Ah yes, "The Great Escape." I was fortunate back 36 years ago to become friends with Barry Mahon, 71 Eagle Squadron ace pilot, shot down at Dieppe and made POW, who was at Stalag Luft III and was the real "cooler king." He had escaped and made it 100 miles into Czechosolovakia (planning to walk to the Eastern Front) when he was captured. After 100 days in the cooler he was released, and the escape committee gave him Ticket #1 for the Great Escape. "But my feet were still too bad to ever be able to do anything, so I gave the ticket back." After the war he was a witness against the Germans who killed them all, and saw them hanged. He came back home to Los Angeles and became Erroll Flynn's last agent, when Flynn (who at that point couldn't get representation) hired him after flying with him. He flew to Cuba a month after the Castro Revolution to find Flynn partying with Che Guevara in the penthouse suite of the Havana Hilton, and managed to convince him it was time to go.
I remember walking into his office in 1985 and there was his good friend Orson Welles, who I got introduced to. Welles was a shadow of his former self by then ("We shall sell no wine, before its time"). But he was still an amazing raconteur - he realized since he was just meeting me that I had never seen his act before (he was right), and so he gave me a Command Performance of "Orson Welles, Famous Raconteur," and told me first hand the story of the 18 minute no-cut tracking shot that opens "Touch of Evil." How Harry Cohn only hired him "if you keep a strict schedule - you fall behind, you're gone." So the first day he spent all day setting up the shot. By 3:30 nothing had happened and Cohn sent a minion to the set, who reported "He's talking to the cinematographer." At 4:00, there was still nothing, and another minion reported to Cohn that Welles was talking to the actors. By 4:30 Cohn himself came down to the set (if they went past 5:00, it was overtime "golden time" for the crew, and Welles was fired for "going over schedule"). "And at exactly 4:41 pm, I called 'Action,' and it went perfectly, with the car exploding at 4:58, and at 4:59 I called "Cut! That's a wrap for the day!' And then I turned to that miserable little @#$##@ and said 'We're three days ahead of schedule.' And left him spluttering. A thoroughly miserable man." (When Cohn, who was universally detested in Hollywood, died and a huge crowd showed up for the funeral, Frank Sinatra was quoted as saying "Give the people what they want...")
Barry was a technical advisor on "The Great Escape," (During the movie, he worked with McQueen and gave him his way of dealing with the interminable hours in the cooler - playing "catch"). John Sturges suggested to him that he ought to produce movies on his own (The last was a TV movie "My Wicked, Wicked Ways," produced with his daughter, an adaptation of Flynn's autobiography).
He was my "doorway" into knowing the Eagle Squadron guys. I'll never forget their reunion in 1983 at the Universal Hilton here at Universal Studios. Peter Ustinov was doing his one-man show in Long Beach and showed up after the Saturday night performance, it turned out he knew them all from their parties in London (and yes, Peter Ustinov was the greatest addition to any gathering who ever lived - exactly who you think he would be).
