Hollywood Hellraisers (43 page)

After a year of personal problems Jack wisely disappeared from view for a while, but couldn’t keep out of the headlines for very long. Despite the man’s Olympic-standard shagging history, there had never yet been even a whisper of a paternity suit. This was even more remarkable, given his confessed hang-up about using condoms. ‘It’s always a problem,’ he once said about them. ‘You can’t feel your wanker.’ Such sentiments look Jurassic in the post-Aids era, but were less so before that epidemic ‘brought the death fuck into the world’. For Jack, whose life revolved so much around women, the Aids scare seriously impinged upon his activities. It didn’t stop him enjoying sex, but he ranked the hysteria surrounding those early Aids cases as ‘right up there with the atomic bomb as events that impacted our culture for the worse’. In the fiftieth-anniversary edition of
Playboy
magazine he wrote: ‘We were moving to a freer society before Aids. Most people who investigated this knew that if you were not shooting up or getting fucked in the heinie, you were as likely to get Aids as you were to have a safe fall on your head while walking down Wilshire Boulevard.’

Jack had always been a target for women who might have designs on trapping him with a paternity suit. He knew the risks well enough, and inevitably his luck ran out when in late 1993 an ex-waitress called Jenine Gourin claimed to have become pregnant by him when she was twenty. When she threatened to sue, Jack’s lawyers took over with promises to pay for the child’s upkeep and education, and the story quietly slipped out of the public’s consciousness.

Then it emerged in 2005 that Jack had another secret love child, this one from Danish supermodel Winnie Hollmann. Born in 1981, Honey Hollman waited until she was twenty-four before finally speaking out about her dad, confessing they shared some of the same personality traits. ‘I have the same temper as him . . . I scream and shout a lot.’

If we don’t sight land in three days you can cut off my head.

Desperate for cash after his son’s financially draining trial, Marlon Brando took any old tosh going. You’ll pay $5m for twenty days’ work on
Christopher Columbus – The Discovery
(1992)? That will do nicely, thank you. His benefactors once again were the Salkinds, who’d paid him an outrageous sum once before, for
Superman
. All this for a man who once said, ‘Never confuse the size of your paycheck with the size of your talent.’

Director John Glen, who’d just come off directing five Bond movies in a row, was excited about the prospect of working with Marlon and they met for dinner before location filming in Madrid. ‘He was extremely charming,’ says Glen. ‘One could understand why he was so powerful on the screen because he had a certain charisma about him.’ Marlon also had his own ideas about how he wanted to portray the role of Torquemada, the Spanish Inquisition’s prime torturer. ‘One of the things he wanted to do,’ recalls Glen, ‘was to have these outrageous nails growing like talons on his hands. I sort of looked at him a bit sideways and thought, well I hope that idea goes away.’ Another ludicrous suggestion was that Marlon should stalk his torture chamber while young naked women were boiled alive in oil; and this was supposed to be a family movie! Anyway the dinner went well. ‘But then the second night I wanted to see him again,’ says Glen. ‘I went to his room and I couldn’t get past the security guards, even though I was the director they wouldn’t let me anywhere near him.’

When Glen began shooting Marlon’s scenes there was an immediate problem. The great man didn’t turn up. ‘I was anticipating trouble. When you’re a director you have to box a little clever sometimes and I’d cast a very good actor called Michael Gothard as Brando’s assistant, the idea being that if Marlon didn’t turn up any time I would put Gothard in. And sure enough, on the first day, Marlon was a no-show, so I put Michael in and he took Marlon’s lines.’

Marlon’s invisibility on the set that first day caused ructions amongst the cast, notably with Tom Selleck, who approached Glen that evening. ‘John,’ he said, ‘I admire your work, but really the only reason I did this film was because Marlon Brando was going to be in it. Now he’s not turned up and he’s not gonna play the thing, I’m not going to do any more, I’m off.’ A bit taken aback, Glen replied, ‘I appreciate your honesty, Tom, and wish you all the best.’ Obviously word filtered back to Marlon that Selleck had walked and that another actor was delivering his dialogue. ‘Because Brando turned up the next day,’ says Glen. ‘Actors being actors, they hate to lose their lines, and I just reshot that section. Naturally Tom Selleck reappeared, too.’

