Richard Quine: Dying Is Easy
A journalist recalls his fateful encounter with Hollywood's most tragic comedy director
If Quine remains best known for his very successful comedies, there is a dark streak running through his work that stemmed from personal tragedies enough to make getting dumped by Kim Novak seem like a piece of cake. In 1987, then only in his 60s, he deeply resented the fact he wasn’t able to work anymore in Hollywood. And the hunting shotgun he used to kill himself sounds all too close to the one that crippled his first wife, actress Susan Peters, on New Year’s Day, 1945. They had been married just more than a year and were hunting for duck near San Diego. “All my life, I’ll hear that shot,” Quine said in a 1946 interview. Even if she kept up a brave front for a few years, both with and without Quine, the very gifted Peters’ career (a great hope for MGM after her Oscar-nominated turn in Random Harvest) had been cut short, and she starved herself to death in October 1952, at 31.
When I met Quine, he was still ruminating on his past humiliations — among them the nightmare that was The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980), his second collaboration with Peter Sellers (and the last film on which he would work), and the picture he was supposed to produce and direct for Mickey Rooney’s company, with the premonitory working title The Picture That Nobody Should See, over which he sued and was countersued. Maybe, as his friend Blake Edwards said at the time, he was simply tired of waiting for the phone to ring. Or maybe, as he pressed the trigger in that gloomy Beverly Hills house, Quine was trying to silence the earlier shot he really had kept hearing all his life. *
RICHARD QUINE AT COLUMBIA | Los Angeles County Museum of Art | Through Sat., Aug. 16 | www.lacma.org
Philippe Garnier is the Los Angeles–based film correspondent for Libération and the author of the books Honni soit qui Malibu: Quelques ecrivains à Hollywood and Bon pied, bon oeil: Deux rencontres avec André De Toth, le dernier borgne d’Hollywood.
Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story contained a misplaced final line which was removed August 11, 2008.
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