Sporting a blue velvet dinner jacket, Coppola was profuse in his thanks to everyone but Evans, whom he “forgot.” He even remembered to thank Towne. There was a dinner afterward in the ballroom of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Frank Wells was sitting at the Warners table with Dick Lederer and a couple of other executives. Getting up from his seat, he said, “Let’s go over and congratulate Francis.” Lederer said, “Don’t Frank, don’t. He’s a Sicilian, he will not shake hands with you.” Wells walked over anyway. Coppola spotted him when he was about ten feet away, shook his head, and said. “No. No. I’m not shaking hands with you.”
Evans was furious at Coppola’s snub, but he had other things on his mind. He was getting deeper into drugs. According to Nicholson, cocaine really took hold around 1972, having burned through the music crowd into the film community. One of the reasons it took hold, he claimed, was that it was a sexual aid. Nicholson had had a problem with premature ejaculation, a fact he generously shared with his fans via Playboy. “Cocaine is ‘in’ now,” he said, “because chicks dig it sexually. While it numbs some areas, it inflames the mucous membranes such as those in a lady’s genital region. If you put a numbing tip of cocaine on the end of your cock because you’re quick on the trigger and need to cut down on the sensation, I guess it could be considered a sexual aid. And it’s an upper, so you’ve got added energy.”
Cocaine was a drug well suited to the driven, megalomaniacal, macho lifestyle of Hollywood, much more so than grass, which had a mellow, laid-back effect, or psychedelics, which facilitated self-exploration. “In your brain, you’re bulletproof, you’re the happiest guy in the room,” says Dick Sylbert. “You can write, you can direct, you can act. A couple of toots, there’s nothing you can’t do.”
What was sauce for Nicholson was poison for Evans. “What started as a fuck drug all but ruined my life of fucking,” he wrote in his book, The Kid Stays in the Picture. “A snort of... coke stops the rush of blood from brain to tool. Coming up short is your cock. Coming up long is dialogue and energy.” Evans’s habit wasn’t evident immediately; at meetings, Paramount executives wondered why he kept putting his hand in his pocket and rubbing his index finger along his gums. Eventually, Evans stopped coming to the office, took to working out of his bed at home, in his pajamas.
According to Dick Sylbert, “The studio was falling apart, Bob wouldn’t have a meeting with anybody. He had his phones and his grapefruit in the morning and he had Peter Bart. The phone would ring, Bob would pick it up. Somebody would say, ‘Bob, what time is it?’ Bob would have to call Peter and say, ‘Peter, what time is it?’”
“I felt that he was abusing himself, and losing it,” recalls Bart. “The amphetamines were getting to him, or whatever it was that he was into, sleeping pills, uppers, downers. They were making him extraordinarily nervous and jumpy. He was very bitter about Ali MacGraw, and he was becoming somewhat unstable. Since there was just him and me, I was being put in a position of approving things because I couldn’t find him. I was making decisions that a vice president for production shouldn’t make. There were too many crises taking place.”
One of the most pressing problems was the matter of a sequel to The Godfather. Paramount had Puzo working on a script right away, but Coppola refused to direct it. Bluhdorn did his best. He never tired of repeating that Francis possessed something more valuable than the formula for Coca-Cola.
With Evans preoccupied with Chinatown and his personal life, and barely speaking to Coppola anyway, it fell to Bart to corral the director. Coppola was adamant. Too many talented people had had their hands in The Godfather— Brando, Willis, Puzo—for him to be secure in calling it his own. Doing another one might undo everything. “If it bombs, then people will look at the first Godfather and say it was all Brando, or whatever,” said Coppola. “If I took my career to an insurance actuary, he’d tell me to lay off the sequels if I wanted to stay healthy.”
Bluhdorn persuaded him to produce it, to supervise it, if he didn’t want to direct it. He would let him select the director. Three months later, Coppola called Evans, said, “I got the guy to do it.”
“Who is it?”
“Martin Scorsese.”
“Absolutely not! Marty Scorsese is a horrible choice. Over my dead body.” Coppola went back to Bluhdorn, said, “I can’t work with these guys. They say no to everything and they exhaust me.”
“Veil den, do it yourzelf.”
One morning, Coppola sat down to breakfast with Bart. “I have no interest in the Godfather movies,” he told Bart. “I want to go and do my own work, even if I have to make it on Super 8. To try to get back into that family again is gonna be a dry heave. The idea of having to work on what is gonna be a big expensive film with a lotta pressure, a lotta people telling me what to do, just sounds like two years of misery.”
