Sexplosion

by Robert Hofler

  Regarding a film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, Burgess had been here before, and not only with Terry Southern but with the Rolling Stones, who briefly toyed with the idea of playing the “droogs” under the direction of Nicolas Roeg. Then Ken Russell was going to direct it, but he started work instead on an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun. If Burgess kept track of these things, and he didn’t when it involved other people’s novels, he would have known that the Devils project had also run into deep trouble that year.

  Just as Stanley Kubrick readied A Clockwork Orange for the cameras, Ken Russell traveled to New York City to help promote Women in Love. He chatted up a lot of the local critics and journalists, but what he really wanted to do was talk to the UA executives about progress on his new film about a bunch of crazy nuns. It was not an unknown story. In 1960, John Whiting had adapted Huxley’s novel into a play with the more marquee-friendly title The Devils, and now Russell wanted a crack at turning this seventeenth-century tale into a movie. It appealed to his macabre sense of the outrageous: A real-life hunchbacked nun, Sister Jeanne, makes false claims of being possessed by Satan as a result of her fantasizing sex with Father Grandier. The nun’s exorcism, which extends to include her fellow sisters, quickly turns into something of a tourists’ sideshow to distract the citizens from losing their political independence. Or as Russell would explain the nuns’ treatment by the state, “It’s as though they’d been exploited to the absolute blasphemy of their religion, which is what the authority wanted and led to the destruction of their city.”

  Glenda Jackson had starred in Russell’s two previous films, Women in Love and the yet-to-be-released Music Lovers, a biography of Tchaikovsky, and he wanted her for The Devils, to play Sister Jeanne. She was intrigued, and especially liked Huxley’s epilogue, not included in Whiting’s play, which told the story of what happened to Sister Jeanne after Grandier was burned at the stake and the walls of Loudun came tumbling down.

  As Russell told it to Jackson, “Sister Jeanne and Sister Agnes went on a jaunt all over France and were hailed with as much fervor as show business personalities and pop stars are received today. . . . She became very friendly with Richelieu, the King and Queen wined and dined her, and she had a grand old time. When she died . . . they cut off her head and put it in a glass casket and stuck it on the altar in her own convent. People came on their knees from miles around to pay her homage.”

  Alas, Russell’s script was too long, and he had no choice but to stick to Whiting’s ending. Jackson read the finished screenplay—the one without her head in a box—and informed her director, “That’s not the way you told it to me.”

  Maybe it was the deletion of the epilogue that caused her to say no. Or the thought of making love, again, to the garlic-eating Oliver Reed, whom Russell wanted to cast as Father Grandier. Or, “I was worried about playing another neurotic, sex-starved lady, albeit a nun,” Jackson later said. Anyway, she said no.

  So, ultimately, did United Artists. There’s never a good time for bad news, but the timing could not have been worse. During his New York press chores for Women in Love, Russell phoned a friend at UA. The friend was undergoing a divorce, and between calls to his attorney, he told Russell. “Look, I’ve got some bad news for you. We’re not doing The Devils anymore. Excuse me, this is urgent,” he said, switching back to his attorney. “See you around.”

  Russell believed that a higher-up at United Artists, after approving the project, finally got around to reading his script and freaked out at all the sex and violence involving Roman Catholic nuns and priests.

  It didn’t get any higher up than the UA president, David Picker, who didn’t feel there was “a censorship problem” with The Devils. Rather, “Because we gave creative control to the filmmakers at UA, I felt The Devils material, in the direction Ken was going with the content, it wasn’t going to work for us. It was more of a risk than I wanted to take.”

  When Russell got the rejection over the phone, “I landed on my ass on Broadway,” he recalled. He also canceled his remaining Women in Love interviews, flew home to England, and started looking for another actress and studio to make The Devils.

