Charles Bukowski (28 page)

Afterwards Bukowski’s closest friends went back to San Pedro for more drinking. When he waved the last of his guests good-bye, he looked more like the Bukowski of old: shirt out, a wine stain down the front and his trousers hanging round his backside.

Sean Penn was a rising Hollywood star having recently appeared
in the thriller,
The
Falcon and the Snowman
, although he was more famous for being the husband of Madonna. When he saw the
Barfly
screenplay, he was so enthused about the film that he offered to play Henry Chinaski for the nominal fee of one dollar. He loved Bukowski’s writing, and began composing poems of his own. His only stipulation was that Barbet Schroeder relinquish the director’s chair to
Easy Rider
star Dennis Hopper, a good friend of his. This caused a problem and Bukowski invited Penn, Hopper and Schroeder over to San Pedro to talk it through.

Schroeder was offered a lucrative deal by Penn and Hopper to stay with the project as a producer, but he was less than pleased at being sidelined and reminded them that
Barfly
was his project, his first Hollywood film and he was determined to direct it. Bukowski was loyal to his friend. He didn’t like Dennis Hopper anyway, distrusting his newfound sobriety, the look of his clothes, and jewelry and what he thought was the hollow sound of his laugh. ‘One time something was said, and it wasn’t quite funny, and he just threw his head back and laughed,’ said Bukowski. ‘The laughter was pretty false, I thought. The chains kept bouncing up and down, and he kept laughing.’

‘You hear that fucking laugh, did you see those chains?’ asked Schroeder when Hopper and Penn had left.

The meeting made Schroeder so anxious he telephoned his lawyer and dictated an addendum to his will that, whatever happened to him, Dennis Hopper would never be allowed to direct
Barfly
.

By saying no to Dennis Hopper, they also lost the services of Sean Penn which was a shame because he probably would have been good in the part, with his chippy manner and his love of Bukowski’s work. It was not the last they saw of him, however.

The actor started visiting Bukowski socially and, despite a forty-year age difference, they became good friends. Penn admired Bukowski’s uncompromising attitude to his writing. He saw him as a true artist who lived on his own terms. They also both liked to drink. ‘I loved the guy,’ he says, simply.

‘Sean wasn’t such a huge star when we met him, although he was beginning to get there,’ says Linda Lee. ‘He was just sort of a kid. He used to call us his surrogate parents. He would just
come over here and tell us his problems, sit and get drunk and chat and be away from that insane Hollywood. Sean liked Hank, and Hank liked Sean because Sean was willing to be with him in a natural way.’

Sean Penn began bringing his actor buddies over to meet Bukowski, people like Harry Dean Stanton who had recently starred in
Paris, Texas
. ‘Harry Dean’s a very strange fellow,’ Bukowski said. ‘He doesn’t put on much of a hot-shot front. He just sits around depressed. I say, “Harry, for Chrissakes, it’s not so bad.” When you’re feeling bad and someone says that, you only feel worse.’

M*A*S*H
star Elliott Gould turned up one night in Sean Penn’s pick-up truck. Penn presented Bukowski with Madonna’s new album and they talked about poetry. Gould says Bukowski reacted to meeting celebrities ‘like a regular guy, totally normal’.

Bukowski was not overawed by film actors because he had little regard for their work. He could count on the fingers of one hand the films he liked.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
and
All Quiet on the Western Front
would be among them. Being more culturally sophisticated than is generally supposed, he also liked Akira Kurosawa’s work and his all-time favorite movie was
Eraserhead
. Bukowski demonstrated his dislike for mainstream movies, and their stars, when he met Arnold Schwarzenegger in September, 1985, at a birthday party for Michael Montfort’s wife. For no particular reason, other than he felt like picking a fight, Bukowski told Schwarzenegger he was a piece of shit. ‘Hank was certainly not overly impressed with any of it,’ says Harry Dean Stanton. ‘He didn’t care much for many movies, as I don’t. Anybody who is perceptive is not going to talk about the thousands of great movies. It is relative to any art form. Excellence in any field is always a rarity.’

Sean Penn also brought Madonna over to San Pedro. She was at the height of her fame and her visit amazed neighbors who had thought of Bukowski as little more than the neighborhood drunk.

