It was while Christian was shooting Reign of Fire in Ireland that Batman came up. There were competing Batman projects at Warner Bros. to reboot the franchise and only one would proceed. Warner Bros. had also changed its casting strategy, preferring to look for a good actor it could transform into Batman, rather than a movie star that would distract from the reboot. For my very first use of Amazon.co.uk, I had sent Christian Alan Moore’s Batman: The Killing Joke and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One so that he could consider pursuing a Batman project that was in the works.
Christian was feeling pretty good about his career at this point. In the 1990s, post-Little Women, he was relegated to small British indie films that couldn’t find distribution. Now in the 2000s, he was doing major studio work. I remember we had a good laugh at his résumé then.
“What do you think my porno movies would be called?” Christian asked me.
“Your porno movies?”
“You know, if they do porno versions of my movies, what kind of titles would they come up with? Of course, there’d be Empire of the Bum.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“Newsies would be Nude-sies. A Midsummer Night’s Shag, um, Poke-Her-Eyes-Out, American Shag-o . . .”
“Yes.”
“Swing Kids would be Swinging Dicks. But of course, Shaft and Little Women would keep their existing titles!”
Eventually, there would of course be a couple of actual porn parodies; the most infamous would be European Psycho, which starred British porn star Danny Mountain.
One strange thing about living in Los Angeles is that time moves slowly. Maybe it’s the near perfect weather without seasons that makes you forget how many years have passed. One day, Christian presented me with a new computer. He wrote:
Enjoy the computer. Sorry I’ve not been able to pay you anything for all of your work, but I hope the computer can suffice until a time not too far in the future when we’ll form a huge corporation, take over the world and sell out!
Love, Christian
He was referring to our family production company that I was eagerly waiting to begin. I had dreams about writing screenplays and producing films, but I was patient because Christian was always getting hit by surprise expenses thanks to his father’s financial mismanagement.
There was a lot of debate in the House of Bale about Equilibrium. On one hand, Christian liked the script and wanted to work again with his Metroland costar Emily Watson. On the other hand, it was a small production ($20 million) and writer/director Kurt Wimmer was green. Though Wimmer would go on to direct other cult sci-fi movies like Ultraviolet and have a very successful screenwriting career, it took a lot of convincing before Christian would agree to work again with a first-time director since his experience on Swing Kids.
Originally entitled Librium, the first sign of trouble was that the drug maker of Librium, an anti-anxiety drug, threatened to sue unless there was a title change. When directorial duties were beginning to overwhelm Wimmer, there was talk that one of Equilibrium’s producers, Jan de Bont, might direct. De Bont had directed Speed, Twister, and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. But Wimmer ended up helming the project, which was primarily shot in Berlin, Germany, with an impressive cast that included Emily Watson, Angus McFayden, Taye Diggs, Sean Bean, Sean Pertwee, and William Fichtner.
De Bont was one of the main reasons why Christian decided to do Equilibrium. His 1994 action hit, Speed, turned Keanu Reeves into an action hero. Reeves was one of Christian’s favorite actors. But before Speed, Reeves was best known for playing dufus roles like Bill & Ted. After Speed, Reeves’s career shifted into high gear, paving the way for The Matrix trilogy. Would Equilibrium do the same for Christian?
Christian and I both saw Equilibrium as a good stepping-stone. He would look good as an action hero, had a couple of shirtless scenes to show off his buff body, and he was sold on the film as a low-budget version of The Matrix. Christian would be trained in martial arts. Wimmer envisioned a gun-based martial art called gun-kata or gun-fu. Unfortunately, by the time production began, Christian did not get along with Wimmer and there was a lot of tension on the set. To say that he was happy when production finally wrapped in December 2000 would be an understatement.
“This movie is finally fucking over!!!” Christian e-mailed me. “Director didn’t even say goodbye. He ran out with his tail between his legs.”
The shoot in Berlin wasn’t all moviemaking pain. Christian recorded vocals for a now defunct German breakcore band called The Thunderinas which was headed by Austrian musician, Rachael Kozak (aka “Bloody Knuckles”). On the song “1-800-INNOCENT,” Christian calls a suicide help line and says, “It’s very hard for me to talk about this, to know if I really have a problem or not. I need to come to terms with myself. Christian was very disappointed that the original ending of the film had been cut back because of the budget. In the original ending, the climactic battle between Christian’s character, Preston, and MacFayden’s character, Dupont, was supposed to be a stylized gun battle where the two men would be shooting at each other, but the bullets would hit in midair because both men had been trained identically. It would have been a more elaborate version of The Matrix’s bullet-time fighting. What actually ended up on the screen, Christian laughed, “looked like the two of us were trying to bitch slap each other with guns.”
Equilibrium was ravaged by critics and it bombed at the box office.
Washington Post noted: “Equilibrium is like a remake of 1984 by someone who’s seen The Matrix 25 times while eating Twinkies and doing methamphetamines.”
Dennis Harvey at Variety wrote: “Misses with its blowhard treatment of a silly, obvious script. Results might hazard Battlefield Earth comparison if new pic were a tad more fun.”
