Hollywood Hellraisers (36 page)

Rolling Stone
magazine had fun revealing some of Warren’s chat-up lines – ‘You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve met who’s not an actress or model,’ or, ‘Your grandmother, she was one of the sexiest women I ever knew.’ Amazingly, he still succeeded in avoiding marriage while remaining friends with many of the women in his life. ‘No matter what has happened,’ he once revealed, ‘I’ve never felt very apart from any of the women with whom I have been involved. Some feeling always remained.’

If you wanted to get me on my back, all you had to do was ask me.

It wasn’t often that Jack Nicholson scooped up a Burt Reynolds cast off, but that’s exactly what happened with
Terms of Endearment
(1983), and he ended up with a second Oscar. It was a gem of a role, Garrett Breedlove, a pot-bellied, balding, hard-drinking ex-astronaut who chases young women around. Perfect casting for Jack, you might think, but director/writer Jim Brooks, who’d come from a highly successful career in TV with
Rhoda
and
Taxi
, initially offered it to Reynolds. After the mustachioed one turned it down Jack was happy to come on board, not giving a rat’s arse about what the role might do to his image. Indeed, critics praised him for taking a part that called for an overweight, middle-aged man, just the sort of casting many Hollywood leading men actively avoided. And Jack went all out with the role, asking Brooks on set, ‘How much gut do you want?’ It also represented a nice change of pace after playing an assortment of sex maniacs and nut jobs. ‘I was looking for a slightly more socially redeeming character,’ Jack said.

As filming began tension emerged between Jack’s co-stars Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger, playing mother and daughter. The two women did not get along and Jack often had to act as mediator. While watching rushes one day, Shirley reached over to touch Debra’s arm. She missed. ‘You grabbed my tit!’ Debra shrieked, and to the amazement of everyone punched MacLaine and had to be pulled off her by crew members. If anything Debra’s behaviour became more deranged. During Jack and Shirley’s love scene the actress crept under the bed sheets with them and licked Shirley’s leg. Fuming, Shirley got in her car and made to drive off. Brooks couldn’t have his star go AWOL so one of the producers threw themselves onto the hood of the car to stop her leaving.

Shirley’s relationship with Jack was far more positive. Although she was Warren’s sister, Shirley didn’t know Jack at all well before starting work on
Terms of Endearment
but it ended up being a dream partnership. ‘To have Jack in bed was such middle-age joy.’

Regardless of the frictions,
Terms
was a huge box-office success and won a clutch of Oscars. Strolling over to the podium to pick up his best supporting actor award Jack punched the air and roared, ‘All you rock people down at the Roxy and up in the Rockies, rock on.’ Not your typical acceptance speech.

While publicising the film in Britain, Jack discovered that his reputation was beginning to get in the way of his work. A British tabloid claimed he’d had a ‘string of drug busts in America’. Jack sued, and the paper was forced to pay him substantial damages. Maybe someone forget to tell Jack that if you dance with the devil, expect to get pricked by his horns. Maybe someone forgot to tell the paper, too.

It wasn’t only on the cinema screen where you’d catch Jack; he often took a starring role courtside at home games for his beloved Lakers. A basketball fanatic, Jack sees his local team as often as work permits, sometimes chartering his own plane to away games for himself and select buddies. He’s gone down in Lakers history as their number one fan, entering the arena sporting sunglasses to huge cheers.
Sports Illustrated
feels that Jack’s affection for basketball is just part of his ‘successful project to have more fun than anybody on the planet’.

A highly vocal fan, ranting and raving at the referee or opposing players, stories of Jack the fan are legion. Back in 1980 when the Washington Bullets were playing the Lakers a lively exchange broke out between Jack and the visitors’ coach, Dick Motta, who claimed Jack made a grab for his leg. ‘You touch me again and you won’t need a frontal lobotomy,’ Motta yelled, alluding to Jack’s
Cuckoo’s Nest
role. Jack hit back, saying it was Motta who was breaking the rules (he had strayed out of his coaching area). ‘Say, pal,’ Motta responded, ‘if you wanna be a coach, buy me a team and I’ll make you my assistant. Now sit down.’ ‘Sit down yourself,’ said Jack. ‘I pay money for these seats and, by the way, pal, it’ll take somebody bigger than you to make me sit.’

