Hollywood Hellraisers (13 page)

By 1964 Warren was strapped for cash and hurried into a terrible film called
Lilith
, directed by Robert Rossen. Rossen had made
The Hustler
with Paul Newman, but could do little with this melodramatic tripe about love in a mental hospital. Warren had severe reservations about the script, but his questioning of practically every move and line of dialogue incensed the director. ‘If I die,’ he moaned, ‘it’ll be Warren Beatty who killed me.’

Years later Tom Mankiewicz was told a story by his father about Rossen. ‘I’m directing this kid Beatty,’ Rossen had said. ‘And you know what, we had an argument about a scene and he turned around and said, “OK, direct it your way.” No actor’s ever said that to me in my life. I said, “Of course I’m going to direct it my way, I’m the fucking director!” It was like, he allowed me to direct it my way.’ Warren did have something of a reputation for being hard on directors in his early days. ‘If the director was indecisive, Warren would absolutely destroy him,’ recalled Robert Towne. ‘He’d ask so many questions — and he can ask more questions than any three-year-old — that the director didn’t know whether he was coming or going.’ Some people saw this as nothing short of infuriatingly arrogant and spoiled behaviour. ‘Obviously every human being has got their doubters,’ says Mankiewicz. ‘One of the reasons that people liked him and one of the reasons why some people disliked him, was that he was very cocky, Warren was a cocky guy.’

His unpopularity also extended to the crew on
Lilith
, who trashed his dressing room. Rumour had it that Peter Fonda and a few of the other actors were seriously contemplating doing him in. At a party to celebrate the end of shooting shit-scared studio executives persuaded Warren to leave early in order to stave off any mayhem.

Rossen never made another film and died in 1966. It’s debatable what actually killed him: heart disease, diabetes, alcoholism — or annoying actors.

Another director who found Warren, ‘difficult . . . impossible’, was Arthur Penn when they worked together on
Mickey One
(1965), which had Beatty play a nightclub entertainer on the run from gangsters. Neither did Warren make friends with his stand-in, John Gibson. After working ten weeks with the star Gibson recalled they’d exchanged barely twenty words, the rest of the time it was a volley of orders — ‘Get my water!’ ‘Get my yoghurt!’ ‘Get my orange juice!’ After a few days Gibson told ol’ buddy Warren to ‘Get lost!’

Warren, bless him, also tried his luck with a nubile extra. ‘You can look, but don’t touch,’ he was told. Yes, that’s right, Warren didn’t necessarily score with every woman with a pulse; occasionally his pickup lines fell on deaf ears. ‘It’s untrue to think I am irresistible to all women,’ he once said. ‘That’s very flattering but I’ve been turned down by armies of them.’ Including
On the Waterfront’
s Eva Marie Saint. Leaving the studio in her station wagon with her two little kids, Warren knocked on the window. She rolled it down and he said, ‘Are you really happily married?’ She drove off.

Mickey One
was poorly received. It seemed that tales of Warren’s womanising resonated more with the public than his acting talents. He desperately wanted to be taken as seriously by critics as Brando. Instead, he was considered just a playboy. He was in despair about it. Weary anyway of press interviews, Warren now pretty much banned them altogether, hoping that journalists would forget his Casanova image and focus on his career. More than most actors Warren resents personal publicity. ‘I’d rather ride down the street on a camel nude. In a snowstorm. Backwards. Than give what is called an in-depth interview.’ When he does agree to speak to the press it’s always on his terms; he’s mostly evasive and he talks methodically, as if cautiously editing every syllable. His pauses are elephantine. As one reporter said, ‘Broadway musicals could be mounted during his pauses.’ Critic Rex Reed once said interviewing Beatty was ‘like getting a pint of blood out of a haemophiliac’.

Shirley hardly helped her brother’s attempt to drop his playboy image with statements like, ‘I keep my daughter as far away from him as possible.’ Never one to miss an easy opportunity to goad Warren in public, Shirley genuinely disapproved of his reckless shagging habits. ‘Warren seems to be quite enthusiastic about sex, to put it mildly,’ she told one reporter. What Warren needed was a stable relationship with a strong woman, not all this gallivanting around. And that’s exactly what happened when he met the elfin star of
Gigi
Leslie Caron. There was only one snag: she was already married to English theatre director Peter Hall. At thirty-two, she was also six years older than Warren and the mother of two young children, but that didn’t stop our man. He was fascinated by her passion and vitality. Hall was incensed when he found out about the affair and allegedly hired a private detective to follow them around London. (Hall, on the other hand, said it was his wife who hired detectives to follow him.)

