Robert Sellers

by Hollywood Hellraisers

  If we don’t sight land in three days you can cut off my head.

  Desperate for cash after his son’s financially draining trial, Marlon Brando took any old tosh going. You’ll pay $5m for twenty days’ work on Christopher Columbus – The Discovery (1992)? That will do nicely, thank you. His benefactors once again were the Salkinds, who’d paid him an outrageous sum once before, for Superman. All this for a man who once said, ‘Never confuse the size of your paycheck with the size of your talent.’

  Director John Glen, who’d just come off directing five Bond movies in a row, was excited about the prospect of working with Marlon and they met for dinner before location filming in Madrid. ‘He was extremely charming,’ says Glen. ‘One could understand why he was so powerful on the screen because he had a certain charisma about him.’ Marlon also had his own ideas about how he wanted to portray the role of Torquemada, the Spanish Inquisition’s prime torturer. ‘One of the things he wanted to do,’ recalls Glen, ‘was to have these outrageous nails growing like talons on his hands. I sort of looked at him a bit sideways and thought, well I hope that idea goes away.’ Another ludicrous suggestion was that Marlon should stalk his torture chamber while young naked women were boiled alive in oil; and this was supposed to be a family movie! Anyway the dinner went well. ‘But then the second night I wanted to see him again,’ says Glen. ‘I went to his room and I couldn’t get past the security guards, even though I was the director they wouldn’t let me anywhere near him.’

  When Glen began shooting Marlon’s scenes there was an immediate problem. The great man didn’t turn up. ‘I was anticipating trouble. When you’re a director you have to box a little clever sometimes and I’d cast a very good actor called Michael Gothard as Brando’s assistant, the idea being that if Marlon didn’t turn up any time I would put Gothard in. And sure enough, on the first day, Marlon was a no-show, so I put Michael in and he took Marlon’s lines.’

  Marlon’s invisibility on the set that first day caused ructions amongst the cast, notably with Tom Selleck, who approached Glen that evening. ‘John,’ he said, ‘I admire your work, but really the only reason I did this film was because Marlon Brando was going to be in it. Now he’s not turned up and he’s not gonna play the thing, I’m not going to do any more, I’m off.’ A bit taken aback, Glen replied, ‘I appreciate your honesty, Tom, and wish you all the best.’ Obviously word filtered back to Marlon that Selleck had walked and that another actor was delivering his dialogue. ‘Because Brando turned up the next day,’ says Glen. ‘Actors being actors, they hate to lose their lines, and I just reshot that section. Naturally Tom Selleck reappeared, too.’

  Despite these early problems, Glen got on extremely well with Marlon. ‘He was very compliant when it came to direction, not difficult at all. I’m always very honest with actors and upfront with them and I think he appreciated that. It wasn’t until later in the shoot that I realised he’d got a little sound piece in his ear and he was having his lines relayed from an adjacent room by an assistant.’

  What surprised Glen even more was the incredible press interest in Brando’s involvement in the film. All the time they were in Madrid the paparazzi hounded them. Driving to locations they’d have about thirty cars full of reporters following behind, all trying to get pictures. ‘It was rather like the Diana scenario where the fame is so great that it becomes completely restrictive. It was a real trial. I think Marlon saw more kitchens in hotels than anything else, because that was the way he used to get into the hotel, round the back, past the dustbins and into the kitchens, that was the story of his life. I think he accepted it, he was almost numb to it.’

  The Columbus movie opened to an apathetic public and Brando’s lazy performance was harshly derided. American critic Richard Scheikel wrote, ‘We are watching a man, broken by unhappiness, going through the motions to pay his bills.’ But Marlon was completely honest about the fact that he’d made the film purely for the filthy lucre. ‘I went to see Marlon in his caravan one day,’ says Glen, ‘and he said to me, “The only reason I’m doing this film is to pay the lawyers.” His son had been involved in a murder case and it had cost Marlon a bloody fortune.’

  ’Cause you, you’re part eggplant.

  Thanks largely to his darkly majestic turn in Blue Velvet, Dennis Hopper was garnering something of a reputation as a rent-a-loon, creating over the next few years a dangerously intense series of misfit characters, cornering the market in miscellaneous perverts, druggies and wackos. He was master of the unsavoury and the unbalanced. ‘I wouldn’t like to mess with Dennis myself,’ said actor Ed Harris. ‘Nobody plays a monster quite like him.’

