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GEORGE MAGAZINE 2001
13 Days That Shook The World Kevin Costner reveals why he made his controversial new movie about the crisis that brought us to the brink of Nuclear War. By Susan Littwin. Photographs by Andrian Delucca. December/January 2001 Kevin Costner was a little over seven years old in 1962, when the world was on the brink of nuclear disaster. He was living with his parents in the working-class town of Compton, California, and remembers their hushed conversations and the duck-and-cover drills at school. But he really didn't understand the severity of it all until he watched a 1974 TV movie called The Missiles of October as a teenager. "We're talking about 13 days when the world hinged on one man in particular, John Kennedy, and how he and Bobby reacted," says Costner. "They're as golden in that moment as Lincoln was his entire four years." With Thirteen Days, the $8o million political thriller about the Cuban Missile Crisis, the man who helped further the Kennedy mystique in the controversial 1991 drama JFK is going back to Camelot. Costner is a producer and star of the compelling movie. It vividly recalls how Soviet missiles with the capacity to wipe out American cities as far as Washington, D.C., were positioned in Cuba, and how the Kennedy White House was caught up in an, agonizing series of diplomatic negotiations, back-channel maneuvers, and military exploits that finally got us to the safe side of an unthinkable brink of World War III. "What was great about that time was how many decisions the made in those with his deep tan and ice-blue eyes. "If they had made the wrong move on Thursday, we would never have gotten to the following Tuesday" indeed, the president was not only up against the Soviets, but also his own military leaders. Kennedy outraged his joint chiefs of staff when he ordered a naval blockade around Cuba instead of bombing the missile site, effectively sidestepping the chance of escalating military retribution from the Soviets -ending in all-out nuclear war. Costner's fascination with the Kennedy clan goes beyond moviemaking. In 1996, he took his son Joe, then eight years old, on a tour of historic ballparks. Ethel Kennedy, Bobby's widow, became their guide for the day at Boston's Fenway Park. She later introduced the actor to other members of the family. "People don't know the Kennedy’s," he says. "They know about the sad endings of their children, and people have gotten into their personal lives. But there's a whole generation that doesn't know what made them special. "John Kennedy brought poetry to humanity," he continues. "You read his speeches, and they're electric. Now people ask, 'Where's the beef? Where's the tax cut?' Kennedy had a philosophy about where the country should go." Yet for all his fascination with Kennedy, Costner has never played the man himself, Hollywood generally believes it's distracting when an iconic movie star plays an iconic figure like John Kennedy In JFK, Costner: portrayed New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison. In Thirteen Days, he is Kenneth O'Donnell, the White House aide and loyal friend who gave Kennedy the breathing room and support to make the life-and-death decisions. "The noise had to stop for John so he could hear in his own heart what was right," says Costner. O'Donnell, who died in 1977, was a tough-talking, ward-wise pol and former Harvard classmate of Bobby Kennedy's. Portraying him is hardly a star turn for the three-time Oscar winner. In the film, Costner's hair is dark and flat, his body is bulky, his suits are off-the-rack, and his Boston accent is working class. "That accent was like fingernails on a chalkboard to the rest of Washington society" says Costner. "Here come the damn Kennedy’s, you know, like a stink in the room to the powers that would be. In some ways, that accent united O'Donnell and the Kennedy’s. They sounded like they were from somewhere else." Although he was officially the president's appointments secretary, O'Donnell functioned more like a chief of staff and political adviser, and was also a charter member of what the press called Kennedy's "Irish Mafia." When the Cuban Missile Crisis heated up, it was JFK, RFK, and Kenny O'Donnell who could be found pacing the floor of the Oval Office. What was O'Donnell's role during the crisis? "I wasn't the person who solved the problem," says Costner, speaking as the character he plays. "I was the friend. That's not to say I didn't have a collective weight with these guys, but my job was to let my friends, who were really special people, have room to think." Costner read books about the Kennedy’s, studied photographs, and listened to hours of tapes of O'Donnell provided by O'Donnell's son Kevin. In one scene, just before Kennedy goes on national television to explain the crisis to the American public, O'Donnell pulls JFK aside, tells him to sit down, loosen his tie, and remember who he is and why he is there. Costner makes no claims about the historical accuracy of that moment. "It is, in fact, a movie, and there were certain things we had to do," he says. "Those things were interesting to me-to sit down with a friend and say,’ You need to take some time for yourself. I want to remind you that you're smart and you're good. I need to remind you of that because there are people in the