Hollywood Hellraisers (23 page)

It was obvious to everyone that Marlon was creating a classic film character; his on-screen transformation was extraordinary. Out went the Kleenex tissues, replaced by a special mouthpiece, wrinkles were added by his make-up man and weights put in his shoes to make him walk slowly. ‘It was ironic,’ says Frederickson. ‘On
The Godfather
Marlon had gone on a diet and showed up lean and mean and young-looking and we had to pad him up and make him look fat and older, and then later when we wanted him to look mean and lean on
Apocalypse Now
, he showed up weighing three hundred pounds and looking like Orson Welles.’

He was still trying to figure out a way to stop eating, though. He had this plan. He’d say to his assistant, ‘Listen, after nine o’clock I want you to lock up all the cabinets and no matter what I say don’t give me the key.’ Then, come 9.20, he’d say, ‘Alice, give me the key.’ ‘No.’ His voice now trembling. ‘I swear to God I’ll fire you.’ ‘No.’ So he went and got a crowbar and just busted all the locks.

True to the method, Marlon remained pretty much in character all the time, talking to the crew in that famous guttural voice. Refused to learn his lines, though. ‘He came on the set and there would be a big card he would read off,’ says Ruddy. ‘But it didn’t matter, he was Don Corleone, he was the man. It was just a fucking amazing experience to watch.’ Actually Marlon had cue cards secreted everywhere, pasted on tables, on fruit in a bowl, written on the back of his hand or shirtsleeve, like a kid with exam answers.

He also invented a whole batch of quirks and mannerisms for Corleone, not least for his famous death scene where he collapses with a heart attack after playing in the garden with his grandson. The child actor wasn’t reacting very well, so Brando stuck an orange peel in his mouth to look like monster teeth, something he’d done to amuse his own kids. Although the result makes him look like a Halloween version of Godfrey from
Dad’s Army
there’s something unsettling watching this evil bastard tearing around a garden chasing a giggling child

That scene was Marlon’s last in the can. Like a lot of things on
The Godfather
it presented its own special set of problems. Coppola had been growing a nice little tomato patch to double for the garden, but on the eve of shooting a torrential downpour all but destroyed it. Because Marlon only had one day left, per his contract, and it looked unlikely they could shoot on the set, some quick thinking was called for. ‘We had huge financial constraints on that movie,’ says Ruddy. ‘Marlon got a deal of fifty grand but if the film went over schedule we had to pay him another hundred. So I went to the hotel and said, “Marlon look, the set’s wrecked, but if we have to shoot on it we will because we don’t have the money to pay you the extra fifty. But if you care to give us a break and leave now, I’ll pay your flight back here again when it’s tarted up and looks good.” He thought about it and said, “Well, you guys have been good to me, OK.” His agent called me the next day and said, “You fuck, hustle my goddamn client.” I said, “I didn’t, I told him the truth, and it was his choice. He was kind enough to help out.” The thing with Marlon and a lot of huge stars, they become highly distilled neurotics obviously, but they have built-in radars, they sense if you’re trying to bullshit them, and if you try to bullshit them you are D-E-A-D, dead. If you’re honest with them and tell them the truth, they’ll go out of their way to help you. Marlon was great to everyone on this goddamn movie.’

The Godfather
was an instant classic when it opened early in 1972 and a worldwide box-office smash. Ruddy remembers attending the first public screening with Al Pacino. ‘We left halfway through to have a few drinks and returned for the final few minutes. When the movie was over there wasn’t one clap, no applause. Al said, “It’s a fucking disaster.” He didn’t realise they were stunned. The audience were wiped out.’

The Godfather
turned Coppola from a flop director into Hollywood’s hottest talent and created stars out of its young cast, but it was Brando’s movie. His performance remains iconic, even carrying favour with real-life mafiosi, who told him they loved the picture because he’d played the Godfather with dignity. For years Marlon couldn’t pay a bill in any restaurant in New York’s Little Italy.

