Hollywood Hellraisers (35 page)

In 1982 a series of personal tragedies befell Marlon Brando. Jill Banner, an actress he had an on/off relationship with over many years, was killed in a car crash. Marlon attended the funeral but kept away from the main mourners, watching proceedings perched in a tree. Then his trusted business manager Norman Garey inexplicably shot himself.

As the eighties drew on Marlon became even more of a recluse and fortified his Mulholland Drive home with security systems. ‘Privacy is not something that I’m merely entitled to,’ he said. ‘It’s an absolute prerequisite. ’ As for his career, it might as well have been over. When producers had the temerity to send him scripts he placed them in his freezer until they hardened and then tossed them high up into the canyon below his home and blasted them into smithereens with a shotgun.

Clearly, Marlon was happy doing nothing in particular, save adding a few more kids to his family, usually by different women. ‘I had a real Ford assembly line going throughout much of my life,’ he once confessed. ‘If you’re rich and famous, getting laid a lot isn’t that difficult.’ His attitude to women, though, hadn’t altered much from his early days. He liked to joke that he had a long bamboo pole with a leather loop on the end. ‘I slip the loop around their necks so they can’t get away or come too close. Like catching snakes.’

He also caught up with his reading and gave some thought to life and what it all meant, trying to figure out what it is he wanted to do with his. ‘I never really knew.’ He also travelled back and forth to his island, his one true sanctuary. ‘He worshipped his island in Tahiti,’ says producer Albert Ruddy. ‘Spent most of his time there. He didn’t like hanging around LA, didn’t like Hollywood people.’

To fill in the blank moments of his life Marlon would call his friends around the world at all hours of the day and night or fire up his amateur radio. Marlon was a keen radio ham. It was one of the few ways that he could be anonymous. He could shoot the breeze, his voice disguised, and not be fearful that people were saying and behaving in a certain way because he was Marlon Brando. ‘He talked on that radio all the time, to people all over the world,’ says Gray Frederickson. ‘I guess he started it because that was his main way of communicating from his island in Tahiti. When we were doing
Apocalypse Now
he was running over to Hong Kong all the time buying electronic gadgets and had it all set up in his little bungalow on location. So he talked to the world on that little ham radio.’

And he ate; boy did he eat. Friends would often find him curled up in bed with a huge tub of ice cream. The last time Gray Frederickson saw Brando was outside a Baskin Robbins shop and he was tucking with relish into a huge ice-cream sundae. His weight fluctuated wildly. Robert Duvall ran into Marlon when they were looping
Apocalypse Now
and remembered him saying, ‘I’ll be fat for ever.’ Comfort eating is often a problem for children of alcoholics. Terrified that they themselves might turn to booze, they turn to food instead. ‘Food has always been my friend,’ Marlon declared. ‘When I wanted to feel better or had a crisis in my life, I’d open the icebox.’

As his career faded, his obesity, along with an increasingly troubled family life, attracted more attention than his acting. His friends were saddened: ‘It disturbs me that toward the end, all some people could speak about was his weight,’ said Jack. ‘What Mr Brando does for a living ain’t done by the pound.’

Every now and then, a person comes along, has a different view of the world than does the usual person. It doesn’t make them crazy.

Dennis Hopper had been existing on a steady diet of largely crap roles. There were even plans to reunite him with Peter Fonda for an
Easy Rider
sequel that was to take place a hundred years in the future after a nuclear holocaust, a world of mutant motorcycle gangs. Dennis and Fonda’s characters are resurrected to restore the American way of life. ‘It’s a satire,’ said Dennis. Jack would have played God. It didn’t happen.

Coppola once again came to Dennis’s rescue, casting him in
Rumble Fish
(1983) as an alcoholic father; Dennis was good at playing those, no research required. ‘I hire Hopper for the two per cent of ultimate brilliance, not the ninety-eight per cent horse shit,’ Coppola said.
Rumble Fish
was an interesting film that brought Dennis back into some kind of relevance, appearing as he did with up-and-coming stars Matt Dillon and Mickey Rourke.

