Bergen got two writing assignments that took her to Africa, where she was rumored to have had an affair with William Holden. She and Bert were having so much trouble, she dreaded coming back. She kept the alleged affair secret, and when she did finally return, things seemed better. They dropped acid, joked about getting old together, her pushing his wheelchair. But Holden apparently plied her with cables and gifts, and Bert couldn’t help but recognize something had happened between them. He was angry and bitter. He said it wasn’t the infidelity that bothered him, he could even dig it, so much as the lying. In March, he kicked her out. (Bergen refused to comment.)
Still, Schneider was devastated. Bert played a piece of music Chaplin had written for his documentary, a lush, sentimental composition, fantasized about marrying Candice on Chaplin’s vast lawn at Vevey, and wept. He started seeing a teenager from his daughter’s school who says she was “sixteen years old” at the time. She adds, “There was a twenty-five-year age difference between us.” They met in a movie line, a Marx brothers film. “It was exciting, glamorous, kind of forbidden,” she says. “It wasn’t forbidden, but it probably should have been.”
CHINATOWN went into production in the fall of 1973. The relationship between Polanski and Towne had deteriorated to the point where Towne knew he was unwelcome on the set. He watched dailies at night with Evans in his screening room, after Evans had watched them with Polanski. The first day, Evans was driven to the location—an orange grove—flat on his back in a station wagon. Polanski, stressed out and feeling sick, lay beside him. When they arrived at the set, Nicholson and Dick Sylbert were leaning against a tree, waiting for them. Polanski got out of the car, walked over to them, and threw up. “That was the beginning of the movie,” says Sylbert. “We went downhill from there.”
The actors were used to the American warm bath school of directing, which is to say, a collaborative approach, with lots of tender loving care from the director. That was not Polanski’s way. “Roman is Napoleon with actors, They do what I tell them to do,’” says Evans. “He’d say, ‘In Poland, I could just go make my fucking movies.’” He was dictatorial and controlling. He gave Nicholson so many line readings that Anthea Sylbert, who was the costume designer, half expected him to begin speaking with a Polish accent.
But Nicholson and Polanski were good friends, and Nicholson was more often than not amused by Polanski’s eccentricities. Says Anthea, “Jack was always amused.” Dunaway, on the contrary, was decidedly not. Cast as Evelyn Mulwray, she considered herself a “star,” and did not go out of her way to ingratiate herself with the director or the crew. The actors had small dressing rooms on the set, as well as trailers. According to several sources, Dunaway was in the habit of peeing in wastebaskets rather than take the walk to her trailer. (Dunaway, when asked about her urinary habits, said she has “no recollection” of such behavior.) When she did use the John in her Winnebago, she did not deign to flush it, calling for a teamster instead. Several teamsters quit.
Dunaway was puzzled about her character’s motivation and, by all accounts, got little guidance from Polanski. He would shout, “Say the fucking words. Your salary is your motivation.” She was obsessed with her look. Indeed, with her trapezoidal cheekbones, alabaster skin, marcelled, honey-colored hair, and blood red lipstick, she looked stunning. Recalls Polanski, “Every time I shouted cut, first there had to be Blistex and lipstick, and then the powder. Right after the clapper board, she would start all over again.” Things came to a head while they were shooting a scene at the end of the second week in the Windsor restaurant behind the old Ambassador Hotel where Robert Kennedy had been shot. Dunaway and Nicholson are seated on a red-leather banquette in a two shot favoring Dunaway. According to Polanski, “There was one hair that would stick out from her hairdo and catch the light and I was trying to get rid of it, trying to flatten it and it would not stay.” Polanski walked around behind her and plucked the hair. Dunaway screamed, “That motherfucker plucked my hair!” or something very much like it, and stormed off the set. Polanski did the same.
