Hollywood Hellraisers (20 page)

The film’s most famous scene is when Jack’s drifter character loses it big time in a restaurant over an order of wheat toast, a case of art imitating life. Carole Eastman witnessed a Nicholson temper tantrum vented against a snooty waitress. ‘You say one word,’ Jack warned her, ‘and I’ll kick in your pastry cart.’ In the early sixties Jack went into a restaurant with a girlfriend and Roger Corman and ordered steak. When it arrived it wasn’t cooked to his satisfaction, but the waitress insisted it was what he’d ordered. Jack grabbed the offending meat off the plate and threw it up in the air — splat — hitting the ceiling.

Jack’s anger is sudden and volcanic. It’s rarely seen, but when it’s unleashed —
wham!
One story comes from the early seventies when he was at an American football game and a group of rednecks sitting behind him were behaving insultingly to a group of women. Jack turned to his girlfriend and said, ‘Would you like to get even?’ Beaming, she agreed. Jack turned round to face them. Three had gone off to buy hot dogs so he focused on the one remaining guy, who nervously hid behind his wife. That didn’t stop Jack. He grabbed the wife and dragged her over the seats in order to get hold of the redneck. Enraged, he unleashed a bad punch and cut his finger on the guy’s glasses before making a hasty exit. ‘I’m a coward, first of all, so when I get to that place, it’s purely hysterical. When I’m angry and I can’t control myself, I don’t like it. I’ve never liked fighting. You know, I could get killed!’

During filming Jack’s co-star Karen Black fell for him in a big way. ‘I think working with someone like Jack, an actor of that quality, turns you on.’ Nothing happened, though. Karen was in a relationship and Jack was still dating Mimi, although the lure of his other female co-star Susan Anspach ultimately proved too strong. Mimi was aware of Jack’s dalliances and was getting pretty fed up. It was common knowledge around the offices of BBS that Jack hit on women at parties and entertained groupies at the office. ‘When Mimi wasn’t there,’ said one BBS production member, ‘it was any girl he could find.’ There were drugs too. Susan Anspach claimed Jack took cocaine on the set. For one love scene Rafelson needed thirty-nine takes. ‘Jack had one toot every six takes,’ said Susan. ‘He frequently left the set to snort cocaine.’

Jack’s affair with Susan was very different from the rest; it produced a child, a boy christened Caleb. During the early years of his upbringing Susan never sought any assistance from Jack, later explaining that at the time she didn’t want to complicate her life with, as she said, Jack’s inadequacies and hang-ups. How could she trust him, she said, considering the way he handled relationships with women? It was a situation that years later would boil over into a particularly nasty public feud.

I’ll tell you exactly what we have been doing. We have been doing sex!

I
t was an odd time for Marlon Brando, the early seventies. If anyone was box-office poison, it was him. ‘Everybody was a bigger star than Marlon then,’ says Michael Winner. ‘He’d had ten flops in a row, nobody wanted him. I thought, I’ve got Marlon Brando, now everyone will finance my film; quite the contrary, they ran away even faster.’

The film in question was
The Nightcomers
(1971), to be made in England, a sort of imaginary prequel to the Henry James novel
The Turn of the Screw
. Marlon liked the script and agreed to appear for just a percentage. ‘He was incredibly professional,’ Winner recalls. ‘Very restrained, knew all the lines, didn’t need an atmosphere of reverence on the set. He was giggling away, telling jokes, got up and did his scene, sat back down again telling jokes. It took a long time for him to get started in the scene, he fumbled and mumbled, rushed to the script to have a look and rushed back. Once he got going, outstandingly brilliant.’

During one take a prop guy dropped a piece of equipment which clanged nosily on the floor. Oh shit, thought Winner, but Marlon didn’t seem to take any notice. ‘I’m terribly sorry that someone dropped something, ’ said Winner afterwards. ‘What?’ said Brando. ‘They dropped something; there was a big bang, and I thought you did very well, you didn’t react.’ Brando just stared back, ‘What?’ Winner said, ‘MARLON, THEY DROPPED SOMETHING!’ Brando gently hit his ear and out came an ear plug. ‘He acted with ear plugs,’ says Winner. ‘So he could only hear the people next to him. Rather clever, I thought.’

Marlon particularly enjoyed his sex scene with co-star Stephanie Beacham. Well, who wouldn’t have? ‘The trouble was,’ says Winner, ‘he insisted on wearing Wellington boots and underpants. I was on the floor crying with laughter. And he said, “What’s so funny, Michael?” I said, “Marlon I don’t know how it looks from where you are, but from here its absolutely fucking hysterical.”’

During the shoot a large bearded man arrived on location. For days he hovered about in the distance, always on the periphery of the set. It was Francis Ford Coppola. Winner said one day, ‘Marlon, isn’t that Francis standing behind the barrier?’ Marlon looked across and said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Shall we let him through?’ asked Winner. ‘No,’ Marlon replied firmly. Coppola had flown in from America to ask Marlon to appear in his next film,
The Godfather
.

