In the film he played Lorre’s son and both actors improvised most of their scenes, having been taught techniques originating with Stanislavsky, Jack in Corey’s class, Lorre with Brecht in Germany. All this was beyond the understanding of poor old Karloff, who approached the film knowing his lines and ready to give the exact performance that he had prepared. ‘With Peter and Jack improvising,’ says Corman, ‘I would almost use the word outrageously, Boris got a little bit nervous between the two techniques. The mediator in all this was Vincent Price, who understood how both sets of actors worked and was wonderful in bringing Peter and Jack together with Boris, who was more of a classically trained actor.’
On finishing The Raven, Corman realised the costumes and sets he’d rented were still his for another forty-eight hours. Karloff, too, remained on the payroll. A light bulb lit above his head like in a cartoon: Why not make another movie? If anyone could make a movie over a weekend, it was Corman. Jack happily accepted the lead, without knowing what the hell it was going to be about. Corman rushed home and bashed out a script entitled The Terror (1963), which everyone set to work on the next morning. It was chaos. Karloff later recalled how removal men arrived to take away the sets as they were acting, but Corman carried on filming guerrilla-style.
Unable to complete the film personally Corman handed it over to a couple of friends; Francis Ford Coppola shot some stuff, as did Monte Hellman. ‘Finally, for the last sequence,’ says Corman, ‘there was nobody left to direct and Jack came to me and said, “Rog, every idiot in town has shot part of this picture; lemme direct the last bit.” I said, “OK, Jack, you’re the director.” So Jack got his first taste of directing and the work he did was good.’
Unsurprisingly, The Terror is a complete farrago: it has witches, a curse, a creepy castle, but no plot — honestly, no plot whatsoever. Jack looks distinctly uncomfortable in the role of a French soldier, wearing Brando’s oversized Napoleon costume from Desirée. ‘I was absurd,’ he says of his performance. ‘It was amazingly bad.’
It takes six men to carry a guy to his grave; it takes one woman to put him there.
Because of a series of poor investments made by his father and heavy alimony payments, Marlon Brando’s finances were looking decidedly shaky. It was now that he started making movies purely for the money, which partly explains why he made such godawful crap in the sixties. The Ugly American (1963), a risible political drama, was followed by Bedtime Story (1964), a weak comedy about two con men, that at least Marlon had fun on. ‘The one thing Marlon regretted, and he told me this, was that no one came to him to do more comedy, because he loved comedy,’ says producer Albert Ruddy. ‘He loved to laugh.’
Having less fun on the film was co-star Shirley Jones. Hailing from a largely film musical background (Oklahoma!, Carousel) she hadn’t worked with such an intense actor before. ‘People say Marlon’s the greatest American actor, I say one of the reasons why is because he wore everybody else down after doing sixty takes on one scene. That’s exactly what he did. Marlon had this theory that the next one was going to be better, or let’s try it another way, while I always thought my first or second take was the best and from then on it was all repetition.’ One wonders how much of this was Marlon seeking perfection and how much a deliberate ploy to hamstring his fellow actors, to render them invisible so it was he who dominated the scene. As Bernardo Bertolucci was later to say of Brando, ‘He’s an angel as a man and a monster as an actor.’
Something else Shirley found unusual was Marlon’s habit of not learning his lines. ‘Instead he’d have his dialogue written on his hand or on a table. It fascinated me that he was able to do that and still come across as brilliant as he was.’ This was a habit of Marlon’s that grew to preposterous levels.
The cast was rounded off by the debonair David Niven, an actor poles apart from Marlon and who confessed to being a shade nervous about working with him, though the two ultimately got on very well. ‘Marlon had great respect for David,’ recalls Shirley. ‘He’d just sit around on the set and listen to him tell stories and laugh and have a wonderful time.’
A misfire, Bedtime Story quietly crawled away and was forgotten until it was remade in 1988 as a vehicle for Steve Martin and Michael Caine, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. But Shirley appreciated her Brando experience, one that could have been an even closer encounter. ‘He came into my dressing room one time and asked me about my personal life, and if I was happily married, so he came on to me a bit. But I wasn’t attracted to him that way at all, and it didn’t bother me because I’m sure he did it with everybody.’
