Hollywood Hellraisers (19 page)

Hanson was a great role, perfect for Jack; certainly he made it his own. A man equally at odds with the heartland of America, he hitches a ride with Dennis and Fonda and around a campfire they philosophise and argue about what is wrong with the country they love. Mostly, though, they smoke dope. That one scene did more for Jack than all the Corman pictures put together; it made him a star.

It was difficult to shoot, not least because, for the sake of realism you understand, the actors smoked authentic dope. According to Jack’s calculation, they dragged on 155 joints of pretty good Mexican grass. There was also the added difficulty of the men breaking into convulsions of laughter, verging on hysterics, with Dennis off camera rolling around in some bushes, ‘totally freaked out of his bird’, said Jack.

It remains an iconic screen moment.
‘Easy Rider
was the first time people smoked marijuana in a movie and didn’t go out and kill a bunch of nurses,’ claimed Dennis. But to some extent the film normalised the use of drugs, and made cocaine fashionable. The plot had these two bikers smuggling a heavy load of drugs in order to fund early retirement. A motorcycle couldn’t carry enough marijuana to score big bucks, and Dennis ruled out heroin, so came up with cocaine, a drug that at the time wasn’t very well known or much used. After
Easy Rider
came out it became as common as heroin on the streets, while in Hollywood parties it was being handed round on trays along with hash. ‘An unfortunate situation in my mind,’ excused Dennis.

Post-production was conducted within a perpetual cloud of dope. Dennis edited like a maverick, tearing up the rule book, not giving a shit. One of his ideas was to run the credit sequence upside down. He was Orson Welles on acid. This was going to be his masterpiece and he wasn’t going to compromise. His first cut ran something like four and a half hours. ‘This isn’t
Lawrence of Arabia
,’ argued the producers.

Months went on and still Dennis was, in the words of one crew member, ‘jerking off in the editing room’. Enter Henry Jaglom, now a respected independent director, then an actor who’d trained with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. For some reason he and Jack were thrown into the editing suite to help out on
Easy Rider
. ‘Each of us worked with an editor in white gloves who sat in front of us, trying to reshape the material in ways we thought would be helpful,’ recalls Jaglom. ‘Jack didn’t want to touch the stuff he was in as an actor, all that campfire stuff, so I concentrated on that to begin with.’

About twice a week everyone would gather downstairs in Columbia’s Projection Room 6 to look at where they were and discuss where they should go. ‘These were exciting, often intense and frequently combative meetings,’ recalls Jaglom. Jack, Dennis and Fonda attended, along with Bob Rafelson and Schneider. ‘Everyone contributed what I think are important benefits to the film,’ confirms Jaglom. ‘But
Easy Rider
is at its heart fully Dennis Hopper’s work and should be respected as such. It was Dennis alone who captured the zeitgeist that made the film resonate so powerfully with a generation.’

For years, though, Dennis and Fonda would feud over ownership of
Easy Rider
, both laying claim to the greater creative input. This infighting even extended to the music soundtrack. Fonda wanted Crosby, Stills and Nash; Dennis told the band that anyone who drove around in limos as they did could have no comprehension of his movie and wanted them out, warning, ‘If you guys try to get in the studio again, I may have to cause you some bodily harm.’

After a preview screening Columbia’s veteran chief executive Leo Jaffe stood up, hailing: ‘I don’t know what the fuck this picture means, but I know we’re going to make a fuck of a lot of money!’ At Cannes it was a sensation, and Fonda, Dennis and Jack wallowed in the attention. ‘We were free to get loaded in those days,’ says Jack fondly. ‘The festival was a little more rocking than it can be in the streets today.’

On a modest outlay of something like half a million dollars
Easy Rider
, when it opened in July 1969, reaped in tens of millions at the box office, this at a time when bloated fare like
Hello Dolly
was almost bankrupting the studios. ‘I was stunned by the response to the film,’ says Jaglom. ‘We all were. Except Dennis.’

Hopper and Fonda’s little bike movie revolutionised Hollywood corporate thinking. The idea that young filmmakers could make a movie for their own people, about their own time, was something that just hadn’t been allowed to happen before because formula films had frozen the industry. It was a unique period and heralded the new wave of American cinema that lasted well into the seventies, when studios threw money at any long-haired geek leaving film school to make more independent, risky movies — people like Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Spielberg and Lucas.

