Sexplosion

by Robert Hofler

  Lance asked Andy about Valerie. “She seems so mean. Is she really like that?”

  “Yes, oh, she hates me, she wants to kill me. We don’t let her come up anymore, she is just too mean.”

  The following week, Valerie Solanas made the last of her unwanted visits to the Factory. She’d really been in pursuit of Maurice Girodias, the original French publisher of the much-banned novel Candy. Somewhat more impressed by “Up Your Ass” than either Warhol or Morrissey, Girodias had offered Solanas two thousand dollars in installments for her autobiography. But when she failed to write anything, the installments of money stopped. She in turn called Girodias a “thief and vulture,” and wanted him dead. Fortunately for Girodias, he was away on business in Canada. Unfortunately for Warhol, Solanas went looking for someone else to hate.

  When she passed Packard Electronics on the ground floor of 33 Union Square West and rode the elevator up to the Factory on the sixth floor, Andy Warhol was talking on the phone, not with a teenage friend three thousand miles away but rather his superstar actress Viva, who at that moment was having her hair done only a few blocks uptown at Kenneth’s Hair Salon. The epitome of laconic aggression, Viva had never sounded more upbeat as she blurted out the good news.

  “Andy, Andy, I’ve got the part. I’m so thrilled!” she cried into the receiver. She didn’t even have to tell him the name of the project. It was John Schlesinger’s new movie, Midnight Cowboy, and Andy knew all about it and how screenwriter Waldo Salt had taken the James Leo Herlihy novel about a Forty-Second Street hustler and added his own subplot in which two Warholesque characters, named Hansel and Gretel, roam the streets of Manhattan looking for strange and photogenic people they can put into a Warholesque movie. Schlesinger wanted Andy to play himself in the movie. Andy passed on the offer but gave his blessing to Viva to play the cinéma vérité director, who, in effect, was him. Schlesinger’s lover, Michael Childers, facilitated the whole thing, him being a good friend of Paul Morrissey, the real director of Warhol’s movies. Childers recalled, “John and I had dinner with Paul and Andy at Max’s Kansas City, and all the Warhol superstar speed freaks were there, along with Salvador Dali and Robert Rauschenberg.”

  Viva, excited by her mainstream-movie breakthrough, had phoned Andy from Kenneth’s, where she was having her hair dyed and frizzed for the role of Gretel. That’s when she heard Andy’s hideous scream above the hair dryers, “Get that woman away from me!”

  Viva had once referred to the denizens of the Factory as “that bunch of perverts” but never let that assessment stop her from taking her clothes off for a Warhol movie.

  But he wasn’t pretending. He wasn’t acting. Andy Warhol had been shot by Valerie Solanas, a militant lesbian feminist who wanted Warhol to film “Up Your Ass,” a script that Warhol found so pornographic that he thought the cops had planted it to trap him with an obscenity charge. When Solanas appeared at his door that day, Warhol had forgotten about “Up Your Ass,” misplaced the script somewhere, and spent the last few days trying to avoid her, blow her off. He barely survived the shooting. Surgeons had to open his chest to massage his heart, working over his nearly lifeless body for hours.

  During the filming of Midnight Cowboy that summer, Viva channeled her Gretel filmmaker role, and, wielding a tape recorder, she never stopped asking everyone on the set, “Say something to Andy, who’s in the hospital.”

  Viva’s big moment in Midnight Cowboy is the party scene where Jon Voight’s hustler Joe Buck arrives and Dustin Hoffman’s tubercular friend Ratso Rizzo negotiates a deal for him to sleep with an uptown matron, played by Brenda Vaccaro. The party might have been screenwriter Waldo Salt’s idea, but it was Michael Childers who enlisted the Warhol troops, including Viva, Ultra Violet from Chelsea Girls, and Paul Morrissey, as well as Hair’s Paul Jabara, to make the trek from downtown way up to the Bronx at the Filmways Studios to act for one hundred dollars a day plus transportation. Not much, but it was seventy-five more than Andy would have paid them.

