Sexplosion

by Robert Hofler

  The other actors in Midnight Cowboy were less challenging, but a challenge nonetheless.

  Filming on Fifth Avenue, Schlesinger needed to see Jon Voight tail a prospective female client as the two of them passed a bank. “I wanted the bank vault to open, just as he was following a particular woman across the street. That’s all I was really concerned about—the cuing.” Schlesinger was ready to shoot the scene when Voight sent a message via one of the assistants, asking, “What is my motivation?” Schlesinger, stationed with the film crew farther up the street, sent back the reply: “A good fuck and plenty of dollars at the end of it.”

  Then there was Brenda Vaccaro, who had agreed to play her sex scene with Voight in the nude. But after being cast, she had second thoughts about getting naked on camera. “In those days nobody did that. This was one of the first [American films] to do nudity,” Vaccaro said of Midnight Cowboy.

  The actress had other problems, too. As she told costume designer Ann Roth, “Oh my God, I’m not thin, I’m not skinny, I don’t look gorgeous.”

  Schlesinger thought she looked fine. He wanted her naked. “Oh, good God! Everybody thinks I’m doing a blue movie!” he exclaimed. For him, nudity wasn’t a big deal. He’d directed other actresses who’d performed without the protection of clothes. He told Vaccaro a story about shooting Darling: “Julie Christie wore these fucking pasties, and then in the middle of the scene she hated them, so she pulled them off.” Maybe Vaccaro would also have a similar change of mind once they started filming the scene. But she didn’t. Finally, “Well, do what you must,” he told her.

  Voight consented to doing the sex scene in the nude. Almost. A flap of cloth covered his genitals and had to be glued on. “It was a mess,” said Childers.

  Vaccaro played the scene wearing a fox fur, which was Roth’s solution to the problem. Schlesinger ended up loving the costume compromise. “Oh love. Fucked in fox!” he exclaimed. The scene required that Vaccaro’s character taunt Joe Buck for being gay when he couldn’t get an erection. Finally, tired of being called “gay,” the hustler character practically rapes his female client. Schlesinger hand-held the camera over Vaccaro’s face as she writhed to Joe Buck’s violent thrusts. “Come now, darling. Do it now. Come, darling,” he directed.

  In a way, the gay-straight reversal that the scene depicted also played offscreen during the production when Schlesinger and his boyfriend got into a “tiff,” as Michael Childers described it. They’d rented a house at Fire Island Pines for the summer, but Childers was so angry about something his new boyfriend had done that he refused to go one weekend. Instead, Schlesinger took his photographer friend Joe Santorum and Viva. When Schlesinger returned Sunday night, Childers asked him, “So did you have a lovely time?”

  Schlesinger laughed. “We all got stoned and I got so stoned I fucked Viva!”

  “That’s the saddest thing I ever heard,” said Childers.

  It did wonders for Schlesinger’s reputation on the set, however. Viva told everyone, “Absolutely one of the three best fucks I’ve ever had in my life!”

  That veneer of heterosexual respectability faded as soon as Schlesinger came to what was called “the blowjob scene.” It elicited some of the more violent reactions from the crew, which had taken to calling Midnight Cowboy “this faggot film.” The blowjob scene marked Bob Balaban’s entrée to the movies. When his parents asked him about his momentous debut, the twenty-year-old actor told them it was only one scene, with Jon Voight. They’d heard of Voight, who’d appeared in an Off-Broadway revival of A View from the Bridge at around the time Balaban starred in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Of course, they wanted to know all about their son’s scene in Midnight Cowboy with Voight.

  “Well, it’s in a movie. We kind of meet in the bathroom,” he told them.

  “Do you have many lines?” they asked.

  “No, not many lines.”

  “So it’s a walk-on?”

  “Well, at least it’s with the star. I give him a blowjob.”

  And there were other things that had not been seen or even suggested in a mainstream American movie. Although audiences who saw the finished film weren’t always sure what was going on in the film’s flashbacks, Childers offered a behind-the-scenes analysis of what Schlesinger and Waldo Salt intended and what the crew filmed:

  “Joe, the cowboy, was abandoned by his mother and left with his grandmother, but she was a floozy and drinking Jack Daniel’s with another cowboy, and she gave [the young] Joe an enema, which carries over to Joe’s male fear of anal rape from this high school gang of four guys in a convertible who are cruising around looking for trouble and they find Joe with his girlfriend and they rape her and rape him anally,” Childers explained.

