Brooke also revealed that when the divorce finally went through she would have been within her rights to have claimed half of Dennis’s profits from Easy Rider. She opted to not ask for a thing. ‘I didn’t want him coming after me with a shotgun.’
Dennis has blamed his behaviour towards Brooke on his drinking and the fact that she was a manic depressive. He claimed she’d be in bed for four or five days, in the dark, then give a party and be all jolly and hyper, then descend back into her moods again. ‘I didn’t know how to cope and I belted her.’ It was a young and stupid mistake he’s since admitted.
Dennis’s behaviour baffled almost everyone who met him. When Schneider bamboozled Columbia into distributing Easy Rider Dennis stood up during one meeting and stuffed his finger up an executive’s nose. If that’s how he behaved in board meetings, what was he going to be like on location? Fonda had shown Schneider and Jack footage surreptitiously taken of Hopper ranting and raving out in New Orleans and told them his director had ‘lost his mind’. Relations were bad. ‘Everyone wanted to kill one another, put one another in institutions,’ said Jack. To save the film Schneider decided that, because of his experience working on Roger Corman productions, Jack should be on the main shoot as a sort of sheriff. ‘Just be there, Jack,’ Schneider told him. ‘And make sure that you and the rest of your dope-fiend friends don’t go crazy. See if you can bring this picture in and keep ’em from killing one another.’ And since Jack was going to be on set virtually every day, why not cast him as the third lead, an alcoholic lawyer called George Hanson who teams up with the motorbike drifters.
The role of Hanson was originally earmarked for Rip Torn, that was until Torn and Dennis almost knifed each other to death. Hopper burst into Fonda’s New York town house one night, where the actor was entertaining Terry Southern and Torn, and barracked them all for getting pissed instead of working on the script. He was angry, having just come back from Texas scouting locations and hearing that kids with long hair were being sheared with razor blades like sheep. ‘Take it easy,’ said Torn, who hailed from that part of the country. ‘Not everyone from Texas is an asshole.’ Hopper pushed him away. ‘Sit down, you motherfucker.’ Things then got very serious when Dennis claimed that Torn pulled a knife on him. Torn would recall the event very differently, saying it was Dennis who grabbed a steak knife and waved it menacingly just inches from his head. Torn disarmed Dennis, knocking him back against Fonda, who fell on the floor. ‘There goes the job,’ thought Torn.
Subsequently Torn claimed that Hopper’s version of the knife incident damaged his career, spreading an unjustified image of him as being something of a nutter. In 1994, just as Torn rejuvenated a stagnant career with success on the Larry Sanders sitcom, Dennis repeated his version of the legend during an appearance on a chat show. Fed up, Torn successfully sued for defamation. The judge ruled that Hopper was not a credible witness.
Filming began around California, then gradually hit the southern states and redneck territory, where the cast were subjected to bowel-loosening levels of intimidation. Every restaurant, every roadhouse they went in there was a Marine sergeant or a football coach who started with, ‘Look at the Commies, the queers. Is it a boy or a girl?’ Hopper went into one bar and immediately a guy swung at him, screaming, ‘Get outta here, my son’s in Vietnam.’ Behind him was the local sheriff; his son was in Vietnam, too. As a joke Dennis said, ‘Hi there, I’m hitch-hiking to the peace march,’ whereupon eight guys jumped him.
This was really what Easy Rider was about. In the new, radically changing America, if youth were going to wear a badge, whether it be long hair or black skin, they’d better learn to protect themselves. This was the ultimate irony: in a country that talks about freedom and democracy it’s people really can’t bear anyone to be different from themselves. As it said on the poster: ‘A man went looking for America. And couldn’t find it anywhere’, a tagline that, according to Richard Rush, Jack came up with.
