Chapter 9: Ross Hunter

Hollywood’s Golden Boy

Ross Hunter
1920-1996

The freshmen girls in Mr. Fuss’ English class swooned every time their teacher diagrammed a sentence or conjugated a verb. After all, how many faculty members walked the halls of Cleveland’s Glenville High School with piercing blue eyes and wavy blond hair, the same traits that his female students fawned over at their weekend slumber parties as they ogled his photograph in the school yearbook? Because of his young admirers, the handsome, Jewish kid from Cleveland’s East Side would become better known as Ross Hunter, Hollywood’s highest-paid, Oscar-nominated movie producer of his era. His rise to the top of Tinseltown’s elite also would demonstrate the don’t-ask-don’t-tell disdain of gay society in the motion-picture industry.

Martin Fuss was born on May 6, 1920, the second of three children and the only son of Yiddish-speaking Austrian natives Isadore Eizik and Anna Rosen Fuss. His parents immigrated to New York, then Cleveland, in 1904 and bought a $13,000 home at 9510 Yale Ave. south of St. Clair Avenue. Isadore made a comfortable living as a tailor and vice-president of the Mutual Cloak & Suit Company in its downtown headquarters at 1220 W. Sixth St. He and Anna welcomed their firstborn, Freda, shortly after their wedding in 1907. They became parents of a third child, Min, in the early-‘30s.

By all accounts, Martin -- whose last name rhymed with “juice” -- was a bright, precocious boy. In the ninth grade at Empire Junior High School, classmates marveled at his depth of intellectual curiosity as he frantically waved his arms to recite a Shakespearean sonnet or translate a German adjective into English. And nobody doubted that he would write his own success story after graduation. “He sat directly behind me that year in two classes taught by Miss Moskopp,” wrote "Cleveland Press" reporter Bill Barrett in a 1976 article. “By the end of the fourth period every day, I was a nervous wreck. It was because of Martin Fuss. Smartest kid I ever saw. He knew all the answers. Miss Moskopp loved him. I couldn’t stand him.”

Hollywood itself could have made a movie about Martin’s motion-picture debut. After graduating from Glenville in 1938, he earned a Master of Arts degree in theater and English from Western Reserve University while working for tuition as an usher at Playhouse Square. He also acted in productions at both the Cleveland Play House and Cain Park. Toward the end of World War II, he served in the U.S. Army’s intelligence unit for a year, before returning home to Cleveland and his first teaching job at his high school alma mater. He later likened the experience to a “'Welcome Back, Kotter' deal,” referring to the late-‘70s TV show about a teacher in an inner-city school in Brooklyn, New York.

The girls fell hard for the dashing 24-year-old Martin. They insisted he should be in pictures. He joked that they should mail his photograph to an L.A. talent agent. That was all they needed to hear. They sealed both a snapshot and a petition into an envelope and fired them off to Paramount Pictures, demanding that the studio give him a screen test. But within days, the moguls at Columbia Pictures caught wind of the package and requested his presence on the West Coast. Thoroughly impressed with his on-camera charisma, the company offered him a three-year, $1,000-a-week contract. Martin became Hollywood’s newest stud on the silver screen. “What happened to me at Glenville was something that would be regarded as pretty farfetched (today),” he said about his students’ petition 30 years later.

Before any filming began, casting director Maxwell Arnow took the trouble to change Martin’s name to the more commercially appealing Ross Hunter. The studio then put him to work in a string of 10 clunkers between 1944 and 1946. He marked his debut in the leading role of Gordon Pearson opposite Judy Canova in the musical, "Louisiana Hayride," about a girl from the sticks who’s duped by a couple of con men and their promises of fame and fortune in Hollywood. His sophomore effort took place in "Ever Since Venus," about an inventor who markets a new brand of kiss-proof lipstick in the cosmetics industry. Columbia spent so little money to produce the flick that Ross dubbed it “Ever Since Penis.” In his third film, "She’s a Sweetheart," he played a furloughed soldier in a boardinghouse.

When he wasn’t on the set, Ross posed for publicity stills that trumpeted him as a “rising young star.” "Modern Screen" magazine even bowed to studio pressure and named him “the Most Popular Actor” of 1944. “Who the hell is this guy, anyway?” sniffed gossip maven Hedda Hopper in her column.

