Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  “Yeah, well, we exist,” she retorted. “We’re alive, we’re here, there’s nothing you can do about it. What do you want to do, kill us?”

  She moved into the other bedroom. She didn’t want to lie there counting the minutes until he came home. They managed to compartmentalize their emotions to avoid disrupting the movie. In the morning, they drove to the set together, discussed the day’s setups as if nothing were happening. In the evening, she retired to her own room. “It was hideous,” she says. The fights got uglier. He screamed, “If you’re so unhappy, why don’t you go home.”

  “Go home to what? Go home to think about you fucking Cybill? It’s my movie as much as yours. You can only feel for people on celluloid. You have no concept what it’s like in real life to feel grief. Picture it in a movie, Peter, and maybe you’ll get it.”

  One day Polly found herself speeding down a stretch of arrow-straight Texas highway between Archer City and Wichita Falls in a rented Ford station wagon, with Peter next to her. She was again hysterical, screaming that without him, she didn’t want to live. She was driving fast, edging past seventy-five. Suddenly, she swerved off the road into a rutted, newly plowed field. “I’m going to kill us both,” she shrieked, as the car bounced over the furrows, ka-boom, ka-boom, ka-boom, until the hood flew up, and the car bottomed out in a cloud of red dust. They both burst out laughing.

  But soon the laughing stopped. By the end of the shoot, Peter and Polly’s marriage, like a vehicle in a slow-motion traffic accident, was wrecked beyond repair. Their friends looked on, aghast. “They were like this extraordinary couple,” recalls Benton. “It was like watching an amoeba split.” Says Bogdanovich, “I felt terribly guilty. My parents had been married for years, and the idea of divorce was alien to me. I regretted what happened with Polly. She suffered, and the kids suffered, and the kids suffered because of Polly’s suffering. I’m sorry for the pain, the kids, more than anything. But I also never felt about anybody quite the way I felt about Cybill. It was one of those times when life just takes over, and you don’t really have control. I don’t regret what I did, in the sense that I wouldn’t have done it if it happened again, ‘cause it wasn’t just a movie thing, it was real.”

  •

  IN THE FALL OF 1970, just before Bogdanovich left for location, Five Easy Pieces had opened to rave reviews and more than respectable box office. It won the New York Film Critics Award for best picture. Rafelson won best director, Karen Black best supporting actress, and it confirmed the promise Nicholson had shown in Easy Rider. Once again, Bert shared the profits, sent day players* four-figure checks. Nobody in Hollywood did that. Five Easy Pieces was the second BBS triumph in a row. The company was batting 1.000. But the same could not be said for Bert’s relationship with his wife, Judy. Throughout the winter, the two had been moving further and further apart. Judy was uncomfortable with the new sexual mores, so different from the ones she had grown up with.

  In all fairness, Bert could hardly exclude his wife from the bountiful garden of his sexual Rousseauism. His attitude was, Judy is too uptight, too possessive. He encouraged her to sleep around, the only restriction being she tell him all about it. Bert knew that she might do as he suggested, if only to get back at him, and he tried to fix her up with his friends, thereby gaining a measure of control over her and them in the process. According to one friend, he told him, “My wife really likes you, I’m going out of town, why don’t you take her out to dinner.” He encouraged another to sleep with Judy. The friend didn’t understand it, felt like a pawn in a ’70s version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. There was a sentimental side to Bert; he wanted everybody he loved to love one another, get in bed togther, a pansexuality that was probably enhanced by acid and MDA, the so-called love drug.

  Incited by the very ’60s conviction that Americans were wallowing in a sea of false consciousness and hypocrisy, Jaglom embarked on a campaign of truth telling. He, Bert, and Judy, sat by the side of Bert’s pool, lit up joints and interrogated one another: What do you really feel? Do we really love each other? Do we want to fuck anybody else besides each other? Finally, Bert confessed his affairs to Judy. But these were casual encounters. Worse, from Judy’s point of view, was the lengthy relationship with Toni Stern. Nor was she pleased to hear that everyone in their circle knew about it except her. On several occasions Jaglom and Blauner had even acted as beards.

