Hollywood Hellraisers (10 page)

Convinced that Jack would emerge as some sort of a name, ‘but with no idea that he would become the great star that he did’, Corman cast him in
Cry Baby Killer
(1958), playing the sort of mixed-up teenager that proliferated in the wake of James Dean. ‘Corman had discovered something that no one else apparently had,’ says director Richard Rush. ‘That if your cast is the same age as your target audience, they’ll come to see it; that was the secret of his exploitation.’

Jack later recalled just turning up for the audition and doing a bit of crazy stuff, screaming louder than anyone else, and getting the role. ‘That’s it. Movie star.’ He thought, ‘What’s so tough?’ The film managed quite the reverse, being so down-market few theatres screened it. At the not so grand opening Ethel May was invited and Jack recalled her whacking with her purse somebody who was heckling him on the screen; ‘It was so humiliating.’

So, instead of instant stardom Jack was out of work for a year. Far from glum, he revelled in a hectic social life, staying up all night on Venice Beach, going to parties, catching Lenny Bruce’s stand-up act over at some beatnik hangout or watching the latest European art-house movie. As for his career, it was so far down the crapper he couldn’t see it. Deciding to take matters into his own hands, Jack teamed up with Robert Towne and out-of-work director Monte Hellman to literally build their own theatre in an abandoned warehouse, stealing timber from building sites at night, yanking a toilet off the wall of a local gas station and nicking electronic and lighting equipment, too. It was like the Sex Pistols stealing the instruments they played on; it was punk theatre.

Doomed to failure, of course, lasting just the one production, and just as well, for Jack had decided to leave theatre well alone and concentrate on cracking film. But would anyone give him a job? Richard Rush had just left his advertising business to set up in the movies, later becoming a cult director with films like
Freebie and the Bean
(1974) and
The Stunt Man
(1980). Back in 1959, setting up his directorial debut
Too Soon to Love
, he advertised in the local papers for young actors to attend a casting session. Rush still vividly recalls the moment Jack walked in. ‘He was terrific, stood out like a jewel among stones.’

Annoyingly, the lead role had already been assigned, so Rush could cast Jack in only a minor role, that of a teen hoodlum. ‘Even then he was a very accomplished actor, and gave a good performance; he was physically tough and threatening in the role. What I learned about Jack from later working with him much more consistently, first off he’s a very smart guy and you can almost call out the number of the IQ you want him to play and he can lower his on-screen intelligence very convincingly, it’s a very clever trick. He can play sophisticated people on film and he can play a bum, and play a bum successfully with great imagination, strength and charisma like he did in
Cuckoo’s Nest
; it’s a strange ability.’

The only other person prepared to hire Jack in any meaningful way was Roger Corman, and over the next few years the actor appeared almost exclusively in a conveyor belt of schlockmeister howlers. ‘I either played the clean-cut boy next door, or the murderer of a family of at least five.’

One Corman role stands out from all the others, a sadomasochist patient who gets his kicks in the dentist’s chair.
Little Shop of Horrors
(1960) is tatty beyond belief and looks as if it was made in two days (wait a minute — it was!), but it’s Nicholson’s performance almost as much as the main attraction, a flesh-eating plant, that audiences remember. A cult classic today,
Little Shop
also gave moviegoers their first glimpse of Jack’s superb gift for comedy. ‘He was great in it,’ says Corman. ‘He brought all kinds of individual bits of humour to the role. I think the high point of the scene was the way Jack yelled, “Don’t stop now!” when the dentist was trying to stop his drilling; it was almost a parody of the sex act, which was the subtext. Jack was great in that part.’

You remarkable pig. You can thank whatever pig God you pray to that you haven’t turned me into a murderer.

