Nicholson

by Marc Eliot

  They tried the same thing without Eastman in Ride in the Whirlwind. They shot it in Utah, and Jack later described it as a very classy, Ingmar Bergman–styled “existential western.” Monte Hellman was more specific. He called the film “a horror picture in the form of a western, something like Henry King’s The Gunfighter reconceived as a horror film … We shot them literally as one movie. Carole was writing one while Jack and I were writing the other, we went off and found the location that served both pictures, and we shot them back to back.”

  Mythic, no backstories, the two films are decidedly experimental, with nary an Indian or ketchup bottle in sight. Jack and Hellman had managed to produce two color westerns for the agreed-upon $75,000 apiece, and when they went a little over budget, Corman, true to his word, took it out of their pay, so that Jack and Hellman (not Eastman, who was on salary) wound up making a total of $5,000 apiece. Corman liked what he saw onscreen and believed that as a team Jack and Monte and Carole were on to something, even if he, or they, weren’t exactly sure what.

  Jack and Monte thought they knew. Their films were about rebellion, cut with acid, and the soul of Kerouac riding shotgun on their shoulders. Jack later said, “As a young Turk, resenting that I had to be nice for the audience … I considered it artistic pandering … when [Monte and I] made [Ride in the Whirlwind], we said, ‘Well at least we aren’t having the guy read the Bible around the campfire.’ That’s because for guys who grew up in the ’50s, that sort of scene would have been considered kissing the public’s ass.”

  Corman managed to sell the two films together as a package to the Walter Reade Organization for TV distribution in the United States and sent Jack to the 1966 Cannes Film Festival to exhibit them out of competition, hoping to find a foreign theatrical distributor for them. Jack recalled, “That was the first time I went there. They didn’t know me, but [Jean-Luc] Godard befriended me the first night—he came to the first screening and after that I was a ‘member of the delegation’ of Cahiers du Cinema …” That delegation included François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol. Godard had told Jack how much he liked The Shooting, and suddenly this struggling actor found himself rubbing shoulders with members of the pantheon of the French New Wave.

  Jack also discovered for the first time how much the French revered Roger Corman’s films, in a way Americans didn’t, and eagerly anticipated the reception of the pair of westerns that he had brought with him. To satisfy the crowds that wanted to see The Shooting, the better-received of the two, Corman four-walled (rented) a theater in Paris around the corner from the Arc de Triomphe, where The Shooting played to packed houses for a year.1

  Jack liked Cannes so much that he decided to stay until his expense money ran out and he had to leave behind the high of the croissant for the reality of Hollywood Boulevard, where he had nothing much else going for him. Both The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind had bombed badly in the States, despite Cannes, thus ending another creative partnership for Jack, this time with Eastman and Monte Hellman.

  Hellman saw the experience differently: “That year was the most productive of my life,” while Jack saw it as a failure. The difference in their perspectives was, essentially, a difference of personalities. Jack had come to think of success as a function of box office, Hellman as an aesthetic evaluation. At this time, Jack had had enough of rebellion and wanted to permanently join the mainstream, while Hellman shunned it, and would for the rest of his career.

  Mike Medavoy recalled, “Monte was a real talent, but he was also a cipher. No one could ever figure him out. He could have been a great studio director, but he wanted to go his own way. Only nobody, maybe even him, could figure out what that way was. Jack, on the other hand, was being pulled into bigger movies, where I think he belonged. He was a big personality that was ready for the stardom he so desperately wanted. He had the indefinable something that we call talent. Everybody wants it, a lot of people think they have it, very few actually do. Jack had it.”

  BEFORE HE’D LEFT for Cannes, Jack and Sandra had been fighting a lot about money or more precisely their lack of it. Upon his return, with empty pockets and spent dreams, their battles grew more intense. At Sandra’s insistence, they went to see a therapist together. They each took acid before the first session, which probably didn’t help.

