With Dennis’s film career still in the shitter, Brooke turned to her numerous friends for help. Ironically it was Brooke’s social position that ensured Dennis entry to the very Hollywood circles that wouldn’t hire him as an actor. Most were alienated by his rebellious persona. They’d be invited to some swish party with important industry figures in attendance, Dennis would start the evening quiet, even reserved, but after a few drinks — well, quite a few, actually — he’d rant and rage at everyone, say how the revolution was coming and they’d be the first lot to get it, that one day he’d make a movie and the old dinosaurs would be slain; hardly the best tactic when you’re looking for work. Poor Brooke would have to spend the following day calling everyone to apologise for her husband’s behaviour. Many of them had known Brooke since childhood and expressed sympathy with her for being married to ‘that madman’.
One person who was prepared to give Dennis a job was first-time director Curtis Harrington. He was putting together a low-budget horror movie, really low-budget, just $50,000, called Night Tide (1961), and wanted Dennis to play a sailor hopelessly in love with a mysterious woman who just might be a rampaging sea monster. It sounded kooky but it would be Dennis’s first lead role and he worked hard the whole shoot. That was until the last day, when he sunk into a deep depression because filming was coming to an end and got miserably drunk, so drunk that he got into a motorcycle accident, necessitating the whole cast and crew reconvening two weeks later to complete the movie.
Drink and Dennis were now happy comrades. As a teen he’d been very much a beer man, but in Hollywood beer was seen as uncouth; people were drinking Martini instead. ‘At first, I thought the stuff tasted awful,’ said Dennis. ‘It’s an acquired taste, I acquired it.’
When Brooke gave birth in 1962 to a daughter, christened Marin, she must have hoped fatherhood would calm Dennis down. Far from it. There was a revolution going on outside, in the streets, and Dennis wanted desperately to be part of it. This was the burgeoning era of free love and abundant drugs and Dennis began experimenting with hallucinogenics, barbiturates and speed. ‘The sixties was just one big drug party,’ he said, a party that lasted twenty years and almost claimed his life.
I’m not even supposed to know girls like that exist.
After his Broadway flop Warren Beatty was to find another mentor in Elia Kazan, who fastened on to the young hopeful straight away. ‘He was awkward in a way that was attractive,’ said Kazan. ‘He was very, very ambitious. He had a lot of hunger.’ Immediately the director launched Warren’s film debut Splendour in the Grass (1961), yet another in a long line of movies exploring how shitty it was to be a teenager with a hard on and square parents.
As he prepared for the role Joan Collins dropped a bombshell — she was pregnant. Warren let the news sink in before enquiring how it had happened. ‘The butler did it,’ Joan quipped. Both knew the timing was lousy, that as a couple they were simply too immature and careerorientated to start a family. But on the drive over to the abortionist Joan suddenly had second thoughts. At odds with his own raw emotions, Warren tried reassuring her and the abortion went ahead; Joan described the experience as ‘horrifying’.
The incident didn’t bode very well for their relationship, though Warren stunned Joan one day by proposing marriage, only to later accuse her of having an affair. He’d got marriage jitters and Joan knew it; he just wasn’t ready to settle down. An astrologer had told her as much, that as an Aries Warren was, ‘ruled by his cock’ and wouldn’t get married, ‘for a long time. Probably not until he’s forty-five or older. After many, many women.’ The astrologer added, ‘He will need a constant inflation of his ego — one woman will not satisfy him sexually.’ Prophetic, or what!
Cast alongside Warren in Splendour was Natalie Wood and at first the two disliked each other intensely. Well established as an actress by now, her affair with Hopper a distant memory, there was no way Natalie was going to put up with a temperamental and egotistical newcomer who proved so difficult to work with that she christened him ‘Mental Anguish’. ‘Here comes MA,’ she’d joke as Warren sauntered onto the set. Having to share a make-up room increased the friction, which got so bad the producer told a crew hand, ‘Natalie can’t stand him, she wants him out of there.’