  Morrissey wrangled a few Factory hangers-on for the party scene. “There were a few around in the back of the crowd and you couldn’t see them. All the professional actors knew how to stay in front of the camera,” said Morrissey.

  According to Childers, he and Morrissey shot an untitled short film in which Ultra Violet enacts being raped by a young blond boy. Schlesinger found it way too graphic, but Childers told him not to worry. The film would be projected over the bodies of the partygoers, and nobody would be able to tell what the hell was going on.

  “It was amazing. The party went on for three, four days,” said Childers. “We weren’t providing drugs.”

  Many of the extras, especially the Factory kids, brought their own pharmaceuticals, especially the amphetamines that helped them stay awake for the long, long shoot. And there were other ways to indulge.

  “It was like a six-day bacchanal. Pot in vast quantities,” said the film’s producer, Jerome Hellman. “And these kids, floating around, fucking in the toilets, fucking in the dressing rooms, fucking in the wardrobe rooms. We had to establish certain characters, so we were worried about people not coming back. Boy, they were back. They couldn’t wait to get back.”

  Even Schlesinger got into the spirit of the Warhol superstars. “Darling, they’re so wonderfully eccentric!” he exclaimed. It was one of the few happy times he experienced on the set of Midnight Cowboy.

  Schlesinger had wanted to make a movie of the male-hustler story ever since a friend had given him the Herlihy novel in 1966. “What attracted me to the character of the cowboy was his basic innocence and naïveté and need for love,” he said. Also, the subject of two men in love “had never been really tackled before,” he added. And also, “The idea of a new look at the city is another reason for wanting to make the film.”

  The British director never really cared for New York City, and as it turned out, he would like Los Angeles even less when he went there for the first time to open his film Far from the Madding Crowd. After an equally downbeat opening for Crowd in Manhattan, Schlesinger met an MGM publicist on his flight to the West Coast for the premiere there. The flack told him, “You’ve got to be terribly careful what you do next. What is this Midnight Cowboy? I don’t like the sound of it. You’ve got to be very careful.”

  Schlesinger had been cautioned before. “It was a book that nobody had wanted to do,” he said of Herlihy’s novel. People were always asking him, “Why are you doing that terrible faggot novel?”

  One of those people was Joseph Janni, who’d produced Darling, Far from the Madding Crowd, and Schlesinger’s two other movies, Billy Liar and A Kind of Loving. Janni called the novel “faggot stuff” and flatly predicted, “This will destroy your career.”

  That’s when Schlesinger approached another producer. “The book had a lot of things against it, especially the sequences of very direct homo-eroticism, but it was a very powerful story,” said Jerome Hellman. “John and I had a very candid conversation . . . and he made it clear he didn’t want to make a gay movie out of it, that he saw it as an oddball love story.”

  After Far from the Madding Crowd received its critical dubbing, MGM wanted nothing to do with Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, and the feeling was mutual after a reader at the studio suggested that Midnight Cowboy might be successful if they turned it into a movie musical for Elvis Presley.

  In the very beginning, things weren’t that much better over at United Artists, especially when the name Sammy Davis Jr. got tossed around as a possibility to play Ratso Rizzo. But that misfire aside, UA was the perfect home for Midnight Cowboy, perhaps the only home. Its president, David Picker, admired Schlesinger’s work, and, even more important, “it was the only studio that would have made the film, because of its tawdry subject matter,” said Picker. It helped that the UA executive had seen Chelsea Girls and charted its success—a success that not only brought moviegoers into the theaters but now whetted their appetite, in Picker’s opinion, for stronger language, more nudity, h
omosexual characters, and drug-related subject matter. He wasn’t alone in that opinion. Noting the box-office grosses for Chelsea Girls around the country, the New York Times reported that “commercial filmmakers here and abroad are planning to use homosexual themes in their movies on the theory that sympathetic treatment of this subject is what lures the audiences.”

