Hollywood Hellraisers (25 page)

One guest at a party in New York during this period recalled seeing Jack reclining fully clothed on a bed practically smothered in women, all horny as hell. Jack just lay there with a big grin on his face. ‘I think he likes women more than any man I’ve ever known,’ Cher said once. ‘I mean he
really
likes them.’

Career-wise, Jack was finding the kind of roles that perfectly suited his personality and screen image, that of a wisecracking anti-establishment figure, tough on the outside but soft and vulnerable beneath, a key to many future Jack characters. At a party Billy Wilder stood talking with Jack and said to him, ‘You know, what the public likes about your characters is that you’re always playing the guy who has this tremendous ability at any given moment to say, “Why don’t you go fuck yourself ?” And that’s what people love because they can’t do that.’ One of the astonishing things about Jack’s career is how long he’s managed to be both a subversive and an institution.

The Last Detail
(1973) had Jack as a naval officer escorting a young offender to prison who gives him one final wild night of freedom. It almost never got made because of the avalanche of swearing in Robert Towne’s screenplay. At one studio meeting Towne recalled how an executive asked, ‘Bob, wouldn’t twenty motherfuckers be more effective than forty motherfuckers?’ Towne thought it over then said, ‘No they wouldn’t.’ This was how sailors talked, that was the whole goddamn point, and since movies were now supposedly more frank and adult in their outlook at portraying ‘real’ life, he wasn’t prepared to back down. Jack stood firm behind him. In the end the studio caved in.

Other problems quickly surfaced, like when their director Hal Ashby, after scouting locations in Canada, was busted in the airport for possession of marijuana. Looking as he did — rose-tinted glasses, full beard, sandals and love beads — he might as well have walked around with a neon sign saying ‘dope-head here’. Studio lawyers got him out of jail and flew him back to LA, with Ashby cursing the whole flight, ‘Motherfucking customs inspectors.’

We are all alone until we look in the asshole of death.

Many of the great French actors had turned it down, Delon, Jean-Louis Trintignant; Belmondo called it a porno script. Nobody wanted to star in
Last Tango in Paris
(1972). Out of desperation, Bernardo Bertolucci contacted Marlon Brando and they arranged a meeting. ‘For the first fifteen minutes he didn’t say a word,’ the director recalled. ‘He only looked at me.’ Bertolucci began explaining the story and the character he wanted Brando to play, that of Paul, an American expat living in Paris whose wife has committed suicide. By chance he meets a young woman in an empty apartment up for rent and they begin a short and ultimately doomed sadomasochistic affair. Marlon listened carefully and then said yes right away, without asking to read the script. Marlon later confessed to never really understanding either what the film was about or its message. ‘Bertolucci went around telling everybody the movie was about the reincarnation of my prick,’ said Marlon. ‘Now what the fuck does that mean?’

It’s the sex scenes that everybody remembers about
Last Tango in Paris
. Maria Schneider was nineteen years old when she was chosen over 200 actresses to play opposite Brando. She got the part of Jeanne because when she was asked to remove her clothes at the audition she did so with no fuss whatsoever. ‘She was a little Lolita,’ said Bertolucci. ‘Only more perverse.’ She later claimed that the infamous ‘butter scene’, where Paul uses the dairy product as an aid to anal intercourse, was not in the script and improvised at the last minute by Brando. Just before Bertolucci called action, Marlon told Maria not to worry, that it was only a movie, but during the scene she admitted to crying real tears. ‘I felt humiliated and, to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci.’ Luckily there was just the one take.

Actually, if Bertolucci had got his way the sex scenes would have been even more outrageous; he wanted his two actors to fuck for real. Marlon quite rightly refused. ‘I told him, if that happens, our sex organs become the centrepiece of the film.’ Bertolucci didn’t agree but lost the argument. Marlon was against performing full frontal nude scenes anyway because ‘My penis shrank to the size of a peanut on set.’

For
Tango
Bertolucci wanted Marlon to explore and experiment on celluloid as never before, to improvise heavily and act purely by instinct. It was a challenge Marlon relished, to play a role so completely derived from within himself, and as a result he gives his most personal and devastating screen performance. But ultimately he viewed it as a violation of his privacy, pulling out painful memories from his past, particularly his on-screen monologues about an unhappy childhood and remote parents. ‘My father was a drunk, tough, whore-fucker,’ he says at one point. During another scene Marlon had to explode emotionally. Suddenly he hit the wall so hard with his fist Bertolucci was convinced he’d broken his hand.

