Sexplosion

by Robert Hofler

  Even though Cammell and Roeg improvised much of Performance on the spot, with the camera rolling, what happened in front of that camera often replicated what was going on behind it. What most participants in the film didn’t know from the get-go is that Cammell intended to put his own private bisexual life up on the screen, as filtered through his deep admiration of the Krays and the Stones. “This ménage à trois, it was part of his scene,” said Lieberson, referring to how Cammell’s life and art intersected in the film. In essence, Jagger played Cammell, with his live-in girlfriends played by Anita Pallenberg and Michèle Breton, who’d never acted in movies before (or since). From there, it got complicated.

  “My first scene was the bedroom scene,” said Pallenberg. She spent the next seven days in bed (and a bath tub) with Jagger and Breton. “Michèle was very nervous.”

  Pallenberg was going with Keith Richards at the time, and while she denied ever having an affair with Jagger, Cammell insisted they were involved and even got Richards to believe it. “Donald could be quite manipulative, even devious,” said Pallenberg.

  Eager to keep an eye on his liberated girlfriend, Richards visited the set regularly, and often parked his Rolls-Royce across the street from the townhouse on Notting Hill’s Powis Square, where most of the movie was shot. “Jagger simply took Anita under the house for sex,” said Cammell. “Keith would come on the set looking for hanky-panky, not realizing that he was standing about three feet above the action.”

  Richards didn’t know. “But I smelled it,” he recalled. “Mostly from Mick, who didn’t give any sign of it, which is why I smelled it. . . . It was like Peyton Place back then, a lot of wife swapping or girlfriend swapping. . . .” It didn’t really matter much who got swapped. During the filming of Performance, Richards was having sex with Jagger’s current girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull.

  Richards never wanted Pallenberg to act in Performance, and her impending affair with Jagger had less to do with his apprehension than his hatred of Donald Cammell, whom he called “a twister and a manipulator whose only real love in life was fucking other people up.” Richards’s character assassination of Cammell didn’t stop there. “Donald was a decadent dependent of the Cammell shipyard family, very good-looking, a razor-sharp mind poised with vitriol,” he continued. “He’d been a painter in New York, but something drove him mad about other clever and talented people—he wanted to destroy them. He was the most destructive little turd I’ve ever met. Also a Svengali, utterly predatory, a very successful manipulator of women, and he must have fascinated many of them.”

  Into this maelstrom of sex and drugs dropped the movie’s one experienced professional actor. While Jagger and Pallenberg essentially played themselves in the film, Roeg and Cammell went far afield to find their Kray-like gangster Chas. James Fox had already compiled an impressive, varied movie résumé, ranging from turns in Joseph Losey’s artful The Servant to George Roy Hill’s campy Thoroughly Modern Millie. Fox was upper-class, his father a theatrical agent. “I’m sure he would be much happier if I appeared in a revival of The Importance of Being Earnest,” Fox admitted, referring to his Performance assignment. He didn’t actually meet the film’s ménage à trois—Jagger, Pallenberg, and Breton—until three weeks into the fourteen-week shoot. For those first few weeks, he stuck to a more completed, less improvised script that included a hit gone bad in which Chas is whipped by two other thugs, whom he in turn tortures and shoots, and a revenge scene that sees Chas pouring acid over his adversary’s limousine after nearly scalping the chauffeur.

  Fox was the consummate professional in his approach to playing Chas. Nicolas Roeg told him to cut his hair like the Krays, and he did. Cammell told him to live in the East End world for a few weeks, and he did. “He literally became a gangster in the name of research,” said Cammell. “He spent evenings in the company of London’s most notorious thugs, to the extent that he actually frightened people.”

  The thugs were the easy part for Fox. Then he started filming his scenes with Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg, who improvised almost every one of her lines. In one typical encounter, Pallenberg sat in bed with Fox and immediately began to threaten his sexuality, saying, “I’ve got two angles, one male and one female. Just like a triangle, see, did you notice?” Later, she asked, “Did you never have female feet?”