Morituri (1965, aka The Saboteur), a wartime spy drama, was another flop, and it was not a happy ship. Brando confessed that making it was like, ‘pushing a prune pit with my nose from here to Cucamonga’. William A. Fraker, later an award-winning cinematographer on pictures like Rosemary’s Baby and Bullitt, was an assistant cameraman on the film and came away knocked out by Marlon. ‘He was sensational. Marlon always had his problems with directors and producers, but he loved the crews, he’d co-operate with them no problem.’ No, Marlon’s problems on the set weren’t with the grips or the sound guys, it was with authority figures.
Aaron Rosenberg was the producer on Morituri and the movie was shot off the coast of northern California. Everyone stayed in local motels and one night Fraker was awoken by a big rumpus going on outside. ‘There was screaming and hollering. I looked out the window and there was Marlon and Aaron Rosenberg fighting each other. Now Rosenberg was an all-American football player in college, he was no baby, and Marlon was from the streets, and they were just pounding each other and pretty soon Marlon knocked Aaron over the side of this hill and he rolled all the way down. Marlon went after him, picked him up and they both shook hands, put their arms around each other and walked off down the street. Those were great days.’
Maybe to get rid of the stench of making money from shit, Marlon sought to do something worthwhile with his fame, like an attempt to make a documentary for UNICEF on the Bihar famine in India. He visited filthy hospitals and watched a child die right in front of him. He derided how his government in one year spent less helping stop the starvation than was spent in a few hours on the Vietnam War. No one listened. Bitter, he turned down a film role, saying, ‘How can I act when people are starving in India?’
Then suddenly news reached him that his father had died. Marlon took the old bugger back to the farm in Illinois and spread his ashes around the fields. But his passing did little to alleviate Marlon’s fantasies of revenge. He used to think, just let me have him back for eight seconds that would be enough to break his jaw. ‘I wanted to smash his face and watch him spit out his teeth. I wanted to kick his balls into his throat. I wanted to rip his ears off and eat them in front of him. I wanted to separate his larynx from his body and shove it in his stomach.’ This kid had issues, obviously. But Marlon knew that he would have to forgive the sins of the father if he was ever to find peace for himself.
What are you hiring a gunman for, Pa?
Like Brando, Dennis Hopper was deeply concerned that the world was taking a big dump on its poorest and most defenceless people, and nobody much was doing anything about it. Impressed and influenced by the speeches of Martin Luther King, he followed much of liberal Hollywood and became interested in the civil rights movement. Actually it was the personal intervention of Marlon that got Dennis actively involved. He was walking down the street when a car pulled up alongside him. It was Brando. ‘What are you doing?’ Dennis did a double take before replying. ‘Nothing.’ Marlon said there was a big march planned from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, so armed with his trusty camera Dennis headed south to participate in what many commentators see as the political and emotional peak of the civil rights struggle, where King eulogized: ‘I’ve been to the mountain; I’ve seen the Promised Land.’
It was a gruelling five-day trek, during which time Dennis took many now historically important photographs of King and the other marchers, ignoring redneck l
ocals who spat at him and called him a long-haired nigger-loving commie. There was a lot of violence going on all around them, helicopters flying everywhere, people screaming and yelling and waving Confederate flags. It was something to be remembered. Certainly the reaction from these bigoted inbreds really got to Dennis, changed him from an individual who believed the world’s problems could be solved peacefully, Gandhi-style, to a man who began to store guns and study martial arts.
The drugs didn’t help, of course. Mists of paranoia floated around in his head unchecked; he believed both the CIA and FBI were tracking his movements. Friends revealed he sometimes stalked the neighbourhood late at night, gun in hand, in search of government agents he was convinced were spying on him. He even began to think that Brooke was part of the conspiracy, that he could no longer trust her. She in turn grew increasingly wary of what he might do; hardly surprising, since Dennis was now a black belt in karate. He also made a habit of falling drunkenly asleep in bed with a lit cigarette between his fingers, causing a fire or two. Once Brooke woke up and the room was filled with smoke and flames and she booted Dennis out of bed to safety. More than once Brooke was to look back on that incident and wonder what might have been had she just left the guy to roast.