M
idway through shooting
One-Eyed Jacks
, Anna Kashfi walked out on Marlon Brando, fed up with his flagrant infidelity. Both ended up in court fighting over custody of their son. What was revealed did not paint a pretty picture. Marlon accused Anna of coming at him once with a butcher’s knife. ‘Go ahead if it makes you happy,’ he screamed at her. Anna claimed that Marlon bombarded her with phone calls during the night and ransacked her house, and when she protested he ‘brutally beat and struck me’. Once, while Marlon was visiting his son, Anna left the house but on her return discovered Marlon having sex with a woman. ‘Would you mind leaving the bedroom while I speak to my husband?’ The woman refused, so Anna threw a lamp at her. Brando countered by saying that on another occasion his wife had attacked and bitten him in his own bedroom. After giving her a good spanking he’d thrown her out, but Anna had forced her way back in. Pinning her to the ground, Marlon tied her up with dressing-gown cord and called the police. It was, it’s safe to say, a messy divorce.

Far from being put off the opposite sex for life, Marlon wasted little time marrying wife number two, in June 1960. Mexican actress Movita Castaneda was nine years his senior. Curiously, after the ceremony she was installed in a separate house and the couple never actually lived together. Obviously Marlon visited from time to time, since she gave birth to a son and daughter.

According to Movita, Marlon was still battling with weight problems due to binge eating. She had to put a lock on their refrigerator to stop him pilfering on the nights he stayed over. She’d usually wake in the morning to find the lock broken. She also related how he often drove down to his favourite all-night hot-dog stand in Hollywood in the early hours of the morning and polish off half a dozen of them.

It was soon back to work for Marlon, turning down
Lawrence of Arabia
in favour of playing Fletcher Christian in a remake of the classic
Mutiny on the Bounty
(1962). It very nearly proved his undoing. The production was a madhouse almost from day one, at least six writers had a go at the script, tropical storms ravaged the Tahitian locations and director Carol Reed and Marlon argued constantly. Stories began to emerge that when Marlon didn’t get his way he’d throw a hissy fit or walk off set, slowing the rate of production to a crawl. His weight fluctuated wildly, too, and he regularly split the seat of his pants. The costume department solved the problem by sewing stretch fabric into his trousers.

With shooting running desperately behind schedule, MGM ordered the company back to Hollywood. Carol Reed confessed he couldn’t go on and quit. His replacement, Lewis Milestone, a no-nonsense industry veteran, collided with Brando head-on, causing even more friction and collective trauma. Milestone complained that Brando was sulky and argumentative and undermined his authority by taking over the direction of his scenes. ‘I’ve been working in the business for forty-six years and I’ve never seen anything like it.’ He considered quitting but was persuaded to stay on.

Brando’s behaviour got worse. Trevor Howard, playing the indomitable Captain Bligh, found the star ‘unprofessional and absolutely ridiculous. He could drive a saint to hell in a dogsled.’ In the end Milestone could take it no longer and walked, leaving an assistant to shoot Brando’s death scene, for which the actor insisted lying on ice to get the death tremors he’d witnessed at his mother’s bedside exactly right. Who knew that off screen at this affecting moment an actress was kneeling beside him, just out of camera range, with his lines written out across her forehead?

When the film finished it had cost a whopping $20m, tipping MGM close to bankruptcy. The fingers of blame pointed at Marlon, as stories of his wacko behaviour, including having aeroplanes filled with cases of champagne flown to Tahiti for parties, were leaked to the press. It was clear to Brando that he was being made the scapegoat for the film’s spiralling costs, and that Hollywood had begun turning its back on him. ‘They start out by seducing you,’ he said, ‘and then they end up pissing on you.’

That was the least of his problems, though. He had woman trouble again. Out in Tahiti Marlon was steadily getting through most of the island’s female population when he fell in love with local beauty Tarita Teriipaia, who played Fletcher Christian’s love interest, a role that, ironically, Movita had played in the 1935 Clark Gable version of
Mutiny on the Bounty
! Eighteen years younger than Marlon, Tarita become wife number three in August 1962 after Marlon’s quickie divorce from Movita came through. She would give him two children.