  After one bad fight on February 8, 1971, Judy kicked Bert out. Devastated, he took refuge in Jaglom’s bachelor pad in the Hollywood Hills. He expected her to call, but she didn’t. Bert couldn’t believe it. “Anyone who can have me and doesn’t want me is insane,” he told Jaglom. Finally Jaglom fell into a fitful sleep after an all-night session of soul searching that ended at 4:00 A.M. TWO hours later, he was rudely awakened. The house was swaying so violently he thought, Oh my God, Bert, what are you doing? He imagined that Schneider, stricken with grief, was shaking the house to its very foundation. It was the earthquake. Jaglom ran to the room where Bert was sleeping, but the bed was empty. Worried his kids would discover he hadn’t spent the night at home, Schneider wanted to be there when they woke up. Bert and Judy agreed to spend the summer apart. They never got back together.

  Bert rented a home in Benedict Canyon above the Beverly Hills Hotel that looked like it might have belonged to Dean Martin. It was a one-story, rambling house with a pool table, wood floors, a zebra rug, suede sofas, yellow and black swirly wallpaper in the bedroom. Across a shallow ravine, some two hundred yards away, was the old Barrymore estate, where Calley lived, and where Can-dice Bergen looked down on Bert’s place from a tower called “the Aviary.” Bert and Candy knew each other slightly, but Jaglom, who was friends with both, played Cupid, convincing them they were right for what ailed each other.

  Bergen was primed for a relationship like this one. Like Shepherd, she had been a successful model, but knew there must be more to life. She had always been uneasy in her skin, resented the fact that she was regarded as little more than a pretty face, a dilettante photographer and journalist. Bergen was deeply sympathetic to the antiwar movement, embarrassed by her father, Edgar Bergen’s, friendship with the Old Hollywood right—Ronald Reagan, Bob Hope, Charlton Heston, as well as the fact that he had made his living throwing his voice into wooden dummies. She had recently been acclaimed in Carnal Knowledge, yet was insecure about her acting abilities. In short, she had something to prove.

  Bergen became a regular visitor at Schneider’s home. Like Cybill to Peter’s Pygmalion, Bergen was the perfect fellow traveler for Schneider’s political and spiritual journey. She presented a surface that was as brittle, burnished, and impenetrable as one of her father’s polished dolls. Bert, a man for whom the term “mindfucker” was invented, urged her to loosen up, get in closer touch with her feelings, drop some acid. As he had with the younger men around him, he easily fell into the role of mentor. He cajoled, lectured, railed against her personality “flaws.” But she proved a fractious student. She found him infuriatingly smug and patronizing. Nevertheless, by mid-summer, they were deeply in love, an established couple. “Bert and Candy” replaced “Bert and Judy.”

  Bert became known for his parties. The house was always filled with a yeasty mix of stars, Black Panthers, antiwar activists, and hangers-on of various stripes. One regular was Bert’s close friend Artie Ross, nearly ten years his junior. Artie was born into a well-to-do Jewish family in Harrison, New York. His mother’s best friend was Judy’s mother. His parents and Bert’s parents belonged to the same country club. Ross felt suffocated by the privileged Westchester private schools he was sent to, and was more than ready for the ’60s. When college rolled around in 1965, he lit out for Berkeley. Artie’s mother was leery, but she comforted herself with the idea that Bert and Judy were in California, and they would look after him. When Bert moved to L.A., Artie sought him out. In photographs taken at the time, Bert has his arm around Artie. Artie was another kid brother.

  There was a lot of semipublic sex at
Bert’s parties and, of course, drugs. The latest treat was nitrous oxide, which people did in combination with MDA. They filled inflatable pool toys with the gas—beach balls, inner tubes, often a big, blue plastic dolphin—pulled the plugs and inhaled until the toys were empty. “You could go very far out very fast with it, and then you came back almost all the way within a couple of minutes with every breath of oxygen you took,” says Brackman. “It was a very radical change of consciousness. It was like the brain went into Star Wars land, leaving the body behind.”

