Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  The younger of two boys by seven years, Marty grew up among priests and gangsters—and flickering images on the screen. “When you go to the movies as a child, you don’t know there’s anybody behind the camera,” he says. “You just think the actors do it. Then you realize, ‘Wait a second. That looks beautiful. This name seems to be appearing a great deal. These films all have something to do with the cavalry, or family life, like How Green Was My Valley. The Informer. The Grapes of Wrath. The images, the darkness of the clouds, silhouettes against the hills, and the music—what you’re noticing, I guess, is poetry. Coming from a family that didn’t have any books in the house, I had to discover it all myself.”

  Scorsese rarely ventured outside the neighborhood. He was short, frail, and sickly, a momma’s boy. He was so allergic to animals he was taking his life in his hands if he petted a dog. His older brother, Frank, was jealous of the attention he got, used to beat him up. “Marty is basically a coward,” says friend Mardik Martin. “In Mean Streets, the mook scene, you see Marty in the corner running—that’s him. He would always hide.” In later life he would go to great lengths to avoid conflict, learning to let other people do his fighting for him, his agent, his pals. He would express his anger in his films. He lived most happily in his own imagination.

  After high school, Scorsese went to the seminary, studied for the priesthood. But driven by a single-minded passion to make movies, he entered NYU in 1960 as an undergraduate. It was a new world. “As somebody coming from the Lower East Side where my father couldn’t even afford an 8mm camera, I couldn’t make pictures like other kids, who had 16mm cameras, did their own little movies in their country homes. But I actually wanted to say something on film and I was able to get my hands on the equipment.”

  At NYU, he fell under the spell of Haig Manoogian. Manoogian taught his students to make films about their own lives, what they knew. He’d say, “Suppose what you know is eating an apple. Try to make a five- to six-minute picture on that. Very hard to do.” Influenced by Italian neorealism and the American documentary movement of the ’30s, he taught the films of Paul Strand, Leo Hurwitz, and Pare Lorentz. These directors all prettified their images, were believers in immaculate composition and lighting, but Scorsese also absorbed the filming-on-the-fly flavor of the new cinema verité movement pioneered by Donn Pennebaker and Ricky Leacock that was going on around him. The slice-of-life influence would show up in his student films, then in Woodstock, and later in the grittiness of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull. Manoogian hammered away at his students with his anti-Hollywood aesthetic. “Don’t reach for the revolver right away,” he repeated again and again. “That’s melodrama. If you want to do that, go work in television, go out to L.A. We’re not making that kind of cinema.” Manoogian’s classes were filled with middle-class kids; he had never had a student like Scorsese. Guns were what he knew. “Every day I grew up in the Lower East Side somebody had a gun,” he says. “It was like second nature to me.”

  Marty was the star. Recalls director Jim McBride, “He was on a whole other level from the rest of us. He could quote films to you, describe them shot by shot. While we were humping around, trying to find the right exposure, he was making these little gems.”

  Like (almost) everyone else, the film that made him want to be a filmmaker was Citizen Kane. But there were other influences as well. At the 8th Street Playhouse in 1960, he saw Shadows. “It had an emotional truth to it, power,” he continues. “It made me realize that I could make a movie.” He adds, “All my life I’ve been bouncing back and forth between Shadows and Kane.” And then there was Roger Corman. “Every morning at NYU we had to light a candle to Ingmar Bergman,” he recalled. “They made us study Wild Strawberries.” But Scorsese preferred The Wild Angels: “It was Corman’s movies we studied in those strange dives all over New York.” But unlike, say, Bogdanovich, Scorsese was also inspired by the Europeans, films like Before the Revolution and Accatone, directors like Truffaut and Godard. “What Godard was showing was new ways to use images to tell a story, new ways to shoot, to cut,” he says. “In Vivre Sa Vie, when the guy comes into the record store where Anna Karina works, says, ‘I want some Judy Garland,’ the camera tracks her all the way across the store as she goes and takes an album out of the top shelf and then goes all the way back. Little things like that suddenly opened up your mind to other ways of doing things, not two people in a frame talking. There was a kind of joy that burst into me when I saw the movies by these guys.”

  Despite his passion and obvious talent, Scorsese had few prospects. “All I could realistically hope for,” he continues, “was to make a short film and maybe work for the USIA. But I was determined to make features, personal movies, something about my life.”