When news arrived that Leslie intended moving her children out to LA to be closer to Warren Hall filed for divorce and petitioned the British government to make his children wards of court and keep them in England. Leslie had no choice but to stay in London. ‘I cannot give up my children.’ It was Warren who made the sacrifice and came to live in England, happy to support Leslie during the custody battles ahead. They settled into a large house in Knightsbridge and Warren bought a suitably ostentatious piece of England, a Rolls-Royce that once belonged to the Queen. Their near neighbour was Roman Polanski. Warren already knew the notorious director, having met him at a Hollywood party and discovered their minds were pretty much in the same place when it came to women. Together they’d toured the streets and topless bars along Sunset Strip. ‘All I was interested in was to fuck a girl and then move on,’ Polanski once confessed. He was Warren’s kind of man and a welcome dinner guest in London, along with his soon-to-be-wife, the beautiful actress Sharon Tate.

Warren had arrived in the capital at a propitious moment. It was the mid-sixties and London was beginning to swing. He made a typically dotty sixties spy romp,
Kaleidoscope
(1966), with Susannah York. ‘I think we worked well together,’ says Susannah. ‘Of course, Warren was a bit of a lad, and I was fairly newly married, so I wasn’t up for any hi-jinks. He had an annoying habit of pinching my bum and I used to slap his hand. But it was all done in good humour. Besides, Leslie would come onto the set, so there really wasn’t any question of taking things any further than just light-hearted banter. I suppose I’m one of the few women who didn’t necessarily respond to him; I didn’t really fancy him.’

Warren perhaps sensed this and his relationship with Susannah never extended beyond the film. Warren felt more comfortable being friends with women that he’d been in an intimate relationship with. ‘But I liked Warren enormously,’ says Susannah. ‘I thought he was personable, funny, very intelligent, enthusiastic, all qualities I like. Also very quick-thinking, very ambitious. I liked his style. A little bit thinking he was the bee’s knees as far as women were concerned. I think sometimes a certain self-regard or vanity might occasionally have got in the way at that time. Probably that was because he was just beginning and it was something that Hollywood fosters in people that could sometimes make him seem a little immature perhaps.’

Just how immature can perhaps be summed up by this story. In London Warren called up his old buddy Charlie Feldman, then producing the spoof Peter Sellers Bond movie
Casino Royale
, asking if he could visit the set. The day Warren arrived just happened to be when 20 nubile and scantily clad young ladies hovered about the place. Inevitably Warren asked to be introduced to them all. Twenty-one-year-old model Alexandra Bastedo (later a TV star in cult show
The Champions
) was amongst them. ‘At the time I was sharing a flat with a girlfriend,’ Alexandra remembers. ‘Her name was Nicole Shelby. That evening we got to bed around midnight and the phone rang. I was nearest so I answered it and this voice said, “Hi Alexandra, this is Warren here. Would you like to come over for a drink?” And I said, “I’m awfully sorry Warren but I’ve just gone to bed.” I put the phone down and went back to sleep. At 3 o’clock in the morning the phone rang again. I staggered back over and this voice said, “Hi Nicole, Warren here. I wonder if you’d like to come over for a drink.” He’d obviously worked his way through the film producer’s address book. Looking back, I don’t regret saying no to Warren, I wasn’t a great one for Lotharios. Someone like that terrified me; I kept well away.’

Sensing his career was in jeopardy if he remained in England, Warren returned to Los Angeles. Frightened of losing him, Leslie vacillated between continents, juggling the needs of her lover and those of her children. Leslie was now more in love with Warren than ever and it showed, at least to those in the know. At one Hollywood party she positively glowed, causing a guest to remark, ‘Leslie is looking so beautiful.’ Overhearing, Natalie Wood said one word: ‘Warren.’

