The audience, which included Jack Nicholson, Liza Minnelli, Paul McCartney, and Groucho Marx, along with sixty-four million viewers at home, watched in disbelief. Glancing to his right, he saw a man with floppy brown hair and a bushy mustache, flashing a peace sign as he ran across the stage-naked. It took Niven a moment to realize what the commotion was. “Get me out of there fast.” And so Niven moved on to introduce the Best Picture presenter, whom he called a “very important contributor to world entertainment, and someone quite likely-”īut before he could finish he was interrupted by a squall of screams. “Hurry up, David,” she had told him backstage. Niven, a stiff-upper-lip charmer, could glide above America’s political paroxysms, and he might have gone on talking were it not for his friend Elizabeth Taylor, whom he was introducing. That was how Hollywood wanted to see itself: as the unifier of a country fractured by Vietnam and Watergate. Scott refusing his award for “Patton,” Marlon Brando sending Sacheen Littlefeather to decline his for “The Godfather.” When Niven introduced the final presenter, he said, “If one reads the newspapers or listens to the news, it is quite obvious that the whole world is having a nervous breakdown.” But in Hollywood, he went on, “we turn out entertainment.” As in recent years, with such surprise sideshows as the Best Picture envelope mixup (“Moonlight” or “La La Land”?) and Will Smith smacking Chris Rock, the Oscars of the early seventies had been bumpy: George C. David Niven, sharing hosting duties with Burt Reynolds, Diana Ross, and John Huston, introduced Hepburn with the line “To conceal the identity of our next presenter has called for a security operation of truly royal proportions.”Ī little royalty-and a little decorum-was what the Academy desperately craved. At ten years old, Tatum O’Neal had become the youngest person ever to win an Oscar, for “Paper Moon.” Katharine Hepburn had attended the ceremony for the first time, to present an award. Late in the evening on April 2, 1974, the forty-sixth Academy Awards had already secured their place in the history books.
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