Sexplosion

by Robert Hofler

  After the festival screening, he and his four stars walked across the Lincoln Center plaza for a champagne reception on the mezzanine promenade of the New York State Theater. Reporters continued to follow the story of a big studio movie opening the festival. Andrew Sarris, film critic for the Village Voice and a member of the festival program committee, avoided responding directly to the choice of Bob & Carol. He instead said, “When you first start picking films you just look for things you can stay awake through.”

  Natalie Wood, who wore her hair in a multicolored chignon, kept telling everyone, “I feel nervous, yes, nervous.”

  Mazursky wasn’t nervous. “Mayor John Lindsay was there. I was flying. It was a big party,” he recalled.

  At around 11 P.M., the director took a break from handshaking and air-kissing when he saw Columbia’s publicist Jack Atlas walk across the vast marble promenade. The flack didn’t look happy. Mazursky noticed a rolled-up copy of the New York Times under his arm. “Vincent Canby didn’t like it,” Atlas told him.

  Mazursky wondered how that could be. The audience’s reception had been terrific. “I went way down,” said Mazursky.

  The next morning at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, Mazursky took time to fully digest Canby’s review, which said the film “cops out” by not having the foursome go ahead with their orgy.

  The director was in the midst of cursing Canby when the phone rang. He answered it.

  “Hello, I’m Pauline Kael,” was the reply.

  “Oh, I know you,” Mazursky blurted into the receiver, even though he’d never met The New Yorker’s film critic.

  “I just wanted you to know that Vincent Canby is a moron, and you’re going to get great reviews,” Kael informed him. She went on to name a number of very prominent film critics who liked the film, including herself.

  “It made me feel good,” said Mazursky, who in the coming months would feel even better when the $2 million–budgeted Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice went on to gross $30 million, 10 percent of which went to Natalie Wood, the most she would ever make for appearing in any film.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, Lions Love screened at the festival, and at film’s end Viva accepted the audience’s obligatory applause in Alice Tully Hall. Her arms raised to soak in their perfunctory admiration, she then doubled over with laughter. She wanted to tell them, “It’s nice to be here this year under such auspicious circumstances—after having been beaten up last year,” but she resisted the impulse. She didn’t want to embarrass her director, Agnès Varda. The audience’s reaction reminded her of how Johnny Carson and his studio audience had mockingly laughed when she mentioned her two upcoming movies, Midnight Cowboy and Lonesome Cowboys—as if she could only star in movies with the word “cowboy” in the title.

  But now the laugh was on Johnny and his company. Midnight Cowboy had quickly turned into one of the year’s most popular movies.

  At the festival, Viva told reporters that her dream role was the one Katharine Hepburn got to play in The Lion in Winter. When reporters sneered, she ended the interview, but not before adding that she was tired of appearing nude and having to make up her own lines in Andy Warhol movies. Fuck, or Blue Movie, had opened earlier that summer at the Garrick Theatre, home to so many Warhol opuses, and if its title weren’t controversial enough, Warhol courted more outrage with his opening-night party for Fuck at Max’s Kansas City, where he acted as father of the bride to Jackie Curtis, who married Stuart Lichtenstein in a mock wedding ceremony.

  Variety was one of the few publications to review the movie. “Warhol makes even sex a bore,” wrote the newspaper’s anonymous critic, who went on to note that thirty-five minutes of Fuck was devoted to just that, with the remaining screen time spent on Viva and Louis Waldon as they talked about taxes and Vietnam, among other things. This dialogue, Variety opined, was supposed to be “socially redeeming,” to inoculate the film from being busted by the cops.

  The cops didn’t read Variety, and seized the Fuck print anyway. They also arrested the Garrick’s theater manager, projectionist, and ticket seller for possession of obscene materials. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed with the lower courts. Fuck was obscene.

  Since the film had cost two thousand dollars, Andy hoped he could get some of that money back by releasing the movie as a book, complete with photos and dialogue, by Grove Press, famous for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer, among other long-censored titles.

  Not everyone thought the book was such a good idea. When Viva threatened legal action, Andy gave her two thousand dollars to shut her up. She shut up, except to say, “I was always a cheap date.”

  Viva never appeared in another Warhol movie.