  Scorsese met Mardik Martin at NYU in 1961. Martin was an Armenian, born in Iran and raised in Iraq. His family was wealthy, but he fled Iraq to avoid the draft, and ended up in New York, penniless, washing dishes in restaurants to earn his way through school. He could barely speak English, and Scorsese was the only kid who would talk to him. They were both short and manic—outsiders. Scorsese was still living in a cramped room in his parents’ apartment. They became friends. Scorsese didn’t drive, couldn’t afford a car. Martin drove him around in his ancient red Valiant, a junker, took him to Barneys in the days before it went upscale. His father’s son, Marty lived and breathed clothes. He was a snappy dresser. Everything had to be just so, the shirts with French cuffs, the starched collars, the slacks with creases like razor blades.

  Working with Martin, Scorsese made a couple of award-winning shorts, among them It’s Not Just You, Murray, in 1964. Scorsese won a Screen Producers Guild Award, and in 1966, he went out to L.A. for a week to work on a Monkees episode for Rafelson, but he couldn’t bring himself to do television, didn’t understand it, didn’t like it. Manoogian’s words rang in his ears.

  While he was working on It’s Not Just You, Murray, he met an actress in the NYU program named Larraine Marie Brennan. She was “black” Irish, a bit of a kook, into numerology, the I Ching. They got married in 1965, and Marty finally left his parents’ home, moved into a flat in Jersey City with Larraine. “Our wives hated us,” Martin recalls. “ ‘Why don’t you guys give up and get a decent job. What are you talking about, films?’ We couldn’t go home because they would pick on us.” Scorsese was working on a loosely autobiographical script with Martin that drew, as Manoogian never tired of repeating, on what he knew. It was called Season of the Witch. They had contempt for Puzo’s The Godfather, then a best-seller, which Scorsese knew bore no relation to the truth. He would tell it like it was. The two young men sat in Martin’s Valiant and wrote. In the winter, in the cold and snow. “We were used to that,” Scorsese says. “We were film students. Film students write anywhere.”

  He was also struggling with a film called Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, and had shot seventy-odd minutes of it that summer. Featuring Harvey Keitel, who eked out a living as a court stenographer during the day, it took four years to complete. The delays made filming almost impossible. “It was all stopping and starting,” he recalled. “You started shooting a scene, then two months later when you wanted to reshoot, the actors had cut their hair, or had another job and couldn’t work. It was a nightmare.”

  Scorsese’s parents supported his filmmaking efforts; his father paid the lab bill for Who’s That Knocking out of his own pocket. After Marty finally completed it, he had to insert a nude scene to attract a distributor. He picked up his agent, Harry Ufland, who worked for William Morris. Scorsese met Jay Cocks in 1968, when Cocks was researching a story on student filmmakers for Time. Later, Cocks got Scorsese and his friends into press screenings at the New York Film Festival, and persuaded Cassavetes to look at Who’s That Knocking. “This movie is as good as Citizen Kane,” exclaimed Cassavetes. “No, it’s better than Citizen Kane, it’s got more heart.” Marty almost fainted. “He couldn’t believe this guy was saying this stuff,” recalls Cocks. “And Joh
n meant it, and from that day on, he loved Marty like a son.”

  Woodstock was Scorsese’s introduction to the ’60s. He joined the 500,000- odd mud-covered hippies like a visitor from another planet, nattily attired in a blue blazer over a shirt with French cuffs.

  Meanwhile, Marty’s marriage was coming apart. He and Laraine had a baby girl named Catherine, after his mother, whom he regarded as a saint. Marty would get up with the baby in the middle of the night, watch Psycho on TV. With the baby came increased pressure from Laraine to earn a living. “Before they split up, they were fighting all the time,” recalls Martin. “Once, my wife and I drove all the way to Jersey City from Queens where we lived to have dinner with them. I could hear them yelling and screaming inside. Marty opened the door, said, ‘Yeah, look, we can’t make it for dinner, I’m sorry.’” For Scorsese, with his Catholic background, the decision to leave his young wife with a newborn was torture, but it was that or give up his dream of becoming a filmmaker, and in the interest of his career, he was ruthless.