  Eventually, Brackman acquired a tank of nitrous oxide that he kept in a closet of his girlfriend’s apartment. It was unusually large, about six feet high, a month’s supply. Brackman had bought it with his MasterCard using a prescription written by Andrew Weil, a Harvard M.D. who had done some pioneering drug research in the ’70s. (Weil later went on to write best-sellers about natural healing.) Brackman deducted the nitrous as a medical expense. He explains, “Once you got it, you could call them up, they’d come and pick up your old tank and give you a new one, just like a bottled water supplier, no questions asked.”

  MEANWHILE, Picture Show was burning up the Bel Air screening circuit. It is easy to see why people were impressed. In an era of gaudy color, it was shot in a restrained black and white, had a spare, dusty look, Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans set in motion, or better, from Peter’s point of view, Ford in his Grapes of Wrath period. And yet, as Platt intended, it delivered a European frankness that was new to the American screen and even more unusual in this Dustbowl setting: Sonny and his girlfriend listlessly making out in the front seat of a truck, her bra hanging from the rearview mirror, a casual shot of her bare breasts just there, a fact of life, like the dry tumbleweed visible through the windshield. In another scene, the kids casually discuss the virtues of making it with a heifer compared to a hooker, and at a swimming party at a rich kid’s home, we see full frontal female nudity with pubic hair.

  But Picture Show has a lot more to offer than mere titillation. Everything works, looks, and sounds just right. Tim Bottoms is splendid as Sonny, tentative and goofy-looking, fumbling through the last years of adolescence toward adult-hood, eyes sorrowful beneath a mop of tangled hair and blinking as if he’s just been hatched, trying to navigate the strange world of adults. Ditto Shepherd, as Bogdanovich instantly understood, perfect at tearing the wings off the boys, self-absorbed, thoughtless, and tempting, a blond lollipop. And the others, Burstyn as her bored mother, trapped in an unfulfilling marriage having once traded wealth for happiness, overwhelmed by melancholy, the feeling of life passing her by. And Clods Leachman as the coach’s lonely wife, reduced to having an affair with Sonny. And Ben Johnson, of course, carrying with him the moral authority of the Old Hollywood, all those years working for Ford. The only misstep is Bridges, too Hollywood handsome to convince anyone he’s a redneck. When the Royal, the only theater in town, does close, someone says, “Nobody wants to come no more. Baseball in the summer, TV all the time.” Sonny and Duane catch the last show, Hawks’s Red River, watch John Wayne and Montgomery Clift saddle up for the cattle drive to Missouri. The last shot is the one that remains in memory: the desolate main street of Anarene, emptied of people, the wind howling, leaves and bits of debris whipped through the air. It’s as powerful an image of alienation and loss as anything in Antonioni.

  Picture Show hadn’t even opened yet and Peter was being fought over by two of the biggest stars in Hollywood, Steve McQueen and Barbra Streisand. According to Platt, Peter took entire credit for the picture, rarely acknowledging her. It’s like I died, she thought. She couldn’t get work. She fantasized about shooting him with her father’s.45.

  Peter’s agent was Sue Mengers. Short and zoftig, she wore muumuus and rose-tinted, oversized glasses, was loud, abrasive, and very funny. When Sharon Tate was murdered, she famously reassured Streisand, also a client, “Don’t worry, honey, they’re not murdering stars, only featured players.” She once said, “I’m so driven I would have signed Martin Bormann.” Ali MacGraw called her a female Billy Wilder. Although her list was comprised mostly of stars, she began to represent directors as well. After all, they were becoming stars. She wouldn’t say, “You want to direct? Go back to the theater.” Instead, it was, “Oh, you underpriced baby. Stan Kamen is keeping you down. I’ll get your mil, honey.”

  Mengers too became known for the parties she threw at her house on Dawn Ridge Drive. If you were happening, or hoped to happen, attendance was de rigueur. They were business occasions more than anything else: Ann-Margret met Mike Nichols at Sue’s and got Carnal Knowledge. Burt Reynolds would meet Alan Pakula and get Starting Over. Lauren Hutton would connect with Paul Schrader and get American Gigolo. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were frequent guests. Woodward always sat in a chair, knitting. As soon as someone lit up a joint, they left. The atmosphere was so heady that Cybill was scared to go. Peter had to drag her down the driveway by the arm.

