Robert Sellers

by Hollywood Hellraisers

  Warren had arrived in the capital at a propitious moment. It was the mid-sixties and London was beginning to swing. He made a typically dotty sixties spy romp, Kaleidoscope (1966), with Susannah York. ‘I think we worked well together,’ says Susannah. ‘Of course, Warren was a bit of a lad, and I was fairly newly married, so I wasn’t up for any hi-jinks. He had an annoying habit of pinching my bum and I used to slap his hand. But it was all done in good humour. Besides, Leslie would come onto the set, so there really wasn’t any question of taking things any further than just light-hearted banter. I suppose I’m one of the few women who didn’t necessarily respond to him; I didn’t really fancy him.’

  Warren perhaps sensed this and his relationship with Susannah never extended beyond the film. Warren felt more comfortable being friends with women that he’d been in an intimate relationship with. ‘But I liked Warren enormously,’ says Susannah. ‘I thought he was personable, funny, very intelligent, enthusiastic, all qualities I like. Also very quick-thinking, very ambitious. I liked his style. A little bit thinking he was the bee’s knees as far as women were concerned. I think sometimes a certain self-regard or vanity might occasionally have got in the way at that time. Probably that was because he was just beginning and it was something that Hollywood fosters in people that could sometimes make him seem a little immature perhaps.’

  Just how immature can perhaps be summed up by this story. In London Warren called up his old buddy Charlie Feldman, then producing the spoof Peter Sellers Bond movie Casino Royale, asking if he could visit the set. The day Warren arrived just happened to be when 20 nubile and scantily clad young ladies hovered about the place. Inevitably Warren asked to be introduced to them all. Twenty-one-year-old model Alexandra Bastedo (later a TV star in cult show The Champions) was amongst them. ‘At the time I was sharing a flat with a girlfriend,’ Alexandra remembers. ‘Her name was Nicole Shelby. That evening we got to bed around midnight and the phone rang. I was nearest so I answered it and this voice said, “Hi Alexandra, this is Warren here. Would you like to come over for a drink?” And I said, “I’m awfully sorry Warren but I’ve just gone to bed.” I put the phone down and went back to sleep. At 3 o’clock in the morning the phone rang again. I staggered back over and this voice said, “Hi Nicole, Warren here. I wonder if you’d like to come over for a drink.” He’d obviously worked his way through the film producer’s address book. Looking back, I don’t regret saying no to Warren, I wasn’t a great one for Lotharios. Someone like that terrified me; I kept well away.’

  Sensing his career was in jeopardy if he remained in England, Warren returned to Los Angeles. Frightened of losing him, Leslie vacillated between continents, juggling the needs of her lover and those of her children. Leslie was now more in love with Warren than ever and it showed, at least to those in the know. At one Hollywood party she positively glowed, causing a guest to remark, ‘Leslie is looking so beautiful.’ Overhearing, Natalie Wood said one word: ‘Warren.’

  Marriage was looking like a real possibility. ‘I believe that a fulfilled monogamous relationship can be great,’ Warren told reporters. ‘But it takes genius to do it.’ That’s why he retained his bachelor pad over at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, hardly an indicator of marital intent. Warren was also lining up a possible replacement. In London he’d been introduced to Britain’s new star, and the face of the sixties, Julie Christie, an Oscar winner with Darling and also the immortal Lara in Dr Zhivago. ‘When I met her,’ he said. ‘I thought she had the most wonderful face.’ Yet those glamorously refined looks belied a beatnik sensibility, in her attitude towards both life and sex. She once said, ‘For men, I don’t think it’s sexiness in me that appeals to them, but an air of abandonment. Men don’t want responsibilities and neither do I.’ She sounded like the perfect match for Warren, if not for the fact that she despised the sort of hollow film-star glamour that he largely personified. Anyway, both were currently in relationships, and Warren had more pressing problems such as rescuing his career from going down the toilet.

  Are bras that heavy, Mister Pulver?