For one thing Natalie couldn’t get a handle on Warren’s vanity. Joan Collins once quipped that Warren was ‘the only man to get to the mirror faster than me’. One morning assistant director Don Kranze caught the actor grooming himself by separating, with surgical precision, each individual eyelash with a pin. ‘This is six feet of pure ego,’ said Kranze. Warren ended up wasting so much time gazing at his own image that Kazan had every mirror in his dressing room covered up. The fact that he was an Adonis was undisputed, but such preening got the crew’s backs up and they nicknamed him ‘Donkey Dick’. After filming Kranze summed up Warren as, ‘a pain in the ass. His emotional maturity was about thirteen.’
Suddenly things changed, or they did for Natalie. During a love scene Kazan sensed a spark, some chemistry between them that hadn’t been there before. Maybe it had dawned on Natalie that Warren was headed for the top and, unabashed star fucker that she was, she had to have him. Their very public love affair meant curtains for Natalie’s husband, poor old Robert Wagner, who watched as his wife of four years fell ravenously addicted to another man. It was, in Kazan’s words, nothing short of, ‘sexual humiliation’. In his autobiography Wagner claimed he sat with a gun outside Beatty’s home many a night, intent on killing him. ‘I was pretty young, and I don’t think I could have ever gone through with that act, but I was pretty frustrated and upset.’
It was also goodbye to Joan Collins, who in time would reappraise her gushing admiration of Warren’s sexual prowess. Responding to Shirley MacLaine’s enquiry, ‘How was my brother?’ Joan replied, ‘Overrated.’ Decades later in 2006 when Joan was asked whether she and Warren really made love seven times in one day, she replied. ‘Maybe he did, but I just lay there.’ Meow.
When Splendour opened it won Warren instant fame. Life magazine called him ‘The latest in the line of hostile, moody, sensitive, self-conscious, bright, defensive, stuttering, self-seeking and extremely talented actors who have become myths before they are thirty.’ Always uncomfortable as an idol, Warren admitted that he’d become successful far too young, that it went to his head and mixed him up emotionally. Sure he had fun, but he needed a period of adjustment to avoid becoming ‘another young actor compulsively working himself towards top billing in an early obituary column’. As his fame grew, so he withdrew more and more, leaning towards complete independence. It’s no surprise that one of his pet projects in the sixties and seventies was a biopic of Howard Hughes. His view of fame didn’t change much over the years either, but in this modern era of twenty-four-hour mass media and YouTube, it has become both costly and cheap, and Beatty is bewildered by the fact that ‘people can become famous in a day for getting out of a cab in the wrong way’.
Everybody wanted a piece of Warren after Splendour, even, as it turned out, the president of the United States. A film was to be made about John F. Kennedy’s heroic exploits in the navy during the Second World War and Warren was singled out to play him. It was a great honour, but he didn’t rate the script and refused. Kennedy shrugged his shoulders and went back to his Camelot whoring. After the film, titled PT 109 and starring Cliff Robertson, flopped in 1963 the two men ran into each other. ‘Boy! Were you right about that movie!’ said Kennedy.
It was largely the magic and glamour surrounding the Kennedy presidency that influenced Warren to become active in politics, and he became something of a bridge between Hollywood and Washington. When Kubrick feared his film Dr Strangelove, a stinging satire of Cold War sabre rattling, might be blocked, it was to Warren he turned to smooth things over with the administration.
Finishing with Kazan, Warren turned next for guidance to wheelerdealer agent turned producer Charles Feldman, whose bon vivant approach to life — eat at the
best restaurants, stay in the best hotels and fuck the most beautiful women — he adored. Feldman would teach Warren much about the movie business, contracts and negotiating deals, and he’d soak it up like a sponge. Unlike Marlon, Dennis and the other bad boy rebels, Warren wasn’t out to shake up the movie establishment but to beat it at its own game. He learned the rules and played it better than any other actor ever did. He talked the moguls’ language — money. And he learned that if you have to argue, you must do so from a position of power.
Someone’s advice he didn’t seek out was his sister’s, despite the fact that she was now one of Hollywood’s top actresses. To avoid any hint of nepotism Warren tended not to bring up the subject of Shirley in interviews. ‘I am not Shirley’s brother,’ he once said. ‘She is my sister.’ It was a stance that led inevitably to rumours of sibling rivalry that have persisted ever since. In 1970 when Shirley was attempting a comeback in a one-woman stage show an audience member yelled, ‘Where’s Warren?’ ‘You want Warren?’ she shouted back. ‘You can have him! Practically every other woman has.’