Ross’ resume continued to balloon with B movies, from "The Bandit of Sherwood Forest" with Cornel Wilde and Edgar Buchanan to "Sweetheart of Sigma Chi," a low-budget film that Columbia made in a mere 10 days. Ross chalked up his movie credentials as “total horrors,” the same description that producer Harry Cohn used to sum up Ross’ performing skills. It turned out that he was the world’s lousiest actor, and Columbia dropped him from its roster as soon as his contract expired in 1947.

To earn a paycheck, Ross resorted to teaching English in an L.A. high school for $57.50 a week. He also studied film production, budgeting and editing in his spare time. By 1950, Universal hired him first as a dialogue coach, then as an associate producer. And a new career that would span nearly 30 years and 45 films at the studio was born. "Flame of Araby," with Jeff Chandler as a Bedouin chief and Maureen O’Hara as a Tunisian princess, marked his behind-the-scenes debut in 1951. He would ultimately work as an assistant on five more films, including "The Duel at Silver Creek" and "Son of Ali Baba," before Universal promoted him to one of its head producers in 1953.

For Ross’ first assignment as a production chief, the studio directed him to the Ann Sheriden vehicle, "Take Me to Town," about a barroom singer with a shady past in a small logging town in the Pacific Northwest. His next two projects included "All I Desire" with the formidable Barbara Stanwyck and "Taza, Son of Cochise" with a novice actor named Rock Hudson. All three films were directed by Douglas Sirk, who shared Ross’ straightforward philosophy about movie-making: To make fans either laugh or cry by the time they leave the theater. The plan worked since their films made money for the studio. “When I started producing, the first question I asked was, ‘Why aren’t they doing any love stories?’ All they were doing was westerns and wars and Arabians,” Ross said in a 1976 "Plain Dealer" interview. “I remember asking why the movie theaters opened at six p.m. instead of at noon when I was a kid. I was told it was because there were no pictures for women. I knew how dumb that was because, as a producer of plays, I knew that women made the selection of what the men were going to see.”

Ross’ modus operandi paved the way for his first box-office blockbuster, "Magnificent Obsession," in 1954. The film -- a remake of the 1935 original that starred Irene Dunne and Robert Taylor -- featured Jane Wyman as a physician’s wife whose life collides with a reckless playboy after her husband’s unexpected death of a heart attack. In his second Hunter production after "Taza," Hudson was cast to play the uncontrollable jet-setter. Ross also added a personal touch to the script by naming one of the film’s minor characters, “Dr. Albert Fuss,” as a tribute to his family in Cleveland.

Critics applauded the flick. The "New York Times" called it a “handsome” weeper with a “moist text.“ Wyman was even nominated for a “Best Actress” Oscar for her performance. Ross knew he had hit upon a profitable combination of sentiment and romance that dictated the genre of most films he would produce for the rest of his career. His sure-fire recipe to portray heartfelt relationships on the screen also filtered into his off-the-set passion for other men, especially the attractive interior decorator he met at the rival MGM studios.

By 1955, the L.A.-born-and-bred Jacques Mapes had established himself as an innovative set designer for 25 movies, including the 1950 biopic, "The Jackie Robinson Story," about major-league baseball’s first African-American player, and the 1952 musical, "Singin’ in the Rain," with Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor and Debbie Reynolds. He also designed the set interiors during the first two seasons of the top-rated TV show, "Letter to Loretta," with Loretta Young in 1953 and 1954. He was also nearly seven years Ross’ senior. And the couple nurtured a profound personal and professional relationship for the next 41 years.

But the studio kept the relationship on the down-low. It routinely linked Ross romantically with actresses like Barbara Rush, Martha Hyer and Ludmilla Tcherina. Likewise, Jacques was paired with Jane Powell to disguise his companionship with Ross, who, even as late as the ‘70s, escorted Tina Sinatra to premieres of his movies to make it look like they were a couple.

