Hollywood Hellraisers (9 page)

On the last day of shooting Dennis decided to make a stand and refused to perform a scene Hathaway’s way. ‘Listen,’ said the director, ‘I own forty per cent of this studio and you’re going to do the scene how I want it.’ It was a battle of wills. Whose would crack first? They started at seven in the morning. By lunch Dennis was still defiant; by dinner he was still giving Hathaway the finger, doing the lines his way; by 11 o’clock, after eighty takes and fifteen hours, it was Dennis who caved in, physically and mentally drained. In tears, he asked Hathaway how the director wanted him to play the scene. He did it and then walked off the set. Not before he heard, ringing in his ears, Hathaway’s curse: ‘You’ll never work in this town again, kid! I guarantee it!’

Few in Hollywood had ever known a young actor behave like this. In the past the industry forgave unspeakable things in the name of genuine, saleable talent, but the consensus was that Dennis Hopper didn’t have any such talent, so Warners dropped him as quickly as they would a dog-shit sandwich. In the words of studio executives, he was dead meat. ‘I was blackballed, which means the executives call each other and say, don’t hire this kid — he’s a nightmare.’ Dennis didn’t make another Hollywood movie for seven years.

Disillusioned, he headed east to New York, where he stayed with John Gilmore. ‘When he flew in Dennis had this BOAC bag that was half full of marijuana. And he was totally stoned all the time, and drinking, just incredibly stoned.’ His sex drive was enormous, out of control. According to Gilmore, ‘Dennis would stop girls on the street and say. “Hi, I’m Dennis Hopper. Do you wanna fuck?” They’d laugh or just glare with indignation — “Who the hell is Dennis Hopper?”’

A friend of Gilmore thought it might be a good idea to get a couple of nuns from a nearby convent to come by and try and save the soul of Dennis. They arrived decked out in traditional black habits and clutching their rosaries. Out of it on dope and booze, Dennis wasted little time in propositioning the younger of the two sisters to a romp with a ‘live pulse’. Gilmore’s friend stepped in. ‘Excuse me, Sister,’ he said, and picked Dennis up and threw him onto a bed, warning, ‘Don’t move a muscle. I’m escorting the sisters out of here.’ Before leaving the nuns turned to the bedraggled form of Dennis. ‘I can see he’s in pain. We will pray for him.’ Considering what was to befall Dennis over the next couple of decades, they obviously didn’t pray hard enough.

Gilmore continued to see Dennis on and off for the next few years but the two men fell out over a film script and never spoke to one another again. ‘Dennis liked to probably sell the idea that he was this wild Hollywood rebel,’ says Gilmore. ‘He was wild. At parties he’d get weird and piss on the wall, but he really wasn’t a rebel, he was just this self-destructive asshole.’

In New York Dennis studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio and guest starred in the odd TV series, ‘strictly for the bread, man’. More often than not he appeared in the pilot episode, ‘usually as the bad guy who’d get knocked off by the hero before he got his own series’. Most of these shows were westerns, such as
Wagon Train
,
Bonanza
and
Gunsmoke
, and Dennis enjoyed standing in front of mirrors to practise his quick draw. ‘I almost shot my toe off once.’

Mostly he soaked himself in the underground culture of the Big Apple, floating in and out of jazz clubs where the atmosphere of drugs, broads and booze appealed. He met fellow purveyors of decadence, hard drinkers and druggies who, like Dennis, could stay up all night drinking and still be standing upright, just, by dawn. He went beatnik basically, grew his hair long and started a Marlon Brando for President campaign.

Most importantly for his sanity, Dennis discovered a real passion for art and became a self-confessed ‘gallery bum’. Hardly a day went by that he wasn’t wandering around the city’s many art galleries. Frustrated by the deliberate stifling of his film career, Dennis turned to art and photography for creative stimulus, beginning with abstract subjects like walls and landscapes. Dennis was reluctant to photograph people — from his own experience in Hollywood he knew how intrusive a photojournalist’s lens could be — but gradually he began to document with his camera the burgeoning sixties vibe, especially the new bohemians he hung out with, an arty crowd of abstract expressionists and pop-art artists that included Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns. Dennis was at the cutting edge, if you wanted to know something about what the scene was, Dennis could tell you.

So how about making up your mind: are you my girl or aren’t you?