“This will make it so you can do your own work,” said Bart. But Coppola, still bitter about Evans and having found this theme, was on a roll. “I’m tired of—I do something that people want, that they love, they beg me to do it, and then they start attacking me, second-guessing me. That’s why I like to cook. You work hard in the kitchen, you come out, and usually people say, ‘Ummm, that was good,’ not, There’s mildew on the rigatoni.’”
“Look, who was the star of The Godfather?” continued Bart, patiently, laying it on thick. “Brando? Pacino?... No, it was you. What does a star get?”
“A million dollars,” replied Coppola.
“If I can get you a million dollars to write and direct, will you do it?”
“Okay, you got a deal.” Bart’s argument made sense. Coppola realized that if Godfather, Part II were successful, it would give him the kind of independence he needed to do his own films. Coppola stipulated that none of the executives and producers who were involved with The Godfather could be involved with the sequel. Evans was not allowed to put a foot on the set. He also secured a commitment from Paramount to finance The Conversation. Bart called Bluhdorn, told him the good news. Bluhdorn started yelling, “ ‘Yes, yes, close da deal. Vhere are da papers? Do it! Do it!’ I think this was one of the times we couldn’t find Bob. There was no one minding the store.”
The deal was signed on June 22, 1972. This was the first time a director had been paid $1 million up front, in addition to gross participation. It was the beginning of a new era for directors, and Yablans, for one, saw the handwriting on the wall. “We paid Francis $60,000 to make The Godfather,” he says. “When you get into these big numbers, the directors have contempt. They’re not gonna listen to you telling them they can’t shoot this or they can’t do that. They’re gonna look at you and say, ‘The schmuck.’” As soon as the news got out, Frank Wells demanded that Coppola pay back the $300,000 he still owed Warners for development at Zoetrope. “Warners hurt me in many ways,” says Coppola. “They threatened to put a ‘cloud’ over Godfather II unless they had their development money returned to them. They truly acted like an ‘Evil Empire.’”
WHEN ASHBY WAS FINISHED EDITING The Last Detail, there was more trouble with Columbia. The executives hated the jump cuts he had lifted from Godard. The release was delayed six months while they again fought over the profanity. Ayres finally persuaded the studio to submit it to Cannes. Columbia refused to throw the obligatory party. But after Nicholson won Best Actor, it would have been extremely embarrassing for Columbia to keep the picture on the shelf.
During the summer of 1973, while Ashby and Ayres were wrangling with Columbia, the banks stepped in to stop production and acquisitions. Under the Schneiders, the studio had wracked up a pretax loss of $72.5 million, and an after-tax loss of $50 million, the third highest annual loss in Columbia’s history. The stock fell from a high of $30 a share in 1971 to $2 a share in 1973. Columbia was facing bankruptcy. Allen and Co., the investment firm that was a major stockholder, engineered a coup. Bert’s father, Abe, was elevated to the post of honorary chairman at $300,000 a year. Stanley Schneider cashed out in June. Alan J. Hirschfield became CEO of
the corporation, backed by Herbert Allen. Agent David Begelman, late of CMA, became president.
Begelman kept Peter Guber as his number two. Although unfortunate in the light of hindsight, at the time the Begelman appointment seemed like good news for Columbia stockholders. The studio was belatedly getting the benefit of the broom that swept the others clean in the late ’60s. But it was not good news for the Schneiders. Bert had gone on a trip to China with Candy for three weeks in April 1973, sponsored by The Guardian, a left-wing newspaper. He wrote postcards with the half-jokey salutation, “Dear Fellow Cultural Worker.” They returned on May 9, her twenty-seventh birthday. Some friends gave her a party. Bert refused to go. She stayed late. At 1:30, he called the party, snapped, “Get home immediately.” When she got back to his house, he was sitting on the bed, voice shaking with anger. He had the tape recorder out, so she could play the tape back later and benefit from his analysis. “It was four A.M., and he was still going; when was I going to get in touch with my behavior?... I was irresponsible and cruel. He was screaming.... Suddenly, he picked up the television at the foot of the bed and hurled it into the next room, where it shattered on the brick floor.” Now they fought constantly. The patio furniture ended up at the bottom of the pool. Carpenters were on daily call to repair the damage.