  Kubrick, never having left Old Blighty, was having slightly better luck with his film adaptation. He completed his screenplay of A Clockwork Orange that spring after only a few weeks of writing, and while there had been a flurry of telegrams to Anthony Burgess to discuss the project, Kubrick didn’t much like collaborating anyway. He saw no reason to meet the novelist. As Kubrick put it, “Whatever Burgess had to say about the story was said in the book.” Kubrick had already read Burgess’s own screenplay for A Clockwork Orange and rejected it, just as he had rejected Terry Southern’s adaptation without so much as a phone call to his Dr. Strangelove screenwriter. Instead, he had an assistant send a rejection letter to Southern. It read in full: “Mr. Kubrick has decided to try his own hand.”

  Burgess did not greet the news of Kubrick’s screenplay with great joy. As he recalled in his memoir, “I feared, justly as it turned out, that there would be frontal nudity and overt rape.” He’d seen Scandinavian pornography and some of the new American films, which “considered themselves antiquated and reactionary if they did not use ‘fuck’ and show fucking. I foresaw a dangerous situation for myself and I was right to do so,” he wrote.

  But it didn’t matter what he thought or cared or feared. Burgess had sold his movie rights to A Clockwork Orange years ago, and production on the film was set to begin that autumn regardless.

  JUNE 24 SAW THE premiere of Myra Breckinridge on the East Coast and the premiere of Catch-22 on the West Coast. It was not a good day for the movies.

  Now that Mike Nichols’s résumé included the critical and box-office failure of Catch-22, critics charged that he suffered from the post-sophomore slump. True or not, he was no longer quite the untarnished success story that he had been when Jules Feiffer first sent him his Carnal Knowledge script. Still, “Nothing was a difficult sell,” said Nichols. “After The Graduate, I could have done the phone book, but had no desire.” Besides, his Graduate producer, Joseph E. Levine, loved Feiffer’s script. “Levine thought it was dirty and he loved that,” added Nichols. “He just wanted to make money.”

  Nichols cast Candice Bergen as the girlfriend who beds both male leads, Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel. In the wake of Catch-22, the actress didn’t read those reviews or the Variety box-office charts, and remained a dedicated fan of the director and his new film.

  “From the moment it was announced, there was a sense that something special would follow, an eagerness to see what Mike Nichols would do next,” she wrote in her memoir. “There was some unspoken honor attached to being part of this film, a feeling of privilege.”

  The other female lead role went to Ann-Margret, who after a series of Kitten with a Whip–style roles had to audition and do a screen test to secure the role of the passive Bobbie, a character who attempts suicide to help persuade Nicholson’s playboy into marrying her. For the audition, the actress played the scene where her Bobby meets Nicholson’s Jonathan for the first time. Over the restaurant table, her swooping décolletage upstages her amateur palm-reading.

  Nichols had her do the scene four different ways, playing essentially four different characters. After a couple of tries, he suggested, “OK, do it as an airline hostess would do it.” The one he liked best was how “a tease” would do it.

  But even then the Bobbie role wasn’t quite hers.

  After the audition, there was a screen test. Nichols visited Ann-Margret’s dressing room beforehand. “You know what’s required of this part?” he asked.

  “Yes, it’s frightening,” she replied.

  But Nichols didn’t mean soul-bearing. He had to explain, “You’re going to have to reveal yourself—take off your clothing—in the movie. You’ve read the script. Obviously, nudity is integral to playing Bobbie. Will you be able to do that?”

  “If I get the part, yes.”

&
nbsp; She did, and Nichols promised that her nude scenes would be semiprivate affairs with only himself, Nicholson, a soundman, and a cameraman present.

  Nichols thought he had the right cast. Jules Feiffer wasn’t so sure. He wasn’t sold on Jack Nicholson, because “here was this guy with a kind of hillbilly, Henry Fonda–ish drawl. Jack was good, but I didn’t really get the message. I couldn’t see him in the part of Jonathan, who I imagined as a Jewish boy from the Bronx.”

  Nichols told Feiffer, “Believe me when I say he’s going to be the most important actor since Brando.”

