Robert Sellers

by Hollywood Hellraisers

  Not yet ready to take on the responsibility of helming a movie himself, Warren hired Arthur Penn instead, after a host of other directors rejected the offer. At first Penn felt like doing the same, not sure if he wanted to work with Beatty again. ‘I’m going to lock myself in a room with Arthur and not let him out until he says yes,’ threatened Beatty. Penn caved in.

  Warren needed all his powers of persuasion to get the fearsome Jack Warner to agree to finance the movie, especially after a number of studios had already turned him down, worried about his recent lousy track record. When he sensed the pitch wasn’t going well — ‘Those pictures went out with Jimmy Cagney,’ blasted the tycoon — Beatty suddenly dropped to the floor and grabbed Warner round the knees. ‘I’ll kiss your shoes here,’ he said. ‘I’ll lick them.’ Warner must have thought Warren was having a nervous collapse. ‘Get off the fucking floor, you crazy bastard.’ ‘Not until you agree to make this movie,’ implored Warren. Probably just to get this nutcase of an actor out of his office Warner agreed to a bargain-basement budget of $2m.

  Warren always insisted this never happened, that the story, spread around Hollywood by people who swore they were in the room and witnessed it, is apocryphal. And yet when directly asked by film critic Roger Ebert in 1971 whether he really got down on his knees in Jack Warner’s office Beatty replied, ‘Probably. Possibly. I used to do all sorts of crazy things with Jack. He thought I was a little crazy. Well, I am a little crazy.’ So who knows?

  Leslie Caron always assumed she would be first choice to play Bonnie; after all, she was sleeping with the producer. When Warren said her French accent and pixie features weren’t quite right for a machine-gun toting bitch from hell, Leslie saw it as an act of betrayal, and it wasn’t long before she was gone altogether from Warren’s life, perhaps realising that he was never going to commit fully to her personally either. Warren was starting to come out with some real peachy quotes concerning marriage, like this absolute gem: ‘The best time to get married is noon. That way, if things don’t work out, you haven’t blown the whole day.’

  Poor Leslie was left devastated; she’d lost Warren and what could have been the role of a lifetime. ‘Anyone who has come close to Warren has shed quite a few feathers,’ she would say years later. ‘He tends to maul you.’ As for Warren himself, he confessed to looking back at the messy end of his affair with Leslie ‘with a deep and profound sadness’.

  Speculation began about who would play Bonnie, with one wag suggesting sister Shirley. ‘That would be adding incest to injury,’ she quipped. Could they handle the love scenes, reporters asked. ‘I guess he couldn’t do it with his sister,’ said Shirley. ‘But come to think of it — maybe he could.’ Warren actually wanted Jane Fonda, Ann-Margret, Sharon Tate, or even ex-lover Natalie Wood. Warren visited Natalie at home and talked to her personally about it. Anxious to play Bonnie, Natalie was also anxious to avoid any more emotional distress. ‘Working with Warren had been difficult before.’ She passed.

  In the end a virtual unknown landed the role: Faye Dunaway. Beatty marvelled at Faye’s abilities as an actress and desperately wanted to give her one too, but the artist in him said no, this time he wouldn’t bang his leading lady. Faye later revealed that she and Beatty had a ‘tacit understanding’ during filming to keep things on a professional footing. Indeed, Warren was prepared to shun nookie altogether for the duration of the shoot. ‘You should be totally abstinent from the start of pre-production,’ he announced. ‘The film will be better if you never come.’ What crap! Filmmaker Kit Carson was a college student at the time and invited to hang out on the set. ‘Warren had his own trailer and every afternoon there would be a couple of girls who’d go inside and it would rock backwards and forwards, and then the girls would leave and Warren would come out beaming, “Heh, ready to go, let’s shoot.”’

  The crew took their collective hat off to Warren’s stamina as a lover, but were appalled that this snot-nosed pretty boy dared hold such a position of power; back then actors just didn’t produce their own movies. But Warren had learned very early in his career that real power was never with the actor, it was with the money men and the producers. No one really believed he could pull it off but in Penn’s estimation he was the perfect producer, staying with the picture through editing, mixing and scoring. ‘He plain works harder than anyone else I have ever seen.’