  Scorsese made the move to L.A. in early 1971 to edit Medicine Ball Caravan. Fred Weintraub used to have an open house every Sunday, where he entertained nubile Hollywood hopefuls around his oversized waterbed. Brian De Palma went, Marty went, and a few months after the earthquake, Marty ran into Sandy Weintraub. She was, as Don Simpson put it, one of Fred’s “two big-titted daughters.” Sandy was a nineteen-year-old hippie with no idea what she wanted to do with her life. She had just come out from New York to visit her father. “I thought Marty was just the cutest thing I had ever seen,” she recalls. “He was chubby and he had long hair and no neck, and was shorter than me. I walked over to where he was, and sat down on the floor. I looked up at him, and I said, ‘If I borrow some money from my father, will you let me take you out to dinner.’ And he went like, ‘Wow, okay.’ It was the ’60s, and I didn’t have anything to wear except the jeans I came out with, and a couple of T-shirts. But I wanted to wear a dress. So I went to a fabric store and I bought a yard of cloth and tied it around my body, sort of toga style. That was our first date.” They went to a movie, of course—Shaft.

  Marty and Sandy became an item, and lived together for four years, well into Taxi Driver. (They would be creative partners as well; she would have an associate producer credit on Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.) “Marty was tempestuous, volatile, passionate about his life,” she adds. “We went to everything that came out. We went to double bills, triple bills. We never ever looked at a movie and thought, Oh wow, what a great career move for him. He breathed, ate, and shat movies. I would tell him about my dreams, and he would tell me about the movie he had seen on TV the day before. He just loved the work. If he had any fear, it was that someday he wouldn’t be able to do that anymore.”

  WHEN SCORSESE MOVED TO L.A., Brian De Palma introduced him to actress Jennifer Salt, who was making the rounds, looking for work and a place to live. One day she tested for John Huston, who was directing Fat City. All the actresses wore the same dress, and when Salt pulled it over her head, the armpits were still moist from the woman who read before her. Her name was Margot Kidder. “It was so tacky,” recalls Salt. But each had heard of the other.

  Kidder was staying at the Sunset Marquis while she looked for work. She and Salt decided to find a share. Donald Sutherland, whom Kidder knew from Canada, turned them on to a $400-a-month house on Nicholas Beach.

  Kidder and Salt’s lopsided A-frame was unfashionably far from the action, up the Pacific Coast Highway past Malibu where the Old Hollywood lived. Tom Pollock, an attorney, had a shack there, actress Blythe Danner and producer Bruce Paltrow lived nearby. Producers Michael and Julia Phillips would soon move in next door, and writers John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion lived up the hill. The Salt-Kidder house, not to mention Salt and Kidder themselves, became a magnet for young Hollywood, a place where the wannabes could take a few tokes, drink red wine, trade John Ford stories, and stare at Salt, Kidder, and Salt’s old school chum, actress Janet Margolin, sunbathing topless.

  The house had a big living room flanked by benches along the walls with an open brick fireplace in the center surrounded by ugly wall-to-wall carpeting. On the second floor were two bedrooms, Margot’s in front, on the ocean, and Jennifer’s in back. Out in front was a flagpole that proudly flew the Salt-Kidder colors, a tie-dyed flag.

  Salt and Kidder were an odd couple, the Lady and the Tramp. Salt was the princess from Sarah Lawrence. Kidder, from a blue-collar family, was raised in trailers and motel rooms, or nearly so. She was cute and scrappy, funny, a tomboy, and enormously bright. Salt taught her how to dress; she taught Salt how to hotwire cars, as it were. Kidder was sexually aggressive, not to say ravenous, slept with nearly every man who crossed the threshold. She acted impulsively with little thought for consequence, moved from crisis to crisis enveloped by dark clouds of Sturm und Drang. She broke hearts and sued producers. Kidder was heavily into the movement, and struck her friends as not altogether stable. She had a Frances Farmer quality about her. And of course she took drugs like they were going out of style, always the first on her block to smoke, snort, or swallow the pill du jour.

  One day at the beach, Eve bit into the apple. It was inevitable. Actor Peter Boyle brought over a vial of coke. Everyone was still on pot and psychedelics, so it was show-and-tell time. “Our attitude about drugs was, they’re mind-expanding, something we do to push the envelope, so, no problem,” recalls Kidder. They considered themselves revolutionaries, and drugs were a tool. She continues, “The only question was, ‘Well, how do you do it?’ Me, of course, being me, went, ‘Oh, of course I’ll try it,’ because I didn’t have the same amount of sensible paranoia that other people had. I stuck a straw in the coke and just went, ‘Pphhhht!’ sucking in half the vial, freezing my lungs and making me unable to breathe. I was gasping, shaking in my boots for thirty seconds. That was my introduction to cocaine.