Despite the charade, Ross continued his mission to produce sugary-sweet films, again teaming Wyman with Hudson in "All That Heaven Allows." If their chemistry could work in one movie, he reasoned, it could certainly duplicate itself in another. The script called for Wyman to portray an upper-class New England widow, who falls in love with a much younger landscaper to the dismay of her children and country-club peers. Ross’ prediction for another box-office smash backfired. Movie reviewers trashed the production, with the "New York Times’" Bosley Crowther criticizing it as a “solid and sensible drama that plainly had to give way to outright emotional bulldozing and a paving of easy clichés.” The film reaped little profit, and Wyman and Hudson never appeared together in a Hunter film again.

The movie compounded Universal’s financial woes. In 1956, the studio’s production manager warned that, if the company didn’t cash in on another hit, it would have no choice but to shutter its operations. No problem, Ross thought. He had just read a script that was so “sickly sweet, so pure that it could make you vomit.” But the project would need cross-promotion with a hit song to sell tickets. So he hired the composing team of Jay Livingston and Ray Evans to write the title track (although, years later, Ross embellished the story by telling reporters he recruited the better-known songwriter Sammy Cahn for the job). The movie was called "Tammy and the Bachelor"; the tune was titled “Tammy”; and the light-hearted mix of film, melody and lyrics warmed strait-laced audiences of the ‘50s. It also saved the studio from bankruptcy. “The song put it over,” Ross remembered in 1977. “You have to be pretty smart to be a really good producer, y’know.”

The film starred the effervescent Debbie Reynolds as 17-year-old Tammy Tyree, who lives with her grandpa on a houseboat, the Ellen B., that’s docked in the Mississippi swamps. One day, wealthy pilot Peter Brent, played by Leslie Nielsen, crashes his plane near their home. And Tammy falls in love with the debonair airman while she nurses him back to health. Critics laughed off the romantic teen comedy as “naïve” and “corny,” but audiences didn’t care. In July of 1957, the National Screen Council honored the movie with its monthly “box-office blue-ribbon award.” Livingston and Evans also scored the “Best Song” Oscar for “Tammy” the following year.

Ross continued to surf the wave of success in 1957 by producing back-to-back remakes of the drama, "Interlude," and the comedy, "My Man Godfrey," both starring June Allyson. His 1958 credits included the melodrama, "The Restless Years," in which Sandra Dee portrayed an illegitimate teen in a small-minded town. And in "This Happy Feeling," director Blake Edwards cast the perky Reynolds to play impulsive Janet Blake, who develops a crush on a retired stage actor.

Ross’ breakthrough film as a producer hit the screen in 1959, when audiences were introduced to the onscreen love connection between Doris Day and Rock Hudson in "Pillow Talk." With Michael Gordon in the director’s chair, the screenplay called for Day’s character as an interior decorator to clash over the use of a telephone party line with Hudson, who played a casanova composer with a bevy of girlfriends. “(Doris) was the girl next door,” Ross said in his recap about the movie’s success. “The housewife liked her because she was like them. But all of a sudden, she was too much like them. So I decided I would take her out of the kitchen and glamorize her. Then the housewife would say, ‘If she can make it, maybe I can.’”

He was right. The romantic comedy cleaned up in Oscar awards and nominations. It won a “Best Screenplay” statuette for Russell Rouse, Clarence Greene, Stanley Shapiro and Maurice Richlin. Day was up for a “Best Actress” trophy, only to lose to Simone Signoret for Room at the Top. Thelma Ritter, who played Day’s alcoholic maid, was nominated for the “Best Supporting Actress” award. The movie also scored nominations in the color-art direction and musical-score categories.

Ross became Hollywood’s golden boy. With Universal’s blessing to produce glossy movies with limitless expense, he again teamed with Sirk to make Imitation of Life with Lana Turner. As the most expensive film ever produced up until 1959, its budget called for more than $1 million alone for its star’s wardrobe. And while critics panned the movie as a mere “soap opera,” the flick raked in $6.4 million at the box office, making it the ninth highest-grossing film of the year and the most successful picture in Universal’s catalog for nearly a decade afterward. It also reinvented Turner, whose career had been flagging ever since her lover had been stabbed to death by her daughter the year before. “I decided if I couldn’t discover new stars, I could at least rediscover old stars,” Ross said about casting Turner in the movie. “I didn’t think they had lost their image. It might have faded a little. But I thought it could be brought back, even if in a different way.”