  Bert wouldn’t let Mengers see the picture. He didn’t like agents, wouldn’t deal with them, thought she had a big mouth, which was true. If he knew he was going to lose Peter he didn’t care. Peter was into Barbra by then, and Bert didn’t hold opinions on people, didn’t try to force them to work for BBS if they didn’t want to. Bert did show the film to Streisand, who was moved to tears, and wanted Peter to direct her in something “significant,” something that would showcase her acting, as well as her voice.

  But Peter had promised McQueen to do The Getaway next. When McQueen took another film instead, Peter had a way out, and one day found himself in Calley’s office. Calley asked him what he wanted to do next. “I sort of would like to do a screwball comedy,” said Bogdanovich, tentatively.

  “Well, do that.”

  “Something like Bringing Up Baby, kind of an uptight professor and a screwy girl, a wacky dame.”

  “Fine, do that.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Yeah.”

  He walked out of Calley’s office thinking, This Hollywood thing isn’t so hard.

  Calley agreed to pay Bogdanovich $125,000 to direct his screwball comedy, plus 8 percent of the net. Peter hired Ryan O’Neal, with whom Barbra was involved, for the male lead. The picture was called What’s Up, Doc?

  WHEN HOPPER GOT BACK to native soil, he announced his engagement to Michelle Phillips. He himself was not into marriage, he explained to his friends, but “she just won’t have it any other way!” Said one friend, “Dennis falls in love... [with] any girl who stands in front of him. Michelle doesn’t know that yet.” They got married, appropriately enough, on Halloween. The marriage lasted about a week. John Phillips called it the “Six Days’ War.” Michelle—now known as “Holly Hopper”—told him Hopper terrified her and her daughter Chynna by firing guns in the house, and handcuffing her to prevent her from running away, saying he thought she was a witch. He hit her, the way he hit Brooke—“one shot,” he admits. One morning, when he woke up, she was gone. Michelle told John that Hopper chased her to the airport in his pickup when he discovered she had left, drove out onto the runway in an attempt to stop the plane from taking off. Later, she called him. Hopper said, “I love you; I need you.” She replied, “Have you ever thought of suicide?”

  The editing of The Last Movie dragged on, as it did with Easy Rider. “Dennis would run it over and over again for every hippie who would come through Taos,” Tanen recalls. “They would tell him, ‘Hey, man, you should put more into it.’ Every time I would go to Taos, it would be twenty minutes longer; it kept growing, like a malignancy.” Rafelson rode into town to help him. “Dennis never showed up,” he recalls. “For the first day or two he was swacked all the time. He would get violent and weird and crazy.” The story went that Hopper invited Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo). He had finally come up with a presentable cut that had a beginning, middle, and an end, and showed it to Jodorowsky. Jodorowsky told him he’d failed, had merely made a conventional Hollywood movie. Hopper was stung. He tore the film to pieces, started over
from scratch, throwing out the narrative. Hopper denies it. “Nobody influenced me. I was a fucking stubborn, dogmatic dictator, that nobody could penetrate,” he says. “They could take it away and cut it, but there wasn’t any way of reaching me.”

  Meanwhile, back at Universal, Tanen waited, biting his nails and worrying about his job. The Last Movie was the flagship of his boutique operation, and there was a lot riding on it. “The editors would come back and tell me, there’s no footage, there’s nothing to cut to, there literally are scenes missing,” he recalls. There was a film within a film, which Tanen derisively called “a film without a film.” He continues, “The pressure from Universal about this movie was nightmarish. Wasserman wasn’t the easiest guy in the world when things were going well, and this little operation was not going well. The studio was not doing well.” He paid Hopper another of his periodic visits. Kit Carson and Larry Schiller were making a documentary about the director called American Dreamer. They had persuaded Hopper to walk naked through downtown Los Alamos for the delectation of their camera. In return, they had agreed to fulfill a Hopper fantasy, in this case, produce fifty beautiful girls at his house for a “consciousness-raising session.”