world who will make you doubt yourself. That's not to say you're infallible. But as a friend,"' he says, again speaking as his character, "'I felt that's what I needed to do for him." It was Costner's own friendship with producer Armayan Bernstein, who worked with him on For Love of the Game that, helped get Thirteen Days off the ground. "We don't play golf, together,' says Bernstein. "We sit in a cafe or the backyard and we talk about life and death, men and women, our kids. We once had a talk about friendship, and we defined it as ‘The ide Back Gang’. You're in a bad spot in an Old West town and one of the guys gets shot off a horse. A friend is the one who rides back for you. If you're in jail or your head is in the noose, you know they're coming back." Bernstein needed someone to ride to the rescue of Thirteen Days. He told Costner about the project when their families vacationed together in Colorado. Bernstein said he had a strong script-a lot of it based on the O'Donnell tapes-but that the project had hit several snags. No studio wanted to green-light a movie with such a somber (i.e., uncommercial) subject matter and no bankable star. Thus began the opening bar of what might be called Dances with Movie Star. Costner knew the dance and asked to see the script. "I didn't want to insert myself into the project by putting pressure on friends. And I didn't know if I would even like the script," he says. But he read it and called Bernstein that very night. "I said,’ Look, I would be part of this film, and I would be part of it starting tonight. I don't have to check with agents. I make my own decisions. But you think about it."
Costner himself had two big questions: "Do I direct the movie? And who do I play? The gold in here is John, but we didn't want people watching the movie to see how well I did with John Kennedy instead of following the story," he says. He had similar thoughts about directing. "It could have, potentially distracted from the movie. People could say that Kevin Costner is not only directing, he's reinventing history," he says, a criticism leveled at both JFK and Dances with Wolves. Ultimately, he agreed to be a producer and offered to play O'Donnell; he also took on the unofficial role of defender of the script, written by David Self (The Haunting). "I protected the screenplay to the point that if they wanted to go in another direction, I was not going to do the movie," says Costner. He, Bernstein, and co-producer Peter Almond met with a slew of potential directors some of whom signed on, then left. "There were a lot of people who wanted to rewrite this script. They wanted changes on every page, 20 pages taken out, some pages made to not be as edgy as they were.' In one of them, O'Donnell is waiting in an anteroom while Bobby Kennedy meets with Russian ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. ”Who are you?” Dobrynin’s aide, a stern Russian woman, asks him. O’Donnell pauses, then answers, "I'm the friend." Everything I did in that movie revolved around that one line," says Costner. "It was a big signal to me." ”You need to be able to hear your own heart in order to live, because if you don't, there are a million things out there to tell you what to do," Costner says. He is talking now about his own career, which was practically bludgeoned to death when he made Waterworld in 1995 and followed that with the equally disastrous The Postman. Both projects skyrocketed millions of dollars over budget and were ridiculed endlessly by critics. But Costner stands by his decisions. "If you listen to that noise, you're going to have a very difficult time hearing yourself.” Roger Donaldson who directed Costner’s first major hit, 1987’s No Way Out, took on the director’s job for Thirteen Days. Bruce Greenwood was cast as John Kennedy, Steven Culp (Nurse Betty) as Bobby. They and Costner worked their way around the fact that the most famous of the three actors did not have the most important role. "Kevin is pretty down-to-earth when he's making a movie," says Donaldson. "He didn't need to be the center of attention. He put on his producer's hat and knew that for the movie to work, his co-stars had to look good, too.' In many ways, Costner, now 45, seems to prefer a low profile these days. When he's not making movies, he can be found riding horses and working the land on his 35-acre mountain retreat in Aspen, Colorado. "I'm a grown man, and I go to a city and spend a lot of hours in a trailer, and then I go to act," he says, wistfully. "Sometimes I wonder if I want to do that anymore. Maybe I just want to walk on God's earth and see it before I leave the place. Maybe I would like to do a dive off a shipwreck. I don't know. You have all these responsibilities to family and children, but once those have been met, what are you going to do? Am I going to make movies until I'm 8o? Or 6o? Or 5o?" He pauses, then offers a slight smile. "Sometimes I have to remind myself of what it is I'm doing and why I'm doing it. "That's why Kenny says to John, 'you know we're going to take our lumps. That's going to happen,’” Costner reflects. "And then Kenny says to Bobby, 'Why do you think we took this job? Because we thought we were the best ones to do it,' Nothing, was going right during those 13 days," Costner says, 'but sometimes you can look back, and say 'Those were the best moves I ever made.’"