As for Dennis, he made the cover of
Life
magazine, which called him ‘Hollywood’s hottest director’, and was hailed as a counterculture icon, a tag that has never truly gone away. Ironically, it was Jack who reaped the greater reward. After over a decade of hacking it in Corman movies and not making the slightest impact, critics were falling over themselves in praise and he ended up with an Oscar nomination at the very time he was contemplating giving up acting. As Richard Rush recalls, ‘After
Easy Rider
Jack came up to me one day and said, “Shit, Dick, I think I’m going to have to become a movie star.” Because he really wanted to be a director. And I thought he was a good director and a very capable writer, but I thought it was crazy for him to fight it; he had this clear path into stardom, might as well grab it and make all the world happy.’

There’s nothing wrong with me. I mean, I don’t like boys.

Warren Beatty had been spending a lot of time with Roman Polanski in London. The director was living it up while his wife Sharon was at home in Los Angeles preparing for the birth of their child. As the pregnancy drew to an end Sharon was constantly on the phone to Polanski, urging him to return. He promised he’d catch a flight in a few days’ time.

Too late. While Polanski remained in London, Sharon was butchered by a group of maniacs. Warren rushed over to Polanski’s house when he heard the news, but the director was inconsolable, distraught. How could this have happened? Why had they targeted Sharon? Who were they? Had there been danger signs? Polanski must have replayed in his mind all the events that led up to this terrible tragedy, a tragedy that for a brief time changed how Hollywood looked at itself.

Polanski and Sharon moved into Benedict Canyon, a popular residency in Los Angeles, in February 1969. Warren was amongst the guests at a housewarming party and frequently popped by, as did the likes of Dennis and Peter Fonda. Unfortunately the house was used for more nefarious purposes when the owners were away filming. Friends held wild parties there which often had to be broken up by the police. Drugs were also being used and supplied on the premises. To use the phraseology of the time, the house was getting a bad vibe. The couple decided to move.

Polanski asked Warren if he fancied taking on the lease. The actor viewed the house and seriously contemplated moving in until he met a couple of Polanski cronies who claimed they’d also been offered accommodation there. ‘There’s plenty of room for everyone, man.’ The prospect didn’t fill Warren with joy, since he knew these particular individuals were caught up in the local drug scene. He left. What Warren didn’t know was that the house and the goings-on within it were under the watchful eye of a certain Charles Manson.

On 5 August the house was again the scene of a celebrity bash. Sharon had invited over Jane Fonda, Roger Vadim and a few others. Three days later she was busily organising another special evening in, this time a quiet dinner to which she’d asked, amongst others, Steve McQueen, a former lover. In the end McQueen got lucky with a girl and spent the night with her. His libido saved his life; Sharon wasn’t so lucky.

Manson had ordered several of his ‘family’ to visit the house and murder everyone inside as nastily as possible. They arrived at midnight. Sharon was tied up and had to endure the agony of watching three of her friends being butchered before begging her attackers to spare her life because of the child she was carrying. Her pleas were answered with a series of vicious stab wounds that penetrated her heart, lungs and liver. As she lay dying in a pool of blood, Sharon’s last words were ‘Mother . . . Mother.’

In London Warren could see Polanski was in deep shock so quickly took charge, arranging for first-class tickets home and an immigration official to escort Polanski personally off the plane and away from the expected press frenzy. In the horrible aftermath of the murders Polanski’s closest friends did their best to keep up his spirits, lest he slide into total darkness. ‘Warren kept up a stream of improbable stories,’ Polanski later recalled. ‘Mostly relating to his hyperactive sex life and containing details I’m sure were invented just to make me laugh.’

Sharon’s memorial service was a moving tribute, but it was too much for some. People wept openly as her coffin, with her unborn baby wrapped in a shroud beside her, went into the ground. Warren attended, thoughts perhaps running through his mind that had he been in LA rather than London he might very well have been among the victims.

Hollywood, with its tales of murder, corruption and decadence had rarely experienced such a time. The Manson murders affected the place, no question. As Robert Towne said, ‘That was the end of the sixties. The door was closed, the curtain dropped, and nothing and no one was ever the same.’ Even Jack began sleeping with a hammer under his pillow.