  Commercial filmmakers ready to break a few rules had no more sympathetic playground than UA. The studio had a reputation for taking on risky material and then leaving directors alone to make their risky film. But there was a catch. “My partners here, the older men in the company, aren’t going to understand Midnight Cowboy,” Picker told Hellman. “So it’s got to be $1 million, all-in!”

  Where Picker initially mentioned $1 million, the budget soon swelled to $2 million and finally topped out at $3 million. Along the way, there was great consternation from the UA accountants, and while Picker remained committed to the project, as its budget swelled, he asked that Schlesinger, Hellman, and screenwriter Waldo Salt defer much of their salaries in exchange for more profit points. As Hellman recalled, “I was able to keep increasing our percentage because they didn’t think this film would make as much money as it did. At the time, United Artists would rather give us an extra ten percent than an extra ten thousand dollars.”

  Hellman and Schlesinger could have solved their budgetary problem by casting a big star to play the cowboy hustler and, indeed, a big star wanted the role. The director’s Malibu houseguest that winter had been Julie Christie, who showed the script to her new movie star boyfriend.

  “You must be kidding!” Schlesinger said when Christie gave him the news that Warren Beatty wanted to play Joe Buck. “If he were the male hustler, the lines would be out to Fire Island!” According to Michael Childers, Beatty was so keen to play the role he even asked for a “secret screen test” to put all fears to rest. But Schlesinger resisted the temptation: No one would buy Warren Beatty as a prostitute who failed, and instead Schlesinger cast newcomer Jon Voight.

  Midnight Cowboy was Schlesinger’s first made-in-America picture. It’s what attracted him to the project—his dislike of New York City. “It’s grim and it’s more grim than we were able to show,” he later said. All in all, making the film turned into a “miserable” time. In addition to hating the big city, he found himself “always confronted by something worse on the streets than one was putting into the film.” There wasn’t anything in the movie that he hadn’t somehow seen in some way somewhere in America: The man in a business suit lying zonked out in from of Tiffany & Company on Fifth Avenue had actually taken place in front of Bonwit Teller. The boy running a plastic mouse over his mother’s face at an all-night diner was a scene that Schlesinger had witnessed at Canter’s Deli on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles.

  Prior to making the film, Schlesinger worried obsessively about the New York crew. He was accustomed to British crews that he handpicked. United Artists, however, had assembled the grips, gaffers, and other technicians on Midnight Cowboy.

  At the time, Schlesinger was still hiding his sexual orientation from the Hollywood film community. He expressed his fears to his new producer. “He was afraid of an American crew,” said Hellman. “If they found out, would they turn on him, making fag jokes behind his back?”

  Hellman finally told him, “John, we’re the bosses here. If someone’s stupid enough to do that, we’ll fire them.”

  Some of the fag jokes were told to his face. One of the assistant directors took to calling out, in front of the entire crew, “We’re ready, my queen!”

  Schlesinger played along as best he could. “Won’t be long for you, my boy!” he shot back.

  Dustin Hoffman called it a fun production. “There was a lot of frivolity on the set,” he said.

  But the crew’s disrespect wore on Schlesinger. It also presented a real concern: A union member couldn’t be fired for harassing a homosexual, regardless of his position on the film. Even worse, the British director could be sent home to England at any moment, since the U.S. Supreme Court had recently ruled in Boutilier v. Immigration and Naturalization Service that homosexuals were, indeed, “psychopathic,” and gay aliens were subject to deportation.

  Schlesinger was afraid, but he acted fearlessly nonetheless. He further risked exposure by hiring boyfriend Michael Childers as his assistant on Midnight Cowboy.

  Hellman approved the hire. “This is our picture,” he told Schlesinger. “Let’s ride this tiger. Let’s put Michael on the movie and fuck anyone who doesn’t like it.” According to Hellman, Schlesinger was “still taking pains to hide” his sexual orientation. “All of which changed during Midnight Cowboy,” he added. “During the filmmaking, I watched John unfold and come out and declare himself and take his place, and he became more expressive. Part of it was the result of falling in love with Michael, which hadn’t happened to John before.”