Back in Hollywood, Marlon again caused controversy with an appearance on a live TV chat show. Fellow guest Zsa Zsa Gabor was decked out in a low-cut pink evening gown and they got chatting. All of a sudden Marlon leaned forward and leered, ‘I don’t know why Zsa Zsa has to talk so much. With those boobs she really doesn’t have to say anything.’ The audience tittered but weren’t quite prepared for Marlon’s next comment. ‘Zsa Zsa,’ he went on, ‘a man can only do one thing with you: throw you down and fuck you!’

I don’t know why I get into gunfights. I guess sometimes I just get lonely.

Still at the Actors Studio, Dennis Hopper met and fell hopelessly in love with former
Vogue
cover model and wannabe actress Brooke Hayward. One of many girlfriends (Dennis was drowning in sex), Brooke was different and there was talk of marriage, provided he cleaned up his lifestyle. Brooke had two children from a previous marriage and didn’t want a wild man influencing them.

Devastatingly beautiful, Brooke came from rich and socially prominent Hollywood stock, the daughter of film actress Margaret Sullivan, who’d been Henry Fonda’s first wife, and Leland Hayward, who coproduced
South Pacific
and
The Sound of Music
on Broadway. It was odd company for someone like Dennis to be involved with, and Brooke’s father immediately railed against his daughter’s choice of husband. Tom Mankiewicz, a close friend of the Hayward family, got to know Dennis around this time. ‘I adored Dennis, I thought he was great. It was a different story with Leland. I remember he called me up and said, “You have to stop this marriage to Dennis Hopper.” I said, “We do?” And Leland said, “The guy is nuts.” I said, “Leland, Brooke really loves this guy.” He said, “This is going to be a disaster, it’s going to be terrible.” He carried on, and I said, “So you and Dennis, did you have fights and stuff?” He said, “I’ve never met him. But I know it’s wrong.”’

In August 1961 they married in a little chapel in New York. Mankiewicz was amongst the thirty guests. ‘I’ll never forget, just before Brooke was going to go down the aisle, Leland appeared. And I thought, that’s great, at least he’s here for his daughter. And he whispered something in her ear and left. I assumed it was, I love you very much honey. Afterwards I asked Brooke, “What did your father say? I’d love to know.” And she said, “He told me, there’s still time to back out.” He said this to her at the top of the aisle!’

It was at the wedding reception that Dennis first made the acquaintance of Peter Fonda, a friend of Brooke’s since childhood. Years later Fonda recalled this historic first encounter. ‘I thought, this guy’s a looney tune. But he sure is interesting.’

Soon after his marriage to Brooke, Hopper decided to return to Hollywood, hoping to resurrect his movie career. The couple moved into a Bel Air mansion furnished with valuable art pieces that had belonged to Brooke’s mother before she took her own life with an overdose of barbiturates in 1960. Dennis had a room set aside for his painting and photography. He’d go on to paint hundreds of canvases, even managing to sell some to fellow actors. These included Joanne Woodward, whose husband, Paul Newman, once told Dennis, ‘You should really concentrate on your painting.’ A put-down if ever there was one.

Just months after moving in Brooke awoke one morning and smelt the unmistakable odour of smoke. There was a fire in the next canyon. Having grown up in the neighbourhood she knew only too well the speed with which such fires could spread amongst the dry California hills, so tried to stay calm, not panicking her family. Out of the window she saw her neighbour watching the fire’s progress through binoculars, then race outside and start packing valuables into his car. That was it; Brooke felt they should be doing the same, just to be on the safe side. She ran into the bedroom where Dennis was sound asleep and woke him, explaining the situation, but he seemed not unduly worried and went back to whatever dream he’d been having. Not long after that he was being violently shaken by a hysterical Brooke: the fire was closing in, there was no time left to save anything except themselves — they had to get out now. ‘We lost everything,’ Brooke later recalled. ‘A huge, lovely house, all my clothes, furniture, well, just everything.’

Dennis lost something even more personal: all his paintings and innumerable poems he’d written. Luckily his photographic negatives were in storage ready for his first gallery showing and so were saved. But the loss of his paintings so devastated him that he didn’t put brush to canvas again for another two decades.