Very quickly the film earned a reputation as the most controversial movie ever made, receiving an instant ban in Italy. Obscenity charges were filed in the Italian courts against Bertolucci, Brando and Schneider, and although they were all ultimately acquitted Bertolucci lost his civil rights (including his right to vote) for five years and was given a fourmonth suspended prison sentence: a bit extreme for the nation that gave the world fascism.

A cause célèbre,
Tango
created a sensation wherever it was shown, in spite of one critic calling it a piece of ‘talented debauchery that often makes you want to vomit’. In America it was slapped with an adults-only rating, usually the kiss of death for a film. For
Tango
, however, it merely guaranteed a media frenzy and queues round the block. In Britain the sodomy sequence was cut, presumably so as not to encourage public schoolboys.

The success of
Tango
, coming as it did right after
The Godfather
, put Marlon back in the top ten of box office stars and he was once again heralded as the greatest actor of his generation, a Lazarus-like comeback that put him on the cover of
Time
magazine. It seemed almost churlish of him, then, to take a three-year sabbatical from movies. Or was it something deeper? Marlon confessed to Bertolucci that he’d never suffered so much during the making of a picture and had decided never again to destroy himself emotionally on camera. In subsequent roles Brando gave up trying to experience the emotions of his characters, as he’d always done before, and simply played the part in a technical way. As he said, ‘I decided to make my living in a way that was less devastating emotionally.’

In a distressed state, Marlon sought refuge on his Tahitian island with his kids. He also spent a lot of time campaigning for the American Indian Movement, an organisation he’d helped found and to which he was the largest financial donor, taking a more radical stance than he had with any other political group. He appeared on TV declaring that he would give his house on Mulholland Drive to the Indians. Neighbour Jack was at home watching and almost collapsed. ‘Jeez, what’s the sonovabitch doing now? He’s crazy.’

Marlon also posted bail for some of the Indian leaders held for violent crimes, and helped others avoid arrest. He took part in ancient tribal ceremonies, occasions that could move him to tears, and was one of the few white men to be so honoured. His involvement in the Indian cause wasn’t universally welcomed by those he was trying to help; some dismissed him as a publicity seeker, which couldn’t have been further from the truth. There were rumours that at one demonstration some tribe members had put a horse’s head in his sleeping bag.

Brando’s semi-reclusive semi-retirement was shattered when his family life once again erupted into the tabloids. He’d just finished
Tango
when news reached him that his ex-wife had spirited their son away to Mexico, an action that he interpreted as kidnapping. Immediately Marlon hired a detective to carry out a search for Christian, finding him in a hippie commune in California, the leader of which admitted that Anna Kashfi had promised them money if they’d hide the boy.

Over the years, Kashfi had become a shadow of her former self. Drink and drugs had taken their toll and she was now clinically paranoid, suffering from epileptic fits and terrible mood swings. Fearful for his son’s welfare, Marlon fought for years to claim sole custody of Christian, telling friends he believed he might be ‘destroyed by his mother’s weirdness’. Like most family squabbles there were two sides to the story, Kashfi often claimed that Marlon was hardly the perfect parent, that when staying with him Christian was exposed to his numerous lovers and rapidly expanding family. Christian himself called the Brando clan ‘weird and spaced out. I’d sit down at the table some nights and there would always be some new addition, and I’d say, “Who are you?”’ Christian also liked to tell the story of the time when, as a kid swimming in a lagoon in Tahiti, a shark swam by and Marlon just shouted ‘motherfucker’ and socked the beast on the nose.

Marlon was the best father he knew how to be, though admittedly this involved alternating between spoiling, ignoring and bullying his kids. ‘The older he gets,’ said his make-up man Phil Rhodes, ‘the more Marlon resembles his father in terms of trying to control and dominate.’ Shuttled between warring parents, sometimes offloaded on friends and relatives or dumped in boarding school, Christian had everything he needed except love and a sense of where he truly belonged. Little wonder he became disorientated, confused, and impossible to handle as a teenager, drinking and taking drugs. The consequences would be dire.

