Hollywood Hellraisers (33 page)

Jack was not altogether unfamiliar with car sex. Sixties party animal Bebe Buell, one-time lover of Mick Jagger, Iggy Pop and Jimmy Page, confessed to having sex up against a car with Jack around about this time. She hung out with him for about a year during the early eighties. ‘He’s a great guy,’ she recalled. ‘It was very cool. My first sex-againstthe-car lesson with Jack.’

When Anjelica arrived in London she couldn’t take much solace in Jack’s company. As he had been during
Cuckoo’s Nest
, he was toting some pretty heavy on-screen psychological baggage that couldn’t be so easily packed away at the end of the day. She’d arrived during the shooting of those scenes where Jack was required to be unshaven, unkempt and very, very bonkers. Working hard and often late into the night he’d often return home, walk straight to the bed, collapse onto it and immediately fall asleep.

The famous moment where Jack is required to break down a bathroom door with an axe to get at his wife and child was worked on for several days. Originally the props department built a door that could be easily broken, but having been a volunteer fire marshal in his youth Jack tore it apart so easily they were forced to build a much stronger replacement. Poking his head through a gap, Jack announces, ‘Here’s Johnny.’ That line, one of the most famous in screen history, was an ad-lib by Jack, an imitation of announcer Ed McMahon’s famous introduction of Johnny Carson on his late-night TV chat show. Amusingly, Kubrick didn’t get the connection; having lived so long in England he wasn’t at all familiar with American television.

When it opened in the spring of 1980
The Shining
was a huge commercial success, but critics were divided over Jack’s performance, some deriding it as completely over the top. During filming Jack had been similarly concerned, querying, ‘Jesus, Stanley, aren’t I playing this too broad?’ No, Kubrick insisted, the character should be an almost pantomimic villain. The result is highly memorable. ‘I can’t talk too highly about how good Jack was in
The Shining
,’ says Vitali. ‘It was a long schedule for him, and he was always up and ready for it. There’s the scene where he’s pushing Shelley Duvall up the stairs and she’s swinging a baseball bat at him. We had two cameras set up, and there was this one take; it was just so amazing that there was a spontaneous outbreak of applause and cheering from the crew. As Stanley said, it was one of those things where the hands and the brain are all wired together, you don’t know what you’re doing, but everything you’re doing is right.’

Let me tell you something. If I didn’t have a son that still loved me, I’d blow your fuckin’ brains out.

W
hen Marlon Brando agreed to play a small role in the political thriller
The Formula
(1980) alongside George C. Scott, nobody knew that it would be the last time he’d stand in front of a movie camera for nine years. Again he was up to his old tricks, insisting his character wear a hearing aid that was in fact a radio receiver through which an assistant fed him his lines. There was also the customary taunting of his director, this time John Avildsen. On his first morning on the set Marlon summoned Avildsen to his trailer. The script was on Marlon’s lap and he was eyeing it contemptuously. ‘I can’t say this shit,’ he said. ‘OK,’ replied Avildsen, ‘let’s find some shit you can say.’ The two men spent a most entertaining morning swapping stories and jokes and then finally arriving at some dialogue Marlon was happy with. ‘It was delightful working with him,’ Avildsen later recalled. ‘He was worth the quarter-million dollars he insisted on getting each day. In cash.’

For years now Marlon had been dividing his time between his home in Mulholland Drive and his paradise island, where life seemed much simpler — but was it? In the mid-seventies he’d sunk a small fortune into a hotel complex that was doomed from the beginning. Storms and high tides meant flooding was a perpetual problem and Marlon was driven nuts by middle-aged ladies crying, ‘Mr Brando, we loved you as Napoleon,’ and asking for his autograph. It was a bad idea that was eventually scrapped. What possessed him to do it in the first place? ‘I love having projects, even bad ones,’ he told the press. ‘I don’t want to sit on an island like a meditative Buddha.’

His other projects included the establishment of a research station to find ways to tap solar and wind energy and to extract protein from seawater. He believed the planet was in peril due to overpopulation and pollution and these problems had to be solved quickly. When one reporter congratulated Marlon on persuading a tycoon to invest in one of these schemes he replied, ‘Wasn’t hard. All I had to do was rub his hump with yak butter and suck on his earlobe a little.’

His island served another purpose, too, as a sanctuary for his children away from the decadence and corruption of Hollywood. Producer Albert Ruddy recalls Marlon telling him, ‘I’m keeping that island, I like that island, I don’t want my kids to grow up in LA, I want them to grow up in Tahiti.’ Nice idea. ‘But the tragedy of his life,’ says Ruddy, ‘is that his kids still grew up troubled.’

Jesus Christ, she’s a dyke.

Dennis Hopper was off to Canada after agreeing to play the role of an alcoholic father just out of prison for ramming his truck into a school bus full of kids in
Out of the Blue
(1980). But he got fed up after two weeks of just bumming around in his trailer and not working. The film was in a mess, it was going to be shut down, the director Leonard Yakir hadn’t any usable footage. It was Dennis who came to the rescue, agreeing to take over. It was an amazing chance to direct again, the first time in ten years, and it had fallen straight into his lap.