When Bert returned from China, he found that the family business had turned into a company of strangers. “I knew Begelman from the days he was robbing Judy Garland,” says Blauner. “He was always a thief. But I had a nice relationship with him.” Begelman couldn’t have been more eager to renew the deal with BBS. “He would have made a deal with our receptionist, with our janitor,” continues Blauner. At about the same time, however, Bert had dropped by the Columbia offices at 711 Fifth Avenue in New York. He had finished his business, was trying to leave, when the Columbia executives insisted he meet Alan Hirschfield. Bert didn’t want to meet Hirschfield, but he had no choice. He had never told Columbia a thing about Hearts and Minds; it was none of their business, and all they knew was the title. The two men exchanged pleasantries, and as Bert was leaving, Hirschfield said, “Well, I can’t wait to see Hearts and Minds.” Bert said, “Ya know, it’s not the normal kind of picture.”
“Whaddya mean?”
“It’s a documentary.”
Hirschfield wouldn’t have known a documentary if he’d tripped over it. “They shit,” says Blauner. “This wasn’t going to satisfy them, they figured Bert had gone around the bend, so get outta the deal.” Adds Rafelson, “Bert’s way of dealing with things was to say, ‘This is a picture. It doesn’t say I can’t make a documentary. So fuck you!’” In December, BBS got a letter canceling the sixth picture. Columbia was playing hardball, withholding money due Schneider from his previous films.
But if you wanted to win a game of hardball with Bert, you had to have balls of steel. As Rafelson put it, “Who gave a shit about the lawsuits? That was the attitude of everybody who ever worked at BBS. That’s what we prided ourselves on, that we were a company of fuck-you, in-your-face guys who could get along together.” The feeling around BBS was that the fact that Hearts and Minds was a documentary was just an excuse to take another shot at the Schneiders. Columbia just wanted to get rid of all vestiges of the family, Bert included, lest it wrest control of the studio from its new bosses.
Nevertheless, the parties at Bert’s continued. Sidney Prince, Bert’s shrink, conducted informal group therapy sessions in the hot tub that included Calley, who had fallen hard for a Czech bombshell introduced to him by Milos Forman. She was a stunning, statuesque blonde, a former Miss Czechoslovakia, named Olinka. He hired her as his housekeeper, and took in her daughter as well, her daughter’s father (he had been a Mr. Universe), and her parents. None of them spoke any English. “All these people would walk around his house speaking Czech, not interacting in any way with the English speakers, not a word, not yes, not no,” recalls Buck Henry, who was around a lot. “John never learned a word of Czech. We’d say, ‘John, do you know what they’re talking about?’ He’d say, ‘No, thank God I don’t. I’ll be upstairs reading.’” Calley eventually married her, and then paid her what in his book was the highest compliment: he named his sixty-five-foot yawl after her. The happy couple spent their honeymoon on the boat in the Aegean, accompanied by Sue Mengers and her husband. Mengers recalls, “Olinka would get up every morning looking like what she was, Miss Czechoslovakia, the most gorgeous girl, in this little bikini. She’d say, ‘Good morning,’ and jump off the boat and swim, while I’d be huddled there wrapped in a towel. My husband would look at Olinka, and then he’d look at me, just like Chuck Grodin. I was Jeannie Berlin, the heartbreak kid, I swear to God.”
If Bert and Candice were becoming unglued, Bert and Huey Newton were getting tighter and tighter. Huey spent more and more time at Bert’s home. “Huey was pretty coked up most of the time,” recalls Brackman. “He was a mad rapper.” Cocaine was becoming a fixture at parties, sitting out on coffee tables in crystal dishes and bowls. Says Brackman, “It was so widespread that weenie straight people—even they did an occasional toot.”
Some Panthers up in Oakland thought Huey had gone Hollywood, that his easy access to Schneider’s money and cocaine were distracting him from the struggle. Conversely, it was easy to see Schneider’s infatuation with Huey as the worst form of radical chic. “I’ve always thought left-wing politics in and out of Hollywood was about pussy and/or drugs,” says Buck Henry. “The first time I saw Huey, I thought, This is really bad news, people being seduced into sexual and drug behavior that they might not have indulged in had they not been involved with the movement. And a lot of lives were left behind. Huey served the sense of these guys’ embarrassment about where they came from and what kind of privilege they received, and in return he got a lot of cute white girls laid at his feet. He also laid down a dose of clap and syphilis that went through an awful lot of people.”
