Hollywood Hellraisers (12 page)

Still suffering in exploitation-movie hell, Jack was only too well aware of the danger of becoming stigmatised in the industry as a B-movie actor. Watching those films today, all he can see is his own ‘fearful, desperate ambition. People who haven’t seen my early movies are better off than I am.’ But, like all actors, he needed the work and has acknowledged that without Corman he might not have survived those tough early years, so is forever thankful. ‘Roger also underpaid us and for that he will be eternally grateful.’

But Corman’s cheapos were about to get a hell of a lot more interesting. The schlock merchant had left the world of radioactive vegetables on the loose to tread a more cultured path, finding success adapting Edgar Allan Poe horror stories starring Vincent Price. For
The Raven
(1963) Corman added Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre to the mix, plus Jack. It was another camp classic. ‘They all got along very well together,’ says Corman. ‘Because Jack had great respect for Vincent, Boris and Peter, and let them know it, and at the same time they realised from the very beginning that he was a very talented young actor, so accepted him into their group.’ No respect, however, was offered by the titular bird, which shat endlessly over everybody. ‘My shoulder was constantly covered with raven shit,’ complained Jack.

In the film he played Lorre’s son and both actors improvised most of their scenes, having been taught techniques originating with Stanislavsky, Jack in Corey’s class, Lorre with Brecht in Germany. All this was beyond the understanding of poor old Karloff, who approached the film knowing his lines and ready to give the exact performance that he had prepared. ‘With Peter and Jack improvising,’ says Corman, ‘I would almost use the word outrageously, Boris got a little bit nervous between the two techniques. The mediator in all this was Vincent Price, who understood how both sets of actors worked and was wonderful in bringing Peter and Jack together with Boris, who was more of a classically trained actor.’

On finishing
The Raven
, Corman realised the costumes and sets he’d rented were still his for another forty-eight hours. Karloff, too, remained on the payroll. A light bulb lit above his head like in a cartoon: Why not make another movie? If anyone could make a movie over a weekend, it was Corman. Jack happily accepted the lead, without knowing what the hell it was going to be about. Corman rushed home and bashed out a script entitled
The Terror
(1963), which everyone set to work on the next morning. It was chaos. Karloff later recalled how removal men arrived to take away the sets as they were acting, but Corman carried on filming guerrilla-style.

Unable to complete the film personally Corman handed it over to a couple of friends; Francis Ford Coppola shot some stuff, as did Monte Hellman. ‘Finally, for the last sequence,’ says Corman, ‘there was nobody left to direct and Jack came to me and said, “Rog, every idiot in town has shot part of this picture; lemme direct the last bit.” I said, “OK, Jack, you’re the director.” So Jack got his first taste of directing and the work he did was good.’

Unsurprisingly,
The Terror
is a complete farrago: it has witches, a curse, a creepy castle, but no plot — honestly, no plot whatsoever. Jack looks distinctly uncomfortable in the role of a French soldier, wearing Brando’s oversized Napoleon costume from
Desirée
. ‘I was absurd,’ he says of his performance. ‘It was amazingly bad.’

It takes six men to carry a guy to his grave; it takes one woman to put him there.

Because of a series of poor investments made by his father and heavy alimony payments, Marlon Brando’s finances were looking decidedly shaky. It was now that he started making movies purely for the money, which partly explains why he made such godawful crap in the sixties.
The Ugly American
(1963), a risible political drama, was followed by
Bedtime Story
(1964), a weak comedy about two con men, that at least Marlon had fun on. ‘The one thing Marlon regretted, and he told me this, was that no one came to him to do more comedy, because he loved comedy,’ says producer Albert Ruddy. ‘He loved to laugh.’

Having less fun on the film was co-star Shirley Jones. Hailing from a largely film musical background (
Oklahoma!
,
Carousel
) she hadn’t worked with such an intense actor before. ‘People say Marlon’s the greatest American actor, I say one of the reasons why is because he wore everybody else down after doing sixty takes on one scene. That’s exactly what he did. Marlon had this theory that the next one was going to be better, or let’s try it another way, while I always thought my first or second take was the best and from then on it was all repetition.’ One wonders how much of this was Marlon seeking perfection and how much a deliberate ploy to hamstring his fellow actors, to render them invisible so it was he who dominated the scene. As Bernardo Bertolucci was later to say of Brando, ‘He’s an angel as a man and a monster as an actor.’