Dennis didn’t muck around. Once in charge he made swift and drastic changes, such as throwing away the script and starting all over again. If I take the movie over on the Saturday, Dennis was thinking, I have Sunday to write it, and we start shooting on Monday. From a routine film about a teenager from a broken home Dennis turned
Out of the Blue
into a thoroughly depressing picture of angst-ridden family life. The mother became a drug addict and the daughter a punk rocker who stabs her father with scissors and then blows up herself and her mother in a truck. In the original script only Dennis’s character died. ‘Now the whole family goes.’ Hopper went on a blitzkrieg and had the movie wrapped in four weeks. When it opened, opinion was polarised: people either hated it or loved it. Dennis didn’t care. He saw himself as a protest artist, making statements about what he saw happening in his country. ‘And what I see is a corrupt place, which I kind of enjoy.’ Leaning forward for effect, Dennis whispered to his interviewer, ‘I’m kind of corrupt myself.’

He flew to London with his daughter Marin for a film-festival showing of
Out of the Blue.
In the arrivals lounge he ran over to her, ecstatic. ‘Oh my God, I’ve just been through customs and I’ve gotta let you know something. I have drugs all over my body.
I have drugs all over my body!
And I got through customs.’ Marin sunk her head in her hands, as if to say, ‘OK, thanks for that, Dad.’

Though he had proved he remained capable behind the camera, Hollywood still refused to take notice. Executive Ned Tanen of Universal, for example, knew that ‘Dennis has more talent in one hand than most of the people making a fortune in the film industry.’ But, ‘Sadly, it can’t be pointed in the right way.’ His drinking and wild behaviour were still barring him from mainstream cinema. As director James Frawley says, ‘Dennis’s reputation in the media, and what he represented, overshadowed his ability as an actor and director, no question. Because he’s a wonderful performer.’

Perversely, Dennis’s drinking was never particularly detrimental to his work. As he liked to say, he drank all day and still managed to write and direct
Easy Rider
. He was able to function normally when he had to, without appearing disorientated. (No more than usual, anyway: he thought he was doing fine so long as he wasn’t rolling around on the floor insensible.) And it was all done in plain sight, no rushing to the bathroom between set-ups for Dennis. ‘In those days I was doing it right out in front of everyone.’ If he wanted to get totally blotto and black out the world he’d start lining up shots of tequila and hit them, bang bang, one after the other.

Years later Dennis confessed that in spite of all the drugs, psychedelics and narcotics he did, he was at heart an alcoholic. ‘Honestly, I only used to do cocaine so I could sober up and drink more.’ At the time he didn’t think he’d ever be able to live without booze. His idea of a perfect retirement at the time was to buy the biggest bottle of alcohol he could, sit in an armchair somewhere and live perpetually pissed. Is it any wonder that
Empire
magazine once said, ‘If Dennis Hopper didn’t exist, Hollywood would be required to invent him?’

You dream that if you discuss the revolution with a man before you go to bed with him, it’ll be missionary work rather than sex.

Warren Beatty had long held an ambition to make a film about American writer and activist John Reed, who charted the bloody birth of the Soviet Union in his classic book
Ten Days that Shook the World
. Reed had been dubbed ‘the playboy of the revolution’. Warren could relate to that.

He knew
Reds
(1981) was going to be a tough pitch. ‘It’s not the most attractive thing in the world to a studio, a three-and-a-half-hour movie about a communist who dies.’ He tried Paramount first and met with its chief Charles Bluhdorn. ‘What’s it going to cost?’ Warren said twenty-five million. Bluhdorn couldn’t believe it. ‘Why are you doing this? Do me a favour, Warren. Take twenty-five million, go to Mexico, spend a million on another movie, and keep twenty-four for yourself. Just don’t make this movie!’ It was tempting, but Warren said, ‘I’m sorry, Charlie. I really am gonna have to do this.’ Against his better judgement Bluhdorn agreed to back the project; after all, Beatty was still hot after the success of his last movie. ‘Warren could dictate what he wanted to make,’ said Robert Evans.
‘Reds
was his come shot after
Heaven Can Wait
.’

To bring his vision to the screen Warren hired acclaimed British playwright Trevor Griffiths, considered by many to be an odd choice. ‘Maybe it was,’ says. Griffiths. ‘I don’t know. Warren wasn’t a theatre man, in fact he didn’t like the theatre, he didn’t like actors or acting, or at least this is my understanding of it. He said to me, “Actors are people who jump through hoops,” that was the definition he gave me. But I thought he was incredibly smart and very connected.’