When the crew hit Taos, New Mexico, Dennis and Jack dropped LSD and were driven over to the crypt of D. H. Lawrence, where they started hallucinating at the foot of the grave, imagining insects crawling over their faces. Later, as dusk began to fall, they hit the waffling inanely stage. ‘We’re geniuses,’ said Jack. ‘You know that? Isn’t it great to be a genius?’ Dennis agreed that it was. From somewhere a beautiful woman appeared – luckily for all concerned she was no hallucination — and took them to a nearby hot spring where they got naked. Dennis claimed the woman for his own, leaving poor Jack to return to his hotel alone. So, whacked out, he stood guard for several hours inside his room, convinced he was about to be raided by Red Indians. For a while he listened to the buzz coming off the television set, imagining himself a bunch of electrical circuits, all pumped up with energy. He went outside and started walking and saw that dawn was rising. Clambering to the top of a forty-foot tree, Jack looked down on a vast meadow, pulsating with patterned light. His eyes fixed on a large white rock in the centre. Suddenly the rock stood up and turned into a fabulous white stallion that went tearing around the meadow, throwing its neck up and bouncing and kicking. Then other smaller rocks began to mutate and transform into horses. ‘The moment filled me with fantastic emotion.’ Christ, he was out of it.
Hanson was a great role, perfect for Jack; certainly he made it his own. A man equally at odds with the heartland of America, he hitches a ride with Dennis and Fonda and around a campfire they philosophise and argue about what is wrong with the country they love. Mostly, though, they smoke dope. That one scene did more for Jack than all the Corman pictures put together; it made him a star.
It was difficult to shoot, not least because, for the sake of realism you understand, the actors smoked authentic dope. According to Jack’s calculation, they dragged on 155 joints of pretty good Mexican grass. There was also the added difficulty of the men breaking into convulsions of laughter, verging on hysterics, with Dennis off camera rolling around in some bushes, ‘totally freaked out of his bird’, said Jack.
It remains an iconic screen moment. ‘Easy Rider was the first time people smoked marijuana in a movie and didn’t go out and kill a bunch of nurses,’ claimed Dennis. But to some extent the film normalised the use of drugs, and made cocaine fashionable. The plot had these two bikers smuggling a heavy load of drugs in order to fund early retirement. A motorcycle couldn’t carry enough marijuana to score big bucks, and Dennis ruled out heroin, so came up with cocaine, a drug that at the time wasn’t very well known or much used. After Easy Rider came out it became as common as heroin on the streets, while in Hollywood parties it was being handed round on trays along with hash. ‘An unfortunate situation in my mind,’ excused Dennis.
Post-production was conducted within a perpetual cloud of dope. Dennis edited like a maverick, tearing up the rule book, not giving a shit. One of his ideas was to run the credit sequence upside down. He was Orson Welles on acid. This was going to be his masterpiece and he wasn’t going to compromise. His first cut ran something like four and a half hours. ‘This isn’t Lawrence of Arabia,’ argued the producers.
Months went on and still Dennis was, in the words of one crew member, ‘jerking off in the editing room’. Enter Henry Jaglom, now a respected independent director, then an actor who’d trained with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. For some reason he and Jack were thrown into the editing suite to help out on Easy Rider. ‘Each of us worked with an editor in white gloves who sat in front of us, trying to reshape the material in ways we thought would be helpful,’ recalls Jaglom. ‘Jack didn’t want to touch the stuff he was in as an actor, all that campfire stuff, so I concentrated on that to begin with.’
About twice a week everyone would gather downstairs in Columbia’s Projection Room 6 to look at where they were and discuss where they should go. ‘These were exciting, often intense and frequently combative meetings,’ recalls Jaglom. Jack, Dennis and Fonda attended, along with Bob Rafelson and Schneider. ‘Everyone contributed what I think are important ben
efits to the film,’ confirms Jaglom. ‘But Easy Rider is at its heart fully Dennis Hopper’s work and should be respected as such. It was Dennis alone who captured the zeitgeist that made the film resonate so powerfully with a generation.’
For years, though, Dennis and Fonda would feud over ownership of Easy Rider, both laying claim to the greater creative input. This infighting even extended to the music soundtrack. Fonda wanted Crosby, Stills and Nash; Dennis told the band that anyone who drove around in limos as they did could have no comprehension of his movie and wanted them out, warning, ‘If you guys try to get in the studio again, I may have to cause you some bodily harm.’
