David was not convinced. Both he and Louise were worrying about possible organ failure. “You must say something to him! It’s a source of extreme worry and concern to everybody as to why Christian is so angry all the time.” David would beg me, but we both knew how stubborn Christian could be. If his own wife and father couldn’t talk him out of this, nobody would. Again, it seemed that David’s unique parenting skills had led to Christian’s single-mindedness.
Christian admitted after the movie was released that director Anderson never actually asked him to lose all that weight and get down to 120 lbs.—a shockingly low weight for someone 6'1". It was his decision to make himself look anorexic for the role.
He revealed: “It was simply the best thing I’d read in a long time and I hadn’t worked in a year and a half. But I knew it’d be tough and it was. The director certainly never asked me to do it but I just felt the physical side was very important. After all, this guy is meant to look like he is on the brink of death and that really is a challenge in itself. I started doing it gradually, then I did become obsessed with it and thought: ‘Maybe I can actually hit the weight which is mentioned in the screenplay.’ I did it and on the very day I was supposed to be that weight, so I was very pleased about that.”
Christian might’ve been pleased with himself about hitting his target weight but to everyone else the transformation was shocking, even to costar Jennifer Jason Leigh. Although she later admitted she was even more horrified when he started to put the weight back on by eating donuts! She revealed: “When he started to eat again we warned him: ‘Start slow, eat poached eggs and raw foods.’ Then we watched in horror as he started with donuts!”
Even Christian later admitted in interviews that he would probably never again go to such extremes for a movie role. He seemed to realize the strain he was putting his body under and admitted he also did not want to be seen as an actor who tried to get attention through gimmicks.
He confessed: “I seriously doubt I would do what I did for The Machinist ever again. Certainly not to that degree. I would lose weight for a part but I wouldn’t take it that far again because I think I would be really asking for trouble although I think a second time would also be less of a challenge because I know I can do it. There was that challenge of: ‘Am I actually able to do this?’ Now I’ve answered that question. And I would be worried if I did it a second time it would turn into a gimmicky thing, people would say: ‘Oh, he’s the guy who loses a lot of weight for movies.’ I can’t envision there being an awful lot of other parts where it would be so essential. But you know, on The Machinist, my wife did get to witness what my ass is going to look like when I’m 90! Not a pretty sight.”
But while things were once again beginning to work out on the professional front, personally Christian was still struggling. After years of working on Christian’s career, we were done professionally. From my point of view, I had faithfully worked on Christian’s career for many years. Promises were made. Promises were broken. I could see how he was treating his father, his mother, his family, and I thought to myself, “If he could treat his own family like that, what chance do I have that he’d treat me fairly?”
To add insult to injury, Christian demanded that I sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). An NDA is a document that celebrities often make their employees sign to secure confidentiality. However, it was part of Christian’s odd sense of entitlement that he’d think I would sign an NDA while we were still figuring out what he was going to pay me, and what my role would be in his production company. The NDA was, in effect, a gag order. If I didn’t like the results, I could never complain—to my family, my friends, to the press, or to a court. On one of Christian’s many calls to me about the NDA, he bellowed, “Sign it! I deserve this!”
That was the end. He deserved it? After I had launched his career to become the biggest star on the Internet? To put him in an orbit where he could seize Batman? What did I deserve? I had been his friend for so many years, but he didn’t stop to think or ask why I’d be reluctant to sign such a draconian document. His sense of entitlement was extreme.
David begged me to sign the NDA. Christian had actually demanded that everyone in his family sign such a document—again, something particularly outrageous to require of a family member. But David had raised his son to think he could do no wrong. The end result was the unraveling of many of his family ties. “Between true friends, words are not needed.” That card from Christian seemed like it was a long time ago.
I didn’t realize I had built a reputation in Hollywood over the years. But many industry people asked me how I could bear to work for Christian for so long. His temper had become well known, his demanding nature notorious. Whenever people asked me, I always thought back to a line from Macbeth:
I am in blood, Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.
I suppose David’s flair for Shakespeare and the melodramatic had rubbed off on me a little.
A couple years ago, a friend of mine in L.A. asked me if I had seen the HBO show Entourage. I had not, and in fact, I had made a point of avoiding it. Something about a rising young actor being loyal to his inner circle of friends rang particularly false to me.
“You have to see it,” she said. “Don’t you know the character Lloyd was based on you?”
I don’t know if that was the case or not. Entourage is one of those slices of Hollywood life where everyone can see a piece of reality in it. But I had to snicker when I read about Lloyd Lee, a “Chinese American assistant who has a demanding and verbally abusive boss.” That definitely sounded familiar . . .
It was a tough choice, but after nearly ten years working for Christian and taking care of his family—first as his Web designer and then as his personal assistant and publicist—I wasn’t having fun anymore. After Christian pointedly turned down The Tonight Show, there just wasn’t any joy in his accomplishments. I was tired of dealing with the Bale family dramas and Christian’s tantrums, which had become the soundtrack to our lives. It was no longer rewarding. I had been offered work with another rising star, Jake Gyllenhaal, and decided to practice my Internet marketing outside of the House of Bale.