Despite these early problems, Glen got on extremely well with Marlon. ‘He was very compliant when it came to direction, not difficult at all. I’m always very honest with actors and upfront with them and I think he appreciated that. It wasn’t until later in the shoot that I realised he’d got a little sound piece in his ear and he was having his lines relayed from an adjacent room by an assistant.’

What surprised Glen even more was the incredible press interest in Brando’s involvement in the film. All the time they were in Madrid the paparazzi hounded them. Driving to locations they’d have about thirty cars full of reporters following behind, all trying to get pictures. ‘It was rather like the Diana scenario where the fame is so great that it becomes completely restrictive. It was a real trial. I think Marlon saw more kitchens in hotels than anything else, because that was the way he used to get into the hotel, round the back, past the dustbins and into the kitchens, that was the story of his life. I think he accepted it, he was almost numb to it.’

The Columbus movie opened to an apathetic public and Brando’s lazy performance was harshly derided. American critic Richard Scheikel wrote, ‘We are watching a man, broken by unhappiness, going through the motions to pay his bills.’ But Marlon was completely honest about the fact that he’d made the film purely for the filthy lucre. ‘I went to see Marlon in his caravan one day,’ says Glen, ‘and he said to me, “The only reason I’m doing this film is to pay the lawyers.” His son had been involved in a murder case and it had cost Marlon a bloody fortune.’

’Cause you, you’re part eggplant.

Thanks largely to his darkly majestic turn in
Blue Velvet
, Dennis Hopper was garnering something of a reputation as a rent-a-loon, creating over the next few years a dangerously intense series of misfit characters, cornering the market in miscellaneous perverts, druggies and wackos. He was master of the unsavoury and the unbalanced. ‘I wouldn’t like to mess with Dennis myself,’ said actor Ed Harris. ‘Nobody plays a monster quite like him.’

Certainly Dennis had more fun playing social deviants and psychopaths. Not that he was in any way like that in real life, of course. ‘But I guess I could have been a top-class serial killer if things had turned out differently. I was the weird kid. Hated my parents. I could have been a killer, but life turned out differently.’ Strange that he was being asked to inhabit such roles now he himself was rehabilitated and ‘normal’. His old friend and fellow art collector Vincent Price told him back in the early sixties, ‘I think you’ll end up playing villains.’ Dennis was put out at the time, seeing himself as leading-man material. But Vincent was right. And when playing baddies Dennis has always tried to give them human qualities so when they carry out their atrocities it’s all the more alarming and disturbing.

Dennis played a true sicko in
Paris Trout
(1991), a bigot and wife beater who uses a broken bottle as a sex aid. Director Stephen Gyllenhaal admitted feeling nervous working with him, ‘He’s something of a myth,’ but later attested to his total professionalism, not at all methody, unlike co-stars Barbara Hershey, who stayed in character throughout the shoot, and Ed Harris, who’d call Gyllenhaal at 3 a.m. to discuss his role. No, at the end of a scene Dennis trotted back into his trailer to watch ice hockey on TV.

In quick succession Dennis appeared in Sean Penn’s directorial debut
The Indian Runner
(1991), played a renegade cop in
Nails
(1992), taking karate lessons and weightlifting classes to get into shape for the physically challenging role, teamed up with Wesley Snipes for the action thriller
Boiling Point
(1992) and was a cartoonish villain in the risibly awful
Super Mario Brothers
(1993), a film so bad that John Leguizamo confessed he and co-star Bob Hoskins frequently got drunk just to make it through the experience. ‘The worst thing I ever did,’ Hoskins dubbed it. ‘It had a husband-and-wife team directing, whose arrogance had been mistaken for talent. After so many weeks their own agent told them to get off the set! Fucking nightmare. Fucking idiots.’

Perhaps the best critic of the film, which was based on the worldfamous computer game, was Dennis’s four-year-old son Henry. After seeing
Super Mario Brothers
he asked his dad, ‘Why did you do that?’ Dennis replied, ‘To buy you shoes.’ Henry looked at Dennis solemnly. ‘I don’t need shoes that badly.’