Aside from early forays into television, Warren Beatty managed some theatre, too, and in the summer of 1958 a production took him out to Connecticut, where he met a remarkable young woman destined, like himself, to become an icon — Barbra Streisand. Her plain looks and foghorn nose didn’t put Warren off; far from it, he was quite definitely turned on by the sixteen-year-old high-school student. Finding out where she was babysitting that evening, Warren turned up and they chatted for hours, but his intentions weren’t exactly honourable: he wanted her there and then, nappies or no nappies. Barbra was no pushover and Warren’s pants stayed firmly on. ‘She seemed to be a person of strong moral convictions,’ Warren said later. ‘One of her convictions seemed to be that with the recent loss of my virginity, I might be experiencing too much of a good thing.’ Indeed, it was hands off when it came to Barbra, at least for now.

Ultimately it was theatre that brought about Warren’s big breakthrough, appearing in a touring play in New Jersey at which the first five rows were full of agents. ‘I really thought I was hot shit.’ It was
South Pacific
director Joshua Logan who first spotted Warren’s talent, along with gay playwright William Inge. Much salivating must have gone on in the stalls when the beauteous Warren entered stage left. Inge, amongst America’s most celebrated playwrights, was, according to Logan, in love with Warren at first sight, gushing, ‘I absolutely must have him,’ a statement that can be given two quite different though probably equally accurate interpretations. It was Logan who had Warren first (professionally, that is), flying him out to Hollywood for a screen test opposite another celluloid virgin, Jane Fonda. The audition was a love scene, ‘We were thrown together like lions in a cage,’ recalled Warren, and it went so well that the young couple were still swapping tonsils long after the director yelled, ‘Cut! Stop! That’s enough!’ As Jane later recalled, ‘We kissed until we had practically eaten each other’s heads off.’

Hollywood was Warren’s kind of town and he was quickly snapped up by MGM, who put him under contract at $400 a week. Flush with money, he checked into the Chateau Marmont off Sunset Boulevard and exploited his sister’s fame by gatecrashing industry parties where he could network and hunt pussy at the same time. His lifetime pursuit of Hollywood’s most glamorous women had begun.

First on the Beatty conveyor belt was British sexpot Joan Collins, who found him, ‘appealing and vulnerable’. Their eyes first met across a crowded restaurant one night in 1959. Dining with Jane Fonda, who, according to Joan, ‘hung on to Warren’s every word’, the Lothario couldn’t help sneaking the odd appreciative peep over at Joan. At one point she returned his gaze and Warren, playing it cool, smiled and raised his glass. They quickly hooked up, and on that first night hit the sack and were still rutting in the early hours of the morning. We know this thanks to Joan’s gleeful confession to a friend that she was amazed at the man’s stamina and that, if Warren kept up such bedroom activity, ‘in a few years, I’ll be worn out’.

It was love, addictive love, for Joan, who was twice suspended by 20th Century Fox, with whom she was under contract, for refusing film roles in order to be with Warren. Considering his sex addiction, which meant they got down to it four or sometimes five times a day, every day, it’s no surprise that Joan never wanted to be out of his sight, presumably fearing that he might end up rutting the sideboard or an innocent maid who had only popped in to turn down the beds. Joan had good cause to worry about Warren’s roving eye: he’d tried to bed starlet Mamie Van Doren, without success. ‘Warren drools a lot,’ Mamie would say of him. ‘He has such active glands.’ Joan observed another habit, that Warren talked on the phone during copulation.

Dating a sex bomb like Joan Collins gave Warren his first taste of celebrity, but his career had stalled. Over at MGM he was picking up his weekly cheque but sitting on his arse doing nothing. ‘I felt I was turning into a very large piece of citrus fruit.’ With borrowed money Warren bought his way out of his MGM contract and sought out a mentor. William Inge was only too happy to oblige, casting him in his latest Broadway play
A Loss of Roses
. Rumours quickly spread backstage that the eager young star did very little to discourage Inge’s obvious infatuation and jealous friends labelled the ageing playwright ‘Warren’s fairy godmother.’ Safe in this position, Warren started throwing his weight around, debating the meaning of the dialogue, showing up late for rehearsals. It got so bad that his co-star, veteran Broadway actress Shirley Booth, quit in protest. The play opened in the winter of 1959 to poor reviews and closed after just three weeks, ending Warren’s first and, as it turned out, only Broadway appearance.