The crowd loved it, of course. Jack’s antics are usually deliberately orchestrated to raise the temperature of a game, firing up both the team and the fans. Once his courtside tantrum was so heated, screaming at a ref who had penalised a Lakers player, that the official warned security that if Jack threw another fit he should be escorted out. It did the trick, though; the Lakers stormed to victory. His gamesmanship is equally outrageous at away games, most notably against arch rivals the Boston Celtics, where he reportedly mooned at thousands of their fans at the Boston Garden Stadium. Red Auerbach, the Celtics general manager, told
Sports Illustrated
, ‘I’ve seen a lot of fans in my day, and to me there’s a difference between being an ass and being a fan.’

After that incident Jack was public enemy number one with the Celtic fans, but still enjoyed the away games in Boston. ‘Until you’ve had 15,000 people in Boston Garden screaming, “Fuck you, Jack!” you haven’t lived.’ It’s all good-natured banter, and as he takes his seat he gestures obscenely to the baying crowd and laughs at their hostile banners – CHOKE ON YOUR COKE, JACK. But even in this maelstrom of hate he had his supporters, two teenagers standing in the corner, wearing dark clothes and sunglasses. As Jack saw them they flipped over a small cardboard sign that read NICHOLSON YOUTH.

You know in 15 years, you’re going to be playing soccer with your tits. What do you think of that?

Besides not making films, Marlon Brando was still trying, unsuccessfully, not to gain the proportions of a humped-back whale. One of his girlfriends apparently dumped him when he failed to keep his promise to lose weight. He said he was dieting, but never seemed to get any thinner. She later found out that deliverymen were throwing bags of Burger King Whoppers and McDonald’s Big Macs over the gates of his Mulholland Drive estate at night to relieve his hunger pangs.

Tales emerged that Marlon’s idea of a snack was a pound of cooked bacon shoved into an entire loaf of bread. Hardly surprising, then, that he was hit by a series of grave illnesses, though somehow he always managed to survive. ‘He has the constitution of a horse,’ said friend Phil Rhodes.

At Mulholland Drive there were rumours that he’d stay in his bedroom for days on end, a loaded pistol and 12-gauge shotgun tucked under his bed. When he went out it was usually in disguise, once with his whole face wrapped in white gauze, like the invisible man. He really would have been better off making movies, but his hatred of the profession, or those in charge of it, never left him. ‘I notice,’ he once said, ‘that the width of a Hollywood smile in my direction is commensurate with how my last picture grossed.’

As a novice actor Marlon became a great observer of people, watching and mimicking their quirks and gestures. When fame came along that particular weapon was ripped from his actor’s armoury and instead he became the observed. Or maybe he never forgave acting for stripping him of what he held most precious – his privacy. ‘Acting is a bum’s life in that it leads to perfect self-indulgence.’

Producer Albert Ruddy recalls one day sitting with Marlon when they were shooting scenes at a New York hospital for
The Godfather
. He’d taken a shine to a little Puerto Rican boy who ran the elevator and they were all chewing the fat when this kid confided in Marlon that he wanted to be an actor. ‘And Marlon berated him,’ says Ruddy. ‘He said, “You want to live your life as an actor, having other people put lines in your mouth?” I was stunned, it was like Frank Lloyd Wright asking, “Why do you want to be an architect?” I was shocked. But that’s how he felt. That’s why he was frustrated and got involved with the Indians and all that. He felt he was pigeonholed and just didn’t want to repeat this success over and over as the greatest actor in the world. The guy had accomplished everything that any actor ever did in their life.’

How would you like to have more fun than you’ve ever had in your life?

As the eighties continued it was a miracle Dennis Hopper’s liver and kidneys hadn’t divorced themselves from the rest of his body, which was in remarkably fine fettle, considering. But it was his mind that went AWOL first. He’d gone to Cuernavaca in Mexico to make a film called
Jungle Warriors
(1984), playing of all things head of the US drug enforcement agency. He arrived smashed out of his skull on booze and drugs. Checking into his hotel he convinced himself that people were being tortured and burned alive in the basement. Sensing he was next in line for similar treatment, he made a bolt for it, out into the warm Mexican night, stripped himself naked and wandered into a forest. He spent the whole night there, totally out of his mind. He sensed bugs and snakes crawling over and inside his skin, he had visions of an alien spacecraft landing and followed the glowing lights. ‘I thought the Third World War had started. I masturbated in front of a tree and thought I’d become a galaxy – that was a good mood!’

