard, hard work, Ameche says, innumerable takes during a month of heat and humidity in Ft. Lauderdale, two months in Chicago. But Ameche loyally thinks the film has the possibility of being a large hit.

Meanwhile, he is pleased to be home to catch up on his reading. He reads voraciously and thoughtfully, everything from deep theology to current events. He thinks--to simplify a well-detailed concept he offers--that civilization fell into a creative slump between the Renaissance and the Impressionists (with a few exceptions) and that the movies have done a microcosmic copy of the slump, with the Hollywood ‘30s and ‘40s the Renaissance and the Impressionists yet to be discovered.

He is not wild about most of the films he sees, and thinks that the studios, led by crazy men (as he calls some of them) with their cadres of sharp and skilled producers, were hugely creative places. “A lot of the performers hated the (studio) system. They thought they knew properties better than the system. And what a crazy idea that was. The people that ran the system were very special people, the producers especially.”

Not all his friends are memories. The hope, subject to change, is that the pals who will join him at the retrospective will include Alice Faye, Binnie Barnes Frankovich (with him in “Three Musketeers”), Francis Lederer (“Midnight”) and such youngsters as Tom Selleck, Joe Mantegna (“Things Change”) and Brian Dennehy (“Cocoon”).

The memories will be there, in the air, as well.