They first met at Mike Nichols’s wedding in America. Esteemed playwright Lillian Hellman, an old friend of Warren, was also there. She was then in her seventies and a frail creature. Griffiths recalls her spotting Warren and hobbling over towards him saying, ‘Warren, my dear Warren,’ and him picking her up above his head. ‘Oh God, the millionaire,’ she said. Warren smiled. ‘Billionaire.’

An early meeting between director and screenwriter was at London’s Claridge’s Hotel, from which Griffiths was kindly asked to remove himself because he wasn’t wearing a tie. Warren wasn’t standing for such stuffy tradition and offered to buy the hotel. Griffiths was allowed to stay. As he began working on the screenplay Griffiths quickly saw that Warren’s obsession about the subject matter was what his obsession always was: ‘With himself. I don’t say that viciously, he just happened to be part of a very winning narcissism that pervades American life, particularly American Hollywood life.’

Ultimately the partnership ran aground when Griffiths submitted his screenplay, which Warren liked but only with, inevitably, a whole bunch of changes. Together they sat in a hotel room for months on end pounding away on a new version. Fed up, Griffiths left for London — he wanted his life back, to put it bluntly — but Warren followed him and they resumed the work until, after one row too many, Griffiths walked out and that was it. Perhaps the problem was that Griffiths’s angle focused too heavily on the politics to the detriment of the romantic elements that Warren saw as equally important to the story. Reed had a tumultuous relationship with fellow scribe Louise Bryant, a role he’d already cast Diane Keaton in. Warren took over the script himself, with assistance from Elaine May and Robert Towne.

As for Griffiths, he looks back now with a combination of, ‘pain, bitterness and joy’. His Hollywood sojourn was not completely devoid of merit or pleasure. He recalls bumping into Jack on numerous occasions, even attending his first A-list party as the guest of Jack and Warren. ‘I had no tie on and hair down my back. Nobody knew who I was so they asked Jack and he told them I was his Native American gardener, so for the next hour people kept coming up to ask me if I’d do their garden for them. They were all women, so Jack had obviously told them a lot more than that. That really amused me.’

When
Reds
went before the cameras not only was Warren the star but he’d installed himself as director. He’d had no choice: ‘I felt that no one had the power to make it but me, that I had earned the right to make that movie.’ It took a whole year out of his life, shooting on several continents, often without a full script. ‘Warren Beatty is
mysterium tremendum
,’ said co-star Edward Herrmann. ‘We never saw a script. We could have been shooting
Casablanca
for all we knew.’

Warren didn’t want to overlook anything, even taking time out to explain to his extras what the film was about. After a lecture on the rights of the working man during filming in Spain, the extras took his message to heart and refused to return to work, having suddenly decided they were being exploited. Warren rolled his eyes, smiled at the irony and increased their wages.

Warren was having trouble casting Eugene O’Neill, the American playwright who stole Reed’s lover Louise Bryant. He went over to Jack’s place for advice. ‘What do you think the part needs?’ asked Jack. Warren thought a bit and said, ‘Above all else, you need to believe unquestionably that the character can take the leading lady away from me.’ Jack smiled. ‘Well, there’s only one actor who could do that — me.’

During filming, rumours circulated that Jack had fallen in a big way for Diane Keaton; they had been seen out together, so naturally to a hack journalist’s mind they were shagging. When asked if the story was true, Jack confessed it did feel a little bit like that. ‘I thought, my God, I’ve got a real crush and, holy fuck, this is my best friend and his girlfriend! ’ Nothing happened, of course, Jack would never two-time his buddy. ‘I’m not an asshole.’

Again during filming, the perfectionist in Warren’s soul came to the fore and he demanded multiple takes from his actors. In one scene played between Jack and Diane, Nicholson raged at Warren, ‘Just tell me what the fuck you want and I’ll do it.’ Jack was visibly shaking.

Esteemed Broadway star Maureen Stapleton, who attended the Actors Studio in the fifties with Brando, was giving a speech to a large crowd of workers in a rainstorm. After each take Warren said, ‘That’s great. Terrific,’ but asked her to do it again, and again and again. After one very good delivery Warren went, ‘Great.’ Everyone on the crew relaxed, not least Maureen. Then. ‘One more time, please.’ Maureen exploded. ‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’ The whole crowd of extras broke into cheers.

Warren had a habit of pushing and pushing his actors. ‘What do people say: he’s not a perfectionist, he just does it until he gets it right,’ says
Dick Tracy
producer Jon Landau. ‘Warren knows what he wants, and as a director knows that you can’t tell an actor what to do, you have to lead them to that place. The actor has to discover it themselves but the director has to be the one influencing them.’ As Robert Towne puts it, ‘Warren works everybody to a frazzle, but always wins them back.’

Well, not quite everyone. Gene Hackman agreed to play a cameo role in
Reds
as a favour to Warren, who’d launched his career with
Bonnie and Clyde
. Despite appearing in only two scenes, Warren made Hackman complete fifty takes for one of them. When he called a few years later to ask Hackman to appear in
Dick Tracy
the answer was, ‘I love you, Warren, but I just can’t do it.’