By dawn, his revelries in the wood over, Dennis wandered back into town, still naked. Some police tried to dress him but Dennis screamed at them, ‘No, shoot me like this! I want to die naked.’ Wrestled into the local jail, the hallucinations continued. Telephone wires started talking to him and he heard friends of his being lined up outside and machinegunned. Fearing that they might soon have a dead film star in their cells, the police dumped him into hospital. There Dennis watched terror stricken as doctors approached him with needles. In his paranoid state he thought they were part of the great conspiracy to kill him.

It didn’t take the film’s producer long to conclude that Dennis was in no fit state to take part in his movie and organise two hulking stuntmen to accompany him back to the States. On the plane Dennis was convinced he was being filmed by Francis Ford Coppola and Wim Wenders, because he’d seen them with cameras as he was boarding. He hadn’t, of course, but Dennis’s life had become its own mad movie. Waiting for take-off, Dennis peered outside and in his raddled mind saw the wing catch fire. He broke free from his bodyguards and tried to open the escape hatch. ‘I was just totally gone,’ he later related. ‘But it’s always very impressive when you do things like that.’ The airline company said it would ground the flight unless Dennis was securely restrained for the whole journey.

Back in LA friends checked Dennis into rehab. ‘Really a drag,’ Dennis called it. ‘Not cool.’ He was still in a bad way, hearing voices and secret messages being passed down to him via telephone wires. Friend Paul Lewis visited him. ‘He reached the point where he was insane. I’d say hello to him and between hello, how are you, was maybe ten minutes; for three words.’ Dennis’s daughter Marin later remembered doctors telling her that her father was practically brain dead and they were moving him to an insane asylum. While there he somehow got hold of a pair of hedge clippers and went wild with them until a pair of orderlies put him in a straitjacket. Staff placed Dennis on a regimen of anti-psychotic drugs but for months he had the shakes and found it difficult to string a simple sentence together, nor could he eat properly, unable to manoeuvre a fork into his mouth. His friend Bud Shrake, who wrote
Kid Blue
, visited Dennis at the hospital and saw a pathetic figure. He guessed they must have given him the wrong kind of medication because his arms were drawn up like a praying mantis’s and he was trembling as if suffering from Parkinson’s disease. At one point they gave him another drug and he froze completely. Doctors would also march him round to different groups of patients, his tongue hanging out, and say, ‘Now how many of you have ever seen
Easy Rider
?’ They’d all hold up their hands. The doctor would say, ‘Well, this is one of the guys who starred in it. You see what drugs will do to you.’

Still suffering the symptoms, Dennis checked himself out of the clinic and was driven back to Taos by his girlfriend. He could barely speak, nor even steady a cigarette in his mouth long enough to light it. How the hell was he ever going to act again? He felt depressed and suicidal. ‘I can’t go through life like this,’ he said. The girlfriend was suitably alarmed to take Dennis to a doctor, who put him on a new course of drugs which seemed to calm him down; at least he could light a cigarette now. ‘That was the start of my coming back.’

It had been a horrific experience and one Dennis had come to realise had been induced more by alcohol than by drugs. ‘Alcohol drove me insane.’ To eradicate booze from his life Dennis went into an Alcoholics Anonymous programme and came out determined to quit. His warped strategy to stay off booze was to keep doing drugs. ‘So rather than having a beer in the morning, I would have cocaine.’ Sounds logical, if you happened to be Dennis Hopper circa 1983. (The logic being he could stop cocaine anytime.) The flaw in his plan was that he was getting through half an ounce of cocaine every two or three days. He’d turn up at AA meetings piously admitting ‘I’m an alcoholic’ with half an ounce of cocaine in his pocket. He was heading for oblivion.

Dennis remained at Taos into 1984. He played a small role in a Robert Altman movie,
O.C. and Stiggs
that tanked big time. He hit the bottle again and the hallucinations returned. So too the voices, voices of people suffering torture and murder. ‘And the radio was talking to me and the electric wires – boy, I was out of it.’