  “Out of the drug taking came a lot of swampy ideas, but also a lot of creative thinking and, most importantly, breaking down of personal barriers and that ridiculousness of pride and holding oneself to oneself and having a phony social persona. If that hadn’t been the case, none of us would have developed our talents. But Steven Spielberg didn’t take drugs, Brian didn’t, Marty didn’t, until later when he got into trouble with coke. The directors who ended up successful were very protective of their own brains.”

  Margot started seeing De Palma. They were passionately in heat, making it anywhere and everywhere, once in a closet at Taplin’s house, during a party. At the time, Bobby Fischer was challenging Boris Spassky, and a chess craze had swept the beach. Brian taught Margie how to play, upset the board onto her lap when she made a dumb move. She played and played until the day she beat him, then lost interest.

  De Palma had a sarcastic wit and a positive genius for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. He invariably antagonized people who didn’t know him, but his friends were amused. He had been so traumatized by the Get to Know Your Rabbit debacle, it took him a while to shake the experience. Professionally, Margot and Jennifer weren’t doing well either. By the end of 1971, both had been out of work for some time. But Brian had a surprise for them. Under the Christmas tree that year, wrapped in gift paper, was a script for Jennifer, and a script for Margot. It was Sisters, one of two scripts Brian had ready to go. (The other was Phantom of the Paradise.)

  Brian brought his friends over, and others came as well. On any given weekend, Salt found herself cooking for De Palma, Spielberg, Boyle, Brackman, John Milius, Richard Dreyfuss, director Walter Hill, Bruce Dern, writer David Ward, and so on. Even Rafelson occasionally came to the beach. They grilled steaks, ate spaghetti, tossed salads. Recalls Salt, “I was always thinking, Should it be chili and the three-bean salad and the cheescake, or should we barbecue chicken—Oh, Steven doesn’t like it when I cut up zucchini in the salad, Marty likes the chili—that was where I was at. I cooked for these boys, gave lots of parties, made them take drugs and take their pants of
f and get down.” Adds Kidder, “The reality was that we always got the drugs and we always got the food and we basically served our guys, the whole time putting down the notion that we as women would do that. There was a real contradiction in what we perceived ourselves to be doing and what in fact we were doing.”

  The guys were high on themselves, on their budding careers, the sense of unlimited possibility. “The goal of all these people was to make their first movie before they were thirty, because that was what the French New Wave had done,” recalls actor Kit Carson. “We were the generation that was never going to get old,” says Kidder. “We were not going to be the establishment, we were going to do films that made statements, whether they were personal ones or political ones.”

  Marty and Sandy would make the drive up the Pacific Coast Highway almost every weekend. Sandy wasn’t crazy about going, but Marty said it was important for his career. Nicholas Beach was isolated; the only rules were the ones they made for themselves. Like, if you wanted to be cool, and of course everybody did, you had to go skinny-dipping, which was especially hard on Marty, because the cortisone he took for his asthma made his body blow up. He wouldn’t even go near the water, sat on the sand fully dressed. Spielberg, who didn’t much like the water himself would say, “C’mon, let’s go in the ocean.”

  “No, no, no, it’s very bad, it’s evil. There’s things out there you don’t even want to know about.”

  “You afraid of jellyfish? There’s no jellyfish out there.”

  “No, no, no, things with teeth.” He paused, added, “I don’t do water.” Milius, meanwhile, surfed happily off the beach in front of the house.

  Marty had a sweet, Old World courtliness about him that endeared him to Kidder and Salt. One day he appeared in an immaculate white suit with a bouquet of flowers for each of them. Says Kidder, “Marty seemed wildly dedicated to creating a new kind of film, a film of substance, to putting his personal vision on film, to marrying his confusion at being a Catholic boy and the intensity of his own spirit with film itself. He loved people trying new things, he loved bravery of personal expression, and he talked about it a lot, very eloquently, albeit very quickly. I don’t remember many silly talks with Marty about nothing.”