Hollywood Hellraisers (14 page)

Furie sought the unlikely assistance of Michael Caine, who was in Hollywood filming at the time. Caine, who’d been directed by Furie in
The Ipcress File
, recalled him coming into his dressing room one day almost in tears because of Brando’s behaviour. They wandered back onto the set together and Caine got talking to Marlon. ‘What do you think of Sidney as a director?’ Brando asked. ‘I think he’s an excellent director,’ said Caine, faithfully. Marlon, in front of Furie and the crew, replied, ‘I don’t think he can direct traffic.’

It’s hardly surprising that Marlon fostered a reputation for being difficult with directors. He habitually turned against whatever he was working on, it seemed to comfort him to be dissatisfied and difficult. However, when people dealt with him honestly, there was no one better. Gray Frederickson, who worked twice with Marlon, says, ‘He was a professional, never caused a problem. If you were a professional with Marlon he respected you. God forbid the people that didn’t know what they were doing around him, he unleashed unholy hell on them.’ Before Tom Mankiewicz started working with Marlon on
Superman
he sought advice from the star’s former agent Jay Kanter. His opinion was stark: ‘Marlon is either at your feet or at your balls.’

It didn’t really matter, anyway, Marlon was convinced we were all fucked, nuclear oblivion was just round the corner, and so began a search for a place where he and his family could be self-sufficient and survive. He remembered how much he’d fallen in love with Tahiti during the making of
Mutiny on the Bounty
, and with the Tahitian people, ‘because they don’t give a damn who you are’, so bought his own little piece of paradise there. At first he lived on his island in a modest house, just one large room, a double bed covered by a mosquito net, scant furnishings and a photograph of his mother. But he had grand plans for the place and over the years would pump millions into turning his own small corner of heaven into an arts and science commune, with disastrous results.

But for now it was back to more mundane matters like earning a living, Brando playing a sheriff in a southern backwater town seething with racism, wife-swapping and murder.
The Chase
(1966) boasted an astonishing supporting cast — Angie Dickinson, Jane Fonda, Robert Duvall and a young Robert Redford — but little else. Marlon’s beating at the hands of a group of rednecks, however, remains one of the most savage in cinema history. Centre stage in the punch-up was a young Brandoinspired actor called Richard Bradford, who recalls that during rehearsals Marlon told him to slap him around and punch him in the body for real. As cameras rolled Bradford lost himself in the moment. ‘There’s a bit where I jump up on a desk on top of Marlon and I’m whacking him, kind of going crazy,’ he says. ‘One of the actors pulled me off, “You’re gonna kill him,” but they couldn’t hold me, I got away and I ran and jumped back up on top and started whacking Marlon again. I think that’s the part they used in the film. That fight was so brutal they didn’t show the whole of it, the censor wouldn’t let them. But I learned something great from Marlon: whenever he was going to fall he just relaxed completely and went down, he didn’t try to break his fall, he just went. Once he literally rolled off that desk and bang, hit the floor, he didn’t try to support himself or anything. I thought that was fantastic.’

Next Marlon played a repressed homosexual married to Elizabeth Taylor in
Reflections in a Golden Eye
(1967), a role in which co-star Julie Harris believed he was ‘exploring his own sexuality’. Rumours have persisted about Marlon’s gay leanings or bisexual nature, that he enjoyed numerous affairs with not only women but men as well, from street riffraff to Hollywood stars such as Laurence Olivier, James Dean, Rock Hudson, Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift, about whom Brando apparently told director Fred Zinnemann, ‘I made him my bitch.’

Brando himself was quoted in the mid-seventies: ‘Like a large number of men I, too, have had homosexual experiences, and I am not ashamed.’ His
Last Tango in Paris
co-star Maria Schneider said she got on well with him, ‘because we’re both bisexual’.

During the filming of
Reflections
Brando socialised with Liz and husband Richard Burton, the trio often getting thoroughly pissed together. ‘Brando is very engaging and silly after a couple of small drinks,’ Burton wrote in his diary. Brando presented the couple with two memorial antique silver goblets. The first was engraved: ‘Richard: Christ, I’ve pissed in my pants.’ And the second: ‘Elizabeth: That’s not piss, that’s come.’

