Robert Sellers

by Hollywood Hellraisers

  Within weeks of finishing work on Rebel Dennis was cast in James Dean’s next movie, the epic Giant (1956) with Elizabeth Taylor. When that was over both returned to LA, Dean ecstatic that he could drive his Porsche Spyder again after studio executives had banned him from car racing during filming. He even took Dennis for a spin in it. On 30 September 1955, on his way to a race meeting, Dean was involved in a head-on collision with another car at a lonely intersection. Rushed to hospital, he was pronounced dead on arrival. He was twenty-four.

  Minutes after the news came over the radio a mutual friend was banging on the door to Dennis’s apartment. It was a bad idea. Recovering from a hectic night, Dennis couldn’t comprehend what he was being told and reacted with violence, shoving the guy against a wall and thwacking him one. He thought it was a sick joke. ‘Don’t you ever put me on like that again, man.’ Then the reality sank in. ‘It was horror. It was unbelievable.’

  Dennis had placed Dean on a pedestal, above anyone else he’d ever met. Now his idol was gone and he was left devastated, wondering how a person of destiny could die just like that. The aftershock of the tragedy would echo inside him for years.

  When the time comes when nobody desires me . . . for myself . . . I’d rather not be . . . desired . . . at all.

  Determined to be an actor, Warren Beatty hit New York with all the explosive energy of a damp squib, working as a dishwasher, as a sandhog during the construction of a new section of the Lincoln Tunnel and also picking up the odd gig as, would you believe, cocktail-lounge piano man, all the while living in filthy conditions that even Marlon might have turned his nose up at: an unheated apartment in a run-down tenement. The previous occupant had been a junkie and the place still reeked of his habit. With very little income, Warren seemed to be just about surviving on peanut butter sandwiches, until he collapsed and ended up in hospital with hepatitis.

  With little experience behind him it was Brando’s old drama coach Stella Adler who gave Warren the, ‘arrogant, self-confidence’, in his words, that would spur him on to success and equip him with the balls to say no to roles he didn’t like. Quite a courageous thing for an out-of-work actor to do. At one audition, when a director criticised his low voice, saying that he was mumbling like Brando, Warren simply gave the script back and walked out. Stella loved Warren the minute he joined her acting class, but her praise alone didn’t pay the bills and the young actor continued to live on the breadline, literally starving, before he won a few roles in daytime soaps, one-off television dramas and off-Broadway plays.

  And there were women, of course. Warren was spending a lot of time with a young actress called Diane Ladd, the future wife of Bruce Dern and mother of Blue Velvet and Jurassic Park star Laura Dern. They met through acting class; Diane was barely sixteen years old. She loved Warren’s company, thought he was fun to be around. ‘He’d take me home and kiss me goodnight — then say hello to my roommates and kiss them too.’ Others found him overbearing and too cocky by half. Neither did they appreciate his sometimes wild sense of humour.

  One of Diane’s flatmates was seventeen-year-old Rona Barrett, later to become a popular TV showbiz reporter in the seventies, to whom Ryan O’Neal famously mailed a live tarantula. Early one morning Rona was awoken by loud rapping at the door and a voice demanding, ‘Open up.’ She was hardly going to do that at 2 a.m., not until the mystery voice identified itself, which it refused to do. ‘Open the door,’ it went on, then menacingly: ‘I’m gonna rape you.’ Startled, Rona replied, ‘No you’re not. Who is it?’ It was Warren, of course, coming to visit his girlfriend. Finally, Diane came running down the hall. ‘Oh my God, it’s only Warren,’ she said, as if this were a daily occurrence. Invited in, he took one look at Rona and blurted out, ‘This is it, baby! You’re finally gonna lose that fucking cherry.’

  Not surprisingly, Rona was never attracted to Warren, even though ‘he had relationships with a number of my girlfriends’. But, rape threats aside, she found him charm personified. Already the Beatty seduction technique was taking shape: an ability to captivate a woman entirely, to be attentive only to her, to make her feel she was the one person in the room, nay the world, who mattered at that moment. As one woman who enjoyed a brief affair with Warren explained to Time magazine in 1978. ‘He doesn’t just want to seduce you but to quite literally charm the pants off you. He tells you you’re fabulous and laughs at all your jokes. He’s so in love with himself that it’s contagious.’

  Like before, Superman, two or three goons holding me while you do the punching.