Something else Shirley found unusual was Marlon’s habit of not learning his lines. ‘Instead he’d have his dialogue written on his hand or on a table. It fascinated me that he was able to do that and still come across as brilliant as he was.’ This was a habit of Marlon’s that grew to preposterous levels.

The cast was rounded off by the debonair David Niven, an actor poles apart from Marlon and who confessed to being a shade nervous about working with him, though the two ultimately got on very well. ‘Marlon had great respect for David,’ recalls Shirley. ‘He’d just sit around on the set and listen to him tell stories and laugh and have a wonderful time.’

A misfire,
Bedtime Story
quietly crawled away and was forgotten until it was remade in 1988 as a vehicle for Steve Martin and Michael Caine,
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
. But Shirley appreciated her Brando experience, one that could have been an even closer encounter. ‘He came into my dressing room one time and asked me about my personal life, and if I was happily married, so he came on to me a bit. But I wasn’t attracted to him that way at all, and it didn’t bother me because I’m sure he did it with everybody.’

Morituri
(1965, aka
The Saboteur
), a wartime spy drama, was another flop, and it was not a happy ship. Brando confessed that making it was like, ‘pushing a prune pit with my nose from here to Cucamonga’. William A. Fraker, later an award-winning cinematographer on pictures like
Rosemary’s Baby
and
Bullitt
, was an assistant cameraman on the film and came away knocked out by Marlon. ‘He was sensational. Marlon always had his problems with directors and producers, but he loved the crews, he’d co-operate with them no problem.’ No, Marlon’s problems on the set weren’t with the grips or the sound guys, it was with authority figures.

Aaron Rosenberg was the producer on
Morituri
and the movie was shot off the coast of northern California. Everyone stayed in local motels and one night Fraker was awoken by a big rumpus going on outside. ‘There was screaming and hollering. I looked out the window and there was Marlon and Aaron Rosenberg fighting each other. Now Rosenberg was an all-American football player in college, he was no baby, and Marlon was from the streets, and they were just pounding each other and pretty soon Marlon knocked Aaron over the side of this hill and he rolled all the way down. Marlon went after him, picked him up and they both shook hands, put their arms around each other and walked off down the street. Those were great days.’

Maybe to get rid of the stench of making money from shit, Marlon sought to do something worthwhile with his fame, like an attempt to make a documentary for UNICEF on the Bihar famine in India. He visited filthy hospitals and watched a child die right in front of him. He derided how his government in one year spent less helping stop the starvation than was spent in a few hours on the Vietnam War. No one listened. Bitter, he turned down a film role, saying, ‘How can I act when people are starving in India?’

Then suddenly news reached him that his father had died. Marlon took the old bugger back to the farm in Illinois and spread his ashes around the fields. But his passing did little to alleviate Marlon’s fantasies of revenge. He used to think, just let me have him back for eight seconds that would be enough to break his jaw. ‘I wanted to smash his face and watch him spit out his teeth. I wanted to kick his balls into his throat. I wanted to rip his ears off and eat them in front of him. I wanted to separate his larynx from his body and shove it in his stomach.’ This kid had issues, obviously. But Marlon knew that he would have to forgive the sins of the father if he was ever to find peace for himself.

What are you hiring a gunman for, Pa?

Like Brando, Dennis Hopper was deeply concerned that the world was taking a big dump on its poorest and most defenceless people, and nobody much was doing anything about it. Impressed and influenced by the speeches of Martin Luther King, he followed much of liberal Hollywood and became interested in the civil rights movement. Actually it was the personal intervention of Marlon that got Dennis actively involved. He was walking down the street when a car pulled up alongside him. It was Brando. ‘What are you doing?’ Dennis did a double take before replying. ‘Nothing.’ Marlon said there was a big march planned from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, so armed with his trusty camera Dennis headed south to participate in what many commentators see as the political and emotional peak of the civil rights struggle, where King eulogized: ‘I’ve been to the mountain; I’ve seen the Promised Land.’

