Robert Sellers

by Hollywood Hellraisers

  It was precisely this kind of reputation that inspired the British director John Schlesinger, who’d launched Julie Christie’s film career with Billy Liar and Darling, to write to his protégée and warn her off the Hollywood Lothario, whom he described as a serial womaniser who ‘gets through women like a businessman through a dozen oysters’. Good advice, though she ignored it.

  Still coming to terms with Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, Warren threw his weight behind the campaign to elect Vice-President Hubert Humphrey to high office. The current incumbent, Lyndon Johnson, was a dead duck because of his Vietnam War policies and Warren, along with many others, saw Humphrey’s liberal allegiance as the nation’s only hope in the face of Richard Nixon’s rabid republicanism. The war was stoking up unrest on the streets of America. At the Democratic convention in Chicago anti-war protestors lined the streets outside the Hilton Hotel, where Humphrey and his team were staying. Warren was tear gassed during one demonstration as he attempted to enter the building.

  Humphrey asked Warren to appear in a campaign documentary. Warren’s price was simple, and something many of Humphrey’s friends were urging him to do anyway: that he should publicly criticise and break with his own administration’s stance on Vietnam. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Humphrey, ‘that’ll be happening within the next week or so.’ Warren was satisfied, but Humphrey failed to honour his promise and his defence of the war cost him the support of the large anti-war lobby. That November Nixon claimed the White House.

  Upon Warren’s return from Chicago, Los Angeles magazine gleefully reported a phalanx of girls ‘larger than a Broadway chorus call’ outside El Escondido. A very nice welcome home present, but the guest directly below his suite had some difficulty getting to sleep, what with the bumping and grinding noises emanating from above his head. ‘What goes on up in that penthouse apartment?’ he asked the manager. ‘I hear the strangest noises at all hours of the night.’ Had the guest known who the occupant above was, he might not have asked such a stupid question.

  To say that a conveyor belt of crumpet perpetually wound its way through Beatty’s hotel suite is not much of an exaggeration. ‘When he was in town he’d have various people over there,’ says Tom Mankiewicz. ‘And a couple of times he said to me, you wanna come up, I’ve got this and that going on. I don’t think Warren wanted me to go up as much as he wanted me to know what he was up to. He had a real reputation, and I think he loved every minute of that reputation. I think he’s very clear that he did it and I think he didn’t mind that people knew that he did it. I’ve always thought Warren, in the best sense of the word, was one of the most shameless people I’ve ever seen.’

  Hey hey we are the Monkees, you know we aim to please. A manufactured image with no philosophies.

  After the positive reaction to his script for The Trip, Jack Nicholson was giving serious consideration to dumping acting altogether and concentrating on writing, and maybe directing. His next screenplay, Psych-Out (1968) was a paean to flower children and all that hippy-dippy shit; the problem was, by the time the cast and crew arrived at Haight Ashbury in San Francisco, home of the hippie movement, the summer of love had turned to winter, hard drugs were being taken, the counterculture was for sale. ‘The kids on the street,’ says Richard Rush, brought in by Jack to direct, ‘took one look at us in our studio trucks and decided that we were the enemy, we were the establishment come to exploit them.’ Knives were pulled on some of the actors, and the film-makers couldn’t call the cops lest they alienate the very group they wanted to film. ‘So I called the Hells Angels,’ says Rush. ‘I called Sonny Barger and said, “Listen, can you send a couple of guys to police this for us?” and he did, and it worked beautifully because both the Angels and the kids on the street had dope in common and the tide turned to friendliness at once. So it worked out fine except that I felt like I had just called the Nazis to police the French underground.’

  Jack had taken a role in the film and once again Rush found him easy going, ‘although very demanding in terms of what he was doing. Inevitably he’d bring you a performance with a lot of invention in it.’ It was the last time they’d work together. When they met up again years later Rush was surprised how unchanged he was by superstardom. ‘He was very much the same old Jack, but he’d become an international icon. I wasn’t surprised he became a star, he was such a naturally magnetic leading man, with terrific range and the ability to handle anything on screen. There’s a common-man appeal in him that’s reached everybody, they all root for Jack whether it’s on the screen or at a Lakers game.’