Dennis played just a brief supporting role in his next film, a flop at the box office on first release but later surfacing as a cult favourite –
True Romance
(1993). With an early script by Quentin Tarantino and direction from Tony Scott,
True Romance
had an outstanding cast: Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, Gary Oldman, Val Kilmer, Brad Pitt and Christopher Walken as a mafia boss whose interrogation of Dennis and humiliation at his hands, through Tarantino’s plenty-controversial dialogue, is an all-time classic. For sheer acting class it’s hard to beat. ‘That should go into a time capsule for future generations to look at,’ said Tarantino.

At the end of it Hopper gets three bullets in his skull. Scott had a special gun that shot out flames. Dennis was understandably concerned. ‘Tony, you’re not putting that gun right to my head.’ Scott assured him the gun was one hundred per cent safe. ‘It’s fine,’ Scott called over a crew guy. ‘Do it to me.’ The crew guy took the gun and fired it against the director’s forehead. He fell on the floor, blood pouring from a nasty wound. ‘OK,’ said Scott. ‘That won’t work.’

Meyer, we have known each other since we were too young to fuck.

In 1976 Goldie Hawn said, ‘Warren Beatty will marry. It will take a very special woman. She’ll have to be non-smothering and non-clinging. And strong! The stronger the woman, the better her chances of holding Warren.’

He first met that special lady at a showbiz party just after
Dick Tracy
. ‘Interesting girl,’ a pal said. Warren followed his gaze and rested on the fragile figure and classic beauty of a young actress called Annette Bening. ‘Ooooh, yeah,’ said Warren.

Warren had decided to make a biopic of gangster Bugsy Siegel, the man who more or less founded Las Vegas. He knew it was vital to cast the right actress to play the love of his life, Virginia Hill. Besides putting bullets into people, Siegel was something of a randy bastard, but after meeting Virginia never chased women again. He found someone who accepted him for who he was. Director Barry Levinson was thinking box office and Michelle Pfeiffer; Warren recalled that actress at the party and set up a lunch date. When Annette’s agent heard the news he was dead set against any meeting, convinced the old Romeo just wanted to hit on his client. ‘And it turned out he was right,’ said Warren.

It was love at first sight for Warren, who fell for Annette in about ten minutes flat. ‘I felt very conflicted because I was so elated to meet her, and yet at the same time I began to mourn the passing of a way of life. I thought, oh, everything’s going to be different.’ Of course the selfish part of him wanted to hang on to his playboy bachelor existence, probably until his bits withered and died, but he knew he was in the last-chance saloon to bag himself a scorching young bride and save himself endless reams of tabloid tittle-tattle about being a sad old lecher. Let’s face it, Warren’s adolescence ran about three decades longer than everyone else’s. ‘Being adolescent never got boring to me,’ he’s confessed. Or as sister Shirley once helpfully said, ‘He’s fifty from the neck up and fourteen from the waist down.’ Fortunately that was all over now, and not a moment too soon. ‘I stood a good chance of reaching the end of my days as a solitary, eccentric . . . fool.’

Desperate to have her there and then, Warren behaved, as always, like the old smoothie he is. ‘As much as I am inclined to make a vulgar move upon you,’ he said to her, ‘I will refrain from doing so because I think it is terrible when people have to work together, if they have that pressure. ’ And Christ, he should know. On
Bugsy
(1991) they worked like a dream, so much so that critic Rex Reed noted, ‘The chemistry is apparent and juicy. Their love scenes don’t look like acting.’ On set, however, Warren’s romancing of Annette was so discreet that not even director Levinson knew what was going on.

Once
Bugsy
was in the can, Warren took Annette out to dinner. Between courses he came right out and asked if she wanted him to make her pregnant; this from a man who’d been running scared from fatherhood for decades. It was so off the wall a proposition, how could the poor girl refuse? ‘Well, I would like to do that right away,’ said Warren, and, er . . . they did. It was also perfectly in keeping with Warren’s character. The guy’s a gent, and a puritan under all that Don Juan stuff. He didn’t litter the world with little bastard Warrens, he wants to go to heaven, so only impregnated the woman he knew he was going to marry.

The baby arrived early in 1992, a daughter, named Kathlyn after Warren’s delighted mother. The event sent shockwaves through the industry. ‘Is this the end of civilisation as we know it?’ asked the
Washington Post
. The greatest lothario in Hollywood history, the man who had bedded the most desirable beauties of the age, was now a father, changing dirty nappies and cooing like an idiot. There were reports he’d fainted while watching birthing videos with Jack, but he denied it.