  Certainly Dennis had more fun playing social deviants and psychopaths. Not that he was in any way like that in real life, of course. ‘But I guess I could have been a top-class serial killer if things had turned out differently. I was the weird kid. Hated my parents. I could have been a killer, but life turned out differently.’ Strange that he was being asked to inhabit such roles now he himself was rehabilitated and ‘normal’. His old friend and fellow art collector Vincent Price told him back in the early sixties, ‘I think you’ll end up playing villains.’ Dennis was put out at the time, seeing himself as leading-man material. But Vincent was right. And when playing baddies Dennis has always tried to give them human qualities so when they carry out their atrocities it’s all the more alarming and disturbing.

  Dennis played a true sicko in Paris Trout (1991), a bigot and wife beater who uses a broken bottle as a sex aid. Director Stephen Gyllenhaal admitted feeling nervous working with him, ‘He’s something of a myth,’ but later attested to his total professionalism, not at all methody, unlike co-stars Barbara Hershey, who stayed in character throughout the shoot, and Ed Harris, who’d call Gyllenhaal at 3 a.m. to discuss his role. No, at the end of a scene Dennis trotted back into his trailer to watch ice hockey on TV.

  In quick succession Dennis appeared in Sean Penn’s directorial debut The Indian Runner (1991), played a renegade cop in Nails (1992), taking karate lessons and weightlifting classes to get into shape for the physically challenging role, teamed up with Wesley Snipes for the action thriller Boiling Point (1992) and was a cartoonish villain in the risibly awful Super Mario Brothers (1993), a film so bad that John Leguizamo confessed he and co-star Bob Hoskins frequently got drunk just to make it through the experience. ‘The worst thing I ever did,’ Hoskins dubbed it. ‘It had a husband-and-wife team directing, whose arrogance had been mistaken for talent. After so many weeks their own agent told them to get off the set! Fucking nightmare. Fucking idiots.’

  Perhaps the best critic of the film, which was based on the worldfamous computer game, was Dennis’s four-year-old son Henry. After seeing Super Mario Brothers he asked his dad, ‘Why did you do that?’ Dennis replied, ‘To buy you shoes.’ Henry looked at Dennis solemnly. ‘I don’t need shoes that badly.’

  Dennis played just a brief supporting role in his next film, a flop at the box office on first release but later surfacing as a cult favourite – True Romance (1993). With an early script by Quentin Tarantino and direction from Tony Scott, True Romance had an outstanding cast: Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, Gary Oldman, Val Kilmer, Brad Pitt and Christopher Walken as a mafia boss whose interrogation of Dennis and humiliation at his hands, through Tarantino’s plenty-controversial dialogue, is an all-time classic. For sheer acting class it’s hard to beat. ‘That should go into a time capsule for future generations to look at,’ said Tarantino.

  At the end of it Hopper gets three bullets in his skull. Scott had a special gun that shot out flames. Dennis was understandably concerned. ‘Tony, you’re not putting that gun right to my head.’ Scott assured him the gun was one hundred per cent safe. ‘It’s fine,’ Scott called over a crew guy. ‘Do it to me.’ The crew guy took the gun and fired it against the director’s forehead. He fell on the floor, blood pouring from a nasty wound. ‘OK,’ said Scott. ‘That won’t work.’

  Meyer, we have known each other s
ince we were too young to fuck.

  In 1976 Goldie Hawn said, ‘Warren Beatty will marry. It will take a very special woman. She’ll have to be non-smothering and non-clinging. And strong! The stronger the woman, the better her chances of holding Warren.’

  He first met that special lady at a showbiz party just after Dick Tracy. ‘Interesting girl,’ a pal said. Warren followed his gaze and rested on the fragile figure and classic beauty of a young actress called Annette Bening. ‘Ooooh, yeah,’ said Warren.

  Warren had decided to make a biopic of gangster Bugsy Siegel, the man who more or less founded Las Vegas. He knew it was vital to cast the right actress to play the love of his life, Virginia Hill. Besides putting bullets into people, Siegel was something of a randy bastard, but after meeting Virginia never chased women again. He found someone who accepted him for who he was. Director Barry Levinson was thinking box office and Michelle Pfeiffer; Warren recalled that actress at the party and set up a lunch date. When Annette’s agent heard the news he was dead set against any meeting, convinced the old Romeo just wanted to hit on his client. ‘And it turned out he was right,’ said Warren.