  They had their problems, though. Working on location in Texas, Warren and Penn clashed over practically every detail. They’d argued before on Mickey One, ‘deep disagreements’ as Penn put it, but this was far worse. ‘We had an argument for an hour every day on Bonnie and Clyde,’ Warren later admitted. ‘I like knowledgeable people to argue with me.’

  When Gene Wilder arrived on set for his short appearance, he was horrified when Warren and Penn began yelling at each other. ‘What’s happening?’ He asked actress Estelle Parsons. ‘Is this movie going to get made?’ Estelle gave him a knowing look, ‘Oh, don’t worry. This happens every day.’

  One thing they agreed on from the start was that the violence should shock people. ‘It has to be in-your-face,’ said Penn. The film’s controversial climax, where the outlaw couple die in an orgy of bullets, was the single most shocking piece of cinema up to that time.

  Bonnie and Clyde was brought in under budget and Warren oversaw the final cut until it met his exacting standards. He knew he’d made a remarkable film; now he had to convince Jack Warner, the toughest of critics and a man who measured a film’s success on how many times he went for a piss. Five minutes into a private screening Warner got up for a leak. Reluctantly, it seemed, he came back, only to excuse himself twice more. His damning pronouncement on Bonnie and Clyde was, ‘It’s a threepiss picture.’ Warren tried to smooth things over. ‘You know, Jack, this is really kind of an hommage to the Warner Brothers gangster movies of the thirties.’ Warner stared back at him and said, ‘What’s a fucking hommage?’ Warren knew he was in serious shit.

  Convinced the movie wouldn’t make a dime, over August 1967 Warners dumped it with scarcely any publicity in second-rate theatres, where it met with some lousy reviews and public apathy. Warren fell into a deep depression. By year’s end he was re-energised by the positive response to the film in Britain and critical reappraisal back home. He walked into Warner Brothers and demanded Bonnie and Clyde be re-released, a practically unheard of move, or he was going to sue one of the studio’s top executives, Eliot Hyman. ‘What the hell would you sue me for?’ Hyman hit back. It was a Beatty bluff. He’d heard rumours of some dodgy individuals Hyman had associated with in the past, that’s all, so shot him a knowing look and said, ‘I think you know.’

  It worked. Bonnie and Clyde was back in theatres and its turnaround from flop to box office smash was unparalleled, and everything to do with Warren. He’d proved himself not just an artist but a street fighter. He made himself a real pain in the arse to an industry who mocked: Why do we have to deal with this good-looking actor? ‘People didn’t recognise him as the superior businessman he is,’ said Penn. ‘They do now. The results of his efforts were absolutely electrifying.’

  Warren was now the most important leading male in Hollywood and one of the richest, but, more significantly, also the most powerful. The Village Voice sent their star reporter Blair Sobol to interview him, along with a young freelance photographer called Linda Eastman, the future Mrs Paul McCartney. As she squatted at the feet of Warren to reel off a load of film Sobol noticed she wasn’t wearing any knickers. ‘Warren must have noticed too,’ said Sobol. ‘Because I didn’t see Linda again for two weeks.’

  Warren wasn’t averse to picking up dates during interviews. Los Angeles magazine journalist Thomas Thompson remembered talking with Warren in London when they were joined by a very attractive German reporter decked out in the latest Carnaby Street fashions. It was too much for poor Warren; he took her up to his hotel room with really quite shocking haste.

  He also had an unusual hiring method for his personal staff acco
rding to Susanna Moore, now an acclaimed novelist, then a nineteen-year-old being interviewed by Warren for a job as his assistant. After the interview she turned to leave when Warren said, ‘There’s one last thing I haven’t checked yet — I need to see your legs. Can you lift up your skirt?’ Susanna obliged. ‘OK, you got the job.’