Evans arranged a truce between the director and his leading lady, but it didn’t last long. “There was a scene where she gets in the car after seeing her daughter, and Jack is in the car waiting for her and scares the shit out of her,” recalls John Alonzo, the DP. “She kept saying to Roman, ‘Roman, I have to pee. I have to pee.’ ‘No. No. You stay there. Johnny, you ready?’ I said, ‘I’m ready.’ ‘You stay there. We shoot, we shoot.’ And then he said, ‘Roll the window down. I got to talk to you. You’re turning too far right. Don’t look at Jack, just look ahead.’ Then she threw a coffee-cup full of liquid in Roman’s face. He said, ‘You cunt, that’s piss!’ And she said, ‘Yes, you little putz,’ and rolled the window up. We were all speculating that maybe Jack peed in the cup for her. [Or maybe] she had a small bladder or something.”
The picture finally wrapped in early 1974. The crew fabricated a huge tube of Blistex, and presented it to Dunaway as a going-away present.
SINCE THE DAYS of Bonnie and Clyde, Beatty had operated as an independent producer on his personal projects. He realized that if he used his own money to develop his films and hire the talent, he could both maintain control over them and get a better deal from the studios by playing them off against one another. “He was so courageous at what he did, taking these tremendous risks,” says Dick Sylbert. “He could’ve really come a cropper, and he almost went into the shithouse on Shampoo. He nearly outsmarted himself.”
According to Towne, one morning, over breakfast, Beatty casually asked for a co-screenwriting credit. He felt he had been screwed out of one by Altman on McCabe. Without missing a beat, Towne said, “Okay.” A friend, to whom Towne told the story, was outraged, asked him, “Did Warren really write any of it?” Towne replied something like, “Naa, ya know, what he did was cross out a lot of stuff that I wrote, and he told me to do this and that, and we usually fought about it, and sometimes he really fucked things up.”
“How could you let him get away with that?”
“Oh, you know Warren. Unless you do things like that, you’re not going to get the other stuff you can get from Warren.”
Beatty had already hired key members of the cast—Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, Lee Grant, and Jack Warden, who plays a wealthy businessman—and the key below-the-line people, Dick Sylbert, Anthea Sylbert, and the DP, Laszlo Kovacs. He was in for a million dollars of his own money before he had a deal, and he stood to lose a lot of money if the production didn’t start on schedule. Although Towne was again on board, he was still dragging his feet, and Beatty was getting impatient. “Robert’s failure to deliver on time kept a host of highly paid people on contract waiting,” he says.
By that time, the relationship between Beatty and Christie had ended, although they remained good friends. She had called him at his Beverly Wilshire suite one night, and said it was over. He hung up the phone, thought, She’s with somebody, I can tell, and said out loud, mournfully, “They’ve all dumped me.” As Beatty wryly put it, “She thinks I’m Jack Warden.”
Shampoo was a hard sell, and Beatty was having a difficult time setting it up. Lester “the Investor” Persky was putting together a package of films he intended to finance for Columbia. He says, “It was very hard-hitting, and the studios didn’t think a film named Shampoo about a hairdresser who was pretending to be gay, and was making out like a bandit with all the wives and girlfriends of his friends, was a sympathetic character, or believable. They thought it was awful.” Evans, on the other hand, would have bought used toilet paper from Beatty and Towne, and Beatty knew it. So he took it to Paramount first. Evans was staying at the Carlyle Hotel in New York. Beatty flew in with the script, sat there while he read it. Evans was desperate to do it, and made him an offer. But Beatty had no intention of taking the first offer he got. He took the project to Warners, where he already had a deal for Heaven Can Wait, with Muhammad Ali attached. He talked numbers with Frank Wells, who topped Evans. Meanwhile, Yablan
s overruled Evans. Beatty went to Begelman at Columbia, who was desperate for product. According to Evans, Beatty said, “Look Bob, I’m bringing it to David, and I want to tell him that you want it. He offered me three million four. I want to tell him that you offered four million.” Evans says he resisted.
“I can’t do that Warren, because we have a deal amongst the guys that we can’t lie—”
“Hey, come on, Bob, it’s me. Begelman calls you, I want you to tell him you’re offering four million for it.”