  There was also a new woman in Jack’s life, Mimi Machu, a former model he’d met on a movie set. The pair were immediately attracted to each other and began a passionate and occasionally stormy affair. Occasionally they’d hang out at the home of director Bob Rafelson. Dennis and Brooke would also be there, the atmosphere was warm and friendly, and the dope was good. Rafelson was riding high as one of the creators of the hit TV show The Monkees and planned to use the group for a surreal assault on the big screen, turning to Jack to help with the script — the result was Head (1968). Both worked on the screenplay, ‘stoned out of our minds’ on acid, says Rafelson. But audiences didn’t get the joke and the proposed sequel never happened. Shame. The ads would have read: ‘From the people who gave you Head.’

  Rafelson would become a key Nicholson collaborator; he was starting to collect them thick and fast. Another powerful new friendship was with Robert Evans, a former movie actor who had been appointed head of Paramount. Evans was backing a Roman Polanski film called Rosemary’s Baby and suggested Jack play the father of the devil child. Polanski wasn’t convinced; Jack was a too unknown and off-the-wall choice. ‘For all his talent, his faintly sinister appearance ruled him out,’ said the director, who preferred Warren, though he said he’d rather play the part of Rosemary. As with The Graduate, Jack had missed out on another breakthrough role. It only added credence to his own argument that he should quit acting altogether.

  Cutting off her nipples with garden shears! You call that normal?

  Marlon Brando’s career was in free fall and his personal life wasn’t faring any better. It was around this time that his Bedtime Story co-star Shirley Jones met up with him again — sort of. Shirley was the star of a new TV series called The Partridge Family, playing the mother of a teen pop group. She also often appeared as a guest on the TV game show Hollywood Squares and became friends with Marlon’s best pal Wally Cox, who also appeared on it from time to time. One evening Wally invited Shirley and her husband to dinner at his home. When they arrived Wally opened the door and rushed out. ‘Now Shirley, don’t say anything, Marlon’s here and he doesn’t want to see anybody or talk to anybody, so just make like he’s not here.’ A little taken aback, Shirley replied, ‘Oh, really.’ Wally said, ‘Yeah, he’s in a very bad mood, he’s having problems with his kids.’ So Shirley went inside. ‘They had a whole table set out with food,’ she recalls. ‘It was a buffet, we could go and get our dinner whenever we wanted. As I approached the table to get some food, underneath was Marlon Brando, sitting in a crouched position. And he stayed there all evening until the people started to leave and then gradually he got up and just left.’

  Marlon’s friendship with his old roommate was really rather odd indeed. Marlon often stayed at his house or sometimes broke in when Wally and his wife were away, and they’d return to see him slouched on a coach eating peanut butter out of a jar. The two men shared the same mischievous sense of humour and intellectual pursuit of life. Rumours that they were lovers have always been dismissed by family and friends, although Marlon could be incredibly possessive of Wally and never wanted him to marry. He did, though, three times. His third wife, Patricia, never saw any evidence of bisexuality or any other shenanigans. ‘I knew Wally pretty well. Even though Marlon had orgies, Wally never participated in them.’ But eyebrows were raised when Marlon told one journalist, ‘If Wally had been a woman, I would have married him and we would have lived h
appily ever after.’

  Marlon was in Tahiti in February 1973 when he learned of Wally’s death from a heart attack, aged just forty-eight. He was devastated, and just like the wrestling from his life of his mother, he’d never get over it. He flew in for the funeral but refused to join his fellow mourners, staying the entire time in Wally’s room, sleeping that night in his old pal’s pyjamas. Later he wrenched Wally’s ashes away from his widow, promising to scatter them himself in the place where they used to go hiking together. Instead, for years Marlon kept them at home or under the front seat of his car. When he revealed to the press that he talked to them nightly, Wally’s widow was furious at being lied to and threatened to sue in order to have them returned, but in the end decided, ‘Marlon needed the ashes more than I did.’

  Hey, man. All we represent to them, man, is somebody who needs a haircut.

  One night during a publicity junket for The Trip Peter Fonda lay whacked out on vodka and weed in his hotel room when an idea suddenly hit his brain that was so enlightening he had to tell someone about it there and then. He called Dennis Hopper. ‘Listen to this, man.’ Fonda outlined his idea of a modern western, two buddies on motorbikes instead of horses travelling across America on one final dope deal. ‘Whaddaya think?’ We’ll take the two leading roles.’

