Hollywood Hellraisers (32 page)

Marlon’s scenes take place in the opening ten minutes of the film, in the lead-up to the destruction of the planet Krypton, and were played for the most part with Susannah York. ‘He was absolutely enchanting,’ she recalls. ‘So nice to me, filled my dressing room with flowers and fruit. I liked him very much. I was certainly very astonished by cards being put up for his lines, that took me a bit of getting used to. And I remember asking somebody why he didn’t learn the lines, because he obviously could, and this guy said, “I don’t think Marlon has very much respect for the profession he’s in.” And that made me feel rather sad for Marlon because he was such a great man, and somebody so wonderful at what he did, and not to feel much respect for it was just enormously sad.’

Stunt man Vic Armstrong, doubling Christopher Reeve in the flying sequences, was also mystified by Marlon’s use of cue cards. ‘It was actually true what they said about him, that when he scratched his head it was to look over at the idiot boards. Guys were walking around with great big cards with lines of dialogue on in different parts of the set and he’d look at them and that’s how he got those long thoughtful looks on screen. It was amazing. But Brando was a very generous, nice person. Of course I was in awe of him, he was an icon.’

I told her you had a small dick!

After his appearance in the belated release of
Apocalypse Now
Dennis Hopper was sure movie offers would come rolling in. At last he had exposure in a major movie that would be seen by millions. Nothing of any merit turned up. His agent suggested he move back to LA in case he be obliterated completely from Tinsel Town’s subconscious. For a while he took the advice, but the sheer phoniness of the place had him yearning for his sanctuary back in Taos.

Waiting for him there was a predictable slide into excess. Things were starting to get a little crazy, even by his standards. He bought a two-ton Cadillac while high on drugs because he thought it was a tank. He gave interviews depressed about his career, the fact he’d had to look for film work in Europe instead of his native land. ‘I can’t say I wasn’t angry and upset during that time,’ he said later, ‘because I was.’ He was particularly desperate to return to directing, to prove himself once again behind the camera. He just had to make films, he said, ‘because that’s what I feel justifies my existence’. He was literally going nuts, and in need of some creative release picked up a brush and started painting again. ‘I was stopped so many times from acting and directing that if I had not had art as an outlet, I don’t know what I would have done.’

Still, there was an air of desperation about Dennis: his expression emoted pain, befuddlement and disillusionment; his angry eyes were soul-piercing. As one journalist put it, ‘He has the face of a human train wreck.’ At least he was still alive to feel miserable; three-quarters of his friends died before he was thirty. Talking to Bob Dylan once, Dennis said, ‘When we hit forty, man, we can look at each other and really talk to each other, like hey, how did we do that?’

With no one prepared to gamble on Dennis he bummed around with some old friends including Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn and rocker Neil Young, and together they churned out a movie that was something like five years in the making, with Young acting as co-director putting something like $3m of his own money into the project. It was called
Human Highway
and filmed partly on location around Dennis’s home. The film didn’t see daylight until the mid-80s, whereupon it was not well received.
Entertainment Weekly
said, ‘The nicest thing you can say about
Human Highway
is that as a filmmaker Neil Young is a great guitarist.’

As might be expected of a Dennis Hopper movie, all did not run smoothly and he ended up in court on an assault charge. Actress Sally Kirkland alleged that one day a doped-up Dennis, who played a cook in the film, was performing knife tricks on the set with real knives. Fearful of an accident, Sally attempted to grab the knife off him and in the struggle received an injury to her hand serious enough to require surgery and two days in hospital. She sued Dennis for $2m, along with the producers, blaming them for not keeping the actor under control. Her lawyers alleged that Dennis and the crew were ‘smoking and in other ways ingesting dangerous and illegal drugs and drugs known to cause violence and dangerous behaviour’. In the end no criminal charges were ever filed against Dennis.

Don’t touch me unless you love me.

When
Heaven Can Wait
was showered with several Oscar nominations Warren Beatty turned up at the ceremony arm in arm with new girlfriend Diane Keaton. God knows what she must have thought when Shirley MacLaine bounded up onto the stage and joked, ‘I want to take this opportunity to say how proud I am of my little brother, my dear, sweet, talented brother. Just imagine what you could accomplish if you tried celibacy!’