Surprisingly, Christian gave me a nicely worded reference letter, which read in part:
I am happy to have this opportunity to recommend Harrison Cheung for any Web marketing project you may be considering. Harrison has been instrumental in building my profile on the Internet and leveraging this Internet presence into strategic publicity. Providing more than simply Web design, Harrison has adeptly created—either singularly or in conjunction with the studios—marketing campaigns custom-tailored to grow my audience.
It only took me five years of therapy to get past my Bale years. My therapist would describe my condition as post-traumatic stress disorder.
It was very bad timing. Christian was furious at my departure as I was one of the few people who understood him and helped buffer his way in Hollywood. Ironically, Christian couldn’t even exert any financial pressure on me since I was still patiently waiting for his “deferred payment” arrangements to kick in. You could say that his family circle was bullied into obedience—the rich relation and all. But I could part ways without signing the NDA, which represented my freedom.
The timing was also bad because David had fallen ill and had been diagnosed with brain lymphoma, a type of cancer that begins in the lymphocytes of the immune system.
With all the turmoil going on in his life at the time, Christian found it easier to withdraw into himself and lose the weight needed for the role in such a short amount of time. As he got skinnier and skinnier and more withdrawn, it was easier for him to cut himself off from the outside world, like Reznik, and ignore the problems around him.
He refused to take my calls and found it hard to accept that his father was dying, even when he was admitted to the leading cancer care center in New York because the cancer was spreading so quickly. Instead, he immersed himself comple
tely in the role as preproduction on the movie began in early April 2003.
With Christian completely immersed in his roles and focusing on his own marriage, he now didn’t have as much time for his father, the man who had once controlled every aspect of his life. Christian was now his own man, picking his own projects and living in his own house with his own family. So David began spending more and more time on the East Coast to be with his wife, Gloria. He would still check in with his son regularly. But Christian admits that while he was filming The Machinist, he had so little energy he rarely spoke or interacted with anyone off the movie set apart from his Sibi. The movie was also shot more than 6,000 miles away from David, in Spain in May and June.
As David became sicker after being diagnosed in April, the calls became less frequent. David complained to friends about not being in close contact with his famous son. He called me one evening as woeful as King Lear. “I miss the laughter,” he said.
He also missed having his family by his side as his doctor and hospital visits became more and more frequent. He still kept his spirits up though, joking with the doctors and nurses. In one of my last conversations with David, he told me that he wanted to be buried back in South Africa. He wanted Nelson Mandela to speak at his funeral to tell the world what a humanitarian he was. David’s illusions of grandeur remained intact, it seemed.
Before long he was too sick to stay at the New York home he shared with Gloria Steinem, and in July he was admitted to New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Steinem visited him every day. However, his condition worsened and in November 2003, Gloria and the doctors made the decision to transfer David back to Los Angeles to be nearer to his family. He was admitted to the Santa Monica Health Care Center, where he remained until his death on December 30, 2003, at the age of sixty-two. His ashes were scattered in the Pacific.
Following David’s death, Gloria wrote a moving tribute to her husband. In fact the memorial was so glowing that anyone reading it would’ve thought David was on the verge of sainthood. It was in sharp contrast to the David Bale other people knew over the years—a confidence trickster who had left behind two broken families as he pushed and pushed his only son toward the fame and fortune he himself had always aspired to.
Gloria wrote:
In 1991, he moved with his two younger children, Christian and Louise, then teenagers, to Los Angeles where they could continue their careers in film and theater. Soon, animal rights activists in the South Bay became aware of a tall man in a black shirt and black sneakers who brought injured animals into clinics, found homes for strays, and stopped on freeways to rescue hurt animals or set their bodies aside with words of respect. Indeed, he tried never to pass a living thing in need, whether this meant driving a homeless person to a shelter, helping over-burdened single mothers in the street, or fighting against developers to save wetlands for migrating birds. As an activist, he also lobbied for such issues at the upper levels of politics and society. As an individual, he took loving care and gave a home to many stray cats, any birds or migrating ducks who visited the backyard, and a series of dogs, including an L.A. street dog named Mojo who soon was traveling back and forth by plane to New York when David also began to live there. David Bale walked lightly on this earth, with few possessions, a great heart, and a rare ability to cross boundaries between people, countries, even species. He had a gift for living in the present, and for giving others the love and self-belief that he had missed as a child. If each of us who loved him nurtures these qualities in ourselves, he will be with us still.
Even though Gloria had written her glowing memorial of David, Christian has never made any comment about his father’s passing. It was Gloria who made the announcement of David’s death to the press and while Christian was mentioned in all of the obituaries in newspapers around the world, he remained silent.
The intensely private star instead threw himself into his next movie role—Batman Begins. In September 2003, just three months before he died, David was told that Christian had been cast as one of the world’s greatest superheroes. He told Christian he was “achingly proud” of him, but they both knew deep down he wouldn’t be around to see the movie.
