Hollywood Hellraisers (44 page)

In March Warren and Annette were married in a small ceremony attended only by close relatives and friends. It must have been an aweinspiring moment for Warren to say, ‘I do.’ Former lover and very nearly Mrs Warren Beatty Michelle Phillips commented, ‘I love Annette and I pray for her every day. She can manage the guy, and I never could. He drove me nuts.’

A family man, and now a married man! Friends and Warren watchers couldn’t quite believe it. Others, though, always guessed that, unlike Jack, fear of being alone would eventually drive him into matrimony. ‘I think people do things that at the time are right for them,’ says Tom Mankiewicz. ‘I think if the Warren Beatty I knew in the seventies had gotten married, he’d have gotten a divorce right away. Playing the field wasn’t really a statement. Warren fucked everything that moved, he just did. If he was in a movie and there were three girls in the movie, it was – bang, bang, bang. Now he’s a terrific father and Annette’s a wonderful mother. They make a great family.’

Warren has categorised his life into two distinct phases, ‘Before Annette’ and ‘With Annette’. He’d avoided responsibility for so long, his life had been one long free buffet, but now it was time to end the party. Incredibly, married life seemed to suit him. ‘I think stability is part of what Warren saw in Annette,’ said sister Shirley. As for Robert Evans, he saw a distinct change in his old friend, who until his marriage had stood alone as the single most competitive person he ever knew. A man whose obsession in life was to be first: ‘First with the new hot girl in town, first to be shown the new hot screenplay, the new hot role, or for that matter the new hot anything – as long as it was new and hot.’

Commentators wondered whether a man whose life was dominated by chasing women could settle down and be content with just the one. ‘Women are his profession,’ said one colleague. ‘Movies are his hobby.’ But Warren was determined to stay the course and he’d a better chance than most, due mainly to his compulsive nature. Divorce would be seen as a failure and, according to Robert Towne, ‘Warren is terrified of failure. He must succeed because he cannot bear to fail. Warren will do anything short of murder to win.’

On his fifty-fifth birthday Warren attended the Oscars, Annette glowing on his arm. She’d been just three years old when he’d made his first trip to the ceremony, escorting Natalie Wood. As he entered the building a woman on the other side of the door just stopped dead when she saw Warren. ‘I love you,’ was all she could utter. Warren gets this a lot and sees it as part of the job of being a movie star. ‘I’ve never seen Warren not be receptive to a fan coming up to him in a public situation,’ says producer Jon Landau. ‘Even when somebody is staring at Warren, then Warren will actually go up and introduce himself.’

In spite of all the failures, politics still held great sway over Warren. He advised Bill Clinton, then running as a presidential candidate, to jazz up his speeches by yelling ‘fuck’ a few times. Clinton ignored him, unlike McGovern and Hart, and won the election. Warren and Annette, along with Jack, were amongst the guests at his inauguration in January 1993. Clinton proved to be a Teflon politician, particularly where sex scandals were concerned. The danger of revelations about his private life had always been a factor in Warren not running for office, but the Clinton experience once again opened up the possibility that one day he might set his sights on the White House.

In this town I’m the leper with the most fingers.

Jack Nicholson burst back into the headlines in February 1994 when he attacked a motorist with a golf club in a rare public display of rage. It happened in LA, when Jack claimed a driver in a Mercedes cut him up. Incensed, he grabbed a golf club and ran over to the offending vehicle and gave it a good whack, Basil Fawlty style. The owner, one Robert Blank, claimed the star shattered the windshield and dented the roof, all of which resulted in a slight personal injury to himself from flying glass. All very bizarre. And in spite of Jack’s wild image, completely out of character.

Questioned by the police, Jack admitted selecting a number two iron to dent the man’s car, adding, ‘You can bet I felt justified.’ Later, when he’d calmed down a bit, Jack excused his behaviour by saying he was deeply upset, having just heard that a close colleague had died. ‘I was out of my mind. He had died that morning and I was playing a maniac all night. It was a shameful experience for me. I don’t like to lose control or to be angry.’

Blank intended to pursue a civil suit against Jack and the star faced prosecution for assault and vandalism, each charge carrying a potential six-month jail sentence. For a while it was squeaky bum time, but in the end Blank settled out of court and the charges were dropped. To many it seemed that Jack’s power and money had triumphed over justice. The
Los Angeles Times
wrote, ‘With the flick of a pen on a personal check, [Nicholson] can make things go away. Sue him for breaking your windshield with a golf club? There, a little cash ought to cover it. Bye bye lawsuit. So long, criminal charges.’ The piece concluded that Jack was ‘someone who seems exempt from the rules that govern life for the rest of us’.