The formula worked in the early ‘60s. Ross paired Turner with Anthony Quinn in "Portrait in Black." He cast Day opposite Rex Harrison in "Midnight Lace." And he brought together Susan Hayward and John Gavin in "Back Street." Then his winning streak came to an abrupt halt.

In 1961, Universal green-lighted Ross’ idea to adapt Rodgers & Hammerstein’s smash Broadway musical, "Flower Drum Song," for the screen. Calling upon Miyoshi Umeki (who had won a “Best Supporting Actress” Oscar for Sayonara in 1957) to reprise her Tony Award-nominated performance as Mei Li, Ross and director Henry Koster also brought on board Jack Soo from the New York production to play Umeki’s love interest, Sammy Fong.

The script’s plot was complicated and somewhat difficult to follow. In a nutshell, Li travels with her father from China to San Francisco for an arranged marriage to Fong, a nightclub owner who’s already involved with his leading showgirl, Linda Low (played by Nancy Kwan). So, Fong sends Li to the house of Master Wang to present her to the landlord’s son, Wang Ta, who’s also infatuated with the exotic dancer. But once he sees her strip-tease act, he becomes disillusioned, gets drunk and sleeps with his childhood friend, Helen Chao. When Li accidentally discovers the rendezvous, she and her dad resurrect the marriage contract to Fong, who has since proposed to Low. Li then realizes that she’s in love with Ta after all, and the couple tie the knot in a double ceremony with the Fongs.

Confused yet? So were most Americans who saw Ross’ cinematic version. Besides, the movie’s score contained mostly unforgettable music and lyrics. And post-Korean War tension against the Asian culture continued to reverberate across the country. For the first time, one of Ross’ projects lost money at the box office. Still, its costly production values netted the film five Oscar nominations in the art direction, cinematography, costume design, sound and music categories.

Ross rebounded between 1961 and 1963 by making three consecutive films with Sandra Dee, whose last Hunter role was as Lana Turner’s 16-year-old daughter in "Imitation of Life." In two Tammy sequels, "Tammy, Tell Me True" and "Tammy and the Doctor," Dee replaced Reynolds in the title role of the Louisiana teen. And in "If a Man Answers," she played opposite her then-husband Bobby Darin in a lighthearted comedy about a rich socialite who tries to train a photographer to be a perfect husband. The film garnered two Golden Globe nominations: one for “Best Comedy” and another for “Best Supporting Actor” for castmate Cesar Romero.

The trilogy of flicks made more than enough cash at the box office to compensate for "Flower Drum Song’s" losses. And Universal recognized Ross’ worth by throwing a star-studded celebration in its commissary, where emcee Carl Reiner announced that the studio had offered the former Cleveland high school teacher a seven-year contract worth $75 million. The deal was, by far, the most lucrative of its kind at the time. It also afforded Ross and Jacques a luxurious lifestyle in the most exclusive enclave of Beverly Hills.

The couple built a two-story mansion on the highest hill of Trousdale Estates. To get to the top of the incline, visitors had to navigate their cars up the curved driveway to a set of marble steps that led to a mammoth front door with lion’s-head handles. Four white, brick columns also flanked the entrance.

Once inside, displays of Waterford crystal, candelabras and potted palm trees greeted guests in the foyer. The house also contained a mirror-lined dining room that overlooked an in-ground swimming pool in the backyard, the Los Angeles skyline on the horizon and, on a smog-free day, the Pacific Ocean in the distance. The master bedroom upstairs -- with its floor-to-ceiling windows -- was perched so high up that nobody could peek in, even in the couple’s most passionate moments.

A movie-projection room afforded ample space to scope out Ross’ films. The muted colors of the living room showed off the pair’s vast collection of European antiques, sculptures and cabinetry. They also provided the perfect backdrop to spotlight Ross’ quirky fetishes for collecting more than 500 paintings of lemons and an assortment of zebra-inspired accessories, including a black-and-white rug made from the hide of a zebra that once roamed the African bush. “I wanted the house to represent all the things I like,” he told future best-selling British author Barbara Taylor Bradford in 1971, when she was writing her syndicated column, “Designing Woman,” that appeared in 183 American newspapers, including the "Cleveland Press." “You might say I wanted the public to know I wasn’t kidding, and that what I put on the screen I really like myself.”