Marriage was looking like a real possibility. ‘I believe that a fulfilled monogamous relationship can be great,’ Warren told reporters. ‘But it takes genius to do it.’ That’s why he retained his bachelor pad over at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, hardly an indicator of marital intent. Warren was also lining up a possible replacement. In London he’d been introduced to Britain’s new star, and the face of the sixties, Julie Christie, an Oscar winner with
Darling
and also the immortal Lara in
Dr Zhivago
. ‘When I met her,’ he said. ‘I thought she had the most wonderful face.’ Yet those glamorously refined looks belied a beatnik sensibility, in her attitude towards both life and sex. She once said, ‘For men, I don’t think it’s sexiness in me that appeals to them, but an air of abandonment. Men don’t want responsibilities and neither do I.’ She sounded like the perfect match for Warren, if not for the fact that she despised the sort of hollow film-star glamour that he largely personified. Anyway, both were currently in relationships, and Warren had more pressing problems such as rescuing his career from going down the toilet.

Are bras that heavy, Mister Pulver?

In the summer of 1963 Jack Nicholson heard the news that June had been diagnosed with cancer and it was terminal. For years now their relationship had never been less than shaky. ‘We used to have incredible fights,’ Jack recalled. ‘She had a fiery, amazing temper.’ Maybe she was bitter that she’d never made it in show business and feared Jack was heading the same way. Neither did she much approve of his bohemian lifestyle, going around with his hair generally a mess, wearing jeans and smoking dope. ‘She saw me as a bum.’

Ironically, Jack had just landed a small role in his first major studio picture,
Ensign Pulver
(1964), a sequel to the 1955 hit
Mister Roberts
. The night before he was due to fly out for location shooting in Mexico he visited June in hospital. He settled down in a chair next to June’s bed and they started chatting. Strange, June must have known that this was the last time they’d ever speak; surely now was the moment to reveal the truth about his parentage, to unburden herself of this guilty secret. She remained silent. When Jack got ready to leave she looked him in the eye. ‘Shall I wait?’ Jack looked at her, in these last few months he’d seen her suffer and lose so much weight. The pain was so bad that surely the most humane thing was to wish for her to be taken now. ‘No,’ Jack replied, looking away. Inside the elevator when the doors closed he collapsed to his knees and sobbed uncontrollably. Almost immediately after arriving on location Jack got the wire. June had passed away at the age of forty-four.

Besides schlockmeister Roger Corman, Jack worked for another bargain-basement producer, Robert Libbert, selling him a script called
Thunder Island
(1963), a potboiler about political assassinations in South America. Director Jack Leewood never forgot the fraught and passionate story conferences during which Jack took it as a personal insult whenever a line or story idea was changed or criticised, actually to the point of violence. ‘He’d go for me physically,’ said Leewood.

When
Thunder Island
opened to moderate success Libbert requested Jack’s services again, this time to co-star in a couple of action B-movies Monte Hellman was shooting back to back in the Philippines:
Flight to Fury
(1964), about hidden treasure and
Back Door to Hell
(1964), about US marines let loose on the Japs in the Second World War. Cast and crew journeyed to the most desolate of locations, hot and humid when it wasn’t raining torrents. Giant cockroaches invaded their rooms, poisonous snakes and spiders bigger than saucers were all over the place and there was no hot water or plumbing; little wonder everyone got the shits or worse and that between pictures Hellman collapsed from exhaustion and had to be hospitalised.

Jack was desperately disappointed when both films met with a lukewarm reception; he’d slogged his guts out in a miserable hell hole for months — and for what? He still wasn’t getting the breaks and he was still driving the same goddamn car, a battered yellow Volkswagen bug, a car he kept for years once he made it big, just to remind himself of where he’d come from.

When star of
Back Door to Hell
Jimmie Rodgers invited Jack to a party at his huge mansion he noticed that for much of the evening he stood by a wall surveying the scene, the upmarket guests, the lush interior. As Rodgers recalled, ‘The look on his face was, so this is what it’s like.’

Have you ever been collared, dragged out into the streets and thrashed by a naked woman?

Marlon Brando continued to make films to pay the bills rather than for any idealistic or creative reason. And his resentment too often showed. On the western
The Appaloosa
(1966), it was open hostility between director Sidney J. Furie and his star; the crew were taking bets who’d lay the other one out first. According to co-star John Saxon Brando would come onto the set to do his close-ups reading a book. ‘He would only lower the book when it was action. When it was cut, he’d raise the book again.’