‘Hank, is it really true Madonna came to see you?’ asked a little girl who lived in the street. She was impressed, but a little suspicious it might be a put-on.

‘Sure.’

‘But why would Madonna come to see you, Hank?’

Although he had affection for Sean Penn, Bukowski didn’t like Madonna at all. Linda Lee says the singer reminded him of some of the crazy women he had known, but he held back from saying so in case he hurt his friend’s feelings. ‘Hank couldn’t stand her,’ says Linda Lee. ‘He did not like her because he didn’t believe in her. He was sort of looking and going, “Oh fuck, you have got a good one here, man.”’ Still they went out together to eat and Bukowski and Linda Lee were invited to a party at their home.

‘Everybody was excited at the notion that Charles Bukowski was coming to the party that they were coming to,’ says Penn, recalling the evening when the poet lumbered into his lounge. ‘He comes and spends about two minutes on his drink before he decides he is just going to prowl around [the] room and steal everybody else’s drinks … This was always the mode whenever you did go out with him somewhere, some circumstance when he wasn’t just at home. The wine was no more to drink. Now it was mix everything and die.’

Penn’s mother, actress Eileen Ryan, decided she wanted to dance with Bukowski and endeared herself to him by saying he was a big phony. ‘The pants are coming off,’ says Penn. ‘He is trying to take my mother’s clothes off. My mother, at this point, is in her late sixties, and everybody is sitting back and saying, “This is what he is supposed to do.” It was the first time they had seen a legend actually behave like a legend.’

Sean Penn and Harry Dean Stanton were eating dinner at San Pedro one day when Bukowski forgot his self-imposed rule and came out with a crack about Madonna. It was so insulting that Sean Penn started getting up as if to fight him. ‘Hey, Sean, sit down,’ said Bukowski in his best tough-guy voice. ‘You know I can take you.’

After years of hard work and disappointment, Barbet Schroeder finally found a company willing to back
Barfly
. Cannon Pictures was owned and run by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, Israeli-born cousins with a reputation in Hollywood for being mavericks. They were also financing another literary project – Norman Mailer’s
Tough Guys Don’t Dance
, which the Pulitzer
Prize-winner was directing from an adaptation of his own novel. Bukowski got invited to meet Mailer at the Château Marmont hotel on Sunset Strip.

Standing on the penthouse terrace, Bukowski saw an entirely new view of the city he had known since childhood – the view the rich enjoyed. He could see the sweep of the shimmering city from Los Angeles airport to where the San Diego freeway emptied a stream of tiny lights into the San Fernando Valley. Helicopters fluttered back and forth, and way out there somewhere was the ocean. It was pretty impressive, certainly a better view than he used to have from his window at De Longpre Avenue.

They swapped stories – Mailer told him a good one about meeting Charlie Chaplin – and then they took the elevator down to the garage to get Bukowski’s car. They were going to a birthday party for one of the executives at Cannon and Bukowski was driving. He was amused when Mailer told him he also drove a black BMW. ‘Tough guys drive black BMWs, Norman,’ he said.

As Bukowski described in his novel,
Hollywood
, he made a faux pas at the party, confusing one Cannon executive with another and Victor Norman (Mailer) made him painfully aware of his mistake.

The story was true, as Mailer remembers.

‘You know, Norman, you and me may have to go outside to fight,’ said Bukowski.

Mailer says he felt a rush of adrenaline as he contemplated flying at Bukowski with murderous intent. ‘It so happened that at the time I was in good shape and was still boxing, and Bukowski, by then, was in awful shape – huge belly, bad liver, all of it,’ Mailer recalls. ‘I remember that I felt such a clear, cold rage at the thought of what I’d be able to do to him – there are preliminaries to fights, mental preliminaries, where sometimes you think you’re going to
win and sometimes you think you’re in trouble, and once in a while you think you have no chance. But this was one occasion when I felt a kind of murderous glee because I knew he had no chance. I was ready to go.’

He leaned forward and said: ‘Hank, don’t even think about it.’

Now that Cannon were behind the project, it was easier getting name actors interested in
Barfly
and it was soon decided that
9 1/2
Weeks
star Mickey Rourke would play Henry Chinaski, although he was initially reluctant to take the part because of the subject matter. ‘All the men in my family for a lot of generations were alcoholics,’ he explains. ‘It was sort of a disgusting character for me to play because a lot of the men in my family have never hit fifty, so I don’t really have a lot of respect for boozers.’