After a preview screening Columbia’s veteran chief executive Leo Jaffe stood up, hailing: ‘I don’t know what the fuck this picture means, but I know we’re going to make a fuck of a lot of money!’ At Cannes it was a sensation, and Fonda, Dennis and Jack wallowed in the attention. ‘We were free to get loaded in those days,’ says Jack fondly. ‘The festival was a little more rocking than it can be in the streets today.’
On a modest outlay of something like half a million dollars Easy Rider, when it opened in July 1969, reaped in tens of millions at the box office, this at a time when bloated fare like Hello Dolly was almost bankrupting the studios. ‘I was stunned by the response to the film,’ says Jaglom. ‘We all were. Except Dennis.’
Hopper and Fonda’s little bike movie revolutionised Hollywood corporate thinking. The idea that young filmmakers could make a movie for their own people, about their own time, was something that just hadn’t been allowed to happen before because formula films had frozen the industry. It was a unique period and heralded the new wave of American cinema that lasted well into the seventies, when studios threw money at any long-haired geek leaving film school to make more independent, risky movies — people like Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Spielberg and Lucas.
As for Dennis, he made the cover of Life magazine, which called him ‘Hollywood’s hottest director’, and was hailed as a counterculture icon, a tag that has never truly gone away. Ironically, it was Jack who reaped the greater reward. After over a decade of hacking it in Corman movies and not making the slightest impact, critics were falling over themselves in praise and he ended up with an Oscar nomination at the very time he was contemplating giving up acting. As Richard Rush recalls, ‘After Easy Rider Jack came up to me one day and said, “Shit, Dick, I think I’m going to have to become a movie star.” Because he really wanted to be a director. And I thought he was a good director and a very capable writer, but I thought it was crazy for him to fight it; he had this clear path into stardom, might as well grab it and make all the world happy.’
There’s nothing wrong with me. I mean, I don’t like boys.
Warren Beatty had been spending a lot of time with Roman Polanski in London. The director was living it up while his wife Sharon was at home in Los Angeles preparing for the birth of their child. As the pregnancy drew to an end Sharon was constantly on the phone to Polanski, urging him to return. He promised he’d catch a flight in a few days’ time.
Too late. While Polanski remained in London, Sharon was butchered by a group of maniacs. Warren rushed over to Polanski’s house when he heard the news, but the director was inconsolable, distraught. How could this have happened? Why had they targeted Sharon? Who were they? Had there been danger signs? Polanski must have replayed in his mind all the events that led up to this terrible tragedy, a tragedy that for a brief time changed how Hollywood looked at itself.
Polanski and Sharon moved into Benedict Canyon, a popular residency in Los Angeles, in February 1969. Warren was amongst the guests at a housewarming party and frequently popped by, as did the likes of Dennis and Peter Fonda. Unfortunately the house was used for more nefarious purposes when the owners were away filming. Friends held wild parties there which often had to be broken up by the police. Drugs were also being used and supplied on the premises. To use the phraseology of the time, the house was getting a bad vibe. The couple decided to move.
Polanski asked Warren if he fancied taking on the lease. The actor viewed the house and seriously contemplated moving in until he met a couple of Polanski cronies who claimed they’d also been offered accommodation there. ‘There’s plenty of room for everyone, man.’ The prospect didn’t fill Warren with joy, since he knew these particular individuals were caught up in the local drug scene. He left. What Warren didn’t know was that the house and the goings-on within it were under the watchful eye of a certain Charles Manson.
On 5 August the house was again the scene of a celebrity bash. Sharon had invited over Jane Fonda, Roger Vadim and a few others. Three days later she was busily organising another special evening in, this time a quiet dinner to which she’d asked, amongst others, Steve McQueen, a former lover. In the end McQueen got lucky with a girl and spent the night with her. His libido saved his life; Sharon wasn’t so lucky.