  Jack Nicholson did a lot of thinking about his future during the summer of 1954. He’d enough grades to go to college, but that meant work and lots of it. ‘And I was too lazy for that. I wasn’t filled with a burning desire to make something of myself in those days.’ So he bummed around for a while, worked as a lifeguard, even making the local papers when in a choppy storm he muscled a boat out, surviving huge waves, to rescue a party of five swimmers who’d got into trouble. ‘What the paper didn’t mention is that as soon as I beached the boat, I puked my guts out in front of about 40,000 people.’

  Another summer job was working as the assistant manager of a local movie theatre. On the Waterfront was showing and the young Jack must have seen every performance, unable to take his eyes off Brando. ‘He was spellbinding, a genius. There was no way to follow in his footsteps. He was just too large and just too far out of sight.’

  By coincidence, or was it providence, June had settled in a suburb of LA with her children after her marriage to the test pilot broke up. Jack, still unaware that his sister was his mother, packed his bags and headed west to stay with her for a while, keen on catching some Californian rays before deciding what to do next with his life. Immediately he connected with the place, its atmosphere, the buzz, it just felt like home. For money he played the horses at the local race track and hustled pool at night, and there was also a part-time job in a toy store. But that wasn’t enough for June; she thought Jack ought to be looking for more secure employment. Both hot-headed, the pair often clashed and after one particularly fierce argument June threw him out into the street. Angry, he walked for hours before stumbling, exhausted, onto Sunset Boulevard. At last, Jack had arrived in the heart of Hollywood.

  On the verge of returning home, feeling he really ought to get serious about his life and go to college, Jack landed a job as a mail boy in the animation department of MGM, for Tom and Jerry creators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. Although the studios were far from the giants they once had been, they were still imposing places and Jack was intoxicated by the sheer vibe of working there. He’d visit sound stages and watch them shoot pictures, see stars like Bogart and Liz Taylor; ‘It was hog heaven for me.’ He once confessed to lying down flat on a studio lawn to get a good look at Lana Turner’s knickers as she boarded a coach. He even had the temerity to ask Joan Collins for a date; she turned him down.

  To this day Jack still recalls the day Marlon arrived on the MGM lot. The staff there were blasé about seeing movie stars, but every venetian blind flew up and all the secretaries stuck their heads out the window to take a peek at him. Jack even snuck onto the sound stage to watch up front and personal his hero in action.

  Moving out of June’s place, Jack rented a small apartment above a garage with an old school pal. They’d go out at night with like-minded souls, wasting hours over a cappuccino in the coffee bars of Sunset Strip talking about movies and worshipping their acting idols, Brando, Dean and Clift. They’d try to hit on girls, without success. At one nightclub Jack plucked up the courage to ask for a dance but rushed back minutes later. ‘I’ve got to find the men’s room.’ His friends were perplexed. ‘What happened?’ Jack explained. ‘I was dancing with this girl and she danced so damn close to me that I exploded in my pants!’

  Walking down a corridor one day at MGM Jack passed producer Joe Pasternak. ‘Hiya, Joe,’ he grinned. Pasternak paused, then said, ‘Hey, kid – how’d ya like to be in pictures?’ Yes, that
really used to happen, you just had to be in the right place at the right time. For days Jack sweated over his audition, daring to dream of stardom. Reality hurt when it hit him: he wasn’t good enough, the test was a disaster and Nicholson was back on the mail run. His gawky, unconventional looks just didn’t fit in with the current emphasis on brooding Roman gods like Marlon and Rock Hudson. ‘Hiya, Joe,’ Jack greeted Pasternak in the corridor a few days after. The producer stopped for a moment, mulling over the earnest youth’s face. Then he spoke: ‘Hey — how’d ya like to be in pictures?’ Jack shrugged his shoulders over the fickle business he’d chosen to be a part of and walked away.

  Get up! Get up, you scum-suckin’ pig!

  Despite all the success Marlon Brando had enjoyed he remained a psychological mess. Sometimes he’d walk the streets till dawn or chat for hours on the phone with friends until succumbing to sleep. Financially things were looking precarious, too. In an effort to mend the relationship with his father he’d taken on Marlon Sr as a business manager, which was a recipe for disaster. When a cattle ranch the old man invested in went belly up the son needed money fast, so signed a contract to appear in a piece of historical nonsense called The Egyptian for 20th Century Fox, the first time he’d agreed to make ‘crap for money’. Then he read the script — ‘It was shit’ — and walked. The studio was incensed. Acting fast, Brando got his shrink to write a letter saying he couldn’t make the film because he was ‘mentally confused’. It was the ultimate sick note, but Fox weren’t buying it and sued Brando for breach of contract. A compromise was reached: Marlon would make another film for Fox, Desirée (1954), starring as Napoleon.