  VIVA, AS IT TURNED out, needed to appear in Andy Warhol movies a lot more than Andy Warhol needed Viva to appear, naked or clothed, in his movies. There was always another superstar lurking around somewhere. There were even a few who weren’t Warhol superstars who claimed to be.

  During a run in the Off-Off-Broadway play Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit, Haroldo Santiago Danhakl found himself perpetually covered in glitter to play a character named Cuckoo the Bird Girl, a moniker that didn’t show half the creativity of his own made-up name, Holly Woodlawn. The name Holly came from Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and since so many female superstars in Warhol’s stable hailed from massive family fortunes—Baby Jane Holzer, Edie Sedgwick—the name Woodlawn referenced being heir to the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

  Neither Paul Morrissey nor Andy Warhol actually saw Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit, which played an old funeral parlor on West Forty-Third Street, but they did see a profile of Holly Woodlawn in Gay, an underground newspaper, in which the person now known as Holly Woodlawn pontificated rather convincingly about being a Warhol superstar. “Intrigued by my boldness,” the actor reported, Morrissey cast her, sight unseen, in Trash. It began with his phone call: “Hi, Holly. Listen, we’re doing a movie this weekend and I was wondering if you’d like to be in a scene? Can you be at my place this Saturday at one o’clock?”

  Casting a transvestite in a lead real role was audacious—and Morrissey’s not having met Holly Woodlawn was the least of it. Cross-dressing remained a crime in New York City. Or as Woodlawn put it, “If you were wearing women’s clothes, you were arrested. If you were wearing mascara, they could put you in jail.”

  Holly Woodlawn soon found herself in the basement of Morrissey’s brownstone on East Sixth Street, fucking herself with a beer bottle. The beer bottle was supposed to be a substitute for her boyfriend Joe, played by Joe Dallesandro of Flesh fame, who couldn’t get it up due to his heroin addiction.

  “Morrissey was very anti-drugs,” said Dallesandro. “That’s why he did the film.” Morrissey saw nothing romantic about getting stoned. He hated what drugs did to people, and he hated its glorification in the recently released Easy Rider and at that summer’s Woodstock festival, which he condemned. “ ‘Three days of love and peace,’ they said. Like hell. It was like the Nuremberg rally, with drugs,” he railed.

  He also despised the welfare system, something he knew a lot about, having worked as a social worker before he met Warhol. In Trash, Holly Woodlawn impersonated a woman who fakes a pregnancy to get on the government dole.

  Woodlawn had no idea of Morrissey’s moral code. As a director, Morrissey didn’t believe in telling actors what to do. He didn’t care about giving them motivation. That Woodlawn liked welfare and drugs only made her more believable as the character. Morrissey didn’t give much in the way of direction, except to say, “Stop the Method moping—just talk! And whatever you do, don’t smile unless you don’t mean it!” And besides, he didn’t have much time to chat, since Trash was being filmed in only six days, strung out over various Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

  “We never filmed one day after another,” said Woodlawn. “After Paul saw the rushes of an earlier scene, he thought up the following one.”

  Showing the daili
es was an excuse for a party at the Factory. After one such rush party, Sylvia Miles from Midnight Cowboy saw Holly Woodlawn at Max’s Kansas City. “Holly!” she called out. “I just saw rushes at the Factory and you are marvelous!”

  But then came the rushes with the beer bottle. Woodlawn thought, “Oh, Lord. What have I done to myself? I was so humiliated. There I was with my ass to the wind, having an orgasm with a beer bottle! Just the thought of it made me shrivel, but what made it even more embarrassing was that people actually thought my beer bottle charade was real!”

  People at the Factory asked the strangest questions. Like “Didn’t it hurt?” and “Weren’t you afraid?”

  As Woodlawn put it, “If they had paid attention, they would have noticed the shot where my panties show, thus blowing the whole illusion.”

  The other big illusion was the more obvious: This superstar never possessed a vagina.

