Spyfail, p.13
Spyfail, page 13
Milchan’s job, therefore, would be to recruit another American spy to secretly smuggle out the critical nuclear triggers, as well as other key supplies and intelligence. But first he would need to develop a cover, one that allowed him to spend a great deal of time in Southern California, the heart of America’s defense industry. He would become a wealthy movie producer. At the same time, working with Rhoodie, he could secretly extend their pro-apartheid propaganda program to America’s film and entertainment industry. What they would call “Operation Hollywood.”
CHAPTER 13
The Producer
Arnon Milchan stepped off his private jet at California’s Burbank Airport flush with tens of millions of dollars he had made from arming the racist South African government, arms used to suppress the raging Black population and prevent future uprisings like Soweto. Now in the summer of 1978 he was on his way to Warner Bros. Studios to recruit an American as a spy for LAKAM, and at the same time build his cover as a wealthy Hollywood producer.
As part of Operation Hollywood, according to a high-ranking South African official, Milchan recommended that the apartheid regime begin penetrating the U.S. entertainment industry with techniques similar to those used with the media. The idea was to expand from secretly investing in newspapers and magazines to also begin clandestinely funding movie, television, and Broadway deals. Such a move would greatly expand their covert propaganda operation, allowing them to put a favorable spin on the government’s brutal segregation policies, or alternatively, cast a harsh light on the Black freedom movement.
Soon Milchan turned up as a producer for a Broadway musical about joyful native Blacks living happily under apartheid, the theme that Rhoodie and the government were trying to project. Ipi Tombi, produced along with fellow Israelis Avrham Dashe and Chaim Topol, started previews at Harkness Theater near New York’s Lincoln Center on December 28, 1976, and instantly attracted angry protests and pickets. Among the groups was the Emergency Committee to Protest the South African Production of Ipi Tombi, which included an executive from WNET, the local PBS station; the editor in chief of Essence magazine; and the president of the Black Theater Alliance. The grievances focused on “the exploitation of blacks by South Africans” and “America’s cooperation and support of the present South African government.”
According to an article in the New York Times at the time, “The protesters contended the musical, conceived and produced by whites, offered an unrealistic picture of blacks in South Africa and could be considered pro-apartheid propaganda.” There was a similar reaction when the play opened in Los Angeles. Protesters picketed the theater shouting, “Shut down Ipi Tombi,” calling it “racist garbage” and “a coverup of South African apartheid.” In New York the production was such a disaster that it ended up sinking the entire theater. A few months after it opened, the wrecking balls started knocking down the walls. “The closing of ‘Ipi Tombe’ may have been the final blow that led to the decision to sell,” said the Times. “The marquee told the story. It read, ‘Happiness Is an African Musical Called Ipi Tombe.’ Over that message, a sign announced the liquidation sale.”
Around that same time, Milchan happened to meet film producer Elliott Kastner in a Tel Aviv restaurant. Born into a Jewish family in New York in 1930, Kastner started out in the industry as a talent agent and later set up shop as a movie producer. He had just arrived in Israel following a disastrous western, The Missouri Breaks, starring Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson. Not only did the film flop at the box office, but it was panned by critics and Nicholson ended up suing Kastner for cheating him out of money. Nevertheless, Kastner hit it off with Milchan so well that he invited him to tag along on a trip to Austria to meet actress Elizabeth Taylor, who was going to star in his next film, A Little Night Music. It would end up another financial and critical dud, but Kastner’s very wealthy new friend had now become his partner. “Suddenly we are doing business together producing movies,” Milchan would later say.
Flush with South African cash from Rhoodie for his secret Operation Hollywood propaganda plan, Milchan had agreed to pump money into a British movie, Black Joy. The film had its origins as a play, Dark Days, Light Nights, written and directed by Jamal Ali. It was intended as a political “call to arms” to oppose the rampant oppression that Blacks go through in a White-dominated society, especially in the ghetto, and to highlight the struggles they must endure. During its performance at the Black Theatre of Brixton, a largely Black section of London, Ali was approached by director Anthony Simmons, who suggested turning the play into a film and asked if Ali would write the screenplay. Excited by the prospect of attracting a wider audience to his political message, Ali agreed and soon thereafter was introduced to Kastner, who would produce it along with Milchan, the moneyman.