Another rising star, Sean Penn, turned up one day to watch filming. He’d never met Dennis before and was fascinated to see the old pro in action. The scene they were working on had Dillon’s character talking about his mother. ‘Was our mother crazy?’ Dennis is supposed to reply, ‘No, your mother wasn’t crazy. She just saw things differently than other people.’ Coppola demanded quiet, then, ‘Action.’ Dillon asked the question. ‘Dad, was our mother crazy?’ Dennis looked him in the face. ‘No, your mother wasn’t crazy! She just saw things — she saw — she saw a buffalo’s feet on an elephant! Have you ever seen rainbows going up a duck’s ass? No, your mother wasn’t crazy.’ The crew fell about. As for Penn, ‘Now I knew that everything I had learned about acting I could just throw out.’

When Dennis arrived on the set of Coppola’s movie he’d been off the booze for months. The reason? His father lay dying, ‘and I wanted him to see me sober for the last year of his life’. There had been very little contact between father and son up until that point, or with his mother, even after the success of
Easy Rider
and the birth of grandchildren. At least there was some form of reconciliation prior to his death. ‘He was really a decent guy,’ Dennis would say of his dad. ‘I just didn’t know him.’

Although he was temporarily off the sauce, Dennis’s belief back then was that for some scenes you had to be authentically rat-arsed on camera, not act drunk. There was one such moment in
Rumble Fish
, a scene in a bar. ‘If we don’t get it after the third take,’ Dennis told Coppola. ‘I’m going to start taking shots of cognac.’ Coppola was horrified. He didn’t want Dennis back on the bottle, at least not on his film. After Coppola had calmed down they shot for eighteen hours. ‘I consumed a bottle of cognac,’ said Dennis. ‘And I stopped drinking again the next day.’

But on the set of his next film, the Sam Peckinpah thriller
The Osterman Weekend
(1983), one journalist recalled interviewing Hopper in his dressing room and he was drinking beer and pulling on a joint at the same time. Dennis was facing his demons again. Amazingly it still didn’t affect his work. He was on time and did the job at hand, the perfect professional, although sometimes when he hit the stuff hard no one knew who was going to come out of the dressing room, Dr Jekyll or Mr Hyde.

But his personal life was a real mess, ‘a nightmare’. Back in Taos, Dennis’s girlfriend was becoming ever more perturbed by his habit of firing guns into the wallpaper. He imagined intruders or phantoms hovering about the rooms. It was said that he slept with a gun under his pillow. It was the same old paranoia. Dennis was himself hovering pretty close to insanity and planned to demonstrate it to a disbelieving world by literally blowing himself up with dynamite as the culmination of an exhibition of his art work, aptly called ‘Art on the Edge’. As a boy Dennis had watched in awe as a stuntman performed this daredevil feat at a rodeo in Kansas, surrounding himself with sticks of dynamite and emerging from the smoke unscathed after they had detonated. It was an illusion, of a kind, but a dangerous and seriously misguided one. The basic theory is that the blast from twenty sticks of dynamite placed in a circle will shoot outwards, creating a central vacuum like the eye of a storm, leaving anything there intact. That is, if everything goes as it should. Some small oversight or miscalculation, or a few sticks failing to detonate simultaneously, and you could be blown to bits.

It wasn’t just the public who crowded into a speedway track in Houston, Texas to see Dennis kill himself; friends had flown in for the party, too. Was this all a giant charade, the artist’s ultimate statement? Or was he literally on the edge, now, as never before? ‘People,’ he reasoned later, ‘were worried about my sanity.’ George Hickenlooper, who made a documentary on Dennis, believes he was ‘at the nadir of his existence then. He was on drugs, his career was in the toilet, he was living on the edge, and it was a way for him to garner some attention, I guess, or at the same time end his life. He would have appreciated either at the time, considering the state he was in.’ So if he lived it was a piece of art; if he died it would be a glorious exit.

The crowd watched with bated breath as Dennis strapped himself into a chair, the explosives arranged around him and then —
ka-boom!
When the smoke cleared, Dennis was unharmed, although his tongue was left so numb that he lost the power of speech for several days. When asked years later if he would ever repeat it he deadpanned, ‘No. I don’t think I’ll try that again, thank you.’

Dennis’s life at this point was about as unbalanced as it had ever been, his consumption of booze and drugs frankly frightening. He really was on course for hell and damnation. The statistics were awesome. At his peak Dennis was consuming daily — wait for this — a half-gallon of rum with a fifth of rum on the side, in case he ran out, twenty-eight beers and three grams of cocaine, ‘lines the length of a fountain pen every ten minutes’. These are amounts that would kill most people.