The Machinist opened in limited release on October 22, 2004, to mixed reviews and minimal box office success, grossing just over $1 million domestically. It was also Christian’s first movie that wasn’t particularly popular on video. This was not the kind of movie that people happily went to see after dinner or watched at home with a big bowl of popcorn. Christian’s fans, by then aware that he was going to be the next Batman, seemed both horrified and impressed by his skeletal appearance. Here was an actor clearly committed to the cause of really living a role.
Robert De Niro had won an Oscar for his weight-fluctuating turn in Raging Bull. Tom Hanks had been nominated for an Oscar for his food-deprived turn in Cast Away. But if Christian expected any awards, he would be disappointed. He did not win any major acting award for The Machinist, even though it was a very showy role.
Meghan Lehmann of the New York Post wrote: “Anderson gives The Machinist a sickly noirish look that contributes to the creeping horror—but it’s the emaciated Bale’s spectral presence that leaves the imprint.”
Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers noted: “Director Brad Anderson tightens the screws of suspense but it’s Bale’s gripping, beyond-the-call-of-duty performance that holds you in thrall.”
Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly seemed to take offense: “Bale exists all too large under the circumstances, a well-fed actor playing at emaciation for the sake of a fiction about a character whose torment is as unreadable as his vertebrae are countable.”
Filming for Batman Begins was scheduled to start on March 7, 2004, and Christian began preparing himself both physically and mentally for the role. And while Christian had not been so close to his father in recent months, he vowed to make Batman his best performance ever—in memory of his dad.
Christian hamming it up, with his “Blue Steel” look.
[12]
A Balance of Darkness
and Light
“What I see in Christian is the ultimate embodiment of Bruce Wayne. He has exactly the balance of darkness and light that we were looking for.”
—Christopher Nolan, Director, Batman Begins
“It makes absolutely no difference who plays Batman, there’s nobody at home. The character is the ultimate suit. Garb him in leather or rubber, he’s an action hero. Put him in civilian clothes, he’s a nowhere man.”
—Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
On Thursday, September 11, 2003, Warner Bros. made the announcement that Christian Bale was next in line to play the ultimate American antihero, Batman, in the upcoming movie Batman Begins. It was the climactic moment to years of excitement and speculation, with names as diverse and unexpected as Jude Law, Ashton Kutcher, Guy Pearce, and Ben Affleck originally bandied about within the studio, leaking out to excite the worldwide rumor mill better known as the Internet.
How important was the choice of the next Batman? It may not have been as historic as a puff of white smoke from the Vatican or as earth-shattering as Barack Obama’s being elected the first black president of the United States, but the fact that it had taken Warner Bros. six years to get the fifth Batman movie off the ground was proof of how much activity was going on behind the scenes in reviving the studio’s “largest asset,” one of its most profitable movie franchises.
In the world according to Hollywood, one could forgive Warner Bros. for generating the kind of fever and excitement over a casting decision not seen since the selection of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. Back then, it was scandal when the British actress Vivien Leigh was cast as all-out Southern Belle Scarlett, beating such well-known names as Norma Shearer, Katherine Hepburn, and Paulette Goddard to the coveted role.
Now it was another Brit, Christian Bale, with his uncanny knack of mimicking American accents, who shocked Hollywood when it was announced that he w
ould be donning the Batsuit, following a long line of U.S. stars from TV show actor Adam West to the big-screen incarnations of Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, and George Clooney, who had all tried to make Batman their own.
Weeks before Warner Bros. made its choice, The Hollywood Reporter had discovered that the studio would be holding test readings with several contenders for the role of the Dark Knight. The short list of young men competing to fill Batman’s codpiece included: Hugh Dancy (Black Hawk Down), Eion Bailey (Fight Club), Henry Cavill (The Tudors and finally, Superman!), Billy Crudup (Almost Famous), Jake Gyllenhaal (Donnie Darko, Prince of Persia), Joshua Jackson (Dawson’s Creek), Cillian Murphy (28 Days Later), and, of course, Christian Bale.
Directing this new Batman project would be acclaimed English director Christopher Nolan, who scored both a critical and commercial hit in 2000 with his sophisticated indie murder mystery, Memento. In 2002, Nolan followed up with another hit, Insomnia, proving to Hollywood that he could handle a big star like Al Pacino in a big studio production. Nolan had originally wanted his Memento star, Guy Pearce, as his Batman but, when Pearce declined, the hunt for the Caped Crusader was on.
Of the eight contenders for Batman, Christian already had a huge advantage. He was the biggest star on the Internet thanks to our years of campaigning, powered by the Baleheads, and we had been actively pushing for the role for the past two years. Entertainment Weekly had crowned him King of the World Wide Web in their October 11, 1996, issue and from that point on every major entertainment trade magazine annually sang odes to the mystery of Christian Bale—the Welsh-born actor who was enigmatically popular on the newest entertainment medium in spite of not having a single box office hit.
Christian Bale Page 20