On the first day of filming, Kastner jetted in from California, but by then Ali already regretted his decision. To his horror, without any consultation the script had been radically changed and stripped of its powerful political message. “I don’t like how the script is turning out,” he told a friend. “It ain’t my play anymore.” He later complained, “The play was quite lost and they wanted to make a kind of blaxploitation film.” Simmons, he said, “made the movie into what I did not want the movie made into… the radicalness had gone and had become a joyous situation. Whereas I was thinking it was much more brutal than that.” At one point Ali became so frustrated by what he was seeing that he suddenly shouted, “Cut!” But Simmons simply ordered him off the set and continued with the filming.
As with Ipi Tombe, the message Rhoodie and Milchan wanted the film to convey was for Blacks to give up dangerous political ideas and instead simply be happy with their lot in life. Simmons, who was also Jewish, would later say, “I don’t want to get involved in a story of the Blacks and the issue of slavery and all of the rest of it. The object is that I wanted to make [a] comedy film… I wasn’t going to do Black Joy as a Black film about how terrible it was to be Black.” He added, “I would [imagine]… the whole thing as a… Jewish story.” The result was to deliberately mute the outrage and oppression of Black voices for the sake of the box office, and clandestinely for the benefit of the racist South African government.
Rhoodie was apparently pleased with the final result. Kastner entered the film in the 1977 Cannes Film Festival, and although it came away with no awards, Rhoodie was there to celebrate. During the May event, Rhoodie, Milchan, and two other members of their propaganda clique, financiers David Abramson and Stuart Pegg, shared a table at the ceremony. Joining them at the table and toasting to their success was another new Milchan friend, forty-three-year-old American filmmaker Roman Polanski.
Just two months earlier Polanski had been arrested at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles for drugging, raping, and performing sodomy on a thirteen-year-old girl, crimes that didn’t seem to trouble Milchan. Later, facing the prospect of prison, Polanski fled to France and became a fugitive from the American legal system. Nevertheless, a few years later Milchan produced Polanski’s French staging of Amadeus, with Polanski directing and starring as Mozart. “He’s fun,” Polanski said about his decades-long friendship with Milchan. “Dinners, parties, nightclubs.”
Israeli spymaster Blumberg cannot forget the evening he spent with Polanski at Milchan’s luxurious villa near Paris. Milchan suggested that they all go out for a night on the town at a cabaret. Polanski immediately agreed. Blumberg, the LAKAM chief, was hesitant. “I went with them but after half an hour I wanted to leave. Naked girls were dancing on stage, it’s not my taste. I asked Milchan to take me back to the hotel, but we could not move because Polanski was so enthusiastic he refused to go. So I had to spend half the night there watching that. It was horrible.”
On the heels of Black Joy, Milchan suggested another joint project with Kastner. He wanted him to produce a fictionalized film about himself, Milchan, as a heroic arms dealer, full of derring-do. A new book had just been released on the trade, The Arms Bazaar, by longtime British author and journalist Anthony Sampson, and Kastner wasted little time contacting him about turning it into a movie. “Kastner had the style of an amiable gorilla,” recalled Sampson. “He conveyed his enthusiasm for the book in the weird, electrical language of the movie trade: he liked the vibes, he wanted to pick up the activity, he didn’t want any static: ‘The word of mouth is big.’” After Sampson agreed to write the screenplay, Kastner said he wanted him to meet “the real backer of the film.” He was “an Israeli called Arnon Milchan… who enjoyed courting danger and flew around the world with a briefcase containing $75,000 in different currencies.”
But around the same time, an internal investigation by authorities in Pretoria began looking into Rhoodie’s years of wild spending and misappropriation of funds. And then Milchan’s name started to appear. As a result, with millions in the bank thanks to his weapons and propaganda deals with the apartheid regime, Milchan decided to distance himself from Rhoodie and go it alone as a producer. In a messy separation, he dumped Kastner, accusing him of overcharging him. Kastner angrily responded, “He wanted to be as famous as me in restaurants and hotels, and to fuck every girl that I fucked.”
