I Enjoy a Good Obit

Here are some interesting excerpts from Blake Edwards':

A lifelong depressive, Mr. Edwards told The New York Times in 2001 that at one point his depression was so bad that he became “seriously suicidal.” After deciding that shooting himself would be too messy and drowning too uncertain, he decided to slit his wrists on the beach at Malibu while looking at the ocean. But while he was holding a two-sided razor, his Great Dane started licking his ear, and his retriever, eager for a game of fetch, dropped a ball in his lap. Trying to get the dog to go away, Mr. Edwards threw the ball, dropped the razor and dislocated his shoulder. “So I think to myself,” he said, “this just isn’t a day to commit suicide.” Trying to retrieve the razor, he stepped on it and ended up in the emergency room.

Those dogs knew something bad was up. They really are Man's Best Friends.

After [Mr. Edwards and Patricia Walker's] divorce, he married Ms. Andrews, the Academy Award-winning musical comedy star, in 1969.

At the time, Ms. Andrews’s public image was of the endlessly cheerful governess she had played in "The Sound of Music." In an interview the couple gave Playboy in 1982, Mr. Edwards recalled how, before he had met Ms. Andrews, he got laughs at a party where people were speculating on the reason for her phenomenal success.

“I can tell you exactly what it is,” he said he told the partygoers. “She has lilacs for pubic hair.”

Ms. Andrews sent Mr. Edwards a lilac bush shortly after they had started dating, she told Playboy, and their marriage lasted 41 years.

...

The early 1970s were not kind to either of them. “Darling Lili” was a bloated box-office bomb. And what Mr. Edwards called his first “personal” film, the western "Wild Rovers" (1971), was cut to ribbons by the president of MGM, James Aubrey. Then Mr. Aubrey took over the editing of Mr. Edwards’s next picture, "The Carey Treatment" (1972), before Mr. Edwards had even finished shooting it.

“I felt like an animal who goes off into the weeds and sucks its paw,” Mr. Edwards later told a reporter. Instead he went off to England and Switzerland, where he wrote the screenplays for “S.O.B.” and “Victor/Victoria.”

It was the success of “10” that allowed Mr. Edwards to make those movies. And “10” was his revenge on Mr. Aubrey. “Right after ‘Wild Rovers,’ Aubrey called me into his office and told me he hated a screenplay I’d written and refused to pay me the last moneys due on it,” Mr. Edwards told Playboy. Mr. Edwards said he responded, “You don’t have to pay me, but give me the script back.” That script became “10.”

RIP.