  Bonnie and Clyde also made Faye Dunaway a star, and she was cast next opposite Steve McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair (1968). It was now, like a heat-seeking missile, that Warren struck. ‘Everybody wants you,’ he said to her hotly down the phone one night. ‘And so do I.’ There was no denying Faye found Warren, ‘pretty alluring’, but she’d made a private vow never to fuck a superstar; most of them were womanisers and that kind of relationship was doomed from the start. When probed years later about Warren’s seduction technique, Faye called it ‘direct’, telling a girl right out front what he wants, and what he wants is to go to bed with her. ‘He’s one of the most charming men I’ve ever met. I wouldn’t have anything to do with him if my life depended on it. I consider him dangerous.’

  Well, the crew on Bonnie considered Faye aloof. During filming she seemed never to be truly part of the team. At the wrap party, held at a New York hotel, Kit Carson recalls a bunch of guys showing up with a string of women who were sent round the room to dance with the guests. ‘They were hookers, and these guys were really low-rent pimps. At the end of the evening Warren paid for them all and took them to Faye’s hotel room. So Faye Dunaway ended up that night with about ten hookers showing up at her hotel. It was Warren’s way of getting back at her because she was too much of a stiff.’

  Reality is a deadly place. I hope this trip is a good one.

  Now thirty, Jack Nicholson had been busting his arse for years. He’d made some fifteen films, written, edited and produced some of them, and for what? He was hardly known outside the midnight-movie crowds, and his big break seemed as elusive as ever. Maybe he was considered too old for stardom by Hollywood standards. There was an air of desperation now, a fear he’d missed his chance. He lost out on The Graduate. Despite the fact that ‘they were auditioning everyone I was having lunch with’, Jack wasn’t even seen and the role went to a complete newcomer – Dustin Hoffman. It seemed to sum up Jack’s predicament and when he heard the news he got miserably drunk.

  While Jack wondered if he was ever going to rid himself of his B-movie millstone, rifts began to appear in his marriage to Sandra. He’d made a fine go of it the first few years and been blessed with a daughter, Jennifer, but his old ways slowly crept back. He seemed to want to carry on his bachelor existence as if he hadn’t signed a wedding certificate, so that meant wild parties, drugs and the odd fling. Filming the Monte Hellman movies in the Philippines had been ‘prostitute heaven’, according to producer Jack Leewood, who revealed that during production he and Jack, ‘were screwing the same dames’.

  At this rate Jack and Sandra were headed for divorce. But Jack, to his credit, did try his best to work things out, in his own inimitable way, by asking Sandra to drop acid with him. Jack was never one to bother with dreary marriage counsellors; he’d found an analyst whose course of treatment included the administration of LSD. Unfortunately Sandra was given the maximum dosage. ‘At one point, she looked at me and saw a demon,’ Jack told Ladies’ Home Journal in 1976. ‘A totally demonic figure. For whatever reason, either because it’s true about me or because of her own grasping at something, it was pretty bad.’ No shit, Sherlock.

  So bad was it that Sandra turned to religion for solace. Jack couldn’t get with that programme. ‘I didn’t want to get caught in a situation where I was in competition with God.’ He also continued using LSD, much to Sandra’s horror. When he refused to give it up, she booted him out of the house and the marriage was dead. The divorce was finalised in 1967 with no residue of hatred. ‘Our marriage was lived out rather than failed,’ Jack admitted. ‘We just grew apart.’ The two remained friends and when Sandra moved to Hawaii with Jennifer he was able to see his daughter at regular intervals. As she grew up Jennifer often spent her summer vacation with Jack, visiting him on film sets, and a charming and strong bond developed between them, with Jack deciding not to duck the odd embarrassing question about his affairs; nor did he necessarily hide other aspects of his lifestyle.

  Meanwhile the ever dependable Roger Corman had become the first filmmaker to tap into the growing California motorcycle-gang culture with its drugs, sex and sadistic violence. ‘I wanted to move away from the studio system and do something reflecting the changing social environment, ’ he says. ‘It was an exciting time because film was changing. I had been shooting primarily studio films such as the Poe pictures, and now everything was shot on location, so it was a whole different feel to the making of films. Also it was the time of the hippie movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement, there was a general rebelliousness amongst the young.’