Perhaps the biggest irony of all was that here was a man who’d suffered perhaps the worst ever run of flops now starring in the biggest hit since
Gone with the Wind
. It was a remarkable resurrection, culminating in his Oscar for best actor. But when his name was read out as the winner there was genuine surprise when instead of Marlon a young woman in full Native American dress came onto the stage to tell the audience he couldn’t accept the award owing to his concerns about the mistreatment of the American Indian. ‘We really didn’t know that Marlon planned not to show up,’ recalls Gray Frederickson. ‘Everyone was shocked when that woman appeared. But he really believed in those causes. When we were filming
Godfather
his big cause was the unfairness of the caste system in India, then he switched to American Indians by the time the Oscar came round.’

Marlon’s stance didn’t find much sympathy from his fellow performers. Michael Caine said that if Brando felt so strongly on this issue he should have had the guts to stand on the stage himself, not send a trembling squaw. Clint Eastwood joked, ‘Maybe we should give an Oscar to all the cowboys shot in John Ford movies.’

But what happened to the Oscar itself? Actor Marty Ingles can throw some light on the mystery. ‘For a time I was a celebrity broker and I came across a guy who had in his possession the Academy award that Brando turned down. This guy was there on Oscar night, he was in the wings and when the girl walked off with the award she didn’t know what to do with it. My friend said, “I’ll take it.” Years later the press got to hear about it and I got some correspondence from Brando by fax which said: “I’m under the impression you have access to the award, I’d like to have it back.” I’m a sweet guy but I’m not an idiot, and I replied, “Mr Brando, the law says it doesn’t belong to you any more. You publicly gave it up. So it’s not yours, let’s make that clear, with all due respect to your genius. I think it would be nice if, maybe, we used it to bring something to humanity, like a giant fundraiser for the cancer foundation, perhaps even a fundraiser for the very Indians that you wanted to speak of.” And he wrote back to say he wanted to give it to his daughter. I replied, ‘Mr Brando, I love you dearly, but you did what you did and now I want to make it work for humanity, and I’d like to see if perhaps we can really do something good for some people that need it. And if you won’t do that, then I keep the Oscar.” And that’s the way it was. My friend still has it.’

Good for nuthin’s good enough fo’ me.

After yet another two-finger salute to the ruling class in Hollywood, Dennis Hopper packed his bags and went into exile in Taos. He was bitter, he was paranoid, and he was deeply pissed off. What he viewed to be his masterpiece had been shat on from a quite considerable height. Would he ever direct again? Would anyone even want to hire him again?

He took solace, almost inevitably, in booze and drugs, while the artistic commune he’d hoped to establish at Taos began to crumble all around him. It was full of wasters, hangers-on and sycophants who did nothing much else but smoke dope with him. As Universal executive Ned Tanen said, ‘It was hippie heaven. Dennis was the friend of every freak who was trying to get back and forth across America.’

One visitor was Kit Carson, former journalist turned filmmaker who’d decided to make a documentary on Dennis and his crazy world at Taos. Carson first met Dennis when he interviewed him at the time of
Easy Rider
. ‘He loved the article and so did his friends. I sat with Dennis and Jack Nicholson going over the edit of the interview and Nicholson kept saying, “He makes you sound like you make sense, Dennis. It’s really hard to do.”’

While filming the documentary, Carson got to like Dennis enormously and enjoyed his playfulness. At one point Dennis said, ‘Why don’t you guys go get a whole bunch of girls and bring them up here for me.’ Carson and his crew were up for that. ‘OK,’ they said. ‘If you’ll walk naked down the local high street then we’ll go get your girls.’ Dennis did just that. ‘And in the documentary,’ says Carson, ‘there’s this moment where Dennis gets out of a car, strips naked and hustles down a block, then we cut to three carloads of girls showing up and we had this sequence of Dennis playing with all those girls. Dennis was someone who rises to dares, that’s who he is.’

Carson’s documentary
The American Dreamer
is full of such eye-popping moments. Bearded and bleary-eyed (one reporter at the time thought he resembled, ‘some kind of maniac bomb thrower’), Dennis babbles about his childhood, fires off semi-automatic weapons and shares a bathtub with three naked young ladies. There’s also a nice caring, sharing moment where Dennis declares, ‘I’d rather give head to a woman than fuck them. Basically, I think like a lesbian.’

