There was another reason for Logan’s inability, at that point, to give his principal player the kind of attention that might have established closer harmony: he was in serious disharmony with the very Japanese elements that had contributed most to his decision to make the picture. Long infatuated with the Japanese theater, Logan had counted heavily on interlacing Sayonara with authentic sequences taken from the classic Kabuki theater, the masked N dramas, the Bunraku puppet plays; they were to be, so to say, the highbrow-lights of the film.
And to this end Logan, along with William Goetz, the producer, had been in negotiation for over a year with Shochiku, the gigantic film company that controls a major part of Japan’s live theatrical activities. The ruler of the Shochiku empire is a small, unsmiling eminence in his eighties, known as Mr. Otani; he has a prénom, Takejiro, but there are few men alive on such familiar terms that they would presume to use it.
The son of a butcher (and therefore, in Japan’s Buddhist society, a member of the outcast group), Otani, together with a brother now dead, founded Shochiku and nurtured it to the point where, for the last four years, its payroll has been the biggest of any single company in Japan. A tycoon to rival Kokichi Mikimoto, the late cultured-pearl potentate, Otani casts a cloaklike shadow over the entire Japanese entertainment industry; in addition to having monopolistic control of the classic theater, he owns the country’s most extensive chain of movie houses and music halls, produces many films and has a hand in radio and television.
From Otani’s vantage point, any transactions with the Messrs. Logan and Goetz must have looked like very small sake. However, he was at first in sympathy with their project, largely because he was impressed by the fervor of Logan’s veneration for Kabuki, N and Bunraku, the three unquestionably genuine gems in the old man’s crown, and the ones closest to his heart. (According to some specialists, these ancient arts owe their continued health mainly to his generosity.)
But Otani is not all philanthropist; when Shochiku’s negotiations with the Sayonara management were supposedly concluded, the former had given the latter, for a handsome price, franchise to photograph scenes in Tokyo’s famed Kabuki Theater, and, for a still handsomer honorarium, permission to make free use of the Kabuki troupe, the N plays and players and the Bunraku puppeteers. Shochiku had also agreed to the participation of its own all-girl opera company—a necessary factor in the production of the film since the Takarazuka troupe depicted in the novel had deeply resented Michener’s “libel” and refused any cooperation whatever. Logan, leaving for Japan, was so elated he could have flown there under his own power. “Otani’s given us carte blanche, and this is going to be it, the real thing,” he said.
“None of that fake Kabuki, that second-rate stuff, but the real thing—something that’s never been put in a picture before.” And was not destined to be; for, across the wide Pacific, Logan and his associates had a personal Pearl Harbor awaiting them. Otani is seldom seen; he usually appears in the person of bland assistants, and as Logan and Goetz disembarked from their plane, a group of these informed the film makers that Shochiku had made an error in its financial reckoning; the bill was now much higher than the initial estimate. Producer Goetz objected.
Otani, certain that he held the stronger cards (after all, here were these Hollywood people in Japan, accompanied by an expensive cast, an expensive crew and expensive equipment), replied by raising the tab still more. Whereupon Goetz, himself a businessman as tough as tortoise shell, ended the negotiations and told his director they would have to make up their own Kabuki, N , Bunraku and all-girl opera company from among unattached, freelancing artists.
Meanwhile, the Tokyo press was publicizing the contretemps. Several papers, the Japan Times among them, implied that Shochiku was to be censured for having “acted in bad faith”; others, taking a pro-Shochiku, or perhaps simply an anti-Sayonara, line, expressed themselves as delighted that the Americans would not have the opportunity to “degrade our finest artistic traditions” by representing them in a film version of “a vulgar novel that is in no way a compliment to the Japanese people.”
The papers antagonistic to the Sayonara project especially relished reporting the fact that Logan had cast a Mexican actor, Ricardo Montalban, in the part of a ranking Kabuki performer (Kabuki is traditionally an all-male enterprise; the grander, more difficult roles are those of women, played by female impersonators, and Montalban’s assignment was to portray one such) and then had had the “effrontery” to try and hire a genuine Kabuki star to substitute for Montalban in the dance sequences, which, one Japanese writer remarked, was much the same as “asking Ethel Barrymore to be a stand-in.”