  The Wild Angels (1966), starring Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra, was a massive hit, so Corman threw Jack into his own derivative biker movie, Hells Angels on Wheels (1967). Prepping the movie, Jack got to meet Sonny Barger, the infamous head of the Hells Angels, who’d agreed to add a little background authenticity to the movie. There stood Barger in cliché black leather and swastika, smoking a joint, his bike parked in his hotel room. He looked over at what he thought was this soft actor and asked, ‘A toke for a poke?’ Jack had no idea what that meant but was pretty much game for anything. He took a drag from a lethal-looking joint and then Barger punched him full in the stomach — a toke for a poke, Hells Angels humour, I guess. Jack did his best to blend in with them during filming.

  Hells Angels on Wheels was directed by Richard Rush, who remembered Jack’s impressive audition for him years before and was happy to cast him again. This time he detected an actor ‘more aware of his capabilities and desirability’ and the flowering of a persona that would eventually explode in Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces. ‘My films called for those qualities,’ says Rush. ‘For example, Jack had one thing that was extremely appealing to me, he had a kind of shit-eating grin that said, I don’t really mean what I’m saying, I don’t mean it to offend you, but it sort of pardoned anything he said or did. It was something he did habitually as a person, a natural quirk, but I liked it very much and called it up for the character.’

  And so was born the famous Jack smile, soon to become his trademark. ‘An icon of our times,’ says Witches of Eastwick director George Miller. ‘Like those newspaper competitions where they just show you the smile and you have to guess whose it is.’

  Drugs were now a major issue in a society perhaps changing too rapidly. The posturing rebellion of Brando and James Dean looked positively anachronistic up against the new drug-fuelled hippie movement; everywhere people were dropping out of society and hitting the road as the reality of Vietnam started to spill out into the streets and campuses of America. ‘There was a marijuana scene very strongly going on, both on and off screen,’ says Rush. ‘But I don’t think it hurt anyone’s performance or functionality.’ Certainly the drug scene was informing the kind of films being made at the time, and the atmosphere of the late sixties. ‘I think it was a great time,’ continues Rush. ‘The sexual revolution had just taken place. The hippies in northern California had created a new culture, make love not war. It was very strongly influencing the rest of the world, kids in particular. Marijuana had become part of the culture, which was a daring part of the rebellion, a rebellion against the restraining holds of society, and we could reflect that in films and in our daily lives as well.’

  Ahead of the game once again, Corman seized on the cinematic potential of putting a drug trip up on the screen. He rang Jack: ‘Write me a screenplay about this psychedelic craze and LSD.’ Jack thought it was a great idea and went to work, drawing heavily upon his own experiences of LSD, which, he told Playboy in 1972, he first dropped as early as 1963 ‘because I was a totally adventurous actor looking for experience to put in his mental filing cabinet for later contributions to
art’. Nothing at all to do with getting plain stoned, then. Jack had heard some people were taking the drug, then not seen as harmful but almost of therapeutic value, at a medical practice in LA and so went along. His private session lasted five hours in total, with the therapist administering the drug on hand throughout to supervise the trip, a trip enhanced by the fact he was blindfolded, to aid further introspection. So strong was the overall effect that Jack was still tripping hours after getting home.

  Jack readily admitted to being unprepared for the experience. Maybe he thought it was going to be like getting zonked out on grass. If so, he was wrong. Some of the images and feelings were frighteningly vivid, such as the moment he thought that ‘my prick was going to be cut off’. He also experienced the sensation of floating inside his mother’s womb and being born screaming and kicking into a cold world, overwhelmed by feelings of being unwanted. These were complicated issues to make sense of at the time, and long before he became aware of his family’s dark secret.

  Jack also confessed to Playboy that he’d dropped acid since, but not as much as most of the people in his social circle, and continued to take it occasionally ‘because once you’ve related to acid, there are certain things you perceive that would be impossible otherwise — things that help you understand yourself. If properly used, acid can also mean a lot of kicks.’