  The reality of the crew’s homophobia, however, turned out to be every bit as bad as Schlesinger anticipated.

  “The crew were these Irish and Italians from Long Island. They were a terrible old boys’ network,” said Childers. “You had to be a son or a nephew to get into the union, which was right-wing and horrible.” According to Schlesinger, the crew was bringing in its own equipment and robbing the production. The camera operators even wanted to be paid overtime for watching the rushes.

  “It depressed me,” said Schlesinger, “and finally angered me considerably, because I didn’t think their work was of a high enough standard to warrant that kind of high-handed attitude.”

  Then came the expected homophobia.

  “The technicians were a tough New York group who regarded me with some suspicion. I think they thought we were making a sleazy film,” said Schlesinger.

  Childers felt that the crew worked in a state of “total shock and disgust at the movie.” When they weren’t wishing out loud, saying, “We should be working on a Neil Simon picture,” they rubbed their beer guts and tsked, “We’ve never seen anything like this!”

  What disgusted the crew is what attracted Dustin Hoffman to Midnight Cowboy. After his breakthrough film, The Graduate, Hoffman was looking for a role completely different, since he felt that many reviewers had pigeonholed him as “some nebbish Mike Nichols had found who was like Benjamin Braddock,” he said.

  Nichols, for one, didn’t like the idea that his Benjamin would be playing a sexually ambivalent lowlife for his follow-up film. He even phoned Hoffman to voice his disapproval. “So I hear you’re going to do this thing, you’re going to play the male prostitute,” he said.

  “No, no, I’m going to play the other role,” Hoffman replied.

  Nichols couldn’t believe it—that Hoffman would settle for anything less than the starring role. “I made you a star, and you’re going to throw it all away?” Nichols asked. “You’re a leading man and now you’re going to play this? The Graduate was so clean, and this is so dirty.”

  Dirty, of course, was the allure for Hoffman, who reveled in looking like a bum who walked with a bad limp and sounded as if he were ready to cough up blood. He even took Schlesinger on a tour of Forty-Second Street to let his director know how much he knew about people like Ratso Rizzo. The actor wanted to make his portrayal more cutting-edge than even Schlesinger desired—or knew he could get away with. Hoffman wanted to know, what exactly was Ratso Rizzo’s relationship with the cowboy hustler Joe Buck? They befriend each other on the mean streets of New York, then move into an abandoned building to weather the winter together. (That dank, ramshackle apartment was built on the tiny studios of Filmways in the Bronx.) One day, Schlesinger gave his two actors some direction. “All right, Dustin’s going to be on the floor and Voight’s going to be on the bed.”

  But Hoffman wasn’t buying it. “We’re not just roommates, we’re lovers. Why aren’t we in bed together, they’re lovers.”

  Schlesinger shook his head. “I’m sure they are, but you try and get this film financed.”

  The topic made t
he actor wonder about his director’s own private life. One day, early in the production schedule, Hoffman asked Schlesinger, “Are you married? Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “Oh no, no, no, dear boy,” Schlesinger replied.

  “How come?”

  “I just couldn’t bear the idea of waking up in the morning with a woman next to me.”

  “I see,” said Hoffman. Years later, to Vanity Fair, the actor would comment on Schlesinger’s response as being “marvelously courageous.”

  At the time, Michael Childers saw a different motivation in Hoffman’s questioning, one that had little to do with blind naïveté. “Dustin was prodding,” said Childers. “He knew me, and he knew John and I were living together. I was a friend of his ballet wife, Anne Byrne, whom I’d photographed. Dustin was trying to get John to admit he was a faggot.”

  Schlesinger took a dim view of such provocations, and harbored a long-held theory about young male actors, who he believed were much vainer than their female counterparts. “They also like to create a stir around somebody they know to be gay, playing games with them, wanting me to in a way fall for them, which I certainly didn’t. I felt that I was being tested all the time,” he said.