'Ernest Lehman' by Jon Krampner
Glen Cove is a place that jogs the memory of classic film fans. It was Audrey Hepburn’s hometown in Sabrina; it was where Cary Grant survived the killers who forced him to drink and drive in North by Northwest. Glen Cove is a posh Long Island address, not far from where screenwriter Ernest Lehman spend an affluent childhood.
Biographer Jon Krampner narrates the life of this reticent writer in Ernest Lehman: The Sweet Smell of Success. Lehman wrote Sabrina and North by Northwest; the book’s subtitle refers to another of his fondly remembered screenplays, Sweet Smell of Success, but there was more. Lehman was integral to the film version of West Side Story, helping director Robert Wise to scout locations and study the speech patterns of gang members Together with Wise and choreographer Jerome Robbins, he transformed the Broadway musical into “the proper blend of cinematic realism and the lyrical, poetic style of the play.”
Lehman’s next project was The Sound of Music, an offer everyone told him to refuse. Billy Wilder sniffed, “Ernie, no musical with a swastika in it can be a success.” Lehman was asked by the studio with finding a director (a token of his esteem in the industry) and was rebuffed by Stanley Donen. Gene Kelly told him to find someone else to direct “this piece of shit.” William Wyler hated the Broadway show but was coaxed into accepting the job—but dropped out. Robert Wise really didn’t want to do it either, but Lehman’s script convinced him. The Sound of Music went on to become one of the most successful products Hollywood ever produced.
Lehman wasn’t content to rest on those laurels. As Krampner puts it, he “would now pivot from a cupful of sugar to a canister of battery acid” for his next project, adapting Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Lehman concealed an imaginative mind within a flat personality, Krampner reports. He kept his neurosis and anxiety in check. His eccentricities, known only to close family and friends, included disabling the air conditioning on sleeper cabins when traveling by train. He was a writer foremost, valuing the repercussions of every word.
Ernest Lehman: The Sweet Smell of Success is published by University Press of Kentucky.