  In the summer of 1963 Jack Nicholson heard the news that June had been diagnosed with cancer and it was terminal. For years now their relationship had never been less than shaky. ‘We used to have incredible fights,’ Jack recalled. ‘She had a fiery, amazing temper.’ Maybe she was bitter that she’d never made it in show business and feared Jack was heading the same way. Neither did she much approve of his bohemian lifestyle, going around with his hair generally a mess, wearing jeans and smoking dope. ‘She saw me as a bum.’

  Ironically, Jack had just landed a small role in his first major studio picture, Ensign Pulver (1964), a sequel to the 1955 hit Mister Roberts. The night before he was due to fly out for location shooting in Mexico he visited June in hospital. He settled down in a chair next to June’s bed and they started chatting. Strange, June must have known that this was the last time they’d ever speak; surely now was the moment to reveal the truth about his parentage, to unburden herself of this guilty secret. She remained silent. When Jack got ready to leave she looked him in the eye. ‘Shall I wait?’ Jack looked at her, in these last few months he’d seen her suffer and lose so much weight. The pain was so bad that surely the most humane thing was to wish for her to be taken now. ‘No,’ Jack replied, looking away. Inside the elevator when the doors closed he collapsed to his knees and sobbed uncontrollably. Almost immediately after arriving on location Jack got the wire. June had passed away at the age of forty-four.

  Besides schlockmeister Roger Corman, Jack worked for another bargain-basement producer, Robert Libbert, selling him a script called Thunder Island (1963), a potboiler about political assassinations in South America. Director Jack Leewood never forgot the fraught and passionate story conferences during which Jack took it as a personal insult whenever a line or story idea was changed or criticised, actually to the point of violence. ‘He’d go for me physically,’ said Leewood.

  When Thunder Island opened to moderate success Libbert requested Jack’s services again, this time to co-star in a couple of action B-movies Monte Hellman was shooting back to back in the Philippines: Flight to Fury (1964), about hidden treasure and Back Door to Hell (1964), about US marines let loose on the Japs in the Second World War. Cast and crew journeyed to the most desolate of locations, hot and humid when it wasn’t raining torrents. Giant cockroaches invaded their rooms, poisonous snakes and spiders bigger than saucers were all over the place and there was no hot water or plumbing; little wonder everyone got the shits or worse and that between pictures Hellman collapsed from exhaustion and had to be hospitalised.

  Jack was desperately disappointed when both films met with a lukewarm reception; he’d slogged his guts out in a miserable hell hole for months — and for what? He still wasn’t getting the breaks and he was still driving the same goddamn car, a battered yellow Volkswagen bug, a car he kept for years once he made it big, just to remind himself of where he’d come from.

  When star of Back Door to Hell Jimmie Rodgers invited Jack to a party at his huge mansion he noticed that for much of the evening he stood by a wall surveying the scene, the upmarket guests, the lush interior. As Rodgers recalled, ‘The look on his face was, so this is what it’s like.’

  Have you ever been collared, dragged out into the streets and thrashed by a naked woman?

  Marlon Brando continued to make films to pay the bills rather than for any idealistic or creative reason. And his resentment too often showed. On the western The Appaloosa (1966), it was open hostility between director Sidney J. Furie and his star; the crew were taking bets who’d lay the other one out first. According to co-star John Saxon Brando would come onto the set to do his close-ups reading a book. ‘He would only lower the book when it was action. When it was cut, he’d raise the book again.’

  Furie sought the unlikely assistance of Michael Caine, who was in Hollywood filming at the time. Caine, who’d been directed by Furie in The Ipcress File, recalled him coming into hi
s dressing room one day almost in tears because of Brando’s behaviour. They wandered back onto the set together and Caine got talking to Marlon. ‘What do you think of Sidney as a director?’ Brando asked. ‘I think he’s an excellent director,’ said Caine, faithfully. Marlon, in front of Furie and the crew, replied, ‘I don’t think he can direct traffic.’

  It’s hardly surprising that Marlon fostered a reputation for being difficult with directors. He habitually turned against whatever he was working on, it seemed to comfort him to be dissatisfied and difficult. However, when people dealt with him honestly, there was no one better. Gray Frederickson, who worked twice with Marlon, says, ‘He was a professional, never caused a problem. If you were a professional with Marlon he respected you. God forbid the people that didn’t know what they were doing around him, he unleashed unholy hell on them.’ Before Tom Mankiewicz started working with Marlon on Superman he sought advice from the star’s former agent Jay Kanter. His opinion was stark: ‘Marlon is either at your feet or at your balls.’