  One day while they weren’t talking to each other, Jack decided to fix the brakes on the car himself; to save thirty-five dollars, he bought new drums and tools and did the job on the front lawn. While he was struggling with the brakes, the phone rang. He went inside, wiping his hands on a rag before he picked up the receiver. It was Corman. He wanted Jack for a gangster picture called The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Nothing new there. What was new was that it was going to be for a major studio. Twentieth Century-Fox had signed Corman to a contract, and that meant more money for everybody, and use of all their props, costumes, and stagehands. Most important, the studio promised to leave everyone alone, insisting they were buying Roger Corman because they wanted a Roger Corman–style movie. And, he told Jack, he wanted him to play one of the killers in the infamous holiday garage executions. Jack thanked him profusely. He really needed the money, he said, and to get out of the house for a while, because he and Sandra were driving each other crazy.

  He had only one line in the picture, but he made it a good one. When another gangster notices one of the killers (Jack) greasing his bullets with garlic, he asks why. Jack says, “The bullets don’t kill ya. Ya die of blood poisoning.”

  He had made it up on the spot, and Corman loved it. So did audiences. This otherwise scripted gangster film brought Jack more attention than all his other roles combined. It also earned him more money than ever before, courtesy of Corman. He was aware of Jack’s deepening financial troubles that were threatening to bring down his marriage. He hadn’t really needed him in the movie, but Corman figured hiring him was better than giving him a handout.

  AFTER MASSACRE, CORMAN returned to independent filmmaking, still smarting over the studio’s broken promise that he could make the film his way. What angered him the most was that when he had tried to cast Orson Welles as Al Capone, the studio had said no. (Jason Robards Jr. got the part.) He finished the film, exercised his out clause, and left Fox.

  Corman now wanted to create a new series of independent films about motorcycle gangs that took their cue from 1953’s The Wild One. It was a genre that had been around for more than a decade but had faded, despite Brando’s iconic performance, because the film hadn’t done all that well at the box office. Forever searching the headlines for subjects for films, Corman began to read about a new phenomenon, the most celebrated and baddest of all motorcycle gangs, Hells Angels, led by the charismatic Ralph Hubert “Sonny” Barger Jr.

  Corman: “The Hells Angels were very much in the news. I got in touch with Sonny Barger and told him I wanted to do a film called All the Fallen Angels. Barger gave the OK, and Jim Nicholson and Sam Arkoff at AIP approved the idea immediately.” Corman used many Hells Angels from the Venice branch to flesh out the backgrounds on their bikes, because they had the best choppers and it was cheaper to pay them “extra” money than to rent real Harleys.

  Corman originally wanted George Chakiris to star in the film. Chakiris had won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1961 for his performance in the ersatz street musical West Side Story (it played better on the stage), after which Chakiris’s career cooled off and Corman figured he could get him on the cheap, until he discovered that Chakiris couldn’t ride a motorcycle. Corman then called Peter Fonda, who he knew could ride, and offered him the lead instead, a character called Heavenly Blues. Peter, the son of screen legend Henry Fonda, drifting along the edges of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking for years, eagerly accepted the offer.

  To play the part of Joe “Loser” Kearns, Corman chose one of Jack’s friends, Bruce Dern—“Derns” or “Dernsie” in Jackspeak—and he also cast Nancy Sinatra, turning the film into something of a clarion call to the next generation,
to the kids who’d never heard of Henry Fonda and wouldn’t be caught dead listening to Frank Sinatra.

  To help with the making of the film, Corman hired the then-unknown Peter Bogdanovich to be his assistant director and uncredited co-writer and Monte Hellman, whose career had stalled, to edit. The director Richard Rush’s had fallen even further. Corman put him in charge of props.

  And Jack was offered nothing—no acting, no writing (Charles B. Griffith wrote the screenplay), no assisting. Corman had originally asked Jack to write the film but wouldn’t pay him what he wanted. His only contribution to the film was a better title. He thought All the Fallen Angels required too many marbles in the mouth, and suggested to Corman the simpler and better The Wild Angels. The title combined Brando’s The Wild One with the motorcycle gang’s name, Hells Angels. Corman loved it, as Jack knew he would. But he was still angry and disappointed at otherwise being shut out of the film.