  Either he wasn’t interested in the role or it was the biggest sulk in movie history, but Marlon’s performance as the diminutive dictator was one big fat void. Critics and the public wholeheartedly agreed. At one screening Marlon’s Napoleon emoted on screen, ‘When did you stop loving me?’ To which one member of the audience heckled, ‘When you made this shit-kicker.’ Marlon’s spirits fell and he told a reporter he felt like giving up movies for a while and finding a hideaway somewhere in the South Pacific, where he could ‘fuck brown-skinned teenage gals until I’ve doubled the island population’.

  Amidst all this wrangling Dodie was taken seriously ill. Marlon and his sisters rushed to her bedside and for the next three weeks held vigil as she slipped in and out of a coma, waking up sometimes to talk with her children, telling Brando to promise her, ‘to try and get along with people. Don’t fight with them, Bud.’

  Then one night she held Marlon’s hand softly and whispered, ‘I’m not scared, and you don’t have to be.’ Then the woman Stella Adler called ‘this heavenly, girlish, lost creature’ was gone. Brando broke down, emotionally spent. Dodie had borne her illness with incredible courage and dignity; Brando later told friends she taught him how to die. Marlon did not fall completely to pieces after Dodie’s death, as friends feared he might, but there were occasions he came mighty close. Like when he drove playwright Clifford Odets home late one night and suddenly started dredging up memories of pulling his mother’s drunken body out of bars as a kid. Tears welled up in his eyes, impairing his vision, and his driving grew erratic, the car swerving from side to side on the perilously steep bends along the Hollywood Hills. Odets was convinced his number was up, but Marlon managed to regain composure and all was well.

  After their fruitful collaboration on Julius Caesar Joe Mankiewicz wanted Marlon to star in the screen version of the Broadway smash musical Guys and Dolls (1955). As Joe’s son Tom recalls, ‘Marlon was in Europe and Dad sent him a telegram saying, “How would you like to play Sky Masterson?” And Marlon sent a telegram back saying, “Actually more terrified than playing Shakespeare for the first time, never have done a musical before.” And Dad sent him back a telegram saying, “Don’t worry about it, neither have I.” And that’s how they started. And they became artistically very close. Marlon once said to me, “Your old man was the only person who would have cast me in Shakespeare and a musical.”’

  His co-star was Frank Sinatra, still pissed at Brando for stealing On the Waterfront from under his nose and now even more narked because he was giving his old lady Ava Gardner a good seeing-to on a regular basis. One morning Marlon got a call from Frank. ‘Listen, creep, and listen good. Stay away from Ava. You got that? First offence, broken legs. Second offence, cracked skull. If you live through all that, cement shoes.’

  Inevitably tensions surfaced between the two men on set. Sinatra’s nickname for Brando was ‘Mumbles’. Marlon said of Sinatra’s voice, ‘I’d prefer a castrated rooster at dawn.’ On set one day Marlon asked Frank to run through lines with him. ‘Don’t pull that Actors Studio shit on me,’ blasted the singer. Their working methods certainly differed. Sinatra liked things done swiftly, if it was a good take, that’s it, let’s move on. ‘That was not Marlon’s way of working,’ says Tom Mankiewicz. ‘And it wasn’t my father’s way of working either.’

  Brando’s rivalry with Sinatra never boiled over into open hostility in public, his best put-down about the crooner being, ‘He’s the kind of guy that, when he dies, he’s going up to heaven and give God a bad time for making him bald.’ The nearest it came to blows was during the filming of a scene in a restaurant booth with Sinatra eating a slice of cheesecake. ‘Just for fun, Marlon kept blowing his line,’ says Mankiewicz. ‘And of course every time he blew his line they’d start again and they’d put a new piece of cheesecake in front of Sinatra. And Frank didn’t want to eat a lot of cheesecake, and during a break Brando said to Dad, “I’m gonna make this son of a bitch eat till he starts shitting in the booth.” Frank knew Marlon was fluffing his lines intentionally just to irritate him because he had a show to do that night in Vegas.’