  Before filming began in Vancouver, Nichols scheduled two weeks of rehearsals, but left it to Feiffer to help Nicholson with some of the script’s slang. A Catholic boy from New Jersey, the actor didn’t know how to pronounce the Yiddish word for “penis,” which in popular parlance had come to mean “jerk” but not so long ago had gotten Lenny Bruce arrested on the West Coast “by a Yiddish undercover agent who had been placed in the club several nights running to determine if my use of Yiddish terms was a cover for profanity,” as Feiffer explained.

  Nicholson kept saying “smuck” or “schmook.”

  “I had to give Jack ‘schmuck’ lessons,” noted Feiffer.

  Right from the beginning, it was an easy shoot. “We were finished shooting by three or four o’clock in the afternoon and we’d go to a Japanese restaurant and Jack would have some stewardess,” said Nichols.

  Also filming in Vancouver that September was Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. The film’s producer, David Foster, invited the Carnal Knowledge cast for a get-together at the house he’d rented in Vancouver.

  “It was this wild party,” said Foster. “And it got to be scary. Everyone was stoned out of their minds. It was insane.”

  Nicholson had never met Beatty, and as the women at the party swarmed around the six-foot-two actor, Nicholson was in awe of this other, taller actor. “Now that’s what a movie star is supposed to look like!” he told Feiffer.

  Feiffer introduced the two men. In time, they would become close friends; they were already practically neighbors, Nicholson having just rented a house up on Mulholland Drive near Beatty’s place. And in time, he would dub Beatty “the pro” for the way he handled not only women but the studio executives.

  But that night at the party in Vancouver, it was Beatty who expressed his admiration for his future friend’s movie acumen. With Easy Rider his only major film credit as an actor, Nicholson had somehow already gotten Columbia Pictures to bankroll his Drive, He Said, which he wrote, directed, and produced. At that point in his career, Beatty had only produced one film, Bonnie and Clyde. He hadn’t yet directed anything, and while he contributed to the McCabe & Mrs. Miller screenplay, Altman made sure he got no credit there. Nicholson’s Drive, He Said was the kind of film that Beatty wanted to make—one that tapped into the political zeitgeist of the times. Its story of two college students and their problems with the army’s draft intrigued a hard-core liberal like Beatty. Nicholson told him that when he wasn’t acting in Carnal Knowledge, he could be found editing Drive, He Said on weekends.

  The drug-taking at the Foster party spooked Mike Nichols, who didn’t want it to infect his production. Nicholson was well-known for being a major pothead, and his character in Easy Rider only advertised that fact. He even bragged, “I was one of the first people in the country to take acid.”

  In 1970, people openly smoked marijuana in Vancouver; the police there were more concerned about the city’s rampant heroin traffic than a little grass dealing. So it was a small thing for Nichols to ask his cast that they all stop smoking the weed. As Nicholson explained, “Mike felt that there would be more vitality, more ability to get with the juvenile factor, especially in the earlier college sequences.”

  If Nicholson stopped indulging, Ann-Margret started, turning herself into the pill-popping sex object Bobbie. She put on weight—not all of it intentional. “I appeared puffier, fuller. Unable to sleep at night, I took pills to knock me out. I returned from the set, wrapped myself in [a] bathrobe, and didn’t leave the hotel room until I was needed on the set. Sometimes that was days,” the actress reported.

  Her life assumed an eerie parallel to Feiffer’s zonked-out character, especially when her Bobbie character complains, “I’m already up to fifteen hours a day [in bed], pretty soon it’s gonna be twenty-four.” Making Carnal Knowledge pushed her into “a depressive stupor fuelled by pills and alcohol,” she admitted.

  It could have been worse. For her nude scenes, Nicholson also stripped to keep her company. He’d say, “All right, here comes Steve! Get ready!” and then throw off his robe.

  “He would make such a fool of himself that everybody else was cool,” said Nichols.

  In the end, Nichols kept Ann-Margret’s nude scenes and cut Nicholson’s. “I’m happy to say,” said Nichols, who had a reason for his double standard regarding nudity. “I wanted the film to be entertaining as long as it could be,” he explained. “I didn’t want the audience to be looking when the trap is sprung. I wanted them to be thinking about something else, Ann-Margret’s top, for instance. The more I could get them to look at her, the more they would be complicit in what happens to her.”