Indeed, Evans was a star-fucker before he was anything else and says he gave in. Begelman made an extremely sweet offer, almost twice as much as Warners, way more than was prudent, given Columbia’s parlous financial condition, and given the fact that Begelman hated the script, thought it was cynical and offensive. But it was Beatty, and if Columbia didn’t produce it, somebody else would. Beatty went with Columbia. But by this time, Begelman had come to his senses, and welshed on the deal. “People thought Columbia was going into Chapter 11 at that point, and he simply reneged on it, because the deal was bigger than he should have offered,” says Beatty. “When he reneged, I went back to Warners.” But Wells played hardball. He asked Beatty, “Warren, what were those numbers we talked about back then?” Warren said, “Here they are.” Wells looked at them, raised his head to look Beatty in the eye and said, “No, no, I think they were half that much.”
Beatty was fucked, not to put too fine a point on it; as Dick Sylbert said, he had nearly outsmarted himself. But he had an ace up his sleeve, Carole Eastman’s script for The Fortune, which, according to Mike Medavoy, who was Eastman’s agent, Beatty had bought for $350,000. With Nicholson attached, himself opposite Nicholson, and Mike Nichols directing, it was about as close to a guaranteed hit as you could get in the mid-’70s. If Begelman wanted The Fortune, he would have to take Shampoo too. (Beatty denies he bought The Fortune, denies he yoked it with Shampoo.)
Beatty collared Begelman at a political fund-raiser. The Columbia executive knew what Wells had done, knew Beatty had already spent a lot of his own money, knew he had the upper hand. He said, “I never made you any promises.” Beatty poked his finger into Begelman’s chest, hard, backing him across the room, saying in a loud voice, “You’re a liar. I know you’re a liar and you know I know you’re a liar, but we’re gonna forget that, and we’re gonna do this deal. You have nothing, you need this picture. Just match my original deal with Warners.” Begelman, who was nothing if not self-possessed, was nevertheless getting red in the face, flustered, and finally gave in. Beatty had his deal, but it was for only half of what Columbia originally offered, approximately equal to the original Warners deal. According to Beatty, he couldn’t even get first dollar gross, and had to settle for a cut of the “rolling gross.”* Still, once the profits of Shampoo reached a certain level, Beatty’s participation hit 40 percent.
In a move of what turned out in hindsight to be stunning stupidity, Begelman laid Shampoo off on Persky. The deal made Persky a very rich man. Begelman retained the lion’s share of the profits of The Fortune, which was going to be a resounding flop. Beatty only made one mistake. Although he may have genuinely wanted to work with Nicholson, The Fortune script was essentially a pawn on the Shampoo chessboard, so he didn’t bother to read it.
Jack didn’t need to read it. As Harry Gittes puts it, “Jack was always wild about Carole. She was the first person to understand how brilliant he was, and write a character for him—a blue-collar intellectual, which is what he is—and he never, ever forgot that.”
All that remained was for Beatty to hire a director for Shampoo. He knew Ashby, and liked him, offered him $750,000. Beatty says Towne objected. “He felt that Hal was a little lax,” says Beatty. “Hal was never a person to fight to get it right, exactly the way it was on the page. Towne said, ‘I implore you not to use Hal Ashby, use Mark Rydell.’ I said, ‘I’m using Hal Ashby.’”
Ashby had gotten close to Nicholson in the course of The Last Detail. He hung out with him, went to Lakers games with him and Bert. Like Rafelson, Mike Nichols, and a few other directors, Ashby tried to hitch himself to Nicholson’s star. He wanted Jack for every new project he announced. But he had a difficult time getting anything off the ground. He tried to set up two films that later became big hits with other directors. Ironically, both would be produced by Saul Zaentz. He wanted to direct One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and had talks with Zaentz and co-producer Michael Douglas. But Zaentz was the kind of creative producer Ashby hated. The director was too withdrawn and suspicious, refused to say how he would approach the book, so they walked away, found Milos Forman. The film was shot in the Oregon State Hospital in Salem, not a fun place to spend a lot of time. The unpleasantness index was so high that cast and crew were spending their off hours hanging out on street corners trying to score lids of grass from local dealers, mountain men with buds in their beards. This was good for the local economy, but embarrassing for the film, so the production office used petty cash to make bulk, shopping-bag-sized purchases. One of the production assistants occupied himself with breaking down the bricks and selling baggies to the actors for the same price they were paying on the street.