They resettled in West Hollywood in a more modest home near Sunset Boulevard. This time it was furnished more to Dennis’s taste; a feature of the living room was a fourteen-foot papier-mâché clown from Mexico suspended from the ceiling. He also began assembling an impressive collection of modern and pop art, at a time when this kind of stuff was considered radical and unacceptable. Dennis’s agent thought he was barmy and threatened not to represent him any more if he didn’t get rid of it all, since he was obviously throwing his money away. ‘That was the end of my agent,’ said Dennis. Most of the paintings were bought direct from the artist’s studio. For example Dennis paid just $75 for one of Warhol’s first Campbell’s soup-can paintings, now worth a few million. He knew everybody in the underground and wasn’t frightened by the new and the experimental. ‘That was one of the most amazing things about Dennis,’ says friend Tom Mankiewicz. ‘He had the greatest eye for modern art, it was remarkable. He would load his house up with painters that no one had heard of, like Jasper Johns and Warhol, who at the time was barely on the map. I remember looking at this whole house full of these paintings and saying, “Dennis I wouldn’t give you twenty bucks for everything.” But he was certainly right and years later there were exhibitions of his art collection. He’s always added and subtracted from it.’

With Dennis’s film career still in the shitter, Brooke turned to her numerous friends for help. Ironically it was Brooke’s social position that ensured Dennis entry to the very Hollywood circles that wouldn’t hire him as an actor. Most were alienated by his rebellious persona. They’d be invited to some swish party with important industry figures in attendance, Dennis would start the evening quiet, even reserved, but after a few drinks — well, quite a few, actually — he’d rant and rage at everyone, say how the revolution was coming and they’d be the first lot to get it, that one day he’d make a movie and the old dinosaurs would be slain; hardly the best tactic when you’re looking for work. Poor Brooke would have to spend the following day calling everyone to apologise for her husband’s behaviour. Many of them had known Brooke since childhood and expressed sympathy with her for being married to ‘that madman’.

One person who was prepared to give Dennis a job was first-time director Curtis Harrington. He was putting together a low-budget horror movie, really low-budget, just $50,000, called
Night Tide
(1961), and wanted Dennis to play a sailor hopelessly in love with a mysterious woman who just might be a rampaging sea monster. It sounded kooky but it would be Dennis’s first lead role and he worked hard the whole shoot. That was until the last day, when he sunk into a deep depression because filming was coming to an end and got miserably drunk, so drunk that he got into a motorcycle accident, necessitating the whole cast and crew reconvening two weeks later to complete the movie.

Drink and Dennis were now happy comrades. As a teen he’d been very much a beer man, but in Hollywood beer was seen as uncouth; people were drinking Martini instead. ‘At first, I thought the stuff tasted awful,’ said Dennis. ‘It’s an acquired taste, I acquired it.’

When Brooke gave birth in 1962 to a daughter, christened Marin, she must have hoped fatherhood would calm Dennis down. Far from it. There was a revolution going on outside, in the streets, and Dennis wanted desperately to be part of it. This was the burgeoning era of free love and abundant drugs and Dennis began experimenting with hallucinogenics, barbiturates and speed. ‘The sixties was just one big drug party,’ he said, a party that lasted twenty years and almost claimed his life.

I’m not even supposed to know girls like that exist.

After his Broadway flop Warren Beatty was to find another mentor in Elia Kazan, who fastened on to the young hopeful straight away. ‘He was awkward in a way that was attractive,’ said Kazan. ‘He was very, very ambitious. He had a lot of hunger.’ Immediately the director launched Warren’s film debut
Splendour in the Grass
(1961), yet another in a long line of movies exploring how shitty it was to be a teenager with a hard on and square parents.

As he prepared for the role Joan Collins dropped a bombshell — she was pregnant. Warren let the news sink in before enquiring how it had happened. ‘The butler did it,’ Joan quipped. Both knew the timing was lousy, that as a couple they were simply too immature and careerorientated to start a family. But on the drive over to the abortionist Joan suddenly had second thoughts. At odds with his own raw emotions, Warren tried reassuring her and the abortion went ahead; Joan described the experience as ‘horrifying’.