These scenes played around with Dennis’s own sexuality and reputation as a ladies’ man. He’d always had a large sexual appetite and thought himself pretty irresistible to women. ‘Dennis thinks he’s very sexy,’ says Carson. ‘And so he will eyeball the women around him, and if they’re in a room with him then they’re sort of looking for the exit door because they know they’re gonna have to get out of there sooner or later. But he’s not pushy about his randiness. But it’s there. It’s one of the amusing things about being around him, just watching him thinking, he’s the hottest dick in the room.’

And of course there were the drugs, lots of drugs. Amazingly, though, Carson didn’t think that the inordinate amount of drugs Dennis was consuming altered his personality at all. ‘By that time in his life he’d done so many varieties of drugs they didn’t have a noticeable effect on him. Drugs were all over the place, mescaline, marijuana, speed, there was a lot of alcohol, too. One time a reporter from
Rolling Stone
arrived and went off on a mescaline trip; she walked out of the house and no one could find her. I went out scouting and found this journalist staggering around in the nearby desert. Years later she credits me with saving her life. She was stoned out of her mind.’

It was a weird existence at Taos, then probably the last vestige of the sixties left on the planet. ‘Actually Dennis was the perfect host for you to experience the sixties with,’ says Carson. ‘It was like the final scenes of
Withnail and I
where they’re trying to count down the end of the sixties but they really can’t.’

Taos had been a strange place anyway to build a fortress of hippie power. The local populace largely resented them moving in, these strange people dressed in flower beads talking bollocks. It was rather a rough town, too, the last place you’d want to huddle round a campfire with guitars singing ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. It was so enclosed an environment that when someone was shot, which happened rather too frequently for comfort’s sake, you knew the person who’d been shot, and you knew the guy who’d done it and why he’d done it.

When Dennis first came out to Taos to set up his commune, ‘it was bad, man. Suddenly there was me, this movie freak and all these hippies around, and the locals didn’t dig it.’ Many times when Dennis and others walked the streets cars would pull up with guys yelling from the windows, ‘Hey, we’re gonna rape your wife and your sister!’ Dennis claimed that groups would go hitch-hiking in the mountains and get the crap beaten out of them by high-school kids while the cops watched. Rape was going on, too. Finally, one night Dennis said, fuck it, and got a gun. Walking in the street, he and his younger brother David were stopped and hassled by some local kids. ‘OK, everybody up against the wall,’ yelled Dennis, brandishing his gun. ‘I’d seen too many John Wayne movies.’ There and then he made a citizen’s arrest and held them all at gunpoint until the cops arrived. When they did they were accompanied by a large mob, ‘something like 150 people wanting to hang our asses. It looked like a scene out of
Viva Zapata —
pitchforks, machetes, the works.’

Naturally the police arrested Dennis and his brother rather than the baying crowd. They posted bail and were let out through a side door of the local jail, where sixty locals still held vigil. Some guys told Dennis to his face, ‘We’re going to kill you.’ When Dennis pointed out this threat to the police they told him to shut up.

OK, thought Dennis, this is war. He made calls to some stunt buddies of his back in Hollywood. ‘Look, I need your help because the police sure aren’t gonna help me.’ Then he and David visited a local sportinggoods store and bought every fucking gun in the place. ‘Back at the house we set up machine-gun nests,’ said Dennis. ‘And rifles on the rooftops — good fields of fire.’ It was like the Alamo. Kit Carson recalls, ‘It got to the point where Dennis was carrying a loaded gun all the time. That was kind of interesting. In the house he’d be looking out the windows with a gun like it was a fort. The town was a little bit afraid of Dennis, actually; that was good, he liked that.’

Next Dennis and David, with guns hidden under their ponchos à la Sergio Leone, visited the high school and gatecrashed their assembly. Dennis bounded up onto the stage. ‘Look,’ he told the kids, ‘I’m here and here I’m going to stay. What’s more, there are more freaks coming in over the next few months, and though they may have long hair, they are not the love generation. They’re back from Vietnam, and they’re hard dudes. They will have weapons — like these.’ With that Dennis and David whipped open their ponchos to reveal a mini arsenal. ‘Macho is macho,’ Dennis continued, ‘and if this keeps up, somebody is going to get hurt around here. Just because these hippies are dropping acid, that doesn’t give you the right to rape their women and cut their balls off.’ According to Dennis, ‘They listened, and they finally got the message.’