  A substantial box-office hit, Guys and Dolls remained the one and only musical Marlon ever made, believing as he did that his voice sounded ‘like the wail of a bagpipe through wet tissues’.

  In an interview Marlon once declared his intention of marrying within the year and was predictably inundated with offers from women in various states of desperation. One postcard arrived from a sixteen-year-old Eskimo girl who ended: ‘Me make best wife, know how to keep husband warm in very cold.’ Brando replied. ‘No good in California.’

  When he did finally marry, Marlon chose a suitably exotic creature, Anna Kashfi, who claimed to have been born in Calcutta of pure Indian parentage. She was just another of his numerous girlfriends until struck down with tuberculosis, whereupon Marlon, a sucker for the helpless, nursed her back to health and then claimed he was smitten, presenting Kashfi with the ring he’d taken from his dead mother’s finger and declaring, ‘I’m glad she’s dead! If she was alive, I never could have loved you. She wouldn’t have let me go.’

  Then it was off to Europe to film the war drama The Young Lions (1958), in which Brando played a Nazi. To help him get into the part director Edward Dmytryk hired an ex-Wehrmacht officer and every day he and Brando hurled German abuse at each other. During one meeting with Dmytryk Marlon announced he needed to take a leak. Instead of going to the bathroom Marlon removed some flowers from a vase, opened his flies and, ‘In front of me,’ Dmytryk later recalled, ‘he took a horse piss into the vase.’

  While filming in Paris Marlon was mobbed; fans tore off his coat and ripped his shirt. Fame was still very much a Kafkaesque nightmare and he grew increasingly paranoid that people used him just for money or status. He described himself as ‘a bomb waiting to go off’. Much of his anger was directed at the paparazzi. In Hollywood he knocked a camera out of a photo journalist’s hand, while in Rome half throttled a paparazzo who dared take a picture of him with a girlfriend. (By the seventies his antipathy for them hadn’t dimmed, as evidenced when he broke a photographer’s jaw. Undaunted, the paparazzo wore a football helmet next time he went snapping photos of Brando.)

  With The Young Lions in the can Brando’s marriage to Kashfi could go ahead. Marlon Sr was not amongst the invited. ‘I’ll bury h
im first,’ he told friends. If it were possible, relations between father and son were worse than ever. At a party given by Marlon for his father, Sr complained about the noise some of his son’s friends were making and told him to ask them to leave. When Marlon refused he was treated to a vicious slap across the face. Though seized with anger, Marlon did not retaliate. Many people have speculated that it was Marlon’s hatred for his father that fuelled his acting, and that it was Stella Adler who showed him how to focus that anger and channel it creatively. Marlon claimed that one of the few positive aspects of playing the motorcycle thug in The Wild One was that it released some of his inner violence. ‘Before The Wild One I thought about killing my father. After The Wild One, I decided that I shouldn’t actually kill him, but pull out his corneas.’

  Marlon and Anna Kashfi were married in October 1957. After a brief honeymoon the happy couple returned to Hollywood. Bizarrely, on that first night back Marlon clambered through the window of his sister Jocelyn’s house, crashing on the sofa and telling her, ‘Well, I did it. I got married. Now what do I do?’

  In May 1958 Kashfi gave Marlon a much-longed-for son, despite the trauma of being forced to change delivery rooms to avoid press photographers dressed as doctors who were roaming the ward. Tears welled up in Marlon’s eyes as he held the child, whom they named Christian. But parenthood couldn’t save the marriage, and the couple argued and fought constantly. Kashfi claimed that Marlon insisted on behaving like a ‘bachelor’ at weekends, and at other times took off at all hours, returning early in the morning without explanation — ‘None of your business where I’ve been,’ he’d growl.

  Brando found solace from marital woes in his pet project, a revenge western called One-Eyed Jacks (released in early 1961 after a lengthy delay), which he wanted Stanley Kubrick to direct. For months they sweated over a script that never quite worked. ‘Marlon, I still can’t figure out what this movie is about,’ Kubrick said one day. ‘It’s about the $350,000 I’ve spent so far,’ replied Brando. Kubrick walked and made Spartacus instead. ‘So there wasn’t anything for me to do except direct it myself,’ said Marlon. ‘Or go to the poorhouse.’ This news was met with consternation by Paramount’s terrified executives, weary of Brando’s erratic behaviour. But he was a star, one the studio’s top brass believed could be controlled; big mistake.