I ate cow shit one time, not too bad if you’re hungry. Not hungry? Don’t eat cow shit.

The communal idealism of Taos was heading for freefall. Dennis Hopper would struggle downstairs in the morning to get something out of the icebox and there’d be thirty people there he’d never seen before. He’d say, ‘Where’s the orange juice?’ and they’d say, ‘Who are you?’

Dennis made the odd debilitating foray to Hollywood to look for work. He’d try to be on his best behaviour, play their game, suck up to the bigwigs, but, sure enough, he’d soon explode. At parties he’d nail producers to the wall and demand to know, ‘Why am I not directing? Why am I not acting?’ The answer was pretty obvious. Nobody wanted to deal with a maniac. ‘I got nothing, man,’ he’d tell reporters. ‘I’m a failure. I’m out on the street again.’

Dennis admits that his biggest mistake after
The Last Movie
was saying ‘fuck you’ to Hollywood and exiling himself in Taos, waiting and hoping for someone to come along with an amazing job offer. James Frawley, a young filmmaker, was one of the few people willing to take a chance on Dennis, casting him as the lead in
Kid Blue
(1973), a wry and interesting western that was shot in New Mexico. ‘Dennis came down to the location not in the best of moods,’ Frawley recalls. ‘He was still depressed about the fate of
The Last Movie
but totally dedicated about doing the best job he could. I think he used the work to get rid of a lot of those negative feelings.’

Frawley was more than aware of Dennis’s reputation for being difficult, but saw this as being primarily because he was such a political outlaw, an outsider that resented authority. ‘When Dennis made
Easy Rider
he immediately became an iconic political figure for the radical left. He had real political power.’ This was clearly demonstrated when Frawley and Hopper took off for a few days’ holiday in Mexico City after wrapping
Kid Blue
. They were sitting at a table in one of the finest restaurants in the city when a guy came over and said, ‘Mr Hopper, Mr Frawley, we know you’ve just finished your picture and we wanted to know how long you intend to stay in Mexico.’ Dennis and Frawley looked blankly at each other. ‘Why? Who are you?’ The man presented his badge to them; he was the head of the secret service and the Mexican president’s brother. ‘They were keeping an eye on Dennis,’ says Frawley. The man continued. ‘You see those two guys over in the corner? They will be following you wherever you go in Mexico. And if you set foot on a campus or speak at a rally you’ll be immediately arrested.’ It was a stark warning. ‘There was a lot of unrest at that time in Mexico, especially with the students,’ says Frawley. ‘But I was kind of amazed that this myth I was sitting with was not so mythological but actually somebody that the authorities were after or watching.’

Famously, Dennis was one of the most paranoid individuals on earth at the time, seeing conspiracies round every corner. ‘It’s true, he would tend to be paranoid,’ says Frawley. ‘There was a rumour that he thought John Wayne was out to get him. But then suddenly something like this happened, which was real, and you go, wait a minute this paranoia has a basis in reality. Dennis was a real political figure.’ And an actor that Frawley believes was unjustly neglected. ‘You were communicating with somebody who had a fertile mind and great passion, someone full of surprises. That was part of the joy of working with Dennis, he never did two takes exactly the same. It was lightning in a bottle; it was a pleasure to have been the bottle for a while.’

Back in Taos, Dennis’s excessive consumption of alcohol and drugs, now in deadly combination with an interest in mysticism and local Indian spiritualism, was leading to hallucinations, and not always pleasant ones. He swore he saw the spirit of D. H. Lawrence wandering around the courtyard. One regular visitor recalled seeing Dennis in a paranoid state, utterly confused. Friends were worried he might lose his mind completely.

More than most, Dennis was suffering from the dying embers of the sixties and its repercussions. When his generation started using drugs it was all going to be wonderful, everyone was going to hold hands, stop the Vietnam War and find God. It wasn’t the sixties that fucked Dennis up, it was the hangover into the seventies. The drugs that were free suddenly weren’t free any more. ‘We ended up at the drug dealer’s door, man, carrying guns and in total madness.’ Grass and LSD had given way to heroin and cocaine. Everybody was addicted and the party was over when people like Hendrix, Joplin and Morrison started dying. They weren’t on a suicide trip; they just took too much shit. Looking back from the safety of today, Dennis knows he was lucky to get out alive. ‘I should be dead or a serial killer.’