Pictures at a Revolution (16 page)

 

On July 4, 1965,
Jane Fonda threw a party in the oceanfront home in Malibu that she had recently rented with the man she was about to marry, director Roger Vadim. The party spilled out of the house, which had once belonged to Merle Oberon, and onto the beach, where she had set up a giant tent and laid down a dance floor.

Fonda wrote in her autobiography that the party was one of the first occasions on which old Hollywood and new Hollywood came face-to-face, and her guest list—with one faction represented by William Wyler, Gene Kelly, Darryl Zanuck, Lauren Bacall, Sam Spiegel, and her father, Henry, and the other by Warren Beatty, Tuesday Weld, Jean Seberg, Dennis Hopper, and her brother, Peter—bears that out.
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Fonda was in the mood to celebrate; after a half-dozen films in which the young actress had seemed to try on different personae—ingenue, seductress, rebel, hellcat—without finding anything that quite fit, she had just opened in her first hit, playing the title role in the comic western
Cat Ballou
, a movie that arrived just when the clichés of an aging genre were becoming ripe for parody. Now she was shuttling between France, where Vadim seemed to be building his body of work around her (actually, around her body), and Los Angeles, where she was suddenly being offered a better class of project: She was currently working with Robert Redford and Marlon Brando in Arthur Penn's
The Chase.
Her father, who had just turned sixty, roasted a pig on a spit and, surrounded by his own friends, enjoyed the event as a belated birthday party; her twenty-five-year-old brother hung out with the Byrds, the band he had hired to play for the crowd. The group's electrified version of Bob Dylan's “Mr. Tambourine Man” had reached the number one position on
Billboard
's singles charts the week before; by the end of the month, Dylan would take his own song electric at the Newport Folk Festival.

Few people were better suited to broker a summit meeting between the Hollywood establishment and its upstarts than Jane Fonda, who even in 1965 had a foot in both worlds. She had not yet been stirred by political activism; that would happen, for the first time, a few days after the party, courtesy of Penn, who invited her to a Hollywood fund-raiser for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that he was co-hosting with Brando.
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But her life in Europe had begun to give her a currency beyond her status as a second-generation movie actress, and perhaps because her own sense of identity was far from settled, she knew how to blend in anywhere, from an old-guard industry function to an all-night talking-and-smoking French house party to an L.A. “happening.”

The party Fonda threw that Fourth of July was a little bit of all three, plus a taste of the New York underground in the form of Andy Warhol, a perfect witness to the spectacle of celebrity, who arrived on a visit from New York with two of his self-created “stars” in tow. “Hollywood's social events were very compartmentalized in those days,” wrote Vadim. “We decided that ours would be more democratic.”
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There's no question that Fonda and Vadim succeeded in that goal, but the party was not, and could never have been, a conscious intermingling of old Hollywood and new, since in 1965, “old Hollywood” did not yet know it was soon to be overthrown, and “new Hollywood” was nothing more than a cast of players who didn't yet realize that they were about to start running the show. But the two groups were aware of each other, and there seems to have been a sense of unspoken but mutually-agreed-upon territoriality.