  Those flashbacks were filmed at the end of production, after the cast and crew had finished with the New York City locations. Dustin Hoffman, Viva, and the other Warhol superstars had gone on to other pursuits by the time Schlesinger called “Action!” and Jon Voight went running down a Texas road to chase an ambulance. When they’d completed the shot, the actor found his director behind one of the trailers. Schlesinger was shaking uncontrollably. “What’s wrong?” Voight asked.

  “What will they think of this?” Schlesinger asked. “It’s about a dishwasher who goes to New York to fuck a lot of women. What will they think?”

  That fear didn’t let up all through the long, arduous editing process at the historic Brill Building, just north of Times Square. Next door, editors were working on Arthur Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant. The film adaptation of Arlo Guthrie’s song about avoiding the draft was Broadway producer Hillard Elkins’s first foray into the movies, and while he was still busy finishing up production on that movie, Elkins juggled his next venture: a new sex revue that Kenneth Tynan wanted him to produce. Elkins met Michael Childers, who made daily trips to the Brill Building to visit Schlesinger, and he asked if the young photographer was interested in meeting Tynan.

  “I like your photography,” Elkins told him. “There might be something for you with this new show I’m doing with Tynan. It’s called Oh! Calcutta!”

  AS HE CONTINUED TO recuperate at Columbus Hospital, Andy Warhol was both intrigued and stressed by reports regarding Midnight Cowboy. Maybe if he’d accepted John Schlesinger’s offer to play the underground filmmaker in the movie, then he, rather than Viva, would have been getting his silver wig coiffed. Instead, he’d been nearly murdered by Valerie Solanas.

  Curiously, Viva was also having her own violent run-ins. At the closing-night party of the New York Film Festival that September, she found herself roughed up by security guards when they mistook her date’s dance moves for his simulating oral sex on her. Suddenly no one was safe, it seemed, in New York City. Until Andy Warhol’s near-death encounter with Solanas, the Midnight Cowboy party scene with its rape film sounded like something the king of pop art would have found fun. But now, sequestered away in a hospital bed for weeks, it bothered him that his whole persona, scene, shtick, and entourage of superstars were being used without any compensation to him.

  “Why didn’t they give us the money?” he asked Paul Morrissey. “We would have done it so real for them.” Warhol meant the party, not the rape movie.

  Ondine, who played the pope in Chelsea Girls, was one superstar who refused to appear in Midnight Cowboy, out of loyalty to Andy, whom he’d known for years, ever since they met at an orgy and Ondine asked Andy, an inveterate voyeur, to leave the premises if he wasn’t going to actively participate. Ondine wanted nothing to do with John Schlesinger or his big-budget movie. “How dare you accept the $25 a day in blood money to go and make fun of Andy? He’s the reason why you’re even here! Don’t you have any feelings?” said Ondine, unaware that the party extras in Schlesinger’s movie had actually been paid a hundred dollars a day.

  Midnight Cowboy did give Warhol an idea, maybe even two ideas, if both of them didn’t originate with Morrissey. If Schlesinger was going to rip off their world, they could in turn appr
opriate his. Their cowboy movie, shot in January, still languished without a theater. Maybe if they called it Lonesome Cowboys it would be close enough to Schlesinger’s title to goose interest. And better yet, maybe they could make another film, one that would be a portrait of a male hustler, like Midnight Cowboy, and quickly get it into theaters to beat Schlesinger at his own game.

  “I vaguely knew what they were doing with Midnight Cowboy,” said Morrissey. “When I had a chance to do Flesh, I thought, I’ll do something like Midnight Cowboy, but I didn’t know how Midnight Cowboy was handling the subject.”

  Morrissey thought he had a new superstar in this kid who’d appeared briefly in Lonesome Cowboys. Joe Dallesandro wasn’t like the other superstars. He wasn’t weird or show-offy or even gay. In the following decade, the legendary film director George Cukor would say of him, “Joe Dallesandro does some enormously difficult things . . . like walking around in the nude in a completely unselfconscious way.”