Warren and Natalie Wood meanwhile had become Hollywood’s glamour couple, photographed everywhere they went. They set up home together and Natalie filed for divorce from Wagner, telling the judge that he preferred playing a round of golf to playing around with her. Warren also took a deep interest in Natalie’s career, helping research her new film role as a stripper by taking her to burlesque clubs; what a chore that must have been.
But things soon started to turn sour. There were rows and long silences and, according to Natalie’s kid sister Lana, then sixteen and just beginning an acting career, a curious lack of intimacy in their relationship outside the bedroom. ‘I have since come to think of it as two lives coming together briefly, but always at cross-purposes,’ she says. ‘There was always a distance between them.’
While holidaying in Europe they went to a nightclub one evening and Wagner showed up. He and Natalie danced for hours and seemed to rejoice in each other’s company. Back at the hotel Warren made business calls until dawn, thwarting, deliberately or not, any chance Wagner might have had to put a call through to Natalie. If he’d succeeded, Natalie later confided to a friend, she’d have gone back to him like a shot, having discovered too late that sex not love was the foundation of her relationship with Warren. And it was love that she needed, not a man who she felt was using her as a shag pillow and a photo opportunity.
Warren’s blatant philandering hardly endeared him to Natalie either. One incident, jaw-dropping in its brazen insensitivity, occurred when they dinned at top Hollywood restaurant Chasens. Halfway through the meal Warren excused himself to go to the lavatory. After ten minutes and no sign of Warren a search party was dispatched. It was the head waiter’s job to inform Natalie that her boyfriend had scored with the well-stacked cloakroom attendant and they’d buggered off to enjoy what turned out to be a marathon three-day sex session. It was public humiliation of the highest order and Natalie took revenge by burning all his clothes and, when he turned up at the house a week later, slamming the door shut in his face. When she’d calmed down Natalie described her Warren romance as, ‘changes of heart, flying jars of cold cream, protestations of renewed love and clashing of egos’. She then proceeded to gobble up Hollywood men with such reckless abandon that future co-star Tony Curtis remarked, ‘Natalie would have been much happier as a nun or a hooker.’
As for Warren, he got over Natalie by dating a bunny girl at the Playboy Club on Sunset Strip. When he called one night and she wasn’t there he chatted up the girl who answered the phone instead and they became lovers too. She later revealed that Warren was always suggesting they do a threesome, despite her aversion to the notion. Invited one evening to his hotel suite, the girl felt compelled to ask on the phone if there wasn’t a floozy already up there with him. Warren said he was quite alone. ‘If I get there and you’ve got a chick with you, I’m leaving,’ she threatened. Warren greeted her in his bathrobe and carried her into the bedroom, where very obviously there was another woman; you couldn’t miss her, she was lying naked on the bed. Feeling duped, the bunny girl was also feeling rather randy; fuck it, who cares, though she drew the line at girl-on-girl action.
Warren followed his startling movie debut by playing an Italian gigolo in the film version of Tennessee Williams’s play The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (1961). Warren heard that the gay playwright had casting approval and wanted an authentic Italian for the role. Undeterred, Warren bought a bottle of something called Man Tan, which turned his face orange-yellow, got a plane to Puerto Rico where Williams was holidaying, tracked him down to a casino and personally read for him. It won him the part. Warren then immediately caught a flight back to New York. Williams had to admit that Warren possessed all the right qualities to play a gigolo. ‘He is so beautiful,’ sighed the playwright. ‘Just looking at him brings a tear to my eyes — what a waste!’
His leading lady was Vivien Leigh, twice his age at forty-eight, who, according to Noël Coward, ‘was on her way round the bend again’ as her marriage to Laurence Olivier headed for the divorce court. She was fascinated by Warren — no surprise there; Joan Collins had noted that he could charm any woman within moments of meeting her. Inevitably rumours began of an affair. Richard Burton spilled the beans to one showbiz reporter. ‘They were at it in broom closets, across billiard tables, in telephone kiosks; you have to hand it to the pair of them.’
