Hollywood Hellraisers (7 page)

It didn’t take Gilmore long to realise that Dennis was into sex in a big way. He accompanied him one afternoon to a burlesque show downtown, ‘and Dennis started jacking off in the middle of it. Someone called the manager and he asked us to leave and Dennis shouted, “I’m Dennis Hopper, man. I’m with Warner Brothers and I’ll have your fucking job!” The guy said if we didn’t leave he’d call the cops. “We don’t allow no jacking off in here!”’

Dennis and Natalie remained an item all through the shooting of
Rebel
, creating such a bad atmosphere on set between himself and the director that Dennis challenged him to a fist fight. ‘Kid,’ Ray said, ‘someday you’re going to learn to put your fists away.’ Dennis consoled himself with the fact that, even though Natalie was shagging the old guy, ‘she was
with me
.’

One day Dennis and Natalie decided to have a good old-fashioned Hollywood orgy and invited another couple round to Dennis’s apartment. No one really knew what the rules were, so Natalie got things rolling by crying out, ‘Let’s have a champagne bath.’ Good idea, thought Dennis, who popped out quickly and returned with a couple of cases of cheap bubbly and proceeded to fill the bath with it. Natalie stripped and slowly lowered herself in. Within seconds she was in absolute agony, her vagina inflamed by the alcohol. A half-dressed Dennis had to rush her to the ER.

Within weeks of finishing work on
Rebel
Dennis was cast in James Dean’s next movie, the epic
Giant
(1956) with Elizabeth Taylor. When that was over both returned to LA, Dean ecstatic that he could drive his Porsche Spyder again after studio executives had banned him from car racing during filming. He even took Dennis for a spin in it. On 30 September 1955, on his way to a race meeting, Dean was involved in a head-on collision with another car at a lonely intersection. Rushed to hospital, he was pronounced dead on arrival. He was twenty-four.

Minutes after the news came over the radio a mutual friend was banging on the door to Dennis’s apartment. It was a bad idea. Recovering from a hectic night, Dennis couldn’t comprehend what he was being told and reacted with violence, shoving the guy against a wall and thwacking him one. He thought it was a sick joke. ‘Don’t you ever put me on like that again, man.’ Then the reality sank in. ‘It was horror. It was unbelievable.’

Dennis had placed Dean on a pedestal, above anyone else he’d ever met. Now his idol was gone and he was left devastated, wondering how a person of destiny could die just like that. The aftershock of the tragedy would echo inside him for years.

When the time comes when nobody desires me . . . for myself . . . I’d rather not be . . . desired . . . at all.

Determined to be an actor, Warren Beatty hit New York with all the explosive energy of a damp squib, working as a dishwasher, as a sandhog during the construction of a new section of the Lincoln Tunnel and also picking up the odd gig as, would you believe, cocktail-lounge piano man, all the while living in filthy conditions that even Marlon might have turned his nose up at: an unheated apartment in a run-down tenement. The previous occupant had been a junkie and the place still reeked of his habit. With very little income, Warren seemed to be just about surviving on peanut butter sandwiches, until he collapsed and ended up in hospital with hepatitis.

With little experience behind him it was Brando’s old drama coach Stella Adler who gave Warren the, ‘arrogant, self-confidence’, in his words, that would spur him on to success and equip him with the balls to say no to roles he didn’t like. Quite a courageous thing for an out-of-work actor to do. At one audition, when a director criticised his low voice, saying that he was mumbling like Brando, Warren simply gave the script back and walked out. Stella loved Warren the minute he joined her acting class, but her praise alone didn’t pay the bills and the young actor continued to live on the breadline, literally starving, before he won a few roles in daytime soaps, one-off television dramas and off-Broadway plays.

And there were women, of course. Warren was spending a lot of time with a young actress called Diane Ladd, the future wife of Bruce Dern and mother of
Blue Velvet
and
Jurassic Park
star Laura Dern. They met through acting class; Diane was barely sixteen years old. She loved Warren’s company, thought he was fun to be around. ‘He’d take me home and kiss me goodnight — then say hello to my roommates and kiss them too.’ Others found him overbearing and too cocky by half. Neither did they appreciate his sometimes wild sense of humour.