  In Morrissey’s Flesh, Dallesandro would be naked a lot in his role as a male prostitute whose bisexual wife needs him to earn two hundred dollars to pay for her girlfriend’s abortion. It wasn’t all acting for Dallesandro, who was raised in foster care after his mother went to the federal penitentiary for interstate auto theft and who supported himself for a time by posing nude for pseudo-gay publications like Athletic Model Guild.

  Dallesandro was never a hustler. But he knew the modus operandi of those who did hustle. “When you’re young and beautiful, you do get a lot of propositions,” he told reporters. “I always said it wasn’t about a hustle. It was about how you got people who wanted to be a part of your life. The pay was that they became a part of your life, even if for a short time.”

  In the hothouse world of the Factory, Dallesandro was a breath of heterosexual air but also someone who never denigrated the homosexuals who flocked around him. “If it hadn’t been for the gay men and how well they treated me, I would have killed somebody,” he claimed.

  Dallesandro actually felt a little sorry for the drag queens that Morrissey cast as women in Flesh, men like Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling, who almost never appeared out of makeup. “I always felt that it is hard enough just wanting to be an actor or an actress,” he said. “What roles can these people do? They can only play a person in drag. For the moment that I had to be with them, why should I burst their bubble? They were women for that moment.”

  Morrissey also cast a few real women as women in Flesh: Geraldine Smith as Joe’s bisexual wife, Patti D’Arbanville as her pregnant girlfriend, Geri Miller as a stripper, Jane Forth as a customer-wife who wants Joe to have sex with her husband. Dallesandro really wasn’t much of an actor, but his broad shoulders created a dramatic V shape that ended in a bubble butt in an age before gyms were as ubiquitous as Citibank branches and Starbucks. He also knew instinctively what not to do.

  “Joe was not an improviser,” said Morrissey. “He was a quiet person, the eye of the storm, and this lunacy going on around him therefore became very dramatic.”

  Andy Warhol described Dallesandro’s appeal even more succinctly. “Everybody loves Joe,” he said.

  Sometimes it seemed everybody at the Factory wanted to see Joe naked. “There was always a reason to take my clothes off,” said Dallesandro. “I was very young. What are we doing? I was uncomfortable.”

  Morrissey filmed Flesh over a period of six weekends at friends’ apartments in New York City. As with Chelsea Girls and the newly titled, and as yet unreleased, Lonesome Cowboys, Warhol gave Morrissey a budget of three thousand dollars, and he got every penny of it back in gossip from the set of Flesh.

  Still stationed at Columbus Hospital, Andy broke out laughing when Geri Miller said how her striptease so turned Joe Dallesandro on that he got aroused and she tied a big bow around his erection. Of course, it was all improvised, like everything in the movie, and Morrissey obliged by keeping the camera running.

  True to plan, Warhol and Morrissey opened their Flesh that autumn at the Garrick Theatre while John Schlesinger continued to edit and fret over Midnight Cowboy. The little picture did very well for itself, playing the Garrick for seven months and grossing an average of $2,000 a week on its $3,000 budget. Where Chelsea Girls offered a couple of seconds of flaccid penis, Flesh gave audiences a few minutes to inspect Dallesandro’s erection, as well as many more minutes of his bare buttocks. Morrissey was surprised that the erection footage didn’t cause censorship problems; maybe it even disappointed him. At his urging, friends phoned the police to complain.

  “He’d have these plants go in and do this. It was just to get all this publicity and coverage, and it worked,” said Dallesandro, who never quite understood all the commotion. “I was pretty amazed, because I couldn’t sit and watch it,” he said of the finished film.

  Like Dallesandro, Morrissey was an odd bird in the Warhol menagerie—but for different reasons. Like Warhol and Viva, he was raised Catholic and proud of it. His conservatism, however, extended beyond mere religious practice, and the Factory stalwarts alternately described him as “a real nine-to-fiver” and “a very typical young man in a hurry.”

  More important, he also didn’t do drugs. Ever. And not only didn’t he do drugs, but he railed against them. “Think of the millions of kids who must have died from drugs in the United States. I never knew anybody who had a relative in the Vietnam War. Yet all those hippies who were screaming against the war were hypocrites,” he used to say. “Don’t let the children be killed by war, but if they’re killed by drugs, it’s OK. The priorities are a bit strange.”