Manson had ordered several of his ‘family’ to visit the house and murder everyone inside as nastily as possible. They arrived at midnight. Sharon was tied up and had to endure the agony of watching three of her friends being butchered before begging her attackers to spare her life because of the child she was carrying. Her pleas were answered with a series of vicious stab wounds that penetrated her heart, lungs and liver. As she lay dying in a pool of blood, Sharon’s last words were ‘Mother . . . Mother.’
In London Warren could see Polanski was in deep shock so quickly took charge, arranging for first-class tickets home and an immigration official to escort Polanski personally off the plane and away from the expected press frenzy. In the horrible aftermath of the murders Polanski’s closest friends did their best to keep up his spirits, lest he slide into total darkness. ‘Warren kept up a stream of improbable stories,’ Polanski later recalled. ‘Mostly relating to his hyperactive sex life and containing details I’m sure were invented just to make me laugh.’
Sharon’s memorial service was a moving tribute, but it was too much for some. People wept openly as her coffin, with her unborn baby wrapped in a shroud beside her, went into the ground. Warren attended, thoughts perhaps running through his mind that had he been in LA rather than London he might very well have been among the victims.
Hollywood, with its tales of murder, corruption and decadence had rarely experienced such a time. The Manson murders affected the place, no question. As Robert Towne said, ‘That was the end of the sixties. The door was closed, the curtain dropped, and nothing and no one was ever the same.’ Even Jack began sleeping with a hammer under his pillow.
Of course the cinema was blamed. The accusation that violent films somehow contributed to a cultural environment that could spawn a Manson massacre, and the general hedonistic lifestyle of the moviemakers themselves, stuck on Polanski and he was virtually blackballed in Hollywood at a time when the town should have been behind him. ‘His situation was a very interesting case of what notoriety can do to you,’ said Jack. ‘He would be excommunicated by Hollywood because his wife had the very bad taste to be murdered in the newspapers.’
Strangely, when Charles Manson wanted his life story told as a movie he instructed his lawyers to get Dennis to play him. At first Hopper turned down an invitation to meet him in jail, but curiosity won out in the end and they talked for something like an hour and a half. ‘It was interesting,’ said Dennis. ‘He told me his whole life was like a movie, and that he always thought there were cameras there.’
It took a while for Polanski to get his life back to some sort of normality. Going back to work, he wanted to make a film of Papillon, the bestselling book about Devil’s Island, and for the lead it had to be Warren. Flying over to Paris to meet Polanski and read the script, Warren ended up spending the next forty-eight hours in clubs and with girls while the script sat unread back at the hotel. Warren was enjoying himself so much that the third day was a repeat of the first two, as was the fourth, and the fifth. ‘I was so frazzled for lack of sleep I couldn’t take any more,’ Polanski recalled. ‘W
e’d been in Paris almost a week and Warren still hadn’t read a page of the book.’ He liked it when he finally got round to looking at it, but there was a scene in which he had to appear naked and that was a no-no. ‘I’m not going to appear bare-ass,’ he told Polanski. ‘It’s a hang-up I have.’ It didn’t matter. Polanski, still persona non grata in Hollywood, couldn’t raise any finance. Papillon was later made by Franklin J Schaffner as a star vehicle for Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman.
I move around a lot, not because I’m looking for anything really, but ’cause I’m getting away from things that get bad if I stay.
Jack Nicholson had always wanted fame, craved it, dreamed of it, but when it landed in his lap after Easy Rider it gave him pause, it was too all-encompassing and it affected him for a while. At times he could be incredibly arrogant with it, at other times show deep insecurity. Of course he missed basic freedoms, like being able to light up a joint in a public place or hang out at his old haunts. ‘And I can’t go around picking up stray pussy any more.’ Maybe now they came to him. He was stuck with being a celebrity, for better or for worse.
He also felt uncomfortable as the poster boy of the counterculture and strongly denied that Easy Rider and some of his other films like The Trip could influence someone to try drugs, although he believed in the legalisation of grass and spoke out about America’s ‘insane’ anti-marijuana laws that made criminals of normal decent people who merely smoked weed recreationally.
Robert Sellers Page 15