Later, after Forman and Zaentz won Oscars for the film, Ashby was bitter. He also wanted to direct Hair for Zaentz, but that also went to Forman. It was a frustrating time for the director. On the one hand, he had nothing but contempt for the studio system, and was looking to get out. He even talked of starting a film collective. “Basically it would have been a fucking dictatorship, and he would have been in charge,” says Mulvehill. On the other hand, Ashby badly wanted a hit, badly enough to overcome his disdain for stars and star vehicles. He wanted it badly enough to direct a Warren Beatty project, which he knew, or should have known, would mean giving up a large measure of control to Beatty. Continues Mulvehill, “Hal was on a certain level very pragmatic. He had not used stars in any of his pictures, and they both flopped.” The studio wouldn’t even open Detail. Adds Jerome Hellman, who produced Midnight Cowboy, and would shortly do the same for one of Ashby’s most successful pictures, Coming Home, “Warren was a giant star, and Hal looked up to and cherished his friendship with Warren. I think for him to do Shampoo was like a validation, because as complicated as Hal was, and as quixotic as he was, he didn’t want to fail, he wanted to be on the A list.” Concludes Mulvehill, “Hal admired the way Warren dealt with his success, he admired his control, his power. Warren massaged the system. Hal didn’t play it that way.” So when Beatty offered him Shampoo, he was ready.
The new regime at Columbia, which still had The Last Detail on the shelf, finally agreed to preview it in San Francisco. It was a huge success. Begelman was finally embarrassed into releasing the picture in December 1973 at the Bruin in Westwood, in time for Academy consideration. It did well, but then, making a serious miscalculation, he pulled it after only a week, thinking he would re-release it right before the Oscars, by which time word of mouth and Academy nominations would build it into a hit.
At the same time, in December 1973, Beatty, Ashby, and Towne sat down for a week or so of intensive work—they started at 9:00 in the morning and worked till 11:00 at night—in Beatty’s suite at the Beverly Wilshire. They were under heavy pressure, because in order to hold the actors, they had to begin shooting in six weeks, by the end of January. They talked through the scenes, then Towne went into the next room to write. His control over the script considerably diluted, Towne was unhappy. He says, “Both Warren and Jack in differing ways used their political power to control creative situations.”
Shampoo went into production in January 1974. If Shampoo had an auteur, it was probably Beatty. From the start, Ashby was at a disadvantage. Beatty had filled the key production slots with his own people, and Hal had no allies, except for editor Bob Jones. “Hal hated authority, and on that picture, Warren represented authority,” says Mulvehill. “It was his film. Hal was a control freak without any control.”
Adds Jones, “It was tou
gh for him. I’d go on the set, and Warren and Towne would be off whispering in the corner. Hal would be sitting in the other corner.” Haskell Wexler was a good friend of Hal’s. “I visited the set a number of times,” he says. “Hal was like an office boy on that, and he wasn’t used to being that way. Warren chewed Hal up and spit him out.”
One day, Dick Sylbert was standing outside the studio. “Hal walked up to me and said, ‘I can’t take it anymore. These guys won’t let me alone.’ He hated it, because we’d have meetings, and we’d go, ‘All right Hal, this is what we’re gonna do.’ We beat the shit out of him, had him boxed in—Warren, Towne, myself, and Anthea. Actor, script, set, and costumes. They’d make him reshoot, do takes he didn’t want to do, coverage he felt he didn’t need. But generally he was smart enough to just go with the flow. He was the best person they could have hired, because Ashby’s feelings about people were very good. He was a sweetheart of a man, and a wonderful director. To do that movie, you couldn’t be mean, you couldn’t do an Altman.”
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls Page 28