After
The Nightcomers
Marlon became one of Winner’s dearest friends, and they usually met up whenever he was in London. While filming
Superman
at Shepperton Studios Winner was invited to Marlon’s rented home for dinner one evening. There were a few people there, including a Pakistani lady, a current flame of Brando’s, who was spouting a lot of cobblers about the underclass in her country. Winner was wondering how the devoutly liberal Marlon could stomach such a woman when he whispered in the director’s ear, ‘She’s a great blow job.’

When he wasn’t in the country Marlon was prone to call Winner at all hours of the day and night, sometimes disguising his voice. ‘I put the phone down on him six times once. I kept getting these calls. A man would say, “This is Baron Von Stumpel,” and I’d put the phone down because I get nuisance calls. He called again and said, “This is Marlon Brando, Michael; you keep putting the phone down on me.” I said, “Marlon, you use these fucking voices all the time — what do I know?” He was the most playful man in the world, Marlon, jokes all the time.’

I had fantasies like that, about being beat up. Did you ever have a fantasy about women beating you up? Or don’t cowboys have fantasies?

Even after the success of
Easy Rider
Dennis Hopper had a tough job trying to set up his next movie. BBS had a gut instinct that his ego would now be about the size of Jupiter and he’d be completely uncontrollable. They passed. As did Warners and Columbia.

The picture Dennis wanted to make had been festering in his mind since the mid sixties, a parable about the impact of a visiting Hollywood film crew on a South American village. It was to be called
The Last Movie
(1971). For a time legendary record producer Phil Spector had agreed to come in as backer until his accountant said Dennis was too big a risk and he walked. Finally, Universal stumped up a million dollars, waving away concerns that Dennis was erratic and unreliable. The world was waiting for the next Dennis Hopper picture after
Easy Rider
, and by God Universal was going to give it to them.

As a token of faith Dennis took a modest fee as star and director in exchange for a large slice of the profits and full creative control. This was the new Hollywood Dennis wanted to be a part of, the old studio formula of making big soulless blockbusters was finished. ‘We’re gonna make groovy movies, man.’ The problem was, although he was a filmmaker of imagination and talent, the drink and drugs got in the way, fucked up his focus to tell a story coherently.
The Last Movie
became a mess and pretty much destroyed his career as a director.

Dennis intended shooting his movie in Chinchero, a village that nestled 14,000 feet up in the Peruvian Andes. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to make the film in Peru, one of the world’s leading producers of cocaine, but there you go, hindsight’s a wonderful thing. On the flight down, the plane was scarcely in the air before the film crew started passing round the drugs, much to the horror of staid South American businessmen who muttered, ‘Damn gringos.’

Once in Peru Dennis managed to offend the government by spouting about the joys of marijuana and tolerance of homosexuality. The Catholic Church was spitting blood and the ruling junta started investigating Hopper’s background, not liking one jot the information coming back about this hippie who spoke fluent revolution.

Drugs were everywhere. Brad Darrach, a reporter from
Life
magazine, could hardly believe his eyes when within hours of arriving a crew hand managed to score some cocaine, seven dollars for a packet that cost ten times that in the States. By the first evening some thirty members of the crew were sniffing the stuff, or smoking grass or dropping acid. By midnight the actors had trotted off to various beds. The reporter did the same, only to be awoken at 2 a.m. by screams he believed were from a young actress experiencing a bad trip.

There were wild parties aplenty. Darrach claimed one actor chained a young girl to a post because she looked like Joan of Arc and he wanted to re-enact the saint’s immolation. There was also a rumour that another actor almost died when he took too many peyote buds at once. The reporter was at a loss to fathom why these young actors were taking so many drugs, other than the obvious reason, that it was the hip thing everyone did in the new Hollywood. ‘It’s also the hip thing not to get addicted,’ Darrach wrote. ‘But some of the people I saw in Peru were nibbling godawful close to the hook.’

Kit Carson was another reporter down there and one night in his hotel somebody knocked on his door. ‘I opened it and there was this guy looking at me holding a bottle saying, “Hey, man, you want some ether? It’s really good.” I mean, everything you can imagine was being done in this hotel. That whole shoot, that was one of the most out-of-control situations I’ve ever seen.’

During one scene a horse bolted after hearing prop gunfire and fell off a high wall, breaking its back. A crew member pulled out a Colt .45 and put a bullet through its brain. Almost instantly a group of locals arrived armed with knives and began butchering the animal for its meat. Two of the cast fainted, the rest retired to the nearest bar. That night Dennis broke down and cried like a baby.

Kris Kristofferson was a young unknown singer when Dennis cast him in a small role as a wrangler. The sights he saw on that movie were enough to scare him off show business for life. ‘I see the guy he’s mellowed into now, and I love Dennis,’ Kristofferson told the
Guardian
in 2008. ‘But back then he was the most self-destructive guy I had ever seen! He got a priest defrocked because he got him involved in some kind of weird mass for James Dean. He antagonised the military and all the politicians. It was crazy.’