Warren met Diane Keaton at a party thrown by her former lover Woody Allen, and for days afterwards besieged her with flowers and calls. Would she go to dinner with him? Would she fly to Acapulco for the weekend? It had never failed before. Playing it cool, Diane turned him down several times before finally agreeing. Diane fitted the template of many previous Warren girlfriends: highly successful, a star in her own right. ‘Warren likes ladies whose names appear above the title,’ joked
Bonnie and Clyde
actor Michael J. Pollard. ‘But he makes exceptions — lots and lots of exceptions.’ Those exceptions might be waitresses, secretaries and Hollywood groupies. A few years back, at a party Roman Polanski hosted at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, Warren parked his car and immediately started to flirt with one of the girl valets. A Hollywood executive was witness to this and it struck him as more than odd that here was Warren, a top movie star, trying to pick up a parking attendant in the middle of the night. ‘His conquests were a matter of chemistry,’ Robert Altman once said. ‘And a hell of a lot of stamina.’

Diane Keaton had fancied Warren for years, of course, first laying eyes on him as a young actress browsing through the Beverly Wilshire bookstore. She looked up and there he was in the lobby. ‘I thought, my God, he’s so beautiful. He looked at me for a second, and then passed me by. I thought, I’ll never know him. He’ll never be somebody in my life.’

Theirs was a contentious, complicated relationship; ‘volatile’ was a word Diane once used to describe it. ‘Warren,’ she said, ‘really likes women who kick his ass.’ According to reports Beatty bought Diane a pair of handcuffs, an ironic comment on their relationship perhaps, or were they just kinky bastards? ‘God help me, no,’ Warren said when confronted with the suggestion. ‘I’ve never been into that.’

Besides Diane, Warren was seeing other women. When Ali McGraw left husband Steve McQueen the news spread along the bachelor grapevine faster than meths goes down a tramp’s throat. Warren immediately called her former husband Robert Evans. ‘Your old lady, she’s free. Do you mind if I call her?’ Evans couldn’t believe the nerve of the guy; everyone knew he was involved with Diane. ‘If you weren’t living with Keaton,’ Evans replied, ‘Ali would be the best thing that could ever happen to you, but she’s too good a dame to hurt for the sake of a notch. You’ve asked me, so I’m telling you — pass.’

Amazingly, just two minutes after Warren’s call, Jack rang Evans with the same question. ‘Whaddaya think, kid? Now that your old lady’s free, is it worth a dial?’ Evans’s advice to Jack was much the same as he’d just given Warren. ‘Call her if you want, but you’re with Anjelica and Ali’s too vulnerable for you to play it shady. Got it?’ There was a slight pause. ‘Got it,’ said Jack. Years later Evans recalled what happened next. ‘One called and called, and the other passed. Who do you think called?’ Doesn’t take a genius, does it?

Did Warren make a habit of this, one wonders. Friend Richard Sylbert once said. ‘I remember years ago Warren used to scan the trade papers, looking to see who was getting a divorce. He was great with wounded birds.’

Warren had no qualms about stealing the vulnerable Ali from McQueen, since the two megastars had been rivals for years. McQueen saw Beatty as white collar and limos, he was blue collar and motorbikes. Later, when Warren was dating supermodel Barbara Minty, McQueen exacted his revenge. After seeing Barbara’s picture in a magazine, McQueen called her up for a date. Barbara was intelligent enough to know that her relationship with Warren was never going to lead anywhere, so agreed. They rode round for a while on McQueen’s bike, and afterwards he confessed to a friend that the moment he felt her cruise missile breasts against the back of his leather jacket, ‘I knew this was the woman for me.’ As Bill Maher, McQueen’s business manager, put it. ‘She was Warren Beatty’s girlfriend. Steve stole her away from him.’

Around this time Warren was dating Jackie Kennedy Onassis, whose second husband Aristotle Onassis had recently died. Once more a grieving widow, Jackie had moved into a flash apartment on Fifth Avenue in New York. How serious their relationship was is open to speculation. In 1997, when quizzed about it on television, Warren denied they ever had sex. Ever on the lookout, though, Warren was flirting like mad with Cher at one party and when the singer refused to leave with him his radar instead switched to a beautiful pair of girls. He knew they were lesbians but that didn’t stop him having a go. In the end one of them said, ‘What the fuck do we need you for?’

Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I’m not gonna hurt ya. I’m just going to bash your brains in.

Jack Nicholson had wanted to work with Stanley Kubrick for years and made no secret of the fact that he’d told Stanley if there was anything that he thought he was right for he’d drop everything and be on the first flight over to England, the American’s home since the sixties.

As soon as he read Stephen King’s chilling novel
The Shining
Kubrick recognised its cinematic potential and saw Jack as the only actor with the intensity to play the central role of a family man driven to mental collapse who tries to kill his family with an axe. ‘The character is a desperate, driven man,’ said co-screenwriter Diane Johnson. ‘And Jack can play insanity better than anyone.’

Jack arrived in London in the winter of 1978, where he’d remain for the next year as the film progressed at a fairly methodical rate, befitting Kubrick’s reputation for perfectionism. To an actor who learned his craft in the Roger Corman wham, bang, thank you, ma’am school of filmmaking, Kubrick’s habitual fifty or sometimes sixty takes for the more difficult scenes was a real challenge for Jack and something quite new. ‘He’s demanding,’ said Jack, with just a hint of understatement. Kubrick’s approach was: how can we do it better than it’s ever been done before? ‘A lot of actors give him what he wants,’ Jack went on. ‘If you don’t, he’ll beat it out of you — with a velvet glove, of course.’

Jack’s method of dealing with such eccentricity was to bitch and moan behind Kubrick’s back, ‘I’m a great off-stage grumbler.’ Poor old Shelley Duvall had nowhere to vent her frustrations, storing it all inside to such a degree that she almost suffered a nervous breakdown. Apparently Kubrick demanded 127 takes from Shelley in one scene.

Seeing all this unfold at first hand was Leon Vitali, a former actor who’d become personal assistant to Kubrick. ‘Stanley loved working with Jack,’ he recalls, ‘because as an actor he placed himself completely in Stanley’s hands and just went with him. I think the secret of their relationship was that Jack never felt hindered from trying anything, and Stanley never felt hindered about saying, “Well, do a little more of that, push it further.” It was a wonderful collaboration.’

According to Vitali, the way Kubrick liked to work was with a script that was never really finished, it would adapt and change all the way through shooting. ‘Jack always used to laugh because every day there’d be so many changes and they were all colour coded, but by the end of it no one could remember which colour came last.’ Rehearsal time was also very important for Kubrick. ‘He’d kick everybody off the set,’ says Vitali, ‘so he could work quietly with the actors. It might take an hour or two hours, or even longer sometimes, with everyone else just waiting outside to come back on.’

Holed up in a palatial apartment on the Chelsea embankment while
The Shining
took shape, Jack was able to savour the London scene in much the same way pal Warren had done in the mid-sixties. At one of the numerous parties he attended given by London’s social elite, Jack met Margaret Trudeau, wife of Canada’s former prime minister Pierre Trudeau. Margaret had left her husband and was enjoying numerous flings around the world. She later confessed to being instantly attracted to Jack and they left the party together in his chauffeur-driven Daimler, she crouching on the floor to avoid the lenses of waiting paparazzi. It was on the journey home, Margaret later revealed, that she discovered ‘just how much room there was in the back of a Daimler’. According to Margaret, she and Jack became brief lovers, and she never let go of the fanciful notion that there might be a chance of a longer relationship. But Jack never hid his love for Anjelica from her and gave the former First Lady of Canada the ultimate brush-off when he told her over dinner one evening, ‘Guess who’s coming tomorrow?’ The fling was over, and Trudeau felt ‘crushed. . . a fool’. But a fool who wanted more. Years later they bumped into each other again at a Hollywood party. According to Trudeau, Jack took her into the men’s toilet for a quick fumble and throb.

Actor Burt Young, who’d appeared in
Chinatown
but is best known as Stallone’s brother-in-law in the
Rocky
movies, was called over to Jack’s table at a New York nightclub to meet some of his pals. ‘This is a great actor,’ said Jack of Burt. Deeply moved, Burt replied, ‘Jack, y’know when I knew you were great?’ Jack looked up and said, ‘No, when?’ Burt carried on, ‘When I read in the paper you screwed Margaret Trudeau in the back of a limousine.’ Jack smiled, ‘Yeah, yeah — that was great!’