  WITH HIS NEW MOVIE magazine Interview, Andy Warhol dreamed of getting free tickets to screenings and, perhaps, becoming an arbiter of the Hollywood scene, even though he hardly ever visited, much less worked, there. But he heard things—like what his good friend pop artist Roy Lichtenstein was telling him about Myra Breckinridge the movie. Lichtenstein, who did for cartoon strips what Andy did for soup cans, had recently worked on the ad campaign for a little British movie called Joanna, in which Genevieve Waite changed costumes dozens of times to portray a waif lost in the moral vacuum of swinging London. Pop singer Michael Sarne directed, and the film had turned into a sizable hit, even after Gore Vidal dismissed it as “forty commercials looking for a product” when the powers at Twentieth Century Fox rejected his two—count ’em, two—Myra Breckinridge screenplays and hired Sarne to write, as well as direct, the movie version. Over lunch at the Plaza hotel, Vidal let his displeasure be known not only to Sarne and the film’s producer, Robert Fryer, but Fox’s top executives David Brown and Richard Zanuck. “I am convinced by what I have read that the next thing I will hear is that Fox is in receivership!” Vidal screamed at his four lunchmates.

  Sarne told this story to Lichtenstein, who told it to Warhol, who knew all about the Myra Breckinridge movie because his superstar Candy Darling had tested for the lead role and been rejected. Andy told Sarne that the movie looked to be a big disaster. “Oh, just leave it alone,” he whined.

  Frankly, Sarne wasn’t that keen on Myra Breckinridge. He didn’t think much of the novel. When a friend gave him a well-worn copy, the book automatically opened, he recalled, “in the middle at this well-thumbed page, where this sodomy scene is going on. And I’m reading about this dildo going into the backside of some young guy, and I’m thinking: Are they serious, the William Morris Agency, Twentieth Century Fox . . . ?”

  But after Joanna, Michael Sarne was hot. And Gore Vidal was suddenly cold, despite the nine hundred thousand dollars Fox had paid him for the rights to film his novel. Vidal’s two scripts, in Richard Zanuck’s opinion, “lacked that touch of craziness and zaniness that his very idea evoked. It wasn’t quite on the page. It had to be told in as outrageous and bizarre a way as the book itself.”

  In one of its attempts to bang the closet door loudly, Time magazine offered another, very speculative analysis of why the original author wasn’t up to the movie job: “Perhaps because of his embarrassment over his novel’s exquisite self-revelations, Vidal failed in two efforts to bring off a light, witty scenario,” the newsweekly prophesied.

  Sarne’s winning concept, according to Zanuck and Brown and almost nobody else, was to have Myra’s sex change be nothing more than Myron’s bad dream. Which could also describe the cast that Fox had assembled for the picture.

  Mae West, age seventy-six, came out of retirement to play the horny agent Leticia Van Allen. She took the job for a variety of reasons: Her spiritual adviser told her to do it. The film shot on the Paramount lot a few blocks from her home in the Ravenswood Apartments. (She’d recently turned down Federico Fellini’s offer to play Nero’s mother in Fellini Satyricon, since she had no desire to travel to Rome or play a character over the age of twenty-six.) She could write her own lines in Myra Breckinridge. The legendary Edith Head would limit her costume palette to black and white. Fox was paying her $350,000. And least of all, “I never could resist an English accent,” said Mae West, referring to Sarne’s voice.

  Mae West’s first job as her own screenwriter was to change the name of her character from Leticia to Letitia. It was, she said, “too choice an opportunity to let it get away.”

  Besides Candy Darling, at least half a dozen other transvestites were tested and rejected, and stars ranging from Elizabeth Taylor to Angela Lansbury to Anne Bancroft passed on the project. Which left it to Raquel Welch to say things like, “I understand Myra thoroughly, I’ve always identified with her.” In addition, the twenty-eight-year-old actress thought that a complex character like Myra Breckinridge represented her best shot at being taken seriously as an actress after posing in a bearskin bikini in 1966’s One Million Years B.C. and wrestling for screen time with ex–football star Jim Brown in the recent 100 Rifles. That bit of interracial sex play produced a mildly risqué photo for the “People” page of Time magazine, but did little else for the actress’s career. Looking back at the end of the 1960s, Welch philosophized, “I was anointed the sex symbol of that era, and I was so socially, politically incorrect. This was the era of girls burning their bras, taking off their makeup. The whole shift in the roles, they were changing.”