All in all, the local press was touchily interested in what was taking place down in Kyoto—the city, two hundred and thirty miles south of Tokyo, in which, because of its plethora of historic temples, its photogenic blue hills and misty lakes, and its carefully preserved old-Japan atmosphere, with elegant geisha quarter and paper-lantern-lighted streets, the Sayonara staff had decided to take most of their location shots.
And, all in all, down in Kyoto the company was encountering as many difficulties as its ill-wishers could have hoped for. In particular, the Americans were finding it a problem to muster nationals willing to appear in their film—an interesting phenomenon, considering how desirous the average Japanese is of having himself photographed. True, the movie makers had rounded up a ragbag-picking of N players and puppeteers not under contract to Shochiku, but they were having the devil’s own time assembling a presentable all-girl opera company. (These peculiarly Japanese institutions resemble a sort of single-sex, innocent-minded Folies Bergère; oddly, few men attend their performances, the audiences being, on the whole, as all-girl as the cast.) In the hope of bridging this gap, the Sayonara management had distributed posters advertising a contest to select “the one hundred most beautiful girls in Japan.” The affair, for which they expected a big turnout, was scheduled to take place at two o’clock on a Thursday afternoon in the lobby of the Kyoto Hotel. But there were no winners, because there were no contestants; none showed up.
Producer Goetz, one of the disappointed judges, resorted next, and with some success, to the expedient of luring ladies out of Kyoto’s cabarets and bars. Kyoto—or, for that matter, any Japanese city—is a barfly’s Valhalla. Proportionately, the number of premises purveying strong liquor is higher than in New York, and the diversity of these saloons—which range from cozy bamboo closets accommodating four customers to many-storied, neon-hued temples of fun featuring, in accordance with the Japanese aptitude for imitation, cha-cha bands and rock ’n’ rollers and hillbilly quartets and chanteuses existentialistes and Oriental vocalists who sing Cole Porter songs with American Negro accents—is extraordinary.
But however low or however deluxe the establishment may be, one thing remains the same: there is always on hand a pride of hostesses to cajole and temper the clientele. Great numbers of these sleekly coifed, smartly costumed, relentlessly festive jolies jeunes filles sit sipping Parfaits d’Amour (a syrupy violet-colored cocktail currently fashionable in these surroundings) while performing the duties of a poor man’s geisha girl; that is, lightening the spirits, without necessarily corrupting the morals, of weary married men and tense, anxious-to-be-amused bachelors. It is not unusual to see four to a customer.
But when the Sayonara officials began to try to corral them, they had to contend with the circumstance that night-workers, such as they were dealing with, have no taste for the early rising that picture-making demands. To acquire their talents, and see that the ladies were on the set at the proper hour, certain of the film’s personnel did everything but distribute engagement rings.
Still another annoyance for the makers of Sayonara involved the United States Air Force, whose cooperation was vital, but which, though it had previously promised help, now had fits of shilly-shallying, because it gravely objected to one of the basic elements of the plot—that during the Korean War some American Air Force men who married Japanese were shipped home. This, the Air Force complained, may have been the practice, but it was not official Pentagon policy. Given the choice of cutting out the offending premise, and thereby removing a sizable section of the script’s entrails, or permitting it to remain, and thereby forfeiting Air Force aid, Logan selected surgery.
Then, there was the problem of Miss Miiko Taka, who had been cast as the Takarazuka dancer capable of arousing Air Force Officer Brando’s passion. Having first tried to obtain Audrey Hepburn for the part, and found that Miss Hepburn thought not, Logan had started looking for an “unknown,” and had come up with Miss Taka, poised, pleasant, an unassuming, quietly attractive nisei, innocent of acting experience, who stepped out of a clerking job with a Los Angeles travel bureau into what she called “this Cinderella fantasy.”
Although her acting abilities—as well as those of another Sayonara principal, Red Buttons, an ex-burlesque, ex-television jokester, who, like Miss Taka, had had meager dramatic training—were apparently causing her director some concern, Logan, admirably undaunted, cheerful despite all, was heard to say, “We’ll get away with it. As much as possible, I’ll just keep their faces straight and their mouths shut. Anyway, Brando, he’s going to be so great he’ll give us what we need.” But as for giving, “I give up,” Brando repeated. “I’m going to give up. I’m going to sit back.