  Fox improvised right back. “No, never,” he replied. “I feel like a man, all the time.”

  “That’s awful. That’s what wrong with you.”

  “I’m normal.”

  “How do you feel Turner feels like?” she asked, referring to the Mick Jagger character. “He’s a male/female man.”

  “You degenerate.”

  Although Pallenberg made up the dialogue as she went along, she took her cue from Cammell, who believed that gangsters and rockers inhabited parallel worlds. He’d originally titled his script The Performers because, as he explained, “each of them is a performer, in one sense or another.” It was his concept to bring together “the Neanderthal gangster and the effete yellow-book world of the rock star into one demonic fusion.” They weren’t that far apart, in Cammell’s opinion. “The gangster is really more bisexual and in touch with his feminine side,” he said. Cammell went on to call his film “a provocative love story,” and he wasn’t referring to the two female characters.

  Unlike Fox, Jagger completely embraced the dual sexuality of his character. He wore makeup, wigs, ultrafeminine clothes. He so lived his part that, during filming, he walked the streets in his Performance drag of red lipstick, purple mascara, page-boy wig, silk scarves, and flowing velvet trousers. “Mick is not acting in Performance,” said Cammell. “That is Mick to the teeth.”

  Fox went along with donning Jagger’s transgender attire. He put up with Pallenberg’s taunts. But he flat out refused to do a love scene with Jagger. He also parted ways with Jagger with regard to taking drugs, which to Fox were “basically harmful orally and show a lack of control.” Jagger, on the other hand, had been arrested on drug charges only the year before. Fox not only refused to kiss his male costar; he also refused to consume the hallucinogenic mushrooms that Pallenberg’s character gives Chas, to break down his defenses. (In the finished film, Cammell and Roeg indicate the Chas character’s homosexual thoughts by editing a scene with Fox in which Jagger rolls over in bed next to him only to morph into Michèle Breton right before they kiss.)

  “Imagine this very macho, violent behavior being shattered, once again, under Jagger’s influence,” Cammell said of Fox. “It was perhaps a tragedy that [James] became so traumatized by Jagger’s sexuality that he succumbed to it and ultimately quit acting altogether.”

  Fox, in fact, joined an evangelical sect shortly after he finished filming Performance, and went to South Africa to spread the word of the gospel. Years later, Fox explained his Performance-induced epiphany: “At the time I thought that if you showed something true, then it was valid. But subsequently I’ve thought dramatists and actors and writers have an obligation to their audience. I think there should be restrictions on things which, just because they are true, need not necessarily be valid. After I made Performance, for about a year and a half, I started to try and reform my life. I thought it was a mess. I did start going back to church and I started to read the New Testament.”

  His wasn’t the only on-the-set education. Cammell, Roeg, and their producer Sandy Lieberson were new to the movie-studio process, and instead of carefully editing the first rushes they sent to Warner Bros.–Seven Arts, “We screened everything we had shot,” said Lieberson, “and they saw hours of it. We were giving them an education in our ignorance.”

  The Warners executives didn’t have to watch hours and hours of it. Amid their shock at the amount of violence and female nudity on display, they couldn’t quite grasp the Jagger/Fox relationship. “Were these characters bi?” one vice president asked.

  Cammell didn’t know the American slang for bisexual. “Bi-what?” he asked in his thick Scottish brogue.
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  “I knew we were in trouble then,” said Lieberson.

  One executive complained, “Even the bathwater is dirty in this film.”

  Roeg sniffed, “Well, the water looks that way because they just took a bath.”

  And there were practical marketing concerns. The Warners men thought they were getting a Mick Jagger rock ’n’ roll movie, and from the looks of the rushes he wasn’t anywhere in the first half hour of what might be the finished film, whatever that was going to be. Their dreams of having another Hard Day’s Night vanished in the rushes.