In Rome Warren also found time to date actresses Inger Stevens and Susan Strasberg, daughter of the famous method-acting teacher Lee, who was so impressed by his tight, revealing pants that she marvelled that he could even sit down in them. ‘I found him charming and intelligent, ’ said Susan. ‘With a tremendous need to please women as well as conquer them.’ Susan and Warren attended a party at Luchino Visconti’s opulent mansion and the director was so fascinated by Hollywood’s newest star he even ignored his fawning stable of lap-boys. ‘I’m going to the bathroom,’ Warren suddenly whispered into Susan’s ear. ‘Follow me in a few minutes.’ Once she arrived he pulled her inside and started to get frisky. She complained the place was too cramped. ‘No it’s not. You’ll see.’ When the couple returned to the living room twenty minutes later they were greeted by six pairs of hostile eyes. ‘To my embarrassment I realised my blouse was still unbuttoned,’ Susan later recalled. ‘I wasn’t quite sure how to act, but Warren beamed at one and all, an enchanting, ingenuous smile.’
Very quickly Warren was acquiring a certain kind of reputation and recalled those early sixties years as ‘a series of very good times, good food, a lot of good-looking girls, and a lot of aimless fun’. Who else would fall for Russia’s prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya and fly to London, Toronto and Moscow just to attend her performances? ‘They’re madly in love,’ said Warren’s old acting teacher Stella Adler. ‘But of course neither can understand a word the other is saying.’
There was also the briefest of flings with the young Cher, who’d only just dropped out of high school and come to Hollywood seeking a showbusiness career. She found Warren instead and was easily seduced by him. ‘I was only sixteen,’ she later excused. ‘Maybe I can get out of it with that.’
Don’t speak of the dead any more. You’re with me now.
While Beatty was establishing himself as Hollywood’s new star, getting something like $300,000 per film, Jack Nicholson was on considerably less for his Corman cheapos. Unlike Beatty, though, Jack could date women without fear of them phoning up the night editor on one of the various sleaze magazines. As he put it, he had ‘complete anonymity in social exchange’, or, more straightforwardly, ‘I was able to go around picking up stray pussy without a care in the world.’
Jack lived at the time in a house not far from Sunset Boulevard, sharing with friends. It was, in his own words, the wildest house in Hollywood. Jack’s comments that he’d never been in an orgy of more than three people gives you an idea of the kind of parties he threw. Orgies weren’t his style, anyway, ‘with
everybody naked and fucking one another all over the place. I’ve never been in that scene.’
All this monkey business changed, temporarily, when Jack met actress Sandra Knight. It was a whirlwind affair and they quickly got hitched in June 1962. Clearly in love, Jack did later admit that the ceremony ‘was a no big deal act for me’. He was right, since he was never to do it again. As vows were being exchanged he even had the temerity to look heavenward to plea, ‘Now, remember, I’m very young, and this doesn’t mean I’m not ever going to touch another woman.’
Still suffering in exploitation-movie hell, Jack was only too well aware of the danger of becoming stigmatised in the industry as a B-movie actor. Watching those films today, all he can see is his own ‘fearful, desperate ambition. People who haven’t seen my early movies are better off than I am.’ But, like all actors, he needed the work and has acknowledged that without Corman he might not have survived those tough early years, so is forever thankful. ‘Roger also underpaid us and for that he will be eternally grateful.’
But Corman’s cheapos were about to get a hell of a lot more interesting. The schlock merchant had left the world of radioactive vegetables on the loose to tread a more cultured path, finding success adapting Edgar Allan Poe horror stories starring Vincent Price. For The Raven (1963) Corman added Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre to the mix, plus Jack. It was another camp classic. ‘They all got along very well together,’ says Corman. ‘Because Jack had great respect for Vincent, Boris and Peter, and let them know it, and at the same time they realised from the very beginning that he was a very talented young actor, so accepted him into their group.’ No respect, however, was offered by the titular bird, which shat endlessly over everybody. ‘My shoulder was constantly covered with raven shit,’ complained Jack.
Robert Sellers Page 9