One of Diane’s flatmates was seventeen-year-old Rona Barrett, later to become a popular TV showbiz reporter in the seventies, to whom Ryan O’Neal famously mailed a live tarantula. Early one morning Rona was awoken by loud rapping at the door and a voice demanding, ‘Open up.’ She was hardly going to do that at 2 a.m., not until the mystery voice identified itself, which it refused to do. ‘Open the door,’ it went on, then menacingly: ‘I’m gonna rape you.’ Startled, Rona replied, ‘No you’re not. Who is it?’ It was Warren, of course, coming to visit his girlfriend. Finally, Diane came running down the hall. ‘Oh my God, it’s only Warren,’ she said, as if this were a daily occurrence. Invited in, he took one look at Rona and blurted out, ‘This is it, baby! You’re finally gonna lose that fucking cherry.’

Not surprisingly, Rona was never attracted to Warren, even though ‘he had relationships with a number of my girlfriends’. But, rape threats aside, she found him charm personified. Already the Beatty seduction technique was taking shape: an ability to captivate a woman entirely, to be attentive only to her, to make her feel she was the one person in the room, nay the world, who mattered at that moment. As one woman who enjoyed a brief affair with Warren explained to
Time
magazine in 1978. ‘He doesn’t just want to seduce you but to quite literally charm the pants off you. He tells you you’re fabulous and laughs at all your jokes. He’s so in love with himself that it’s contagious.’

Like before, Superman, two or three goons holding me while you do the punching.

Jack Nicholson did a lot of thinking about his future during the summer of 1954. He’d enough grades to go to college, but that meant work and lots of it. ‘And I was too lazy for that. I wasn’t filled with a burning desire to make something of myself in those days.’ So he bummed around for a while, worked as a lifeguard, even making the local papers when in a choppy storm he muscled a boat out, surviving huge waves, to rescue a party of five swimmers who’d got into trouble. ‘What the paper didn’t mention is that as soon as I beached the boat, I puked my guts out in front of about 40,000 people.’

Another summer job was working as the assistant manager of a local movie theatre.
On the Waterfront
was showing and the young Jack must have seen every performance, unable to take his eyes off Brando. ‘He was spellbinding, a genius. There was no way to follow in his footsteps. He was just too large and just too far out of sight.’

By coincidence, or was it providence, June had settled in a suburb of LA with her children after her marriage to the test pilot broke up. Jack, still unaware that his sister was his mother, packed his bags and headed west to stay with her for a while, keen on catching some Californian rays before deciding what to do next with his life. Immediately he connected with the place, its atmosphere, the buzz, it just felt like home. For money he played the horses at the local race track and hustled pool at night, and there was also a part-time job in a toy store. But that wasn’t enough for June; she thought Jack ought to be looking for more secure employment. Both hot-headed, the pair often clashed and after one particularly fierce argument June threw him out into the street. Angry, he walked for hours before stumbling, exhausted, onto Sunset Boulevard. At last, Jack had arrived in the heart of Hollywood.

On the verge of returning home, feeling he really ought to get serious about his life and go to college, Jack landed a job as a mail boy in the animation department of MGM, for Tom and Jerry creators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. Although the studios were far from the giants they once had been, they were still imposing places and Jack was intoxicated by the sheer vibe of working there. He’d visit sound stages and watch them shoot pictures, see stars like Bogart and Liz Taylor; ‘It was hog heaven for me.’ He once confessed to lying down flat on a studio lawn to get a good look at Lana Turner’s knickers as she boarded a coach. He even had the temerity to ask Joan Collins for a date; she turned him down.

To this day Jack still recalls the day Marlon arrived on the MGM lot. The staff there were blasé about seeing movie stars, but every venetian blind flew up and all the secretaries stuck their heads out the window to take a peek at him. Jack even snuck onto the sound stage to watch up front and personal his hero in action.

Moving out of June’s place, Jack rented a small apartment above a garage with an old school pal. They’d go out at night with like-minded souls, wasting hours over a cappuccino in the coffee bars of Sunset Strip talking about movies and worshipping their acting idols, Brando, Dean and Clift. They’d try to hit on girls, without success. At one nightclub Jack plucked up the courage to ask for a dance but rushed back minutes later. ‘I’ve got to find the men’s room.’ His friends were perplexed. ‘What happened?’ Jack explained. ‘I was dancing with this girl and she danced so damn close to me that I exploded in my pants!’