And the San Francisco Chronicle lashed out with: “Super-violent, super-serious and super-stupid.”
But the film served an important part of Christian’s campaign to win Batman. He demonstrated vividly that he was not just an actor, but that he could be an action hero.
At the time, I remember a series of journalists in a hotel room asking Christian which of his characters he identified with the most.
“I’m not going to answer that,” he’d say to each one.
After the last journalist had left, I turned to Christian and said, “I bet I know which character you identify with the most.”
He looked back at me, eyebrows raised, a slightly amused look on his face.
“Patrick Bateman,” I said.
Christian laughed. “That’s right!”
It’s not that I thought Christian was a serial killer, but the curious torment Bateman has with himself was very much Christian. I thought back to a line from the movie: “I have all the characteristics of a human being: blood, flesh, skin, hair; but not a single, clear, identifiable emotion.”
Back to the Hollywood maxim—one for the studio, one for yourself. After doing a string of big studio films and earning big studio dollars, Christian returned to small drama in Laurel Canyon. It would reunite Christian with his Prince of Jutland costar Kate Beckinsale. Indie queen Frances McDormand starred as a veteran rock producer, while Christian played her uptight, conservative son, a theme Christian had explored earlier in Metroland.
I remember Christian decided not to attend the cast screening of Laurel Canyon. I was sitting beside Frances McDormand when she turned to me, got in my face, and asked, “Where’s your boss? Why isn’t he here?” She was so direct and unexpectedly blunt that I babbled some excuse, but it was clear that she wasn’t pleased that Christian was absent.
Laurel Canyon fared poorly at the box office, grossing less than $5 million worldwide, and garnered mixed reviews. Todd McCarthy, Variety, wrote: “The dramatic trajectory is frightfully obvious, the characters tediously one-dimensional, the dialogue banal.”
Shaft, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Laurel Canyon, Reign of Fire, and Equilibrium—there wasn’t a box office hit among them. Whispers of “box office p
oison” resurfaced, and Christian “Fail” realized that his next major studio film had to be chosen carefully. Though every one of Christian’s films had found an audience on video thanks to his very strong Balehead fan following on the Internet, he needed bigger theatrical box office appeal to secure the A-list, leading-man status he craved.
While the post-Psycho years were busy for Christian professionally, at home, he was in a personal hell with his father. Christian and Sibi’s marriage was a surprise start to a year that would be full of challenges for father and son. The newlyweds initially moved in with David in the Manhattan Beach house and there was immediate friction.
David was spooked by Sibi’s legal name, Sandra. The mail that came in for her was addressed to Sandra Bale, the name of David’s first wife in South Africa. David complained that he got a heart attack every time he saw a letter for her. And while David, as Christian’s manager and father, had held onto the purse strings, Sibi was put in the position of being forced to deal with a father-in-law who was immediately paranoid of her every move. If Sibi needed to buy a household item like a mattress, she had to ask David for the money, which would immediately trigger David’s scrutiny and criticism. And of course, I’d get an earful later that evening when David would vent.
David had been fighting deportation as he had long overstayed his 1991 visitor’s visa, which was only good for six months. David claimed he was too ill to board an airplane and therefore too ill to be deported back to England. On April 12, 2000, David waved around a letter from his cardiologist, which stated in part:
Mr. Bale’s departure from the United States carries significant life-threatening risks which include but not limited to the following:
Physical and mental stress of flying
Stresses placed on him by virtual of separation from his children and his home.
The INS was not sympathetic. In one meeting with David, an INS officer bluntly told him that there was an illegal immigrant with spina bifida that they were deporting, so his claims of medical duress weren’t enough to stop the proceedings.
Christian’s relationship with his father had started to deteriorate after he discovered back in 1998 that his father had badly mismanaged his finances. He had paid off a big chunk of debt by doing Mary, Mother of Jesus, and the flurry of movie shoots in 2000 and 2001 put Christian back in black. In fact, Christian was so pleased that he was making good money again as an actor, he turned down two commercial endorsements I had negotiated in 2000—Cerruti, the fashion designer behind American Psycho, had wanted Christian to be The Cerruti Man, and The GAP had also offered Christian a series of TV commercials. To torment the Cerruti people, Christian offered to be their spokesman only on the condition that they renounce leather from their entire fashion line. Cerruti politely declined.
But David’s parenting strategy of keeping financial secrets from his son was backfiring.
The bungled production deal with Santa Monica Studios, the debts, the two liens filed against him, taxes owed to both the U.S. and U.K. governments? Jungle Croquet? Christian felt betrayed and retreated to the sanity and calm of his wife’s family, the Blazics.
Embattled with his immigration problems, David had little time to smooth things over with his son. David was up against the wall. How could he stay in the country? He began to plead and lobby all their Hollywood contacts to write to California senator Diane Feinstein to introduce a private bill to grant him a green card. The lobbying worked. Feinstein, without even doing a background check on David Bale, introduced the bill (S.2945) on July 27, 2000. The full text of the bill is in the Appendix—enjoy!