Back in the closeted fantasy world of Hollywood, Dennis wanted a movie real bad, something mainstream; he hadn’t had a role in a studio film for eight years. It was one of Hollywood’s biggest ironies that the man who gave it to him was his old adversary Henry Hathaway. The veteran had heard about his marriage to Brooke and hoped it might have calmed him down, so cast Dennis in The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), a John Wayne western. Over the years Dennis had thought of every possible way to kill his nemesis on From Hell to Texas, ‘From poisoning, to a truck running him over.’ Instead he kept his counsel and took the job. ‘You’re not going to make any trouble like you did before, right?’ said Hathaway on his first day. ‘This is a big Duke picture and you know Wayne doesn’t dig any of that method shit. So if you’re going to use any of that method shit, get out of here, kid.’ Actually Hopper got on swimmingly with Wayne and co-star Dean Martin, boozing royally together; many mornings Hathaway would greet the bleary-eyed trio warily. And there were no problems on set, either. ‘That was great, kid,’ Hathaway praised Dennis for doing a scene in take one. ‘But Henry, I’m a better actor now than I was eight years ago.’ Hathaway shook his head. ‘No Dennis, you ain’t a better actor. You’re just smarter.’
That rhinoceros hasn’t been innocent since the day he was born.
Since Warren Beatty’s social life was more exciting than any script, he decided to bring his exploits to the silver screen himself, portraying ‘the plight of the compulsive Don Juan’. The film was called What’s New Pussycat?, an expression Warren often used when calling up his girls on the phone. He brought in Charlie Feldman as producer and sought the talents of a new young comic, Woody Allen, to write the script. ‘Warren and Woody thought they were going to make a low-key, Woody Allen kind of picture,’ recalls Clive Donner, who’d been hired to direct. ‘Now there was no way Charlie was ever going to do that, that wasn’t his style, low-key pictures, he was into big fucking powerful productions.’
Dashing over to Woody’s New York apartment for a meeting on 22 November 1963 Warren overheard on the radio the shocking news about Kennedy’s assassination. He arrived at Allen’s place still numb with shock. ‘We sat there, stunned,’ Warren later recalled.
Worse than Kennedy’s head exploding like a melon was the prospect of starring opposite Feldman’s mistress, Capucine. ‘Warren and Charlie were very good friends,’ says Donner. ‘But Warren just didn’t want to act with Capucine. He’s a lovely guy, Warren, but deadly serious. So we had a big meeting, it went on and on and on, with Warren trying to get his own way.’ In the end he confronted Feldman; it was either him or Capucine, and as she was fucking Feldman it was no contest. Warren was out, replaced by Peter O’Toole, and What’s New Pussycat? turned into one of the biggest comedy hits of the decade.
By 1964 Warren was strapped for cash and hurried into a terrible film called Lilith, directed by Robert Rossen. Rossen had made The Hustler with Paul Newman, but could do little with this melodramatic tripe about love in a mental hospital. Warren had severe reservations about the script, but his questioning of practically every move and line of dialogue incensed the director. ‘If I die,’ he moaned, ‘it’ll be Warren Beatty who killed me.’
Years later Tom Mankiewicz was told a story by his father about Rossen. ‘I’m directing this kid Beatty,’ Rossen had said. ‘And you know what, we had an argument about a scene and he turned around and said, “OK, direct it your way.” No actor’s ever said that to me in my life. I said, “Of course I’m going to direct it my way, I’m the fucking director!” It was like, he allowed me to direct it my way.’ Warren did have something of a reputation for being hard on directors in his early days. ‘If the director was indecisive, Warren would absolutely destroy him,’ recalled Robert Towne. ‘He’d ask so many questions — and he can ask more questions than any three-year-old — that the director didn’t know whether he was coming or going.’ Some people saw this as nothing short of infuriatingly arrogant and spoiled behaviour. ‘Obviously every human being has got their doubters,’ says Mankiewicz. ‘One of the reasons that people liked him and one of the reasons why some people disliked him, was that he was very cocky, Warren was a cocky guy.’