Besides drugs, the location was awash with groupies, or ding-a-lings as Dennis called them. He fell for Michelle Phillips, a member of the Mamas and the Papas, who had a small role in the film. When her work was finished and she left, Dennis moved in with a local lass who was often spotted shopping around for marijuana and cocaine. Dennis ultimately booted her out, convinced she was a spy for the government. This wasn’t paranoia: the local government had posted spies amongst the crew, itching for any excuse to kick Dennis and his movie out of the country. ‘This shit don’t bother me, man,’ Dennis told a friend. ‘It’s the old establishment disapproval, man. I got a picture to make. I got my art to express.’

As filming wound down cast and crew turned to booze rather than drugs as the temperature dropped markedly. At the end-of-shoot photo Dennis, bottle in hand, hollered, ‘This picture was not made on marijuana. This picture was made on Scotch and soda.’ Dennis’s own personal supply of grass was actually stolen quite early on in production and for the rest of the shoot he had to bum from other people’s private stashes.

Amazingly, in spite of all the drugs, boozing and whoring,
The Last Movie
was completed on schedule and within budget with Dennis, according to the
New York Times
, ‘inspiring something akin to idolatry in his actors’. But he was physically drained and now faced the monumental task of editing his beast. Immediately he annoyed the studio by retreating to Taos in New Mexico, away from any Hollywood influence, a place so remote that one reporter found it hard to believe that there were actual roads that connected it to the rest of the world. Taos was where Dennis and Jack had spectacularly tripped on LSD together. He’d fallen in love with a house there, enchanted by its association with onetime occupant D. H. Lawrence, and when he learned it was up for sale, Dennis had to buy. It consisted of three buildings, a small living space where Dennis resided, a large residence left for visitors, family and staff, and a place Dennis filled with musical instruments for people to go inside and, like, jam, man. His dream was to create a commune, a hang-out for artists. Rooms were filled with the weird and wonderful, and Dennis’s own art pieces. In the dining room stood a white plastic box, maybe eight feet long, that had an aluminium shaft sticking out of it and two very large balls. It was called
The Perpetual Erection Machine
. Before Tracy Emin, before Damien Hirst, there was Dennis Hopper!

Jack came down a few times and visiting reporter Kit Carson saw at first hand the interplay between these two emerging icons. ‘They were competitive in a friendly way. I think they probably dared each other a lot, but that’s how you act when you’re two driven alpha male figures; you get off on that. Though Dennis went a whole lot further than Jack did in a way of bringing himself to the edge of the universe.’

It was at the house in Taos that Dennis sat down to edit
The Last Movie
. And, along with other dropouts and hangers-on, ingest an inordinate amount of drugs. ‘I was only down there once in Taos,’ says Tom Mankiewicz. ‘Everybody was just blotto. You thought, everybody’s going to die, everybody in this house is going to die.’

Not long after settling into Taos Dennis surprised friends when he turned his fling with Michelle Phillips into a more permanent arrangement. They married in the main living room, 150 candles burned and 200 guests gathered to hear them exchange vows. Michelle later confessed that she was drawn to Dennis in part by her ‘Florence Nightingale instinct. I was so overloaded emotionally by this point in my life, I didn’t know what I was doing.’ She’d not long divorced from husband and former lead singer of the Mamas and the Papas John Phillips, by whom she had a daughter, Chynna, who would herself go on to become a pop star with the group Wilson Phillips.

According to Tom Mankiewicz, the wedding took place in something of a drug-induced haze. ‘Apparently one night, and this is what I heard, everybody was getting wasted, dropping acid. Dennis married Michelle Phillips, and then the next morning literally woke up in bed and didn’t recognise her; he had no memory of the ceremony whatsoever. It got annulled pretty much straight away, he didn’t remember marrying her.’

In the days after the wedding Michelle alleged that the behaviour of her new husband was slightly disturbing. He let off guns in the house and handcuffed her to prevent her from fleeing, saying he thought she was a witch. In an interview with
The Times
in 2004 Dennis contested Michelle’s assertion that he handcuffed her. ‘Where did the handcuffs come from?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t handcuff her. I just punched her out.’

By the end of the week Michelle knew she had to get out. She grabbed Chynna and together they made a dash for the airport. In the story she later told John Phillips, Dennis chased after them, driving his car onto the runway in an attempt to stop the plane taking off.

Back in LA Michelle’s father dragged her to an attorney, saying, ‘Men like that never change. File for divorce now.’ It was going to be embarrassing in the short term. ‘Everybody had the same question,’ Michelle explained to
Vanity Fair
in 2007. ‘A divorce after eight days? What kind of tart are you?’

Dennis, back in Taos, took a phone call from Michelle and begged her to come back to him. ‘I love you, I need you. What am I going to do?’ According to Dennis, Michelle replied, ‘Have you ever thought about suicide?’ Dennis paused for a moment. ‘No. Not really.’ And that was it. He was left devastated. The only sign that Michelle had ever been in Taos was a room Dennis had prepared for her daughter, a room the child would never see. It became a shrine almost, untouched, unlived in.