  When production finished, Corman sensed he might have something special on his hands. He exhibited the film in competition at the Venice Film Festival, where it failed to please the cineaste crowd. Undeterred, he brought it back to the States, where it quickly found an audience among the young.

  The Wild Angels, Corman’s sixty-first film, was among his biggest hits. Made for $360,000, it took in $15.5 million worldwide, and was the seventeenth-highest-grossing American film of 1966. It also single-handedly redefined “youth” films, taking them off the clean white beaches and putting them on the gritty blacktop roads.

  After the success of The Wild Angels, everybody wanted to make a copycat biker movie. The Rebel Rousers, produced and directed by Martin B. Cohen, starred Bruce Dern, whose biggest film to date had been The Wild Angels. Even Jack also took a role in The Rebel Rousers. It was so bad it didn’t get released for three years.

  When Fonda passed on the 1967 follow-up to The Wild Angels, Hells Angels on Wheels, Corman cast Jack as a new character, Poet, a disillusioned and disaffected gas-station worker who searches for the meaning of life from the seat of a Harley-Davidson. Fonda had turned Corman down because he’d wanted more money than Corman was willing to pay. But that was only part of the reason. Fonda really wanted to produce his own biker film.

  With Jack in the lead, Hells Angels on Wheels proved infinitely better than The Wild Angels. Fonda looked good as a biker but was a bit dull as an actor, and Dern was at best a journeyman, with a horsey face and a funny way of using his hands, as if he were twisting dials every time he spoke a line of dialogue. But although the film was twice as good, because of the crowded market and diminishing returns, it grossed only half as much as the original.

  NOT LONG AFTER the completion of Hells Angels, Jack’s already shaky marriage to Sandra collapsed. There had never been enough money, they lived in relative squalor, in Sandra’s opinion, unfit for raising a child, and his career was still going nowhere. But what finished it for Sandra was Jack’s inability to keep it in his pants. She heard about another affair he was having and decided she wasn’t going to live like this while he was out partying it up. For his part, he just couldn’t put up with the pressure of matrimonial monogamy. His constant affairs were fuel for his tender ego and release for his ongoing feelings of entrapment. During the filming of Hells Angels on Wheels, Jack had started an intense affair with a young beauty, Mireille “Mimi” Machu (real name I. J. Jefferson), a flower-power-child-meets-go-go-dancer type who had a small part in the film. She was a younger, sweeter, and hotter version of Sandra.

  In June 1967, Jack and Sandra formally separated. Alone, she got deeper into mysticism and the work of Jiddu Krishnamurti. Jack’s friend Harry Dean Stanton, also into Krishnamurti, urged Jack to read him, saying that it might be the path to save his marriage. He tried it and also delved into some of the various fads and movements that Sandra swore by, one of which was Reichian therapy, the only therapy (besides a few visits to the marriage counselor with Sandra) Jack was ever willing to try. It actually did draw him deeper into himself but no closer to Sandra. One of Jack’s female friends, Helena Kallianiotes, whom he knew from the coffeehouse days and who occasionally worked as a dancer while skimming along the edges of the independent film movement, but with whom he never slept, put it best describing why Jack’s and Sandra’s marriage fell apart: “She fell in love with God and Jack couldn’t compete.”

  Sandra eventually relocated to Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco’s hippie/mystic mecca, and took baby Jennifer with her. With his wife and child gone, Jack moved in with Harry Dean Stanton, who now had a small rental in Laurel Canyon, just north of Hollywood.

  If Jack was distressed by the loss of Sandra and Jennifer he didn’t show it, at least not directly. And he denied that Machu had anything to do with it. He told Playboy, “My marriage broke up during the period when I was acting in a film during the day and writing a film at night. I simply didn’t have time to ask for peace and quiet or to say [when we fought], ‘Well, now, wait a second, maybe you’re being unreasonable.’ … It ended before I was ready to be out of it. She felt that I wasn’t worth her time. She’d had it. It was very sudden, very abrupt. I was unprepared. I couldn’t cope with all the emotion that was released as the result of being cashiered … our marriage was lived out rather than failed.”