Burton truly admired Brando, often arriving on the set to pick up Liz early so he could watch him at work. It was a combustible friendship that as the years dragged on decayed and died. Burton felt that his fondness for Marlon was not reciprocated. In the early seventies he wrote disparagingly about Brando in his diary after learning from Liz that he’d expressed concern about him during a gossipy telephone chat. ‘He really is a smugly pompous little bastard and is cavalier about everybody except Black Panthers and Indians. That sober self-indulgent obese fart being solicitous about me. Sinatra is the same. Gods in their own mirrors. Distorted mirrors.’

She’s gorged herself with fresh blood. She’s a monster.

After his supporting role in Wayne’s
The Sons of Katie Elder
, the only roles on offer for Dennis Hopper were in exploitation gems like
Queen of Blood
(1966), which has Basil Rathbone sending a rocket ship into an unknown galaxy to bring back a blood-sucking alien witch-bitch thing. Dennis plays one of the pilots and is clearly improvising much of his dialogue; I mean, who the hell calls their shipmates ‘baby’?

Like many young people at this time, Dennis was being swept up in the counterculture movement; taking part in anti-war demos, political protests for free speech and civil rights. All very high-minded and noble, but the fringe benefits were good, too, namely sex, drugs and rock and roll. And more drugs. A lot more drugs. ‘Back in those days, we were all like guinea pigs,’ Dennis recalled. ‘We were always waiting for the next new drug. It was like, Hey, gimme some of that!’

But the impact it was having at home was considerable. Booze had always been an issue with Dennis, but now he’d embraced the drug scene things got darker and weirder and more dangerous. Brooke believed it was the combination of drink and drugs that warped his personality, changed him and made him more violent, more of a loose cannon. He even made her take mescaline on one occasion, which she later described as, ‘one of the most horrific experiences’. She was frightened; saw his eyes ‘zipping around like the fourth of July’. At those moments she feared he’d do something that he might not remember the next morning. One time, when Dennis was rehearsing a play and nervous about his performance, Brooke said she had to get home for the kids and couldn’t stay to support him. Driving off, Dennis suddenly jumped on the hood of Brooke’s car and kicked out the windshield. Brooke started worrying about the safety of her children.

Dennis saw nothing wrong in exposing himself to every new dangerous stimulus going: hadn’t the great artists that he aspired to be like done precisely the same thing? John Barrymore, Edmund Kean . . . they’d all got bladdered. Van Gogh, said Dennis, drank for a whole summer to find the perfect yellow to paint his damn sunflowers. Their collective geniuses almost excused Dennis to go hell for leather. ‘I was an artist; I was supposed to drink, supposed to take drugs.’ It also fitted in well with his plan. From as far back as he could remember he saw himself as destined to achieve the extraordinary. ‘I ruled out even the vaguest notions of normal work.’ He saw art as the perfect vehicle; guys like Van Gogh gave him faith because, although their lives were tragic ruins, the fruits of their suffering had achieved immortality. ‘Dennis did look back at his wild period and compare it to what Van Gogh said about needing to drink to get that perfect yellow,’ says film-maker George Hickenlooper. ‘Which in retrospect I think Dennis thought was horseshit because in the end drugs and alcohol only limit you as an artist. But at the time drugs and alcohol served as a vehicle for him to act outrageously. It also magnified what was already there, that is a personality and a temperament that is truly an artist trying to function in an industry that proclaims to be about art but is really more about money.’ Hopper’s difficulty with the Hollywood power structure was almost always over artistic vision, not trailer size or corporate jets.

So, sadly for Dennis, all drinks and drugs did was turn him into something of a stumbling wreck. ‘Dennis’s mind was all over the map,’ says Tom Mankiewicz. ‘Everybody started to use drugs then. I recall one time we were driving to Tijuana for the bullfights and stopped off at Disneyland. And there’s a ride called the Mad Hatter’s Tea Cup which has a circular bar in the centre where the harder you pull on it the faster the cup spins. Dennis had had a lot of joints, and I’d had booze, but Dennis was really wasted, and he started to pull the thing so fast that the announcer on the public address system said, “Would the gentlemen on teacup eight please slow down.” And after the ride was over we were ejected, and Dennis said to me, “What a bummer, getting thrown out of Fantasy Land.”’

This here’s Miss Bonnie Parker. I’m Clyde Barrow. We rob banks.