“I remember the party, as does everyone who went near it, very well,” says Buck Henry, who was in Los Angeles working with Mel Brooks to create a new comedy series,
Get Smart
, that would make its debut on NBC in the fall. “I'm not even sure I was invited, but I went anyway, because I knew a lot of people. What I recall was the feeling that there was the adults' room and the kids' section, where it was really fun to be. There was a space for [Henry] Fonda and the establishment in the back, but there was certainly a large percentage of young Hollywood—because there were all of Jane's friends. People got into big trouble, people left and came back, there was a lot to drink, a large segment of the group was going outside to do drugs of one level or another. And of course, the Byrds were playing, and they moved me almost beyond words.”
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At one point, Henry Fonda went over to his happily stoned son and yelled, “Can't you get them to turn it down?”
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Although the term
generation gap
was beginning to come into popular use, the question of who belonged to old Hollywood and who didn't was not one that could be resolved by age alone. About some of the guests, there was no doubt: Old Hollywood, defiant, resistant, and crotchety, was William Wyler, who after thirty years behind the camera was trying to stay abreast of contemporary material with an adaptation of John Fowles's sadistic thriller
The Collector
but couldn't hide his disgust at the increasing popularity of movies like
8 1/2
and
Last Year at Marienbad.
“What is it?” he fumed. “It's just another talking radio show with pictures. Nobody acts!…The public wants to know what a story is all about. It does not want to leave a theater wondering what it saw.”
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Old Hollywood was Darryl Zanuck and George Cukor, both staring dumbstruck as a barefoot young hippie began to nurse her baby in front of them.
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Old Hollywood was, as Sydney Pollack put it, “the same people doing the same things they had been doing for the last twenty-five years.”
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Others, though, weren't so easily labeled. Warren Beatty, who had been groomed for movie stardom by the well-oiled workings of the old studio system, had returned to the West Coast with Leslie Caron for a visit. He hadn't yet won control of
Bonnie and Clyde
, but he was already thinking about casting, and the party offered up at least three possibilities for Bonnie: Tuesday Weld, Natalie Wood, and Fonda herself. Weld was new Hollywood, trapped in a series of sex-kitten parts but bringing a highly charged, troubled element to her screen personality that occasionally broke through to the surface of even a banal role. Wood, although she was a year younger than Beatty, had made her film debut as a child in 1943 and was old Hollywood to her core; it was the only world she could imagine. “The whole routine about submerging your personality [while acting] is a lot of bunk. You have to bring your personality to every part you play,” she had said at twenty, airily dismissing what she called “the nose-picking ‘Method' fringe group, who never got closer to the Actors Studio than Sunset Boulevard.”
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Even if the term
new Hollywood
had been in use, Wood certainly would have considered herself no part of it; and in 1965, it's doubtful that Beatty, watching his contemporaries get high on the beach, would have identified himself as part of the counterculture. He would have been more likely to head for the back room in the hope that he'd find the people with whom he really wanted to work—Wyler, George Stevens, Fred Zinnemann.