  It was love at first sight for Warren, who fell for Annette in about ten minutes flat. ‘I felt very conflicted because I was so elated to meet her, and yet at the same time I began to mourn the passing of a way of life. I thought, oh, everything’s going to be different.’ Of course the selfish part of him wanted to hang on to his playboy bachelor existence, probably until his bits withered and died, but he knew he was in the last-chance saloon to bag himself a scorching young bride and save himself endless reams of tabloid tittle-tattle about being a sad old lecher. Let’s face it, Warren’s adolescence ran about three decades longer than everyone else’s. ‘Being adolescent never got boring to me,’ he’s confessed. Or as sister Shirley once helpfully said, ‘He’s fifty from the neck up and fourteen from the waist down.’ Fortunately that was all over now, and not a moment too soon. ‘I stood a good chance of reaching the end of my days as a solitary, eccentric . . . fool.’

  Desperate to have her there and then, Warren behaved, as always, like the old smoothie he is. ‘As much as I am inclined to make a vulgar move upon you,’ he said to her, ‘I will refrain from doing so because I think it is terrible when people have to work together, if they have that pressure. ’ And Christ, he should know. On Bugsy (1991) they worked like a dream, so much so that critic Rex Reed noted, ‘The chemistry is apparent and juicy. Their love scenes don’t look like acting.’ On set, however, Warren’s romancing of Annette was so discreet that not even director Levinson knew what was going on.

  Once Bugsy was in the can, Warren took Annette out to dinner. Between courses he came right out and asked if she wanted him to make her pregnant; this from a man who’d been running scared from fatherhood for decades. It was so off the wall a proposition, how could the poor girl refuse? ‘Well, I would like to do that right away,’ said Warren, and, er . . . they did. It was also perfectly in keeping with Warren’s character. The guy’s a gent, and a puritan under all that Don Juan stuff. He didn’t litter the world with little bastard Warrens, he wants to go to heaven, so only impregnated the woman he knew he was going to marry.

  The baby arrived early in 1992, a daughter, named Kathlyn after Warren’s delighted mother. The event sent shockwaves through the industry. ‘Is this the end of civilisation as we know it?’ asked the Washington Post. The greatest lothario in Hollywood history, the man who had bedded the most desirable beauties of the age, was now a father, changing dirty nappies and cooing like an idiot. There were reports he’d fainted while watching birthing videos with Jack, but he denied it.

  In March Warren and Annette were married in a small ceremony attended only by close relatives and friends. It must have been an aweinspiring moment for Warren to say, ‘I do.’ Former lover and very nearly Mrs Warren Beatty Michelle Phillips commented, ‘I love Annette and I pray for her every day. She can manage the guy, and I never could. He drove me nuts.’

  A family man, and now a married man! Friends and Warren watchers couldn’t quite believe it. Others, though, always guessed that, unlike Jack, fear of being alone would eventually drive him into matrimony. ‘I think people do things that at the time are right for them,’ says Tom Mankiewicz. ‘I think if the Warren Beatty I knew in the seventies had gotten married, he’d have gotten a divorce right away. Playing the field wasn’t really a statement. Warren fucked everything that moved, he just did. If he was in a movie and there were three girls in the movie, it was – bang, bang, bang. Now he’s a terrific father and Annette’s a wonderful mother. They make a great family.’

  Warren has categorised his life into two distinct phases, ‘Before Annette’ and ‘With Annette’. He’d avoided responsibility for so long, his life had been one long free buffet, but now it was time to end the party. Incredibly, married life seemed to suit him. ‘I think stability is part of what Warren saw in Annette,’ said sister Shirley. As for Robert Evans, he saw a distinct change in his old friend, who until his marriage had stood alone as the single most competitive person he ever knew. A man whose obsession in life was to be first: ‘First with the new hot girl in town, first to be shown the new hot screenplay, the new hot role, or for that matter the new hot anything – as long as it was new and hot.’

  Commentators wondered whether a man whose life was dominated by chasing women could settle down and be content with just the one. ‘Women are his profession,’ said one colleague. ‘Movies are his hobby.’ But Warren was determined to stay the course and he’d a better chance than most, due mainly to his compulsive nature. Divorce would be seen as a failure and, according to Robert Towne, ‘Warren is terrified of failure. He must succeed because he cannot bear to fail. Warren will do anything short of murder to win.’

