Free The View from the Bridge by Nicholas Meyer

contributions as writer of the novel and screenplay; he sought my opinion on other matters, including casting. I suggested Peter O’Toole as Holmes, a seemingly inevitable role for the tall, lanky Brit, but he and Herb had not had a good working relationship on the musical version of Goodbye, Mr. Chips. When I heard that Robert Duvall was interested in playing Watson, I sparked to the idea. In the novel, I tried hard to emphasize a revisionist doctor, not the bumbler offered by Nigel Bruce. Our aim was to get audiences to look at these people afresh, and what could be fresher than Robert Duvall as Dr. Watson? But can he do an English accent? wondered Herb.
    Herb Ross, formerly a choreographer, was married to Nora Kaye, the greatest dramatic ballerina this country had ever produced, and he never made a move without her. Kaye had been a devastatingly powerful and dynamic dancer, and when she opened her mouth, Lower East Side New Yawk came out, and with it a shrewd intelligence. On the day Duvall came to meet with us (stars do not audition, they “meet”), Herb and Nora had been feuding on the phone, hanging up on each other all morning. Duvall was also up for the role of Woody Guthrie in the forthcoming Bound for Glory and to our consternation he arrived in character—as Woody Guthrie. Herb and I glanced at each other, bewildered, as Duvall conversed in his Oakie twang. After fifteen or twenty minutes, he rose to leave and then, as a seeming afterthought, produced an audiocassette. “I brung you this so’s you kin hear me talk like Dr. Watson,” he explained before departing.
    Wouldn’t you know, there was no cassette player around for love or money, except one in someone’s BMW, parked outside Herb’s office. The next thing, eight of us had crammed into that car like clowns in a circus and listened to Duvall’s impeccable Oxbridge. “He can do it!” I exclaimed, vindicated.
    Not so fast. Herb had to play the tape for Nora. In due course a cassette player was found and he held it to the office phone and prefaced playing it by saying, “Nora, listen to this. Can you tell this man isn’t English?”
    In light of their recent spat that was all the opening she needed. On the extension, I could hear her: “Hoibert—is dat Mel Brooks? You wanna trow de pichure in the terlit, just youse dat poison, whatever. Don’t take my woid for it,” she went on. “Ask an English poison. Ask Sam.”
    Herb hung up the phone, devastated. Me, too. I could see my actor getting away. . . . “Sam” turned out to be the Rosses’ friend, actress Samantha Eggar (who would later play Mrs. Watson in the movie). Herb followed Nora’s instructions and, with the same preface, played the tape for Eggar, who hesitated as I held my breath on the extension again. “Well, it’s awfully good,” she acknowledged carefully, “but he’s trying too hard, isn’t he?”
    Damn. Now Herb was really spooked. “Can we call one other English person?” I begged. “And this time, can I ask the question?”
    We found a British secretary in the office of a studio executive—having a British secretary is considered el swell out here—and I said to her, “We’re having a debate over whether this person is Australian or South African. Can you tell us?” My knuckles were white on the receiver as Herb played the damn cassette again.
    â€œOh,” she corrected, “neither. That’s BBC English. That’s an Englishman.” Which is how Duvall became Dr. Watson.
    Later, Herb asked me what I thought of getting Laurence Olivier to play Professor Moriarty. It took all my self-control to pretend this was a regular question. Laurence Olivier, my childhood idol, he who had introduced me to Shakespeare, whose movies Hamlet , Richard III , Henry V , Wuthering Heights , and The Beggar’s Opera I had sat through a