Sadly for David, time ran out. The bill was introduced and read but that session of Congress ended before it could be voted on.
It seemed that maybe true love saved the day for David. Standing in the kitchen, David told me he had three women eager to marry him, and he just had to make a decision. He carefully analyzed each woman’s prospects—one woman, Charlotte Cornwell, a drama teacher at the University of Southern California and sister to spy novelist John le Carré, loved him but had no money or fame to go with her green card potential; another woman, Luanne Wells, was the multimillionaire-widow of Disney chief Frank Wells, but she had no fame and had several highly suspicious sons who threatened a background check and a prenuptial agreement; the third was legendary American feminist Gloria Steinem. David had met the New Yorker Steinem on one of her many visits to California at a charity fund-raiser. After careful consideration, Bale decided to marry Steinem, who was seven years his senior, as he assumed she had both the wealth and the fame he so craved.
Christian shows off his knife skills (and his new veneers specially made for American Psycho).
She is, of course, the American feminist who had preached against the institution of marriage as outdated and patriarchal. She had led campaigns against the book and the film American Psycho. Incorrectly but widely attributed to Gloria: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Yes, that Gloria Steinem.
On August 31, 2000, just three days before David married Gloria in Oklahoma, Christian was hit with another surprise courtesy of his father’s mismanagement—yet another lien, this one for $50,269—for back taxes owing to the state of California. Christian and David were done professionally.
On September 3, 2000, a day after David’s fifty-ninth birthday, David and Gloria wed on a secluded Oklahoma Indian reservation. Conducting the nuptials ceremony was Gloria’s friend Wilma Mankiller, a former chief of the Cherokee Nation. Although Louise attended the ceremony, Christian was not invited. Gloria had chosen private and secluded Oklahoma away from her family and friends, rather than New York or California, because she knew that her marriage would stir much press coverage and criticism thanks to her longtime stance against the institution of marriage. But David had already given instructions to me as Christian’s publicist to leak the news to my contact at People. Perhaps out of a force of habit, David lied to the press at the time about his age, narrowing their age difference to three years. Steinem’s marriage was headline news around the world.
Oddly enough, David Bale, who had told the INS that he was too sick to fly, began commuting regularly between New York and Los Angeles with his new wife. The deportation order was dropped and he was granted “conditional residency,” which allowed him to stay in the U.S. for two years. Gloria’s home base remained in New York, although the Manhattan Beach house was now well-stocked with almonds, her favorite snack food.
After David was married, he was depressed about the damage to his relationship with his son. “I’ve failed him! I’ve failed my own son!” David would weep into his beer. Although David was thrilled to be married to a celebrity, he was still very hurt that he was no longer close to his son. When David and Gloria were interviewed by Barbara Walters on 20/20, Christian instructed me not to provide any clips or photos of him for Walters’ show to use. Everything David had hoped for—the family production company, the family business—was through. He now had to turn his attention to making Gloria happy. They had to prepare for an interview with INS to prove that their marriage was legitimate.
Within a week of their marriage, the press had discovered David’s deportation woes. Gloria quickly went on the defensive, telling the New York Daily News, “Apparently, there is a need to look for ulterior motives when a feminist marries.” But eleven years later, on August 9, 2011, Steinem would finally admit on the Joy Behar Show that the reason they married was because David “needed a green card.”
I confess I had no sympathy for David’s predicament. He had brought this on himself by raising Christian to be blissfully unaware of his financial status. It seemed to me as if David had been happy to keep Christian childlike. It was his way of keeping control over his son.
For his part, Christian spent the rest of 2000 arguing with his father to turn over all of his accounting files to a new accountant. By the end of 2000, Christian had asked me to intercede and I worked with Christian’s new accountant, Mark, t
o repair the House of Bale. To say that David was furious was an understatement. Here was Christian’s new accountant prying into David’s mysterious years of money-juggling.
Christian e-mailed me, “Dad is speaking with Mark. My ultimate point is for him not to have to deal with taxes, but right now it is essential for the transition as I do not know enough about past years. Please help him in any way you can, and keep him from strangling Mark.” I remember my first face-to-face meeting with Mark the Accountant, as I told him to be patient and prepared for an avalanche of David’s mystery files.
Christian himself was in a darker place. He was no longer the young man with the easy laughter. He had become much more insular and somehow humorless. Understandably, he was taking his career much more seriously, but he had also felt betrayed by his father. And since David had spent the past decade painting his mother, Jenny, as a money-hungry shrew, Christian trusted very few people. Conversations became confrontational, as he took the tactic that he would deny the premise and validity of any question.
“Why do you look so down, Christian?” I would ask.
“What makes you think I look ‘down’?” he’d fire back sarcastically. “Who do you think you are to ask me that? You have no idea how difficult it is to be an actor!”
To me, my former adopted kid brother was becoming increasingly bossy and angry. I was tethered to his whim by cell phone, so at any time of the day or night, I could receive a call asking me to buy him socks (easier than doing laundry) or to restock his fridge with Guinness. Even while he was beginning to make good money, he had me take the photos to be his headshots.
Christian Bale Page 18