Despite his enormous wealth, fights over every last dime would become a constant Milchan trademark. “He’s as cheap as they come,” said filmmaker Oliver Stone, who worked with Milchan on such films as JFK and Natural Born Killers. “He’s sick about money, obsessed with losing it. I learned a very hard lesson, and it cost me a lot of my personal money. I don’t want to get into a pissing contest, but Arnon can be very nasty.” As if to make the point, Italian spaghetti western director Sergio Leone, who directed Milchan’s film Once Upon a Time in America, presented Milchan with a gift. It was a life-sized sculpture of a man sitting at a table in front of a plate piled with money. The name of the artwork is The Last Supper of a Greedy Man.
In 1976, now in sole charge of the Arms Bazaar project, Milchan called Sampson and said he wanted to meet him urgently. He then chartered a jet, flew to London, and showed up at Sampson’s home in sports clothes and tennis shoes, and carrying a black briefcase with a row of six combination locks. Getting down to business, Milchan told Sampson that he had been in the arms trade himself and had dealings with South Africa. “As he talked about the plot,” Sampson said, “I began to suspect that he wanted the story to be about himself.”
Later Sampson was flown to Paris, picked up by Jose, Milchan’s chauffeur, and taken in a Range Rover to meet with Milchan, who by then owned an eighteenth-century chateau, Montfort l’Amaury, on a fifty-acre estate an hour’s drive outside Paris. A hunting lodge that had formerly been used by French kings, it sat on the edge of a pond and was close to the comparatively humble abode of future French president Jacques Chirac. Milchan had purchased it a few years before, while just in his early thirties. When Blumberg was in Paris he would often stay there. “I never saw such luxury, elegance, size,” he later said.
The chateau was a convenient place to unload some of his growing mountain of blood-soaked cash—millions earned at a high cost to South Africa’s oppressed Blacks who found themselves at the receiving end of his tons of imported weapons. Lives that apparently didn’t matter to Milchan. Now he was planning to launder more of it through Hollywood film studios as he turned himself into a producer. It was a nice cover as he resumed his espionage activities for Blumberg and Israel’s LAKAM, and began targeting Americans for nuclear secrets and technology.
But rather than the chateau, the chauffeur drove Sampson to Elysée-Matignon, a restaurant and club with faux gold bullion walls that Milchan used as an informal office. Sampson joined Milchan for lunch and they discussed a draft of Sampson’s screenplay. Next, they went to Milchan’s apartment in the city, a stately building on Rue Singer in the 16th arrondissement, one of the most expensive sections of Paris, between the Arc de Triomphe and the Bois de Boulogne. As Milchan’s blonde Swedish girlfriend played pinball, the two discussed the script in his study, a dimly lit room with dark tiles made of rugged tree bark that reminded Sampson of the lair of some nocturnal forest creature. “The atmosphere was placeless and creepy,” he said, “with strange young men waiting around and phones ringing with messages from foreign airports.”
Shortly after Sampson returned to London, Milchan called again. “I’ve got Sydney Pollack and Sidney Lumet interested,” he said, referring to two of Hollywood’s most prolific producers and directors. Later he called back saying he had talked to Lumet, Pollack, and Robert Redford, who were filled with ideas and asked Sampson to fly to Hollywood and discuss the film with Pollack. Arriving in July 1978, Sampson was put up at the fashionable Sunset Marquis Hotel in West Hollywood, an enclave for the 1970s rock-and-roll crowd, from David Bowie to Bruce Springsteen.
The next day he was driven to Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank and was escorted to Room 1206, Pollack’s small and largely nondescript office on the sprawling lot. By then Pollack was an established director of such films as They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, with Jane Fonda, and The Way We Were, which starred Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand. At the time, Pollack was heavily involved with both Fonda and Redford in a new film, The Electric Horseman. It centered on Redford as a former rodeo champ who reluctantly goes to work as a spokesperson for a cereal company. As a prop he is given Rising Star, a $12 million champion Thoroughbred racehorse outfitted in an elaborate electric light costume. Redford soon realizes that Rising Star has been badly maltreated and identifies with its plight. He then steals the horse and makes his way cross-country to release it in a remote canyon to join a herd of wild horses. Fonda is cast as a television reporter who finds him, tags along, and the two become lovers.