Recovering fast, Warren got a semi-regular role in a new popular TV comedy,
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
, starring Dwayne Hickman as a girl-chasing teen. Warren played the neighbourhood ‘rich kid’ Milton Armitage, and although he appeared in only six episodes made a lasting impression on Hickman. ‘Warren Beatty has always acted like a movie star, even when no one knew who he was. He had great confidence in himself and seemed assured of his success, and the fact that he wasn’t well known didn’t matter.’

Hickman thought him pleasant and very good in the role, ‘It was perfect for him.’ But Warren ‘didn’t have much to say to anyone’, and when he left to become a genuine star, didn’t admit for years that he’d been in
Dobie
. ‘Which I thought was strange,’ says Hickman. ‘Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, Jim Garner all had big film careers and had started in television, not to mention the fact the show is on video for anyone to see. Dustin Hoffman used to kid him about it in interviews.’

All these years later one incident remains in Hickman’s memory. ‘Everybody was on the studio floor and about to shoot. We had these little canvas knock-down dressing rooms just behind the set and one of the crew, as a joke, turned the latch and locked Warren in.’ Instead of yelling to get out or trying to kick the thing over, Warren just waited till the cameras rolled and started singing opera. “Cut,” the director yelled. “What is that? Who’s doing that?” An assistant piped up, “Warren Beatty is locked in his dressing room.” “Well, let him out!” implored the director. “We can’t shoot with that kind of noise. Good God!”’

No novocaine. It dulls the senses.

Jack Nicholson was advised that if he wanted to get anywhere in show business he ought to gain experience and training first. The best acting classes in town were run by Jeff Corey, an advocate of the method. Though not hamstrung by it, he encouraged playfulness in his class and improvisation, at which Jack excelled. Corey was all for his students making the bizarre choice; ‘Be unpredictable,’ he’d urge. ‘But most importantly, don’t copy other actors, be yourself, be original.’

Corey’s lessons were important in other ways, too. Valuable friendships were forged with people who were to play significant roles in Jack’s life: Robert Towne, the future screenwriter of
Chinatown
, and Carole Eastman, who’d write
Five Easy Pieces
. Jack thought Carole was, ‘a knockout’, a feeling not exactly reciprocated: she thought the young actor ‘defied description’, was a bit of an oddball, ‘as if he’d been dropped out of outer space’. She had to admit, though, there was something special about him. ‘It was like seeing Marlon Brando on stage for the first time — he was
it
.’ Nothing sexual developed, however, much to Jack’s dismay.

This was fairly indicative of his carnal grabbings at the time. Although Jack liked to call himself the great seducer, Robert Towne remembered things a little differently. Yes, there were plenty of groupies hanging about Hollywood, and great women in acting classes, but few of them wanted to fuck a nobody, a category Jack and his little group of buddies certainly qualified for. As producer Julia Phillips once famously claimed, in Hollywood you fuck up, not down.

In the spring of 1957 the Hanna-Barbera cartoon unit at MGM closed down and Jack was out of work. It was a disruptive period; without a place of his own he’d crash at friends’ houses or stay sometimes with June. Inevitably the arguments would begin again. ‘She thought that I was lazy, wasn’t trying,’ Jack confessed to
Vanity Fair
in 1992. ‘She thought all I was interested in was running around, getting high, and pussy.’ Imagine how tempting it must have been for June to yell out, ‘Do as I say because I’m your mother, you prick!’ But she daren’t, so the rows continued. One time they didn’t speak to each other for a whole year. It got that bad.

Meanwhile over at Jeff Corey’s class there was a new student, Roger Corman, a maverick director/producer who made films like other people made IKEA wardrobes: quick, cheap and with as little fuss as possible. Stories about him are legion, like the time someone asked for a helicopter to shoot a high angle. ‘I’ll get you a ladder,’ Corman said. He’d enrolled to learn more about how actors prepared and trained, and for him Jack stood out from day one. ‘I thought he was an outstanding actor and what I’ve always liked about Jack is that he’s a totally dedicated and sincere actor who can take a dramatic performance and do it very well but bring a little bit of humour to it, which I think makes the performance far more complex.’