  JACK WORKED FOR Corman again in 1967 on another motorcycle movie, The Trip, but this one was different because Jack wrote the entire script himself. Corman produced and directed The Trip in three weeks. Corman gave one of the lead roles to Dern, a move that made Jack bristle. He complained to Corman that he had written the role of John (his real first name) based largely on himself, and that he, Corman, had given it to Dern only because he was his favorite actor.

  “Bruce was one of my favorite actors,” Corman said. “I wanted every actor in The Trip to have a certain look, and to be able to ride a motorcycle really well. There are too many action pictures made where the hero can’t jump on a horse and you have to make that cut so the stuntman can ride away. I wanted my actors to be able to do their own riding. Bruce and Peter Fonda were both expert cyclists and Jack wasn’t. Despite what anyone may think, that was the only reason, simple and clear, that he was not in the film.”

  Jack quickly cooled off and regained some perspective. “By now, Roger and I were back in synch,” he said. “Hey, the man’s supporting my whole life, how could I not be in synch with him? He had asked me to write Hells Angels on Wheels. I said, Roger, you know we’re pals and this and that, can’t you pay me a little more than scale? Scale plus five dollars and I would have relaxed. No. And I didn’t write it. To write The Trip, though, he said all right and gave me a little more and I did it.”

  Also in the film was Dennis Hopper. “I had known Jack and Peter prior to [The Trip],” Hopper recalled, “when we were all doing motorcycle pictures at AIP [and in acting classes] … I made a thing called The Glory Stompers and Peter had made Wild Angels. I knew Jack as an actor, but I also knew him as an excellent screenwriter.” Dennis, who played Max, everyone’s favorite dealer, had been recommended for the part by Fonda, who agreed to be in The Trip because he needed bridge money while he continued to look for funding for his own biker film.

  To better acquaint himself with the subject matter, Corman agreed to take an acid trip. Jack wrote the highly personal and character-rich screenplay on acid as well, completing it shortly after Sandra left. The film had a touch of the European exotica about it that he had taken from his Cahiers experience at Cannes. Later on, when Bosley Crowther reviewed the film for the New York Times, he picked up on its art-house look as much as its drive-in attraction. “If The Trip is a fair indication of what one sees when high on psychedelic drugs, take it from me the experience is not very different from looking at some of the phantasmagoric effects in movies like [Federico Fellini’s] Juliet of the Spirits …”

  The film also referenced Ingmar Bergman and Jean Cocteau, and there was even a tongue-in-cheek homage to the earlier Corman horror flicks during one of Fonda’s hallucinations. (Corma
n had the sets warehoused and wanted to use them in the film because they were free, and he had Jack find a way to write them into the screenplay. They became part of one of Fonda’s trips.)

  When Corman expressed little enthusiasm for filming the second-unit scenes in the desert, Hopper and Fonda volunteered and Corman gave them his blessing. Hopper took the director’s chair and Fonda played producer, and they shot a number of scenes, few of which were actually in Jack’s original script. It was the first time they had worked together creatively as a team.

  It wouldn’t be their last.

  THE TRIP WAS ultimately perceived by most critics as too pro-drugs at a time when it was a growing problem among the country’s young. The film’s criical failure was a big disappointment to Jack, who had so emotionally invested himself in his screenplay. He was certain, now, after fifteen pictures in nine years, that he was not, after all, going to be the next Marlon Brando or James Dean or Robert Riskin to Corman’s Frank Capra. His feelings of failure were reinforced when he had recently been up for Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. Casting went down to the wire before director Roman Polanski chose John Cassavetes over Jack to play the part of the devil/husband. When he found out, Jack got stoned with Harry Dean Stanton to the point of immobility.

  ON WEEKENDS, HARRY Dean liked to throw sex parties that started on Friday night and ended sometime Monday morning that gathered the hottest starlets and all the available young men, some single and some not, who wanted to get whacked out and share beds filled with these naked, luscious, beautiful women. Lately, though, Harry Dean had had to literally pull Jack out of his room to join in. Most of the time, while the action was hot and heavy in the other rooms, Jack would prefer to stay by himself, in his bedroom, furiously pounding out his next screenplay.