Between 1963 and 1967, Ross produced eight respectable romantic comedies and dramas, such as the screen adaptation of the Enid Bagnold play, "The Chalk Garden," which earned a “Best Supporting Actress” Oscar for Dame Edith Evans in the role of an English widow in search of a governess (Deborah Kerr) for her troubled granddaughter (Hayley Mills). Other projects included the 1965 comedy, "The Art of Love," in which Dick Van Dyke played an American painter in Paris, where he fakes his own death to hike the value of his art pieces. And for "The Pad and How to Use It," actor James Farentino walked out of the Golden Globe award ceremony in 1967 with the “Most Promising Newcomer” trophy for portraying a bachelor who finds his ideal mate at the symphony.

Then Ross hit paydirt with one of the most upbeat flicks of the ‘60s. In the 1967 musical, "Thoroughly Modern Millie," Julie Andrews -- who had already captured audiences’ hearts in "Mary Poppins" and "The Sound of Music" -- played a fresh-faced Kansas girl, who bursts onto the New York social scene eager to become a woman of the world in the roaring ‘20s. The film owed much of its success to its charming score, whose most recognizable song was “Baby Face.” Ross also had to acquire the rights to the 1919 tune, “Jazz Baby,” to use in the movie since its owner, General Mills, had relied on the song as an advertising jingle to promote its breakfast cereal, Wheaties, for more than 40 years.

With critics salivating over the finished product and theatergoers snapping up tickets, "Millie" earned $15 million in the U.S. alone, making it Universal’s most successful movie to date. It also capped off the year with an impressive five Golden Globe and seven Oscar nominations. At the Golden Globes, Carol Channing beat the competition in the “Best Supporting Actress” category for her role as an eccentric widow. And composer Elmer Bernstein snagged an Oscar for “Best Original Score.”

Ross’ latest box-office triumph offered him a chance to form his own production company, with Universal as his films’ sole distributor. Naturally, he named the firm after himself and brought Jacques into the fold as his primary associate producer. The partners’ first project together was Rosie!, a screen adaptation of actress Ruth Gordon’s play, "A Very Rich Woman." For their director, they called upon David Lowell Rich, who then cast Rosalind Russell in the title role of a generous, wealthy woman whose two daughters (Audrey Meadows and Vanessa Brown) try to commit her to an insane asylum before she can spend every dime of her fortune. Rosie’s granddaughter (Sandra Dee) thwarts the plan by intervening in her aunts’ scheme.

The production received glowing reviews. Critics bandied about Russell’s name for an Oscar. But Universal failed to promote the flick. As a result, Ross lost money on his venture for the second time in his career. He wouldn’t see his name on the silver screen again for two years. It took a 1968 Arthur Hailey thriller to bring him out of exile.

Set in Chicago in the middle of a blizzard, "Airport" contained all the elements of a blockbuster that Ross required: romance and infidelity, danger and disaster, an ensemble cast of charismatic characters. Director George Seaton based the screenplay on the Hailey novel, in which a mentally ill passenger boards a Rome-bound Boeing 707 with a homemade bomb in his suitcase. He hired heartthrobs Burt Lancaster as the airport’s manager, Dean Martin as the co-pilot and Van Heflin as the suicidal bomber. Jacqueline Bissett as the pregnant chief stewardess and Jean Seberg as the airport’s public-relations manager provided eye candy for the screen. And Maureen Stapleton as Heflin’s wife and Helen Hayes as an elderly stowaway dispensed their award-winning acting skills in supporting roles.

Ross allocated nearly 70 percent of his $11.5 million budget to the $18,000-a-day rental fee for the 707 used in the film. Crews then shot all the location scenes in early 1969 in the terminal and on the tarmac of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, where a Minnesota winter could dump all the snow that was needed for a blustery backdrop. But leave it to Murphy’s Law, for a sign that now hangs in the airport says that “the weather remained stubbornly clear, forcing the director to use plastic ‘snow’ to create the appropriate effect.”