It was a gruelling five-day trek, during which time Dennis took many now historically important photographs of King and the other marchers, ignoring redneck locals who spat at him and called him a long-haired nigger-loving commie. There was a lot of violence going on all around them, helicopters flying everywhere, people screaming and yelling and waving Confederate flags. It was something to be remembered. Certainly the reaction from these bigoted inbreds really got to Dennis, changed him from an individual who believed the world’s problems could be solved peacefully, Gandhi-style, to a man who began to store guns and study martial arts.

The drugs didn’t help, of course. Mists of paranoia floated around in his head unchecked; he believed both the CIA and FBI were tracking his movements. Friends revealed he sometimes stalked the neighbourhood late at night, gun in hand, in search of government agents he was convinced were spying on him. He even began to think that Brooke was part of the conspiracy, that he could no longer trust her. She in turn grew increasingly wary of what he might do; hardly surprising, since Dennis was now a black belt in karate. He also made a habit of falling drunkenly asleep in bed with a lit cigarette between his fingers, causing a fire or two. Once Brooke woke up and the room was filled with smoke and flames and she booted Dennis out of bed to safety. More than once Brooke was to look back on that incident and wonder what might have been had she just left the guy to roast.

Back in the closeted fantasy world of Hollywood, Dennis wanted a movie real bad, something mainstream; he hadn’t had a role in a studio film for eight years. It was one of Hollywood’s biggest ironies that the man who gave it to him was his old adversary Henry Hathaway. The veteran had heard about his marriage to Brooke and hoped it might have calmed him down, so cast Dennis in
The Sons of Katie Elder
(1965), a John Wayne western. Over the years Dennis had thought of every possible way to kill his nemesis on
From Hell to Texas
, ‘From poisoning, to a truck running him over.’ Instead he kept his counsel and took the job. ‘You’re not going to make any trouble like you did before, right?’ said Hathaway on his first day. ‘This is a big Duke picture and you know Wayne doesn’t dig any of that method shit. So if you’re going to use any of that method shit, get out of here, kid.’ Actually Hopper got on swimmingly with Wayne and co-star Dean Martin, boozing royally together; many mornings Hathaway would greet the bleary-eyed trio warily. And there were no problems on set, either. ‘That was great, kid,’ Hathaway praised Dennis for doing a scene in take one. ‘But Henry, I’m a better actor now than I was eight years ago.’ Hathaway shook his head. ‘No Dennis, you ain’t a better actor. You’re just smarter.’

That rhinoceros hasn’t been innocent since the day he was born.

Since Warren Beatty’s social life was more exciting than any script, he decided to bring his exploits to the silver screen himself, portraying ‘the plight of the compulsive Don Juan’. The film was called
What’s New Pussycat?
, an expression Warren often used when calling up his girls on the phone. He brought in Charlie Feldman as producer and sought the talents of a new young comic, Woody Allen, to write the script. ‘Warren and Woody thought they were going to make a low-key, Woody Allen kind of picture,’ recalls Clive Donner, who’d been hired to direct. ‘Now there was no way Charlie was ever going to do that, that wasn’t his style, low-key pictures, he was into big fucking powerful productions.’

Dashing over to Woody’s New York apartment for a meeting on 22 November 1963 Warren overheard on the radio the shocking news about Kennedy’s assassination. He arrived at Allen’s place still numb with shock. ‘We sat there, stunned,’ Warren later recalled.

Worse than Kennedy’s head exploding like a melon was the prospect of starring opposite Feldman’s mistress, Capucine. ‘Warren and Charlie were very good friends,’ says Donner. ‘But Warren just didn’t want to act with Capucine. He’s a lovely guy, Warren, but deadly serious. So we had a big meeting, it went on and on and on, with Warren trying to get his own way.’ In the end he confronted Feldman; it was either him or Capucine, and as she was fucking Feldman it was no contest. Warren was out, replaced by Peter O’Toole, and
What’s New Pussycat?
turned into one of the biggest comedy hits of the decade.