But in Bert’s case it was more than radical chic. If the bottom line in Hollywood was money, Schneider was serious. His checkbook was always open. He would walk into Panther headquarters in Oakland and write a check for $100,000 without blinking an eye. “Bert really put his money where his mouth was,” say Toby Rafelson. “He was very much a mensch, very courageous, very willing to give away money in order to do the right thing.”
For nearly two years, Bert had been taking care of Susan Branaman, who was dying of cancer. She was a Mack, of the Mack truck family, had been to Radcliffe College but had dropped out, gotten involved with a painter and poet in North Beach, and had become a hooker to support her heroin habit. When she died, Bert held a wake for her. Her body had been cremated, and her remains set out in bowls. The bereaved guests snorted the ashes, like they snorted coke.
Bob Rafelson too was floundering. Columbia asked him to do a picture, wanted him to come over to the lot for a meeting. As always his own worst enemy, he replied, “I’m not going over to Columbia Pictures. You come to my office.” The president and the chairman made the trek to La Brea. “It was fucking unbelievable,” he continues. “I didn’t know that I was being arrogant. I didn’t know what the rules were.” Rafelson acted out the movie he wanted to do next. They said, “This is great, we’re going to do it.”
Then Rafelson added, “Terrific, but there’s one more thing, we’ve got to get things solved with this documentary problem. You guys aren’t accepting the movie, we got to get it resolved.”
“Of course, we’ll take care of it.” Recalls Rafelson, “I never heard from them again. I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t find a powerful enough person to find out why I couldn’t find out. They seemed so enthusiastic and so reassuring. And I wasn’t even out of the office yet. I found out, man, this is a nasty business out there.” Rafelson had developed a reputation of being hard to work with, belligerent and insistent on his own way.
In August 1973, while Bob and Toby were at their house in Aspen, a propane stove exploded, injuring their daughter Julie, who was about to turn ele
ven. Julie was very much the apple of Bob’s eye, and equally as precious to her mother. They rushed her to the hospital in Denver, but she was badly burned and an infection set in. Bert and Judy, who were barely speaking to each other, flew out to be with Julie and her parents. Julie died. Says Henry, “Nobody ever recovers from that, and it affected everything Bob ever did after that.” Toby had found out about her husband’s infidelities, including his affair with Paula Strachan. (Paula was shortly to marry and later divorce Bob’s older brother, Don.) Toby learned that many of her good friends had slept with him, so that all her relationships were compromised. She was the proverbial last to know.
Toby was going through what Judy had endured three years before. “None of the women I knew, who were the female sides of all these couples, were as irresponsible as the men, nor did they have the same urge to rebel as the men did,” says Toby. “I let Bob go his way, but I wasn’t going to participate. Once in a while I would do a drug trip with him, but rarely, because I never really trusted that he would be there for me. But when you’re with somebody who’s experimenting and feeling his oats, whether he’s screwing around or taking drugs or talking in certain ways that you don’t particularly approve of, it’s very hard to hold a marriage and a house and a life together, and continually put that person down or disapprove of them.” Toby and Bob had always bantered, exchanged playful barbs. But now it turned vicious. Then Toby was diagnosed with cancer. Her friends felt he was not there for her.
The spring and summer of 1974 were hard for Bert and his friends. The trouble was bad, and came often. Peter Davis’s wife, Josie Mankiewicz, was killed by a taxi cab in New York as their young son watched. Relations between Schneider and the new regime at Columbia continued to deteriorate. Begelman agreed to take Hearts and Minds to Cannes in 1974. He asked for a copy of the rough cut to screen for the board of directors. Schneider refused. He thought the request was “weird.” Begelman saw the film for the first time in the spring and reversed himself, refused to send it to Cannes. Schneider ignored him, continued his preparations. Begelman demanded that the Columbia logo be removed. BBS sued Columbia for various monies allegedly owed, and to force Begelman to release Hearts and Minds. Eventually, Jaglom ponied up $1 million, which he and his partner, Zack Norman, had laboriously raised from dentists and plastic surgeons over the course of five years to produce his own Vietnam-themed picture, Tracks, to star Dennis Hopper. He bought Hearts and Minds from Columbia, then turned around and entered into a distribution deal with Calley, who released the film in December 1974, in time to qualify for the Oscars.
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls Page 27