Sampson got the impression that Pollack was interested in the idea, but oddly he seemed even more interested in exactly who Milchan was, along with his motivation. Pollack found it puzzling that he traveled on a South African passport and gambled extravagantly at Caesars Palace, where he was said to have lost $200,000 in a single night. “What did he really want?” was the impression Sampson got from Pollack, implying that making movies was not Milchan’s real goal. Nevertheless, the concept of a film about an arms dealer was appealing and Pollack brought in a screenwriter, Bob Garland, for Sampson to collaborate with in London. At the meeting, Garland pitched Robert Redford to play the lead.
Although Sampson had no way of knowing, what Milchan really wanted was to turn Pollack into a spy for LAKAM, and then become his control agent, his handler. And, Milchan hinted, it was something he eventually accomplished. Pollack “was my partner,” he would later admit, in “all kinds of things.” When asked if Pollack knew of and participated in all of Milchan’s activities, Milchan said, “He had to decide what he was willing to do and what he was not willing to do. On a lot of things he said no. On a lot of other things he said yes.”
Just what assistance he provided Milchan is still unknown, since Milchan revealed Pollack’s role only after the director’s death. Burbank, however, was in the center of the defense and aerospace industry. And Warner Bros.’ neighbor was Lockheed’s highly secret Skunk Works, where the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes were designed. At the time of Sampson’s visit, the Skunk Works had just received a new highly secret contract to build the F-117 stealth fighter. While there’s no indication that Pollack had access to the plant, the question remains just what help he might have provided, or who else he might have recruited for Milchan, such as someone high up at the plant. Ironically, just a few years earlier Pollack had directed Three Days of the Condor, a cat-and-mouse spy thriller. Based on the novel Six Days of the Condor by author James Grady, it starred Robert Redford as a covert CIA agent fighting back against a corrupt agency.
Soon after Sampson returned to London, Milchan called to ask how the meeting went. But almost before Sampson could answer, Milchan said he wanted a new script written, one that would attract Robert De Niro. By then De Niro was well established, with a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in The Godfather II playing the young Vito Corleone, and a nomination for Best Actor for his portrayal of the violent, mentally disturbed Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. The next month Sampson returned to Paris for another meeting with Milchan and a further discussion about a possible film to snare De Niro, who Milchan saw as key to his entrée into Hollywood. Sampson, however, was starting to become suspicious. “I remained baffled by his real motivation and loyalties,” he said.
In the end, nothing came of Sampson’s screenplay because Milchan had a better idea. He knew that De Niro, like much of Hollywood, was very pro-Israel. So rather than dump another unread screenplay on De Niro’s doorstep, he would make “the Godfather” an offer he couldn’t refuse. He would fly him to Israel to meet with Defense Minister Ezer Weizmann, soon to become president, and General Moshe Dayan, the high-profile war hero and minister of foreign affairs. The pretext was for Milchan to produce a film about Dayan with De Niro playing the general. Whether or not a film would ever develop, it would give the gregarious Milchan a unique chance to spend quality time and bond with De Niro, who was the same age as him.
The invitation would also offer Milchan a perfect opportunity to show off his connections and enormous wealth, which was key for a producer. Shortly after arriving, a beaming De Niro sat at a dinner table next to a smiling Dayan, clad in a suit and tie along with his trademark black eye patch covering his left eye. Likely nearby was Milchan’s boss, LAKAM chief Benjamin Blumberg, sizing up Milchan’s next possible recruit. Later Dayan introduced De Niro to his family. And afterward, a tanned, fast-talking Milchan gave him a tour of the city while pitching him on his willingness to invest heavily in his films. It was important, he told De Niro, “for the producer to be real partners with the stars and the director, for the producer to put his neck on the line financially and for them to do it artistically.”