Neither the golf-club incident nor the paternity suit did anything to diminish Jack’s popularity. His stature in the film community was also never higher. Just a month later the American Film Institute honoured Jack with their Lifetime Achievement Award, justly deserved, if a little premature. Past recipients had been such well-wrinkled veterans as Hitchcock, Bette Davis and Henry Fonda. Jack was the youngest ever to receive the honour and dubbed it the Prime of Life Award.

He arrived on stage to the tune of Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to Be Wild’ and star guests such as Shirley MacLaine, Cher, Bob Dylan, Faye Dunaway and Robert Evans, along with Dennis and Warren, all wore shades in tribute. ‘I’m touched,’ Jack said. Then, alluding to the road-rage incident, ‘And I’m lucky to be at large.’ Jack had wanted to make the occasion even more special by inviting swathes of family members, many of whom he’d not seen for years. The audience also included his ex-wife Sandra Knight and their daughter Jennifer, along with Rebecca Broussard. There were, however, some notable absentees, namely Susan Anspach and their son together Caleb. Susan had to wait a couple of days to see the ceremony on television and after watching it called Jack. It was past midnight. ‘This has to stop,’ she said. ‘This is really rude. If you don’t want to invite me or Caleb, fine, but at least make a nice comment about your son.’ Jack’s voice, Susan recalled, was just a little slurred; he sounded stoned. ‘Don’t you know it’s really late? I don’t know what all this hysteria is about. You call me at this hour with this shit.’

When a few weeks later in a
Vanity Fair
interview Jack waxed lyrical about his young family with Rebecca but again failed to mention Caleb, Susan was seized with a mother’s anger and sent a letter to the magazine’s editor, hoping to rectify the omission. Jack called Susan, ‘as mad as hell’, in her words, that
Vanity Fair
planned to publish her letter in full.

Since their break-up Jack and Susan’s relationship had always been a little shaky – Jack described her as ‘fucking unpredictable’ – but now it hit the skids with a vengeance. Some years earlier Jack had been happy to help Susan out when her career had taken a nosedive and she’d found difficulty keeping up with the mortgage repayments on her house in Santa Monica. Through a company operated by his financial manager, Jack arranged a large loan. After Susan’s letter was printed in
Vanity Fair
the company suddenly requested that the loan be repaid, along with a daunting amount of interest. Refusal on her part, said the notification, would result in foreclosure. ‘He’s trying to ruin me absolutely,’ Susan complained.

The row was getting ugly and spilling out into the public arena, as Susan was hounded by Jack’s legal beagles for several months. The
Los Angeles Times
called it ‘the misplaced trust between a Hollywood God and the mother of his child’. Jack must have known this wasn’t playing very well, after all it was a comparatively small sum of money compared to his overall fortune, and eventually the whole matter was settled out of court. With Susan bound by a confidentiality clause, all the frenzied media could get out of her was the happy comment, ‘I’m still in my home.’

After all that Jack needed some fun and headed to London, one of his favourite cities, where he frequented nightclubs, got roaring drunk and was seen in the glittering company of various British totty including Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss and Amanda de Cadenet, with whom it was reported he was having a fling following her estrangement from husband John Taylor of Duran Duran.

Jack also made time in his busy schedule to catch a performance of
Revue Voyeurz
, a lesbian musical that had dancers exposing themselves on stage, simulating sex, performing fellatio on rubber penises and gang raping a protesting virgin. It was Jack’s kind of musical and he happily posed for pictures with the girls all wearing chains and bondage gear backstage after the performance. They couldn’t wipe the smile off his face for two months.

Inevitably, wherever Jack went, the press followed. They camped outside his hotel watching a parade of nubile maidens going in and out at all hours, then wrote snide reports about it the next day. He was dubbed ‘Jack the Sad’. ‘Even if endless nymphets are happy to feel old age creeping over them,’ wrote one hack, ‘you just might not be up to it any more.’ Of course he was used to being hounded by now. Nine days in ten since the mid-seventies he hadn’t walked through a door without there being photographers around to capture the moment. It’s one of the reasons he took to wearing sunglasses; they’re primarily a defence against fifty flashbulbs going off in his face, and part of his personal armoury. ‘With my sunglasses on, I’m Jack Nicholson. Without them, I’m fat and sixty.’