Of course the cinema was blamed. The accusation that violent films somehow contributed to a cultural environment that could spawn a Manson massacre, and the general hedonistic lifestyle of the moviemakers themselves, stuck on Polanski and he was virtually blackballed in Hollywood at a time when the town should have been behind him. ‘His situation was a very interesting case of what notoriety can do to you,’ said Jack. ‘He would be excommunicated by Hollywood because his wife had the very bad taste to be murdered in the newspapers.’

Strangely, when Charles Manson wanted his life story told as a movie he instructed his lawyers to get Dennis to play him. At first Hopper turned down an invitation to meet him in jail, but curiosity won out in the end and they talked for something like an hour and a half. ‘It was interesting,’ said Dennis. ‘He told me his whole life was like a movie, and that he always thought there were cameras there.’

It took a while for Polanski to get his life back to some sort of normality. Going back to work, he wanted to make a film of
Papillon
, the bestselling book about Devil’s Island, and for the lead it had to be Warren. Flying over to Paris to meet Polanski and read the script, Warren ended up spending the next forty-eight hours in clubs and with girls while the script sat unread back at the hotel. Warren was enjoying himself so much that the third day was a repeat of the first two, as was the fourth, and the fifth. ‘I was so frazzled for lack of sleep I couldn’t take any more,’ Polanski recalled. ‘We’d been in Paris almost a week and Warren still hadn’t read a page of the book.’ He liked it when he finally got round to looking at it, but there was a scene in which he had to appear naked and that was a no-no. ‘I’m not going to appear bare-ass,’ he told Polanski. ‘It’s a hang-up I have.’ It didn’t matter. Polanski, still persona non grata in Hollywood, couldn’t raise any finance.
Papillon
was later made by Franklin J Schaffner as a star vehicle for Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman.

I move around a lot, not because I’m looking for anything really, but ’cause I’m getting away from things that get bad if I stay.

Jack Nicholson had always wanted fame, craved it, dreamed of it, but when it landed in his lap after
Easy Rider
it gave him pause, it was too all-encompassing and it affected him for a while. At times he could be incredibly arrogant with it, at other times show deep insecurity. Of course he missed basic freedoms, like being able to light up a joint in a public place or hang out at his old haunts. ‘And I can’t go around picking up stray pussy any more.’ Maybe now they came to him. He was stuck with being a celebrity, for better or for worse.

He also felt uncomfortable as the poster boy of the counterculture and strongly denied that
Easy Rider
and some of his other films like
The Trip
could influence someone to try drugs, although he believed in the legalisation of grass and spoke out about America’s ‘insane’ anti-marijuana laws that made criminals of normal decent people who merely smoked weed recreationally.

Jack had always been open and honest about his own private drug use, confessing that he smoked grass and used cocaine, now the ‘in’ drug, ‘because chicks dig it sexually’. He referred unashamedly to certain practices of Errol Flynn, where the old-time movie star recommended placing some powder on the end of one’s dick as an aphrodisiac.

Years later Jack tried to distance himself from such statements, claiming that at no time did he ever advocate the use of hard narcotics. Yes he admitted to having ‘done all the drugs’, and in the early nineties remained ‘an old pot head’, but never once was he enslaved to them. Back in the early seventies Jack’s openness about drug taking shocked the establishment and really pissed off the anti-drug-abuse authorities, coming as it did in the aftermath of such drug-related celebrity deaths as Janis Joplin’s and Jim Morrison’s.

As the sixties died Jack was very hot indeed and top scripts were landing on his doormat. To the consternation of friends, and no doubt his bank manager, chances to appear in
The Godfather
,
The Great Gatsby
and
The Sting
were all spurned over the next few years, any one of which would have sent Jack’s earnings through the roof. Instead he preferred to stay with BBS, who were flush and cool after
Easy Rider
. Their offices were really the place to be in Hollywood; these guys knew how to party, but they also, most importantly, knew how best to cultivate and exploit Jack’s new screen image. It proved a masterstroke as Bob Rafelson, along with Carole Eastman, were composing a script especially tailored to his special gifts as an actor, one that would capitalise on both his
Easy Rider
success and his appeal as a counterculture figurehead. It was called
Five Easy Pieces
(1970) and would earn Jack his second Oscar nomination in a row. His performance is raw and startling, certainly amongst the best he’s ever given.