  There could be no bigger change than transsexualism, and without the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight Raquel Welch considered Gore Vidal’s Myra the perfect send-up of that pesky sex-symbol image of hers. Director Michael Sarne embraced the choice. He opined, “She has a marvelously artificial way of acting. And you could totally believe that she was a sex change in a mad sort of way . . . to me she fitted kind of stylistically into my pop-art gallery. And Mae West fit into that, too: the pose, the walk—‘I’m pop art, I’m a Marvel comic.’ ”

  Sarne also approved of director John Huston to play Buck Loner, although, even before production began, he made the mistake of calling the famed director of The African Queen and The Maltese Falcon an “old hack” in the press. Even more controversial was his and producer Robert Fryer’s decision to cast film critic Rex Reed as Myron, because, even though he’d never acted in the movies, Reed did occasionally appear on TV, “camping about, criticizing movies,” said Sarne. Those performances were good enough for him.

  But Fox ultimately rejected Sarne’s script, too, and instead went with one written by David Giler, who would go on to write the Alien franchise. Until those sci-fi hits arrived, it didn’t really make much difference which script was being used, because Mae West was writing her own lines and Rex Reed had script approval regarding every scene in which he appeared. One of Reed’s first chores was to tell everybody that he wasn’t playing the following scene: “I was supposed to run naked down Wall Street at midnight, chased by the entire New York police force. When I get to the foot of the Stock Exchange, I look up and, instead of the lady with the scales, there is Raquel with a machete in her hand. She proceeds, of course, to castrate me in front of thousands of people—but instead of blood and genitalia, out come rhinestones, pearls, rubies and sapphires.”

  Reed let me it be known, “No power on earth could get me to play that scene.”

  What the film critic agreed to was a kind of Danny Kaye/Walter Mitty–type fantasy movie in which his character “Myron, instead of undergoing a sex change, would be involved in an accident and dream that he was the alter ego of Myra Breckinridge, giving advice to her. The two of them would be living together at Chateau Marmont and there would be lots of sex between them: I’d be a sort of carnal Jiminy Cricket to Raquel’s erotic Pinocchio. I didn’t object too strenuously to that,” Reed reported. “Under no circumstances was I interested in playing a homosexual who has an operation to make him into a man,” he added.

  Again, it was Time magazine’s responsibil
ity to call into question yet another man’s masculinity, in this case referring to “the epicene Rex Reed,” who “regularly breaks up the crew with his lavender drawl,” as if anyone’s voice ever spouted color.

  Much to his shock, there were limits to Reed’s script-approval power. When he refused to play the scene as written—he wakes up in surgery and screams, “Where are my tits?”—David Brown broke out the boxing gloves. “I’ll use another actor’s voice and have the offending words reverberate throughout the hospital corridors!” Brown ordered.

  During the filming, Sarne enjoyed his conversations with Brown and Zanuck, especially those talks that involved Zanuck asking, “How you going to shoot the rape scene? How do you show the dildo?”

  Which kind of perturbed Sarne. “It was like a boys’ night out, you know, all the time,” he recalled.

  The women involved, however, weren’t so happy, and they weren’t happy almost right from the very beginning. Mae West claimed never to have heard of Raquel Welch. When the two stars finally met, Mae reported back to Rex Reed, her confidant on the set, “She’s a sweet little thing, but no real women would play this part.”

  And it didn’t bolster Raquel’s esteem that Mae got a larger dressing room or that her costumes, by Theadora Van Runkle, were red and blue and never the flashier chiaroscuro of her costar’s, or that Sarne quickly took to calling her “Old Raccoon,” or that David Giler told the producer, “She looks like a drag queen.” More than her director’s direction, Raquel despised Giler’s screenplay, which caused her to break down in tears several times. She even asked John Huston for his help in the script department.

  “Darling, don’t you worry about a thing,” he told her. “It’s just a movie, it’s only a movie.”

  Finally, the actress took it upon herself to start writing memos to the producer. She thought the rape scene should begin with her wearing a gorilla costume, like Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus, and the rape should end, she wrote, with “a wild frenzy dance, symbolic of the orgiastic proportions Myra is experiencing at this time.” And she added, “We must be cognizant of the fact that today’s audiences have already seen Curious Yellow and Sister George and they are going into this film hoping to see something outrageous, which will satisfy them without being vulgar.”