His unpopularity also extended to the crew on Lilith, who trashed his dressing room. Rumour had it that Peter Fonda and a few of the other actors were seriously contemplating doing him in. At a party to celebrate the end of shooting shit-scared studio executives persuaded Warren to leave early in order to stave off any mayhem.
Rossen never made another film and died in 1966. It’s debatable what actually killed him: heart disease, diabetes, alcoholism — or annoying actors.
Another director who found Warren, ‘difficult . . . impossible’, was Arthur Penn when they worked together on Mickey One (1965), which had Beatty play a nightclub entertainer on the run from gangsters. Neither did Warren make friends with his stand-in, John Gibson. After working ten weeks with the star Gibson recalled they’d exchanged barely twenty words, the rest of the time it was a volley of orders — ‘Get my water!’ ‘Get my yoghurt!’ ‘Get my orange juice!’ After a few days Gibson told ol’ buddy Warren to ‘Get lost!’
Warren, bless him, also tried his luck with a nubile extra. ‘You can look, but don’t touch,’ he was told. Yes, that’s right, Warren didn’t necessarily score with every woman with a pulse; occasionally his pickup lines fell on deaf ears. ‘It’s untrue to think I am irresistible to all women,’ he once said. ‘That’s very flattering but I’ve been turned down by armies of them.’ Including On the Waterfront’s Eva Marie Saint. Leaving the studio in her station wagon with her two little kids, Warren knocked on the window. She rolled it down and he said, ‘Are you really happily married?’ She drove off.
Mickey One was poorly received. It seemed that tales of Warren’s womanising resonated more with the public than his acting talents. He desperately wanted to be taken as seriously by critics as Brando. Instead, he was considered just a playboy. He was in despair about it. Weary anyway of press interviews, Warren now pretty much banned them altogether, hoping that journalists would forget his Casanova image and focus on his career. More than most actors Warren resents personal publicity. ‘I’d rather ride down the street on a camel nude. In a snowstorm. Backwards. Than give what is called an in-depth interview.’ When he does agree to speak to the press it’s always on his terms; he’s mostly evasive and he talks methodically, as if cautiously editing every syllable. His pauses are elephantine. As one reporter said, ‘Broadway musicals could be mounted during his pauses.’ Critic Rex Reed once said interviewing Beatty was ‘like getting a pint of blood out of a haemophiliac’.
Shirley hardly helped her brother’s attempt to drop his playboy image with statements like, ‘I keep my daughter as far away
from him as possible.’ Never one to miss an easy opportunity to goad Warren in public, Shirley genuinely disapproved of his reckless shagging habits. ‘Warren seems to be quite enthusiastic about sex, to put it mildly,’ she told one reporter. What Warren needed was a stable relationship with a strong woman, not all this gallivanting around. And that’s exactly what happened when he met the elfin star of Gigi Leslie Caron. There was only one snag: she was already married to English theatre director Peter Hall. At thirty-two, she was also six years older than Warren and the mother of two young children, but that didn’t stop our man. He was fascinated by her passion and vitality. Hall was incensed when he found out about the affair and allegedly hired a private detective to follow them around London. (Hall, on the other hand, said it was his wife who hired detectives to follow him.)
When news arrived that Leslie intended moving her children out to LA to be closer to Warren Hall filed for divorce and petitioned the British government to make his children wards of court and keep them in England. Leslie had no choice but to stay in London. ‘I cannot give up my children.’ It was Warren who made the sacrifice and came to live in England, happy to support Leslie during the custody battles ahead. They settled into a large house in Knightsbridge and Warren bought a suitably ostentatious piece of England, a Rolls-Royce that once belonged to the Queen. Their near neighbour was Roman Polanski. Warren already knew the notorious director, having met him at a Hollywood party and discovered their minds were pretty much in the same place when it came to women. Together they’d toured the streets and topless bars along Sunset Strip. ‘All I was interested in was to fuck a girl and then move on,’ Polanski once confessed. He was Warren’s kind of man and a welcome dinner guest in London, along with his soon-to-be-wife, the beautiful actress Sharon Tate.
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