His paranoia was working overtime, too. For some reason he believed there was a contract out on his life. Even the sanctuary of Taos felt unsafe. He had to get out, so called on a bunch of friends to form an armed escort to the local airport. He fled to LA, where he booked into a hotel and called over some female company for a welcome-home orgy. Between bouts of wild sex Dennis was snorting his way Scarface-like through vast quantities of cocaine. He was even shooting the stuff, taking coke directly into his bloodstream. (The effect was instantaneous and dramatic, but it left his body just as quickly.) At times he was shooting it every ten minutes, plus speedballs, coke and heroin mixed, the lethal combination that had killed John Belushi only a few months earlier.

Still convinced there was a contract out on him, Dennis moved from town to town. At one point he confronted a local mobster he believed was out to get him. The meet was in a deserted parking lot and Dennis wanted answers to questions. When he wasn’t satisfied with the answers he pulled a knife. Luckily the crook felt pity for the miserable Dennis and didn’t have him killed on the spot.

Let’s face it, I fucked them all.

Following her romp with Jack, supermodel Janice Dickinson managed to snare Warren Beatty next. They kept bumping into each other in New York and Janice invited him to the notorious nightclub Studio 54. Warren declined, that just wasn’t his scene. She’d got his attention, though, and Warren invited her to his suite at the Carlyle, where she’d romanced Jack. Warren’s suite was considerably bigger, she noticed.

Warren got chatting to Diane Keaton on the phone as Janice made herself comfortable. Just then the second line rang; it was new conquest Mary Tyler Moore. Deftly Warren put Diane on hold and proceeded to make Mary ‘feel deeply loved, too’, recalled Janice, who watched, marvelling, as he telephonically juggled both women for a few minutes.

Eventually royally seduced, Janice recalled that Warren hung on her every word, making her feel like the centre of the universe, and when they made love she wasn’t disappointed. ‘He knew where everything was and what to do with it. Of course he’d had lots of practice. I tried not to think about just how much.’ Janice woke up at around 3 a.m. to find Warren wasn’t in bed; instead he was standing admiring himself in the mirror. When she asked what he was doing he said, ‘I’m trying to get that just been fucked look.’ Janice dated Warren for the next few months before their passion petered out naturally. ‘I never let myself fall in love with him,’ she said. ‘As I knew he was making half a dozen women feel the same way at the same time.’

Including Sylvia Kristel. Warren bumped into the
Emmanuelle
star at an LA party and called her a few days later. Sylvia felt seduced almost by his voice alone, writing in her autobiography: ‘When you hear him murmur “It’s Warren Beatty” you immediately realise he’s actually saying: might the prospect of sleeping with me be agreeable to you?’

Sylvia agreed to meet Warren at a luxury hotel, despite a friend’s warning that he always carried the key to a suite, just in case he got lucky. They had lunch, though Sylvia was curious that he’d brought along another woman, ‘That week’s conquest.’ Sylvia later found out that Warren thought she was bisexual and was hoping . . . well, Warren lived in eternal hope. She arranged another meeting with him, but this time with the caveat that ‘Sylvia is not Emmanuelle.’ So began an affair that lasted a few brief though memorable months. Sylvia saw that for Warren the pursuit of women was ‘an irrepressible urge, an endless hunting ground’. She found it amusing to watch Warren constantly on the lookout for new prey like an animal, knowing that few women could resist but that all would suffer the ‘frustration of becoming no more than a memory a few hours later’.

By the eighties, of course, Warren’s reputation as a ladies’ man was already legendary. ‘But it was a puny thing compared with the reality. It really was,’ says screenwriter Trevor Griffiths. ‘He used his sexuality the whole twenty-four hours of his day. It really was like
Shampoo
; there was no way of getting away from the next erection. We’d be driving down Sunset Boulevard or wherever, and he’d stop next to some woman in her Mercedes. He’d just look at her, she’d look at him, and something would happen behind their eyes. He’d mouth “hello” and they’d pull over and there would be an exchange of telephone numbers. Now, you imagine that and put yourself in his position and that is a very strange life to lead.’