An Insider tells the Real Story Theodore Sorensen's unique : qualifications for assessing the movie Thirteen Days are certified by the mementos in the entryway of his midtown Manhattan office. Near the door hangs a framed note from Jackie Kennedy and two sheets of yellow legal paper bearing her husband's cramped handwriting: They are notes John Kennedy scrawled during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Sorensen was then a chief speechwriter, confidant, and close adviser to President Kennedy; he's now a 72-year-old partner at a powerful New York City law firm. He walked off with the notes after one of the many tense strategy sessions he participated in during that perilous patch of history. Stooping, Sorensen squints behind thick framed glasses as he deciphers the scribbles: "blockade ... Soviet submarines ... Khrushchev... serious, serious." He pauses. "Kennedy was a big doodler." On display behind Sorensen's desk ' Is another keepsake, an Illustration that appeared in Look Magazine. It shows him and Kennedy alone in the Cabinet Room reviewing the speech JFK was about to deliver on national TV-the one in which the president revealed the crisis to the world. “That's a pretty accurate rendition of the scene," Sorensen: says. It's obvious what he witnessed still replays his memory with dramatic clarity. He can recall the last-minute conference on that speech. He remembers waiting for approval of the letter he drafted to the Russian premier, agreeing to not Invade Cuba if the missiles were removed. He can still hear the joint chiefs of staff urge military strikes that, if launched, would have triggered nuclear conflict. Easing his lanky six-foot frame into a cushy, beige chair, Sorensen begins describing his reaction to the movie, in which he is played by Tim Kelleher. "There are some dates that are wrong and some chronologies that are a little unrealistic," says Sorensen. "But the point is, it is a movie; it's not a history book." He is particularly pleased with how the film treats the brothers Kennedy: "it gives them credit for finding a peaceful resolution despite the demands of the military and the congressional leaders, who wanted to take a more aggressive tack. Considering there's been a lot of Kennedy bashing over the years, it's nice to see a work that praises them." While watching a preview of the film, Sorensen had jotted his reactions on a legal pad, and hi methodically reviews those notes as he continues. The portrayal of the joint chief, he says, is dead-on-the generals were that rash, bullying, and itching to go to war with Russia. But, he says, President Kennedy would never have agreed to green light an air strikethrough the film shows him reluctantly agreeing to employ that option If negotiations break down. For Sorensen, protecting his old boss's heroic image has become an unavoidable avocation. "I don't think I'd use the words 'special responsibility,"' says Sorensen, "but I have on more than one occasion sought to set forth the true record of what John F Kennedy accomplished." This is what he wants us to know about Thirteen Days: "JFK was not a Hamlet torn with indecision and self-doubt. And," he says, sarcastically, "thank God he has Kenny O'Donnell [JFK's scheduling secretary and friend] to pep him up and stiffen his spine and tell him what to do. One gets the impression from the movie that Kennedy didn't have many Ideas, and that Kenny supplied them." Sorensen allows that such liberties needed to be taken for dramatic purposes, and that a big time-Kevin Costner, who plays O'Donnell-was necessary for the movie to succeed. "in truth, though," says, "Kenny was not known be very much involved In the missile crisis." So, who would have been a more accurate central character? "Me!" he blurts out. You? "Well, I was there, and I was very much involved. But I don't want to say that; I certainly don't want you to put that in your story," Sorensen says. And then he laughs. Sorensen stresses that he doesn't want to diminish the movie's impact by dwelling on Inaccuracies. He says, "I think basic message-that It's too easy to get on the ladder of escalation if prudent leadership is not at the helm-is a good one." He adds, "I'd like to have great many people, including young people who were not all at the time of the missile crisis see the movie-and get that message." James Burnett |