  Regarding the abundance of sex and drugs in Flesh, he didn’t see a contradiction. Morrissey insisted, “I was making fun of people who accepted the hippie life of sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Autumn 1968, Revelry

  That autumn, Andy Warhol finally got around to using his Fuck title. Since Viva and Louis Waldon got on so well in the rape scene from Lonesome Cowboys, which continued to languish without a release date, it was decided that they should copulate for his camera. The result was Fuck, or Blue Movie, a ninety-minute film shot in one day for much less than the usual three-thousand-dollar budget.

  Viva said the film was made, essentially, “to teach Andy,” who “had no private life. In filming as in ‘hanging out’ he merely wanted to find out how ‘normal people’ acted with each other.”

  As usual, the actors’ twenty-five-dollar fee was supplemented with a free meal, in this case, at Casey’s restaurant. But at the last minute, Andy wasn’t so sure that getting a bite after the shoot was such a good idea. Casey’s, after all, wasn’t Max’s Kansas City.

  “Oh no, we can’t go in there,” he warned his entourage. “There’s only two women and there’s eight men. It won’t look good. They’ll think we’re gay.”

  IT WAS THE MOMENT John Schlesinger dreaded most: showing his first rough cut of Midnight Cowboy to the executives at United Artists. Just before he and Jerome Hellman were about to enter the screening room at the West Fifty-Fourth Street Movie Lab, Schlesinger stopped to ask his producer, “Do you honestly believe anyone in their right mind is going to pay to see this rubbish?”

  Maybe their attempt to translate the bucolic barnyard prose of Thomas Hardy, redolent of red ochre and sheep manure, led the makers of the movie Far from the Madding Crowd to seek out dark-alley encounters and urban decadence for their respective follow-up efforts.

  Across the Atlantic that autumn, Schlesinger’s cinematographer on the Hardy adaptation had also begun to realize a career dream: to direct his own film or, as it turned out, to codirect. Although cinematographer Nicolas Roeg and writer Donald Cammell were director-virgins on Performance, the screen debut that excited the Warner Bros. executives wasn’t theirs but rather Mick Jagger’s.

  In an effort to replicate the Beatles’ movie successes, Warners put the Rolling Stones’ lead singer on payroll for a quarter million dollars a year, as the company’s so-called “youth advi
ser.” Warners was looking to replicate the success of Help! and A Hard Day’s Night. Instead, what they got was Performance, a film filled with so much kinky sex and violence that the studio initially deemed it unreleasable.

  Jagger and the Stones had been offered a Terry Southern–scripted, pre–Stanley Kubrick screen adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange, about a gang of thugs in futuristic London. But the rocker, who had no interest in making his screen debut alongside his bandmates, was looking for something “a bit more solo,” said the Scottish writer Donald Cammell, a close friend of Jagger.

  Cammell, as it turned out, had more than a bit of Burgess in him when it came to wanting to write about Old Blighty’s gangland, and was as chummy with Jagger as he was the Krays, Reggie and Ronnie, who were the kingpins of organized crime on London’s East End in the 1950s and 1960s. Cammell’s idea for a Mick Jagger movie was to bring the permissive druggy world of the rockers together with the violent druggy world of the gangsters.

  “In Britain, the underworld was typified by the Krays. The Krays were very macho, very dangerous, and rather glamorous,” he enthused. “I idolized those guys—their passion, their energy. My whole life was hanging out with those people in the dockland.” Added to the mix was Cammell’s deep admiration for Vladimir Nabokov’s 1936 novel, Despair, about a man who confronts his doppelganger and is destroyed. In Cammell’s version, the Stones would meet the Krays and both would be destroyed.

  Cammell called his two male characters “the lover and the beast,” although it’s difficult to tell which is which because the drugged-out rocker of the film, who lives with two equally drugged-out girlfriends, often changes places with the violence-prone gangster, who’s on the lam after a hit gone bad. Warners, for its part, didn’t much care about the story as long as it starred Mick Jagger. It helped, too, that practically every major participant on the film—Jagger, Cammell, Roeg, and producer Sandy Lieberson—were with Creative Management Agency, which had recently entered into a deal to represent the Warners’ TV division. It was such a cozy relationship, at least in the beginning, that no one really noticed there wasn’t much of a script. “Just a few pages that Donald had written,” said Nicolas Roeg. “We would rehearse through the night sometimes, and out of that would come changes.” Warners cared about only one thing: They had a movie starring Mick Jagger. What could go wrong?