  ‘Wow, man, that’s great,’ said Dennis. ‘Jesus, that’s great, man.’

  ‘I’m going to produce this movie and I want you to direct it,’ said Fonda. ‘Will you do it?’

  ‘Gee whiz, man, are you kidding me? Wow, babe. Jesus, that’s great. Of course I’ll fucking do it. What’s the title?’

  ‘Easy Rider.’

  ‘Wow, man.’

  Dennis seized on the project, realising no sane film executive would ever give him the chance to direct his own picture. As Jack said, ‘You know Dennis, you don’t exactly just turn over some money to him and say, no problem, you know what I mean.’

  After hiring Terry Southern, a hot writer with Dr Strangelove to his credit, to turn their story outline and ramblings into a coherent script, Hopper and Fonda pitched the idea around the studios, but there were no takers. Maybe Dennis’s manic way of describing the story, all shouting and arm waving, scared producers.

  So they tried the private sector, in the shape of the reclusive American supermarket tycoon Huntington Hartford. Dennis’s heartfelt pitch to the businessman went down so well that Hartford declared, ‘I will give you the money.’ Denis couldn’t believe it. ‘You will?’ Hartford smiled. ‘Yes, I can see you’re impassioned and this will be a great movie. So I will give you the money. You only have to do one thing for me.’ He looked Dennis straight in the eye. ‘A man with your kind of passion should be able to levitate.’ Dennis was dumbfounded as Hartford carried on. ‘Levitate now, and I’ll give you the money.’ Dennis stood there and for a few seconds genuinely wondered if he’d be able to pull it off. Finally he turned to Fonda and said. ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here.’

  Jack had a better idea: why not pitch their biker movie to his old Head collaborator Bob Rafelson and his producing partner Bert Schneider, who now ran their own production company with links to Columbia? The name of it was BBS. Dennis was already known to Rafelson, after the director had one night almost tripped over him at a party where he lay poleaxed on the floor. ‘This guy is fucking crazy,’ Rafelson announced to Schneider. ‘But I totally believe in him, and I think he’d make a brilliant film for us.’ When Jack chipped in that Easy Rider could be ‘the Stagecoach of bike movies’ Schneider seemed impressed and handed over a cheque there and then for $40,000, telling Fonda and Hopper to get down to New Orleans and shoot the Mardi Gras sequence as a test. If they didn’t balls it up, he’d bankroll the whole movie.

  Great news, but back at the Hopper homestead things weren’t running so swimmingly. His marriage to Brooke was teetering on the edge, and her support for his latest venture non-existent; in fact she was downright hostile, adamant that he was going to fall flat on his arse. ‘You’ve never wanted me to succeed,’ Dennis fired back. ‘You should be encouraging me, instead of telling me I’m going to fail.’ He wanted a divorce, and Brooke was only too happy to oblige. Dennis left to make his bike picture.

  Down at Mardi Gras, chaos was the order of the day thanks mainly to Dennis’s self-confessed ego problems; as far as he was concerned he was ‘the greatest fucking film director there’s ever been in America’ and he proceeded to tell his crew exactly who was in charge. ‘This is MY fucking movie,’ he yelled at them. Cruising down paranoid boulevard, Dennis saw conspirators on every corner. ‘Nobody’s going to take my fucking movie away from me!’ This before a foot of celluloid had been exposed. Dennis was hell-bent on making his mark as a director. ‘I mean, talk about obsession,’ he later confessed. ‘I didn’t give a fuck if I ran over people in the street. If they got in the way, then they’d better get out of the way.’ A few of the crew began seriously debating whether all of Hopper’s marbles were present and correct. Fonda grew anxious as his ranting intensified. The shell shocked crew looked to their producer, but Fonda didn’t know what to do. ‘I’m fucked,’ he thought.

  As the scheduled five days went on people started quitting. There was confusion and bafflement amongst the three cameramen who’d been hired about what exactly they should be shooting. The tension escalated. ‘Dennis was this semi-psychotic maniac,’ said sound man Peter Pilafian. ‘There would be a couple of handguns, loaded, on the table. He liked that kind of atmosphere.’