  It didn’t really matter, anyway, Marlon was convinced we were all fucked, nuclear oblivion was just round the corner, and so began a search for a place where he and his family could be self-sufficient and survive. He remembered how much he’d fallen in love with Tahiti during the making of Mutiny on the Bounty, and with the Tahitian people, ‘because they don’t give a damn who you are’, so bought his own little piece of paradise there. At first he lived on his island in a modest house, just one large room, a double bed covered by a mosquito net, scant furnishings and a photograph of his mother. But he had grand plans for the place and over the years would pump millions into turning his own small corner of heaven into an arts and science commune, with disastrous results.

  But for now it was back to more mundane matters like earning a living, Brando playing a sheriff in a southern backwater town seething with racism, wife-swapping and murder. The Chase (1966) boasted an astonishing supporting cast — Angie Dickinson, Jane Fonda, Robert Duvall and a young Robert Redford — but little else. Marlon’s beating at the hands of a group of rednecks, however, remains one of the most savage in cinema history. Centre stage in the punch-up was a young Brandoinspired actor called Richard Bradford, who recalls that during rehearsals Marlon told him to slap him around and punch him in the body for real. As cameras rolled Bradford lost himself in the moment. ‘There’s a bit where I jump up on a desk on top of Marlon and I’m whacking him, kind of going crazy,’ he says. ‘One of the actors pulled me off, “You’re gonna kill him,” but they couldn’t hold me, I got away and I ran and jumped back up on top and started whacking Marlon again. I think that’s the part they used in the film. That fight was so brutal they didn’t show the whole of it, the censor wouldn’t let them. But I learned something great from Marlon: whenever he was going to fall he just relaxed completely and went down, he didn’t try to break his fall, he just went. Once he literally rolled off that desk and bang, hit the floor, he didn’t try to support himself or anything. I thought that was fantastic.’

  Next Marlon played a repressed homosexual married to Elizabeth Taylor in Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), a role in which co-star Julie Harris believed he was ‘exploring his own sexuality’. Rumours have persisted about Marlon’s gay leanings or bisexual nature, that he enjoyed numerous affairs with not only women but men as well, from street riffraff to Hollywood stars such as Laurence Olivier, James Dean, Rock Hudson, Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift, about whom Brando apparently told director Fred Zinnemann, ‘I made him my bitch.’

  Brando himself was quoted in the mid-seventies: ‘Like a large number of men I, too, have had homosexual experiences, and I am not ashamed.’ His Last Tango in Paris co-star Maria Schneider said she got on well with him, ‘because we’re both bisexual’.

  During the filming of Reflections Brando socialised with Liz and husband Richard Burton, the trio often getting thoroughly pissed together. ‘Brando is very engaging and silly after a couple of small drinks,’ Burton wrote in his diary. Brando presented the couple with two memorial antique silver goblets. The first was engraved: ‘Richard: Christ, I’ve pissed in my pants.’ And the second: ‘Elizabeth: That’s not piss, that’s come.’

  Burton truly admired Brando, often arriving on the set to pick up Liz early so he could watch him at work. It was a combustible friendship that as the years dragged on decayed and died. Burton felt that his fondness for Marlon was not reciprocated. In the early seventies he wrote disparagingly about Brando in his diary after learning from Liz that he’d expressed concern about him during a gossipy telephone chat. ‘He really is a smugly pompous little bastard and is cavalier about everybody except Black Panthers and Indians. That sober self-indulgent obese fart being solicitous about me. Sinatra is the same. Gods in their own mirrors. Distorted mirrors.’

  She’s gorged herself with fresh blood. She’s a monster.

  After his supporting role in Wayne’s The Sons of Katie Elder, the only roles on offer for Dennis Hopper were in exploitation gems like Queen of Blood (1966), which has Basil Rathbone sending a rocket ship into an unknown galaxy to bring back a blood-sucking alien witch-bitch thing. Dennis plays one of the pilots and is clearly improvising much of his dialogue; I mean, who the hell calls their shipmates ‘baby’?