  Nichols never stopped working on the script with Feiffer. After rushes each day, they’d discuss what had just happened, what was going to happen next. Feiffer looked forward to shooting the scene in which Bobbie pleads with Jonathan to marry her. She wants a life, she wants a wedding ring, she wants children. Her demands cause him to explode, and he calls her “a ball-busting, castrating son-of-a-cunt bitch.”

  Rereading those words, Nichols suddenly had a problem. As Feiffer told it, Nichols thought that Jonathan’s conduct was “too repellent for an audience to stomach. They would recoil from the character and never get back into the movie.” The language was much stronger than even Nichols’s first screen effort, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Most audiences had never heard the words “a ball-busting, castrating son-of-a-cunt bitch” in a movie theater, the word “cunt” being the real showstopper.

  It was Feiffer’s favorite scene, and he didn’t want to see it cut. He recalled a conversation he’d had with his friend Lillian Hellman regarding Carnal Knowledge. She wanted to know what it was about, and he told her, “It’s a picture about men’s hatred of women. All heterosexual men hate women.”

  “You’re talking about homosexuals,” Hellman corrected.

  “No. Homosexuals love women. And heterosexuals hate women.”

  Feiffer felt he needed the “ball-busting, castrating son-of-a-cunt bitch” to make his point about straight men’s innate dislike of women.

  Nichols eventually agreed. “I guess we have to shoot it . . . because that’s what would happen,” he said.

  As the two men debated over the “ball-busting” speech in Carnal Knowledge, the National Organization for Women, founded only four years earlier, held the Women’s Strike for Equality to protest unequal pay and the lack of abortion rights. Twenty thousand women gathered in New York City and elsewhere, the largest protest of its kind.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Autumn 1970, Arrests

  In the late 1890s, Oscar Wilde said that homosexuality was “the love that dare not speak its name.” In the late 1960s, Mike Nichols called it “the vice that won’t shut up.”

  Holly Woodlawn fretted over what she’d wear to the October 5 world premiere of Trash at Cinema II on Third Avenue in Manhattan. The rushes, especially her scene making love to a beer bottle, had delighted guests at the Factory, and when she went to Max’s Kansas City on South Park Avenue and made her way to the back room, with Dan Flavin’s huge neon sculpture overhead casting a red inferno glow over the leather booths, Holly Woodlawn was a star. Or, at least, she was a superstar.

  “I felt like Elizabeth Taylor!” she reported. “Little did I realize that not only would there be no money but that your star would flicker for two seconds and that
was it. But it was worth it, the drugs, the parties, it was fabulous. You live in a hovel, walk up five flights, scraping the rent. And then at night you go to Max’s Kansas City where Mick Jagger and Fellini and everyone’s there in the back room. And when you walked in that room, you were a star!”

  In the meantime, she had to eat, and it wasn’t possible to charge every meal at Max’s to Andy Warhol. That autumn, a friend of Holly’s was subletting the Park Avenue apartment of Mme. Chardonet, a French diplomat’s wife, who made the mistake of not only subletting the apartment to a friend of Holly Woodlawn’s but leaving her checkbook and passport in plain sight. Visiting her house-sitter friend, Holly had a financial epiphany when she spotted the checkbook and passport: She would impersonate Mme. Chardonet at the local bank. It was easy. Since Holly wore women’s clothes better than most women, she had no problem impersonating Mme. Chardonet and draining her bank account by one-third of its contents.

  Two weeks later, having spent that $2,000, Holly returned to the bank to take what she should have gotten the first time around, the remaining $4,000. Instead, she was arrested. Bad timing. The Trash premiere on October 5 was only five days away and she still had nothing to wear, and now she was also stuck in jail.

  Bail was set at one thousand dollars, and while Holly attempted to contact the Factory, those phone calls were not returned. The cops took her to the Women’s House of Detention, where a female officer put Holly in a cell with twenty females. “All right, lift your dress and pull down your pants,” the officer ordered.