Mickey Rourke had never read Bukowski’s work and was not particularly impressed with the screenplay when he saw it, or the low budget. ‘It was nothing at first that turned me on as an actor, but once I saw the package being put together, and I saw the meticulous dedication that was surrounding this project, that stimulated me more.’

Mickey Rourke suggested Faye Dunaway for the part of Chinaski’s girlfriend, Wanda Wilcox, the character based on Jane Cooney Baker. Several years had passed since Faye Dunaway’s great success in
Bonnie and Clyde
and her career had declined to the point where she was being offered television work and second-rate films. She felt that, because of her age, she was ‘becoming invisible’ as she wrote in her autobiography,
Looking for Gatsby
, and that
Barfly
was the chance of a comeback.

Then Cannon unexpectedly pulled the plug on the deal, saying there was no money to finance the picture. They also set a prohibitive turnaround fee, the price another movie company would have to pay to take over the project. Schroeder responded with one of the most bizarre bargaining tactics in the history of Hollywood. He bought a Black & Decker circular saw, took it into Menahem Golan’s office, plugged in, switched on and held the blade over his left hand, threatening to slice his finger off unless the film went into production. When Golan saw that he was serious, he told him he had a deal. Bukowski reflected that his past life seemed tame in comparison with this sort of madness.

When Mickey Rourke visited San Pedro for tips on playing his part, he noticed that although Bukowski lived comfortably, his typing room ‘looked like a boarding house, like a piece of shit dive. It was very suburban except for the room that he wrote in.’ He got another insight into how he would play the character by listening to Bukowski talk. ‘He spoke in a very peculiar way, almost like he was speaking to himself where he didn’t really give a fuck if anybody else understood him.’ Bukowski boasted about the fights with Frank McGilligan in Philadelphia, but Rourke didn’t take the posturing seriously. ‘You can’t be any sort of physical specimen if you live out of a beer can,’ he says. ‘I saw him as a man who was more physical with his mouth than his fists.’

Filming began in a bar in Culver City with genuine barflies as extras, although Bukowski didn’t know them. Mickey Rourke invited Bukowski into his trailer on the first day and poured him a large whiskey. He was most hospitable, saying Bukowski was welcome to stay as long as he liked. ‘OK, I’ll stay forever,’ Bukowski replied, having lived in smaller apartments.

Mickey Rourke was thirty-two, just a little older than Bukowski had been when he lived in Philadelphia. He came on the set unshaven, wearing dirty clothes, shuffling and talking in an approximation of Bukowski’s peculiar voice, drawing words out for emphasis. It was a fairly good imitation. ‘The guy was great,’ Bukowski said of the actor’s performance, although he later modified his praise. ‘He really became this barfly. He added his own dimension, which at first I thought, this is awful, he’s overdoing it. But as the shooting went on, I saw he’d done the right thing. He’d created a very strange, fantastic lovable character.’

They also filmed at a bar on the outskirts of downtown, around 6th and Kenmore, where Bukowski worked as a stock room boy in the early ’50s. Bukowski had a cameo part as a barfly in the scene where Wanda and Chinaski meet. There was real booze in the bottles and Mick Collins, who played the barman, began fixing drinks for everybody, getting himself and Bukowski loaded. He recalls how important a figure Bukowski was on set, unusually so for a screen-writer in a Hollywood film (Schroeder didn’t change a word of dialogue unless Bukowski agreed). ‘Barbet, Mickey, Faye, everybody took second place. They all respected him,’ says Collins.

The exterior shots for Wanda’s apartment were filmed at the Maryland Royal Palms, a rooming house at 360 S. Westlake Avenue next door to the Aragon where Bukowski had lived with Jane. In one scene, Faye Dunaway and Mickey Rourke walk down the hill outside the building. She is going to look for a job, and he wants her to come back and drink with him. If they had kept going to 6th, turned right and walked another block, they would have been on Alvarado Street where Bukowski met Jane. The memories all came back as Bukowski watched the filming of his life, amazed at how his fortunes had changed.