Walking down a corridor one day at MGM Jack passed producer Joe Pasternak. ‘Hiya, Joe,’ he grinned. Pasternak paused, then said, ‘Hey, kid – how’d ya like to be in pictures?’ Yes, that really used to happen, you just had to be in the right place at the right time. For days Jack sweated over his audition, daring to dream of stardom. Reality hurt when it hit him: he wasn’t good enough, the test was a disaster and Nicholson was back on the mail run. His gawky, unconventional looks just didn’t fit in with the current emphasis on brooding Roman gods like Marlon and Rock Hudson. ‘Hiya, Joe,’ Jack greeted Pasternak in the corridor a few days after. The producer stopped for a moment, mulling over the earnest youth’s face. Then he spoke: ‘Hey — how’d ya like to be in pictures?’ Jack shrugged his shoulders over the fickle business he’d chosen to be a part of and walked away.

Get up! Get up, you scum-suckin’ pig!

Despite all the success Marlon Brando had enjoyed he remained a psychological mess. Sometimes he’d walk the streets till dawn or chat for hours on the phone with friends until succumbing to sleep. Financially things were looking precarious, too. In an effort to mend the relationship with his father he’d taken on Marlon Sr as a business manager, which was a recipe for disaster. When a cattle ranch the old man invested in went belly up the son needed money fast, so signed a contract to appear in a piece of historical nonsense called
The Egyptian
for 20th Century Fox, the first time he’d agreed to make ‘crap for money’. Then he read the script — ‘It was shit’ — and walked. The studio was incensed. Acting fast, Brando got his shrink to write a letter saying he couldn’t make the film because he was ‘mentally confused’. It was the ultimate sick note, but Fox weren’t buying it and sued Brando for breach of contract. A compromise was reached: Marlon would make another film for Fox,
Desirée
(1954), starring as Napoleon.

Either he wasn’t interested in the role or it was the biggest sulk in movie history, but Marlon’s performance as the diminutive dictator was one big fat void. Critics and the public wholeheartedly agreed. At one screening Marlon’s Napoleon emoted on screen, ‘When did you stop loving me?’ To which one member of the audience heckled, ‘When you made this shit-kicker.’ Marlon’s spirits fell and he told a reporter he felt like giving up movies for a while and finding a hideaway somewhere in the South Pacific, where he could ‘fuck brown-skinned teenage gals until I’ve doubled the island population’.

Amidst all this wrangling Dodie was taken seriously ill. Marlon and his sisters rushed to her bedside and for the next three weeks held vigil as she slipped in and out of a coma, waking up sometimes to talk with her children, telling Brando to promise her, ‘to try and get along with people. Don’t fight with them, Bud.’

Then one night she held Marlon’s hand softly and whispered, ‘I’m not scared, and you don’t have to be.’ Then the woman Stella Adler called ‘this heavenly, girlish, lost creature’ was gone. Brando broke down, emotionally spent. Dodie had borne her illness with incredible courage and dignity; Brando later told friends she taught him how to die. Marlon did not fall completely to pieces after Dodie’s death, as friends feared he might, but there were occasions he came mighty close. Like when he drove playwright Clifford Odets home late one night and suddenly started dredging up memories of pulling his mother’s drunken body out of bars as a kid. Tears welled up in his eyes, impairing his vision, and his driving grew erratic, the car swerving from side to side on the perilously steep bends along the Hollywood Hills. Odets was convinced his number was up, but Marlon managed to regain composure and all was well.

After their fruitful collaboration on
Julius Caesar
Joe Mankiewicz wanted Marlon to star in the screen version of the Broadway smash musical
Guys and Dolls
(1955). As Joe’s son Tom recalls, ‘Marlon was in Europe and Dad sent him a telegram saying, “How would you like to play Sky Masterson?” And Marlon sent a telegram back saying, “Actually more terrified than playing Shakespeare for the first time, never have done a musical before.” And Dad sent him back a telegram saying, “Don’t worry about it, neither have I.” And that’s how they started. And they became artistically very close. Marlon once said to me, “Your old man was the only person who would have cast me in Shakespeare and a musical.”’