  There was talk of not releasing the movie, and Lieberson soon doubted he’d ever be allowed to produce another. “I knew Seven Arts was angry that their production plans in Britain should have had what was considered a disgraceful start,” he recalled. Also, there was something about Performance he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Even the workers in the film lab refused to edit the movie, and Cammell and Roeg had no choice but to cut it themselves. “This film, for whatever the reasons, was having a tremendous emotional effect on people intimately concerned with it, which couldn’t be countered or contained by rational argument,” said Lieberson. “It was to have the same effect on nearly everyone who saw it. It changed people from relatively reasonable individuals into impassioned denouncers of the evil they claimed it represented. We really began to wonder, had we made such a corrupt film? It was a nightmare.”

  In an attempt to appease the people at Warners, Cammell and Roeg edited out fifteen minutes, most of it sex- and violence-related, but their efforts didn’t help. Warners put Performance on the shelf, where it would remain for more than a year.

  Mick Jagger, however, was able to unleash some of his sexual menace later that year. He and Keith Richards made their song “Sympathy for the Devil” the lead single on the Rolling Stones’ new album, Beggars Banquet.

  MART CROWLEY’S THE BOYS IN THE BAND cost only $9,000 to produce Off Broadway, and it returned that investment every ten days throughout its run in 1968. Variety reported that, in terms of income, it generated the income of a Hello, Dolly! It helped that, while Broadway charged $7.50 to see a play, The Boys in the Band, in a two-hundred-seat theater, upped the ticket price to $10.

  The play might never have happened without Crowley’s Natalie Wood connection, agent Richard Gregson. Ironically, the play’s success was not enough to save Gregson’s agency, London International, which had to be dissolved shortly after The Boys in the Band opened Off Broadway. Natalie Wood was living at the time with her fiancé in London, where he undertook the necessary business measures to close shop. It wasn’t a good year for either of them. The actress’s own career had slid into a self-imposed two-year hiatus from the screen, her 1961 halcyon of Splendor in the Grass and West Side Story yielding a subsequent string of duds like Inside Daisy Clover, This Property Is Condemned, and Penelope, which was quickly followed by her suicide attempt. Wood was officially, chronically unemployed when her agent, Freddie Fields, sent her a script written by a fellow client, an actor-writer named Paul Mazursky, who had ambitions of being a movie director and wouldn’t sell his screenplay about spouse-swapping unless he got to direct it. Mazursky had cowritten Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice with another actor-writer, Larry Tucker, and the two of them had been shopping the script around Hollywood, where they had endured the usual mindless conversations with reluctant studio VPs. Like the executive at National General who told them the screenplay was “too dirty. It’s filthy.”

  “What if I got Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward to play one of the couples?” Mazursky asked.

  “That’s clean,” said the executive.

  Mazursky didn’t know Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, but his agent did know and represent Natalie Wood, and it was Freddie Fields and producer M. J. Frankovich who thought that she and Robert Culp, then starring on TV in I Spy with Bill Cosby, would be big enough household names to make the story “clean.”

  It helped too that, unlike John Updike’s dark tale of Protestant angst in New England, Bob & Carol put a sunny California spin on chronic marital infidelity. Instead of cheating on each other, these glamorous Southland couples would be open about their philandering, testing the bonds of honesty with feel-good buzz words like “groovy” and “let it all hang out.” In place of Updike’s burning-church apocalypse, there would be Natalie Wood in a bikini at a backyard poolside barbecue. If they started production fast, Bob & Carol could easily beat the Wolper Company’s production of Updike’s Couples to the screen. (Regarding the competition, Mazursky later said, “I read all of Updike’s novels, so I must have read Couples. But it wasn’t an influence in any way on my movie.”)

  And it didn’t hurt that, in 1968, as Mazursky put it, “A few new people were getting a crack at things in Hollywood. The business was in a state of chaos. The big pictures were flopping right and left. Then somebody made Easy Rider, and it made a lot of money. The studios were willing to try new directors, as long as the pictures didn’t cost much.”