  Like many young people at this time, Dennis was being swept up in the counterculture movement; taking part in anti-war demos, political protests for free speech and civil rights. All very high-minded and noble, but the fringe benefits were good, too, namely sex, drugs and rock and roll. And more drugs. A lot more drugs. ‘Back in those days, we were all like guinea pigs,’ Dennis recalled. ‘We were always waiting for the next new drug. It was like, Hey, gimme some of that!’

  But the impact it was having at home was considerable. Booze had always been an issue with Dennis, but now he’d embraced the drug scene things got darker and weirder and more dangerous. Brooke believed it was the combination of drink and drugs that warped his personality, changed him and made him more violent, more of a loose cannon. He even made her take mescaline on one occasion, which she later described as, ‘one of the most horrific experiences’. She was frightened; saw his eyes ‘zipping around like the fourth of July’. At those moments she feared he’d do something that he might not remember the next morning. One time, when Dennis was rehearsing a play and nervous about his performance, Brooke said she had to get home for the kids and couldn’t stay to support him. Driving off, Dennis suddenly jumped on the hood of Brooke’s car and kicked out the windshield. Brooke started worrying about the safety of her children.

  Dennis saw nothing wrong in exposing himself to every new dangerous stimulus going: hadn’t the great artists that he aspired to be like done precisely the same thing? John Barrymore, Edmund Kean . . . they’d all got bladdered. Van Gogh, said Dennis, drank for a whole summer to find the perfect yellow to paint his damn sunflowers. Their collective geniuses almost excused Dennis to go hell for leather. ‘I was an artist; I was supposed to drink, supposed to take drugs.’ It also fitted in well with his plan. From as far back as he could remember he saw himself as destined to achieve the extraordinary. ‘I ruled out even the vaguest notions of normal work.’ He saw art as the perfect vehicle; guys like Van Gogh gave him faith because, although their lives were tragic ruins, the fruits of their suffering had achieved immortality. ‘Dennis did look back at his wild period and compare it to what Van Gogh said about needing to drink to get that perfect yellow,’ says film-maker George Hickenlooper. ‘Which in retrospect I think Dennis thought was horseshit because in the end drugs and alcohol only limit you as an artist. But at the time drugs and alcohol served as a vehicle for him to act outrageously. It also magnified what was already there, that is a personality and a temperament that is truly an artist trying to function in an industry that proclaims to be about art but is really more about money.’ Hopper’s difficulty with the Hollywood power structure was almost always over artistic vision, not trailer size or corporate jets.

&
nbsp; So, sadly for Dennis, all drinks and drugs did was turn him into something of a stumbling wreck. ‘Dennis’s mind was all over the map,’ says Tom Mankiewicz. ‘Everybody started to use drugs then. I recall one time we were driving to Tijuana for the bullfights and stopped off at Disneyland. And there’s a ride called the Mad Hatter’s Tea Cup which has a circular bar in the centre where the harder you pull on it the faster the cup spins. Dennis had had a lot of joints, and I’d had booze, but Dennis was really wasted, and he started to pull the thing so fast that the announcer on the public address system said, “Would the gentlemen on teacup eight please slow down.” And after the ride was over we were ejected, and Dennis said to me, “What a bummer, getting thrown out of Fantasy Land.”’

  This here’s Miss Bonnie Parker. I’m Clyde Barrow. We rob banks.

  Warren Beatty’s last four films had tanked at the box office and he needed a hit. Actually, he needed a miracle. Salvation came from a pair of outlaw lovers that maybe could speak directly to the anti-war generation — being anti-establishment was a pretty cool thing to be in the late sixties. They were called Bonnie and Clyde.

  Warren snapped up a screenplay based on their lives and installed himself as producer and star. But there was one aspect of the story that he refused to countenance: the Clyde character was revealed as having bisexual relationships within his gang. ‘Let me tell you one thing right now,’ he told the writers. ‘I ain’t gonna play no fag. The audience won’t accept it, they’re going to piss all over my leg.’ A colourful expression that was one of his favourites. Thinking that Clyde should have at least some kind of sexual dysfunction, Warren instead played him as impotent, a neat subversion of his own Casanova persona.