Warren Beatty’s last four films had tanked at the box office and he needed a hit. Actually, he needed a miracle. Salvation came from a pair of outlaw lovers that maybe could speak directly to the anti-war generation — being anti-establishment was a pretty cool thing to be in the late sixties. They were called Bonnie and Clyde.

Warren snapped up a screenplay based on their lives and installed himself as producer and star. But there was one aspect of the story that he refused to countenance: the Clyde character was revealed as having bisexual relationships within his gang. ‘Let me tell you one thing right now,’ he told the writers. ‘I ain’t gonna play no fag. The audience won’t accept it, they’re going to piss all over my leg.’ A colourful expression that was one of his favourites. Thinking that Clyde should have at least some kind of sexual dysfunction, Warren instead played him as impotent, a neat subversion of his own Casanova persona.

Not yet ready to take on the responsibility of helming a movie himself, Warren hired Arthur Penn instead, after a host of other directors rejected the offer. At first Penn felt like doing the same, not sure if he wanted to work with Beatty again. ‘I’m going to lock myself in a room with Arthur and not let him out until he says yes,’ threatened Beatty. Penn caved in.

Warren needed all his powers of persuasion to get the fearsome Jack Warner to agree to finance the movie, especially after a number of studios had already turned him down, worried about his recent lousy track record. When he sensed the pitch wasn’t going well — ‘Those pictures went out with Jimmy Cagney,’ blasted the tycoon — Beatty suddenly dropped to the floor and grabbed Warner round the knees. ‘I’ll kiss your shoes here,’ he said. ‘I’ll lick them.’ Warner must have thought Warren was having a nervous collapse. ‘Get off the fucking floor, you crazy bastard.’ ‘Not until you agree to make this movie,’ implored Warren. Probably just to get this nutcase of an actor out of his office Warner agreed to a bargain-basement budget of $2m.

Warren always insisted this never happened, that the story, spread around Hollywood by people who swore they were in the room and witnessed it, is apocryphal. And yet when directly asked by film critic Roger Ebert in 1971 whether he really got down on his knees in Jack Warner’s office Beatty replied, ‘Probably. Possibly. I used to do all sorts of crazy things with Jack. He thought I was a little crazy. Well, I am a little crazy.’ So who knows?

Leslie Caron always assumed she would be first choice to play Bonnie; after all, she was sleeping with the producer. When Warren said her French accent and pixie features weren’t quite right for a machine-gun toting bitch from hell, Leslie saw it as an act of betrayal, and it wasn’t long before she was gone altogether from Warren’s life, perhaps realising that he was never going to commit fully to her personally either. Warren was starting to come out with some real peachy quotes concerning marriage, like this absolute gem: ‘The best time to get married is noon. That way, if things don’t work out, you haven’t blown the whole day.’

Poor Leslie was left devastated; she’d lost Warren and what could have been the role of a lifetime. ‘Anyone who has come close to Warren has shed quite a few feathers,’ she would say years later. ‘He tends to maul you.’ As for Warren himself, he confessed to looking back at the messy end of his affair with Leslie ‘with a deep and profound sadness’.

Speculation began about who would play Bonnie, with one wag suggesting sister Shirley. ‘That would be adding incest to injury,’ she quipped. Could they handle the love scenes, reporters asked. ‘I guess he couldn’t do it with his sister,’ said Shirley. ‘But come to think of it — maybe he could.’ Warren actually wanted Jane Fonda, Ann-Margret, Sharon Tate, or even ex-lover Natalie Wood. Warren visited Natalie at home and talked to her personally about it. Anxious to play Bonnie, Natalie was also anxious to avoid any more emotional distress. ‘Working with Warren had been difficult before.’ She passed.

In the end a virtual unknown landed the role: Faye Dunaway. Beatty marvelled at Faye’s abilities as an actress and desperately wanted to give her one too, but the artist in him said no, this time he wouldn’t bang his leading lady. Faye later revealed that she and Beatty had a ‘tacit understanding’ during filming to keep things on a professional footing. Indeed, Warren was prepared to shun nookie altogether for the duration of the shoot. ‘You should be totally abstinent from the start of pre-production,’ he announced. ‘The film will be better if you never come.’ What crap! Filmmaker Kit Carson was a college student at the time and invited to hang out on the set. ‘Warren had his own trailer and every afternoon there would be a couple of girls who’d go inside and it would rock backwards and forwards, and then the girls would leave and Warren would come out beaming, “Heh, ready to go, let’s shoot.”’