  Tom Mankiewicz happened to be in New Orleans at the same time, working on a TV music special. ‘I ran into Dennis and Peter by accident. Nobody had any idea that Easy Rider was going to become some sort of classic. But, my God, if I’d had the money I wouldn’t have given it to these guys. They were loaded all day long.’

  Come the final day the now infamous cemetery scene was shot, featuring Fonda with actresses Karen Black and Toni Basil. Baird Bryant was the sole cameraman on that and remembers Dennis bullying Toni to get undressed and ‘crawl into one of those graves with the skeletons’. It was here that Dennis and Fonda clashed big time. Fuelled by a cocktail of speed, wine and lungfuls of grass, Dennis wanted Fonda to clamber atop a statue of the Madonna and open his heart on screen about his feelings for his mother. At the age of forty-two, after years suffering from mental illness, she’d committed suicide by cutting her throat with a razor in 1950, when Fonda had been ten years old. ‘I want you to ask your mother why she copped out on you,’ said Hopper.

  This time Fonda thought Dennis had gone too far, this wasn’t creating art, this was a family tragedy that he was being asked to expose to millions of cinemagoers munching on their popcorn. Reluctantly he did it, getting emotionally strung out. According to Bill Hayward, Hopper’s brother-in-law installed as producer, Fonda never really got over that and a rift developed in their relationship, ‘that never recovered’.

  Still paranoid, Dennis demanded that his other cameraman, Barry Feinstein, hand over all the footage he’d shot; he wanted it locked in his room, safe. Pissed off, Feinstein lobbed the film cans at him and the pair ended up brawling and falling through a door into one of the motel rooms. They got up and stared at the sight in front of them, Fonda in bed with both Black and Basil (Black denies this). Feinstein wasn’t stunned for long; he grabbed the TV set and hurled it in Hopper’s general direction.

  Karen Black later described the shoot in one word: ‘Insane!’ Not into drugs in a big way herself, she was in another universe from Dennis and co. Dennis would see some guy outside the motel window and say, ‘Hey, man, you see that guy outside the window? I’m gonna get him!’ And he’d go running out and lose all track of time. ‘He was NUTS!’

  So it had been an interesting few days in New Orleans. At the end of it Fonda called Brooke and suggested that maybe she and the children oughtn’t to be in the house when Dennis returned. His reasoning — ‘Dennis has gone berserk.’ Terry Southern phoned Brooke with much the same advice: ‘This guy’s around the
bend.’ Brooke ignored them both; she’d handled Dennis before and she could handle him again.

  But, waiting for him to come through the door, she must have felt like a beach-bar owner waiting for a hurricane to make landfall. Once home, Dennis locked himself away in his bedroom for three days, emerging only to view rushes of the Mardi Gras footage, which, in the opinion of Bill Hayward, was ‘an endless parade of shit’. Not surprisingly, Dennis’s mood blackened further, ably assisted by his increased drinking and drug taking. At this point Brooke categorised him as ‘exceedingly dangerous’.

  One night, according to Brooke, Hopper lost it when he found out the kids had eaten all the hot dogs being served for dinner. He began striding menacingly towards Brooke, but her young son blocked his path. ‘Don’t you get near my mother.’ It was the final straw for Brooke. The kids were getting mixed up in all the shit with Dennis and she got out, sleeping with her young family for a week on the floor of a friend’s house.

  As Brooke set about getting a restraining order against Dennis, he was arrested for smoking dope while cruising down Sunset Strip and thrown in jail. He protested his innocence in court, saying the cops only pulled him over because his hair was too long and he was driving a battered old car. The cops said he threw a joint out of the window. No I didn’t, pleaded Dennis, how could he when the only joint he had was still in his pocket?

  The minute Brooke’s father heard about the impending divorce he called up his daughter. ‘Congratulations. That’s the first smart move you’ve made in six years.’

  Suing for divorce, Brooke claimed Dennis had a violent temper, used drugs and had struck her on several occasions. She also charged him with ‘extreme cruelty’. Not surprisingly, she won custody of their daughter, and in the final settlement also received the house and the artwork Dennis had collected during their years together: Warhols, Lichtensteins and many others. Not long afterwards Brooke sold the paintings to private dealers. Today the collection would be worth in excess of $70m and is distributed amongst some of the world’s finest art galleries.