The “kids' section” of Fonda's party was populated by people who would come to define new Hollywood and yet, at that time, were barely inside the door—Peter Fonda and his friends Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper, all of whom were scraping by on a combination of episodic television gigs and low-budget movies and were now entering the orbit of American International Pictures (AIP) and exploitation-movie king Roger Corman. Vadim described the boys as being “particularly cheerful” that night, and as the sun went down and the celebration escalated, Peter Fonda climbed onto the roof of the house of another son of Hollywood, Robert Walker Jr., and, blissed out, watched the action below, thinking,
“God bless grass.”
(A couple of months later, when the Beatles played the Hollywood Bowl for the first time, Peter Fonda and the Byrds would go to an afterparty with the Fab Four, where he would take one of his first acid trips.)
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In the “adults' section” sat Sam Spiegel, who was, that summer, Jane Fonda's boss and Arthur Penn's as well. Spiegel was sixty-five, a hands-on producer whose name (or self-chosen pseudonym, “S. P. Eagle”) had been on
The African Queen, On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai
, and
Lawrence of Arabia. The Chase
was his first movie since
Lawrence
had won him his third Best Picture Oscar in 1962; although David Lean's film had marked a career high point for him, in the wake of its success Spiegel's arrogance and autocracy were alienating even longtime colleagues. During production of
The Chase
, Spiegel was making Penn's life so miserable that the director would leave Hollywood after the shoot vowing never to work for a studio again.
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Penn, who already felt the script was a “dog's breakfast,” later said that he had “never made a film under such unspeakable conditions,” which included the daily delivery of script rewrites that were so clumsy and incoherent, he suspected they must have come from the pen of Spiegel himself.
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After seeing a cut of Penn's difficult little passion project,
Mickey One
, a Columbia executive said, “No more artsy-smartsy pictures.”
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Now he was back working for the same studio and was, ironically, trapped by Mike Frankovich's willingness to leave creative decisions in the hands of an independent producer. With Spiegel calling all the shots from casting (he apparently made liberal use of the couch) to location shooting (there would be none, despite the movie's southern setting and multiple outdoor scenes) to rewrites, there was little Penn could do but report to the set and shoot the screenplay—whatever it happened to be that day. (In postproduction, Spiegel would take
The Chase
away from Penn and edit it himself, to the satisfaction of almost nobody involved.)
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On his own at the party, Sidney Poitier, at thirty-eight, belonged to neither old nor new Hollywood; once again, he was a category unto himself, liked by all but claimed by nobody. His fifteen-year marriage to Juanita Hardy was finally at an end; Hardy, who was herself becoming an active and engaged civil rights fund-raiser, was three thousand miles away, living in the home she and her husband had once shared in the New York suburb of Pleasantville and raising their four daughters. After the divorce, Poitier later wrote, “I remember feeling liberated—but from what?” He had not been happy in his marriage, but with his relationship with Diahann Carroll far from settled, there were lots of “empty, lonely times” ahead.
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That evening, missing his kids, Poitier naturally gravitated toward Roger Vadim's little girl, Nathalie, and he and Gene Kelly spent part of the night playing with her and teaching her to tap-dance.
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Poitier was ready to fill the emptiness with work, and since
In the Heat of the Night
had no director or script yet, he would soon head for Seattle to begin shooting a movie for Sydney Pollack, a thirty-one-year-old TV director making his first feature. The project,
The Slender Thread
, was based on a
Life
magazine article by Shana Alexander that had been transformed by writer Stirling Silliphant, the man behind CBS's popular
Route 66
, into a melodrama about a suicide hotline worker who tries to help a depressed woman (played by Anne Bancroft.) Poitier may have found the role appealing because it had nothing in particular to do with the “Negroness” of his life, but there turned out to be a saccharine ideology behind his casting after all—the notion that if a black man in mid-1960s America could explain to a desperate woman why life was worth living, the film would be all the more believable. Poitier was, as always, an amiable collaborator, and he was willing to push himself even when the material didn't challenge him—he brought his own acting coach to Seattle to help him figure out how to play his big scenes with nothing but a telephone receiver as his costar. But
The Slender Thread
wouldn't prove to be much better than his other recent films, despite its energetic director. “You have to take Dramamine to watch that movie,” says Pollack. “I was trying so hard to shake off the stigma of television that everything was moving and zooming and panning. I didn't know what the hell I was doing.”
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In the middle of the party, and yet, as always, standing at a cocked eyebrow's distance from it, was Mike Nichols. Once again an immigrant in a new land, he surveyed the tribal rituals, the lapses of etiquette, the deferences and courtesies and small humiliations of this hothouse of West Coast privilege and restlessness, and filed them away for future use. At one point in the evening, he wandered from the crowd and found himself under the canopy of a huge tree around which part of the tent had been set up. A small knot of revelers was slouched around the trunk, and when Nichols approached, one of them looked up at him and said, “Are you having a good time in L.A., Mike?”

Nichols responded in his slow deadpan, “Yes. Here under the shadow of this great tree, I have found peace.”

The laugh he got came from Buck Henry. Henry knew Nichols's work, but not the man himself; although as children they had briefly overlapped at New York's Dalton School, and Henry had performed improv with a group called the Premise at around the same time Nichols and May were gaining a following at the Village Vanguard, their paths had never crossed. As Nichols remembers it, Henry picked up his little jab at Big Sur–meets-India mysticism and ran with it. “We started laughing,” Nichols says, “throwing some of that shit back and forth. I had found a buddy.”
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