"Airport" opened in movie theaters nationwide on March 5, 1970. By the end of the year, its box-office take worldwide grossed a staggering $100.4 million, an amount that kept Universal in the black for the next three years. The film also scored a whopping 11 Oscar nominations, including one for Ross for “Best Producer” in the only time the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would recognize him for his work. (He didn’t win, but Hayes took home the “Best Supporting Actress” statuette.) “I must confess. I believe 'Airport' became such a hit because it was the only movie of its kind on the screen at the time,” Ross said six months after the film’s release. “We gave audiences something they couldn’t get any place else.”

Despite the movie’s record-breaking numbers, Ross never produced another project for Universal again. Deliberately vague with reporters, he claimed he couldn’t find another script that could rival or top Airport. In April of 1971, he and Jacques moved Ross Hunter Productions into a suite of comfy offices at Columbia Pictures, the same studio that dropped Ross from its actors’ roster nearly 25 years earlier.

But their association with the company didn’t last long, thanks to the only movie they ever made for their new bosses. To say a remake ---a musical one, at that -- of "Lost Horizon" almost drove Columbia out of business would be an understatement. But nobody foresaw the film’s colossal failure before and during its production.

Director Frank Capra first adapted the James Hilton novel for the screen in 1937, with Ronald Colman portraying a British diplomat on a hijacked DC-10 that crashes in the Himalayan mountains of Tibet. After he and 90 fellow Westerners are rescued, an English-speaking postulant guides them to the temperate paradise of Shangri-La, where its inhabitants enjoy youthful looks and long lives.

Thirty-five years later, Ross felt compelled to produce an updated version of the film. He and Jacques hired gay playwright Larry Kramer to write the screenplay. They contracted with the songwriting team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David to compose the music. And they asked 35-year-old Englishman Charles Jarrott to direct the project.
With the crew in place, they chose Peter Finch to play the diplomat with a supporting all-star cast that included Sally Kellerman, John Gielgud, Liv Ullman, Michael York, Olivia Hussey, George Kennedy and Charles Boyer.

The set was as impressive as its actors. Ross had a nearly four-acre Shangri-La built on the Columbia lot for a half-million dollar price tag. It featured a 600-foot-long mountain range made of plaster, four glimmering swimming pools, two 40-foot-high waterfalls and an 80-foot-high monastery. The studio’s secretaries often spent their lunch hours on the set to gaze at its magnificence. All told, the total production cost amounted to just shy of $7 million, making the film one of the priciest to produce in the early ‘70s.

The movie opened on New Year’s Day of 1973 to a chorus of critics’ boos for the tone-deaf and dance-challenged cast of actors. "New York" magazine reviewer John Simon wondered if the reels came in garbage, not film, cans. The always-opinionated Pauline Kael of the "New Yorker" wrote that “there’s probably no way to rethink this material without throwing it all away.” Audiences agreed. American box offices pulled in an embarrassing $3 million in ticket sales, which didn’t recoup even half of what Ross’ production company spent to remake the flop. Still, he stood by his latest baby. “Everyone is entitled to his opinion, and I wouldn’t tell a critic what to write,” he said three months after the movie’s release. “But they have to realize for whom I’m making movies. I’ve learned that people want to see films offering some love, beauty and hope in a world where these things don’t seem to exist. I believe they do exist, and that’s what I want to give.”

Columbia’s top brass didn’t see it that way. To them, "Lost Horizon" was a lost investment. At 53, Ross’ golden touch was starting to tarnish. The utopia that he strived to bring to movie buffs was taking a backseat to thrillers like "The Exorcist," westerns like "The Sting" and coming-of-age flicks like "American Graffiti," all of which were the highest-grossing films of 1973. So, Ross and Jacques parted ways with the studio, dismayed with the direction Hollywood had taken in its movie-making. “It didn’t work. What more can I say?” Ross said. “I put up a front and went out and promoted ('Lost Horizon'). But the critics in this country just massacred us. They were waiting for me to stumble. And, in all honesty, I don’t think it was as bad as they said it was.”