  Columbia Pictures would let Mazursky direct, as long as his movie cost only $2 million—and starred Natalie Wood, who had been making $750,000 a picture. For Bob & Carol, she would take a big cut, at $50,000, but she would also get 10 percent of the gross.

  Actors, especially ones who have once been major stars, are notoriously fearful of novice directors. But Wood liked the script and she even liked the burly, ebullient, intellectual Mazursky, who flew to London to meet her for tea at Claridge’s. They followed that interview with a long tête-à-tête in Hyde Park. She told him about Gregson and her ex-husband, Robert Wagner, whom she called her “best friend.” And Mazursky told her how Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice had been inspired by a few days that he and his wife, Betsy, spent at the new-age Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, where they’d experienced a “weekend marathon” of couples’ therapy. He’d been intrigued by a Time magazine article titled “The New Therapy,” which was illustrated with a photograph of the seventy-five-year-old psychotherapist Fritz Perls in a hot tub at Esalen with six naked women. It got Mazursky thinking: There might be a movie script somewhere in all those wet cedar barrels up north.

  As Mazursky described his Esalen experience to Wood, “A group of us, all couples, began explaining what we felt about our relationships, and after four hours Betsy became upset. She complained that I didn’t let her breathe and some of the others attacked me.” Wood recognized it immediately as the first scene in his script, which went on to speculate what would happen if a married couple, Bob and Carol, took that let-it-all-hang-out group therapy to the next level and swapped partners with another married couple, Ted and Alice, their best friends.

  Wood’s big question was whether the two couples in Mazursky’s script go through with their plans to swap spouses at the end of the movie. Tucker and Mazursky’s script left that option open.

  “I don’t know. We’ll see what happens,” Mazursky told her. “Some scenes I like to rehearse. Some I don’t.” The orgy, to be or not to be, fell into the latter category.

  Mazursky called Natalie Wood “a studio brat,” with all due affection, and felt it best to surround her with professional stage actors, a couple of whom, Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon, were relative newcomers to the screen. He told Wood’s costars, “Natalie’s never studied a day in her life. You all have studied. Be kind to her. Help her through this.”

  Mazursky also relied on a bit of typecasting with real-life swinger Robert Culp, who knew so much about the current California sex scene that he eschewed a costume designer and used his own wardrobe, which included “outfits with zippers down to the ankle and up to the neck,” noted Mazursky. All those love beads, leather suits, Nehru jackets, and ruffled lace shirts were “hip,” in Culp’s estimation. “I sent away to London for a lot of that stuff,” he bragged.

  Dyan Cannon also considered herself a bit typecast as the uptight Alice, despite having done some of her own new-age psycho experimentation. “Of course I had LSD with Cary Grant,” she said of her
ex-husband, whom she’d divorced a few months earlier and was still fighting in the courts regarding child custody of their baby daughter, Jennifer. That battle had gotten nasty and public. Elliott Gould was well into the last quarter of his marriage to Barbra Streisand, but they were still on good enough speaking terms for her to show up on set to get advice from Natalie Wood on how to secure perks in her movie contract, like trailer size and shrink-visitation rights. “Natalie was one of the first to do all that,” said Cannon.

  It was a happy ensemble, but the big orgy finale weighed on the actors. Mazursky remained mum on what he wanted them to do. “We’ll improvise it,” he kept saying.

  The big day arrived, finally. “There was an air of great expectancy on the set as the foursome arrived,” said Mazursky. “I had ordered a closed set, no visitors, thereby raising the expectation of something very wild and sexual. The actors were mostly giggling nervously. I arranged Natalie, Bob, and Dyan in the king-size bed, sitting up under the covers. They were waiting for Elliott to join them.”

  Gould took longer than usual to exit his trailer that day. Finally, after “a last-minute breath spray and underarm cleanup,” as Mazursky described it, the actor took his place next to Natalie in the bed, and once under the covers he threw off his underwear as directed, even though he had taken the precaution of double-dressing, with “rugby jockey shorts.” Gould “just couldn’t be naked” next to Natalie Wood.