  On his fifty-fifth birthday Warren attended the Oscars, Annette glowing on his arm. She’d been just three years old when he’d made his first trip to the ceremony, escorting Natalie Wood. As he entered the building a woman on the other side of the door just stopped dead when she saw Warren. ‘I love you,’ was all she could utter. Warren gets this a lot and sees it as part of the job of being a movie star. ‘I’ve never seen Warren not be receptive to a fan coming up to him in a public situation,’ says producer Jon Landau. ‘Even when somebody is staring at Warren, then Warren will actually go up and introduce himself.’

  In spite of all the failures, politics still held great sway over Warren. He advised Bill Clinton, then running as a presidential candidate, to jazz up his speeches by yelling ‘fuck’ a few times. Clinton ignored him, unlike McGovern and Hart, and won the election. Warren and Annette, along with Jack, were amongst the guests at his inauguration in January 1993. Clinton proved to be a Teflon politician, particularly where sex scandals were concerned. The danger of revelations about his private life had always been a factor in Warren not running for office, but the Clinton experience once again opened up the possibility that one day he might set his sights on the White House.

  In this town I’m the leper with the most fingers.

  Jack Nicholson burst back into the headlines in February 1994 when he attacked a motorist with a golf club in a rare public display of rage. It happened in LA, when Jack claimed a driver in a Mercedes cut him up. Incensed, he grabbed a golf club and ran over to the offending vehicle and gave it a good whack, Basil Fawlty style. The owner, one Robert Blank, claimed the star shattered the windshield and dented the roof, all of which resulted in a slight personal injury to himself from flying glass. All very bizarre. And in spite of Jack’s wild image, completely out of character.

  Questioned by the police, Jack admitted selecting a number two iron to dent the man’s car, adding, ‘You can bet I felt justified.’ Later, when he’d calmed down a bit, Jack excused his behaviour by saying he was deeply upset, having just heard that a close colleague had died. ‘I was out of my mind. He had died that morning and I was playing a maniac all night. It was a shameful experience for me. I don’t like to
lose control or to be angry.’

  Blank intended to pursue a civil suit against Jack and the star faced prosecution for assault and vandalism, each charge carrying a potential six-month jail sentence. For a while it was squeaky bum time, but in the end Blank settled out of court and the charges were dropped. To many it seemed that Jack’s power and money had triumphed over justice. The Los Angeles Times wrote, ‘With the flick of a pen on a personal check, [Nicholson] can make things go away. Sue him for breaking your windshield with a golf club? There, a little cash ought to cover it. Bye bye lawsuit. So long, criminal charges.’ The piece concluded that Jack was ‘someone who seems exempt from the rules that govern life for the rest of us’.

  Neither the golf-club incident nor the paternity suit did anything to diminish Jack’s popularity. His stature in the film community was also never higher. Just a month later the American Film Institute honoured Jack with their Lifetime Achievement Award, justly deserved, if a little premature. Past recipients had been such well-wrinkled veterans as Hitchcock, Bette Davis and Henry Fonda. Jack was the youngest ever to receive the honour and dubbed it the Prime of Life Award.

  He arrived on stage to the tune of Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to Be Wild’ and star guests such as Shirley MacLaine, Cher, Bob Dylan, Faye Dunaway and Robert Evans, along with Dennis and Warren, all wore shades in tribute. ‘I’m touched,’ Jack said. Then, alluding to the road-rage incident, ‘And I’m lucky to be at large.’ Jack had wanted to make the occasion even more special by inviting swathes of family members, many of whom he’d not seen for years. The audience also included his ex-wife Sandra Knight and their daughter Jennifer, along with Rebecca Broussard. There were, however, some notable absentees, namely Susan Anspach and their son together Caleb. Susan had to wait a couple of days to see the ceremony on television and after watching it called Jack. It was past midnight. ‘This has to stop,’ she said. ‘This is really rude. If you don’t want to invite me or Caleb, fine, but at least make a nice comment about your son.’ Jack’s voice, Susan recalled, was just a little slurred; he sounded stoned. ‘Don’t you know it’s really late? I don’t know what all this hysteria is about. You call me at this hour with this shit.’