I have seen the devil in my microscope, and I have chained him.

When director Richard Stanley was given the green light to shoot his modern remake of the horror classic
The Island of Dr Moreau
(1996), he wanted Marlon Brando to play H. G. Wells’s mad scientist. The idea intrigued the actor. Maybe he saw some parallels between himself and Dr Moreau; like Wells’s character he had tried to create his own Utopia on his private island. He’d also in recent years pumped millions into various scientific schemes including genetics, the idea being that it was too late to repair the post-industrial environment mankind had created for itself, so, like Moreau, shouldn’t the human race think of genetically modifying itself to fit the new environment? He’d invested too in alternative energy and terraforming: adapting other planets to support colonisation from earth. ‘I think at that point in his life he had a very low opinion of the craft of acting,’ says Stanley. ‘So he was constantly trying to find causes to put his money into, feeding the Third World or creating alternatives to gasoline, terraforming Mars, space travel, ideas that he felt were real jobs. A part of him was in danger of turning into the Moreau character. Another very Dr Moreau touch that Marlon had in real life was he had these guard dogs in the house which were trained to attack anything he pointed his laser pen at. He had this laser pen and he’d point the dot at the wall and the dogs would leap at it, their jaws biting at the laser beam. Very Dr Moreau.’

Stanley felt confident, he had Brando voicing interest and a great script, but then he heard rumblings that backers New Line Cinema didn’t want him as director and were planning a coup, replacing him with Roman Polanski. Stanley wasn’t going without a fight and demanded a showdown with Marlon; he wasn’t even put off when he heard that Brando wanted to skin him alive. (Why? Who knows? He just did.) ‘Actually New Line didn’t think I’d last five minutes with Brando,’ says Stanley. ‘And it was intimidating, pulling up into Mulholland Drive, the gates opening, TV cameras everywhere, excessive security. I was surprised when I finally met him because I was expecting him to be more of a monster than he was, because the build-up was so huge. He seemed smaller than I expected, but old. Obviously he wasn’t Brando as we’d seen him in the movies. But all the time I was sitting down I was thinking, James Dean played bongos with this guy, he went out with Marilyn Monroe and fixed Tennessee Williams’s plumbing.’

New Line had insisted on having a representative at the meeting, a fly on the wall to see exactly what went down. It was a woman executive. ‘And quite early on she complained that it was too hot in the room,’ recalls Stanley. ‘Marlon turned up the thermostat. “If you turn that up any more I’m going to go to sleep,” she said. And he just continued to edge it up very slightly, during which time he scarcely made eye contact with me. I was totally nervous; I don’t think we exchanged a single word. Instead he made light chat with this woman, all the time gradually edging up the heating, and within about twenty minutes she was completely unconscious. That was weird. He just put her to sleep. As he turned up that dial she just got drowsier and drowsier until she was gone and right out of the meeting. At which point he looked at me and we started talking.’

Successfully. Stanley was back on his own movie, Brando was happy and New Line had to lump it, for the time being, at least. He returned to Mulholland Drive several times. ‘After one meeting I was given a ride back to my hotel by his daughter Cheyenne. I remember as I was getting out of the car she looked at me and said, “Are you afraid?” I said, “Of what?” But she didn’t answer and I still don’t know what she meant by that, and it was the last time I heard from her. She was dead not so long afterwards.’

Things looked good for Stanley, that is until he actually started making the movie. He lasted about four days before New Line finally got their way. Since subtlety hadn’t worked, they simply fired him, bringing in veteran John Frankenheimer, who had the script completely rewritten. Incensed by the way he’d been mistreated, Stanley sneaked back onto the set. ‘I was curious. I wanted to see what was going on. It was a good thing to see because it was such a shambles, just complete chaos.’ There were days when the crew didn’t know what scenes were scheduled to be shot, actors would be in make-up for five hours being transformed into Grizzly Man or Rhinoceros Man only to find out they weren’t needed that day. It was just a complete mess. And Brando was also up to his old trick of baiting his director, according to cameraman William Fraker. ‘Marlon was tough to work with, no doubt, if you were a director or producer. He’d want to hear the director’s ideas for a particular scene and then he’d have an explanation as to why he thought that was all wrong. And they’d sit down for hours and talk. In fact on one day during
Moreau
we sat down for eight hours while Marlon and Frankenheimer worked it out. So directing Marlon was a chore, really tough.’