After his production company gathered up its equipment and moved from its suite of offices on the Columbia lot, Ross floated from one independent studio to the next. He pitched movie ideas, only to leave behind scraps of footage to unfinished projects. In 1975, he joined Paramount Pictures and decided to switch to a medium to which all deposed motion-picture producers went: television. His first made-for-TV movie, "The Lives of Jenny Nolan," aired on NBC later that year.

The program starred Shirley Jones as a news reporter who investigates a politician’s assassination while trying to solve her husband’s mysterious death. But critics decimated the production, singling out Jones’ wardrobe over the script as better-suited for the screen. Ross blamed the network for its interest in meeting a deadline than taking the time to make a quality product. He also lambasted himself for being “quite naïve about the television-network scheme of things.”

A year later, Ross returned to NBC to produce "The Moneychangers," a four-part mini-series based on another best-selling Arthur Hailey novel about a couple of high-ranking bankers who are in a power struggle to become CEO. He asked network executives for a $1 million budget to cast the film with household names, including Kirk Douglas and Christopher Plummer in the leading roles. Two hours later, they gave him the go-ahead. And in December of 1976, each of the parts aired on successive Sundays throughout the month. The critics adored the series. “When I went to the network this time, I decided to lay it on the line,” Ross told Plain Dealer television critic William Hickey two weeks before the first installment was broadcast. “I was burned once and was determined that would never happen again. I was pleasantly surprised by their attitude of cooperation.”

Because of "The Moneychangers’" reception, NBC inked a deal with Ross that gave him ownership to the negatives of all the films he’d produce. It also agreed to grant his company generous production schedules and financing packages. The contract cleared the way for him and Jacques to make "A Family Upside Down" in 1978 with Fred Astaire and Helen Hayes as a retired couple who move in with their son while Astaire’s character recuperates from a heart attack. Ross wrote the story himself. “I left the script at Fred’s house one afternoon, and he called me at one in the morning,” he told Astaire biographer Bob Thomas in 1984. “He wasn’t sure he was capable of such a dramatic part. I told him to forget it. ‘You’ll knock the hell out of it.’ We talked for four hours, and at the end, Fred agreed to do the movie.”

Later that year, Astaire copped an Emmy for his role, and the program would be named the “best motion picture made for TV” at the Golden Globes. Ross and company were psyched to take on their next project, "The Best Place to Be," which was based on the Helen Van Slyke novel. With Donna Reed in the role of a widow who’s having an affair with a much-younger man, the story took place in Cleveland and Shaker Heights. It also cost $3.5 million and took 10 weeks to shoot the scenes on 63 different sets to make it on the air in time for the all-important May sweeps period of 1979. The harried schedule was so nerve-wracking that Ross came down with a case of shingles. He never again produced another movie for either television or the big screen because of the hassles. “Time, not money, is the element that separates movies made for TV and a real, honest-to-God feature film,” he groaned to UPI reporter Vernon Scott. “You can always cut budgets, but you can’t cut time. Nobody can write or produce well under duress.”

By January of 1981, Ross found solace in directing dinner-theater productions, including "The Gingerbread Lady" with Vera Miles at the Beverly Playhouse in New Orleans. He simultaneously toyed with the thought of producing the film, "The Jazz Babies," with Carol Channing as the leader of an all-girl band, but nothing ever came of it. After the play wrapped up its month-long run, he and Jacques quietly retired to their Beverly Hills mansion to rest on their laurels. In a 1985 interview, Ross reflected on his catalog of movies. “They weren’t great, but they weren’t supposed to be,” he said. “I gave the public what they wanted: A chance to dream, to live vicariously, to see beautiful women, jewels, gorgeous clothes, melodrama.”

At home, on Sunday, March 10, 1996, Ross suddenly died of a heart attack. He was buried in the same Los Angeles cemetery as Natalie Wood and Donna Reed. His crypt is caddy-corner to that of Marilyn Monroe’s. And the lush, lavish movies he made throughout his career remain his legacy. “I don‘t want to hold a mirror up to life as it is,” he often said. “The way life looks in my pictures is the way I want life to be.”

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Ross Hunter was interred in the Corridor of Memories of the Pierce Brothers’ Westwood Village Memorial Park & Mortuary, 1218 Glendon Ave. in Los Angeles, California. He was 75 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser