Robert Sellers

by Hollywood Hellraisers

  When a few weeks later in a Vanity Fair interview Jack waxed lyrical about his young family with Rebecca but again failed to mention Caleb, Susan was seized with a mother’s anger and sent a letter to the magazine’s editor, hoping to rectify the omission. Jack called Susan, ‘as mad as hell’, in her words, that Vanity Fair planned to publish her letter in full.

  Since their break-up Jack and Susan’s relationship had always been a little shaky – Jack described her as ‘fucking unpredictable’ – but now it hit the skids with a vengeance. Some years earlier Jack had been happy to help Susan out when her career had taken a nosedive and she’d found difficulty keeping up with the mortgage repayments on her house in Santa Monica. Through a company operated by his financial manager, Jack arranged a large loan. After Susan’s letter was printed in Vanity Fair the company suddenly requested that the loan be repaid, along with a daunting amount of interest. Refusal on her part, said the notification, would result in foreclosure. ‘He’s trying to ruin me absolutely,’ Susan complained.

  The row was getting ugly and spilling out into the public arena, as Susan was hounded by Jack’s legal beagles for several months. The Los Angeles Times called it ‘the misplaced trust between a Hollywood God and the mother of his child’. Jack must have known this wasn’t playing very well, after all it was a comparatively small sum of money compared to his overall fortune, and eventually the whole matter was settled out of court. With Susan bound by a confidentiality clause, all the frenzied media could get out of her was the happy comment, ‘I’m still in my home.’

  After all that Jack needed some fun and headed to London, one of his favourite cities, where he frequented nightclubs, got roaring drunk and was seen in the glittering company of various British totty including Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss and Amanda de Cadenet, with whom it was reported he was having a fling following her estrangement from husband John Taylor of Duran Duran.

  Jack also made time in his busy schedule to catch a performance of Revue Voyeurz, a lesbian musical that had dancers exposing themselves on stage, simulating sex, performing fellatio on rubber penises and gang raping a protesting virgin. It was Jack’s kind of musical and he happily posed for pictures with the girls all wearing chains and bondage gear backstage after the performance. They couldn’t wipe the smile off his face for two months.

  Inevitably, wherever Jack went, the press followed. They camped outside his hotel watching a parade of nubile maidens going in and out at all hours, then wrote snide reports about it the next day. He was dubbed ‘Jack the Sad’. ‘Even if endless nymphets are happy to feel old age creeping over them,’ wrote one hack, ‘you just might not be up to it any more.’ Of course he was used to being hounded by now. Nine days in ten since the mid-seventies he hadn’t walked through a door without there being photographers around to capture the moment. It’s one of the reasons he took to wearing sunglasses; they’re primarily a defence against fifty flashbulbs going off in his face, and part of his personal armoury. ‘With my sunglasses on, I’m Jack Nicholson. Without them, I’m fat and sixty.’

  I have seen the devil in my microscope, and I have chained him.

  When director Richard Stanley was given the green light to shoot his modern remake of the horror classic The Island of Dr Moreau (1996), he wanted Marlon Brando to play H. G. Wells’s mad scientist. The idea intrigued the actor. Maybe he saw some parallels between himself and Dr Moreau; like Wells’s character he had tried to create his own Utopia on his private island. He’d also in recent years pumped millions into various scientific schemes including genetics, the idea being that it was too late to repair the post-industrial environment mankind had created for itself, so, like Moreau, shouldn’t the human race think of genetically modifying itself to fit the new environment? He’d invested too in alternative energy and terraforming: adapting other planets to support colonisation from earth. ‘I think at that point in his life he had a very low opinion of the craft of acting,’ says Stanley. ‘So he was constantly trying to find causes to put his money into, feeding the Third World or creating alternatives to gasoline, terraforming Mars, space travel, ideas that he felt were real jobs. A part of him was in danger of turning into the Moreau character. Another very Dr Moreau touch that Marlon had in real life was he had these guard dogs in the house which were trained to attack anything he pointed his laser pen at. He had this laser pen and he’d point the dot at the wall and the dogs would leap at it, their jaws biting at the laser beam. Very Dr Moreau.’

  Stanley felt confident, he had Brando voicing interest and a great script, but then he heard rumblings that backers New Line Cinema didn’t want him as director and were planning a coup, replacing him with Roman Polanski. Stanley wasn’t going without a fight and demanded a showdown with Marlon; he wasn’t even put off when he heard that Brando wanted to skin him alive. (Why? Who knows? He just did.) ‘Actually New Line didn’t think I’d last five minutes with Brando,’ says Stanley. ‘And it was intimidating, pulling up into Mulholland Drive, the gates opening, TV cameras everywhere, excessive security. I was surprised when I finally met him because I was expecting him to be more of a monster than he was, because the build-up was so huge. He seemed smaller than I expected, but old. Obviously he wasn’t Brando as we’d seen him in the movies. But all the time I was sitting down I was thinking, James Dean played bongos with this guy, he went out with Marilyn Monroe and fixed Tennessee Williams’s plumbing.’

  New Line had insisted on having a representative at the meeting, a fly on the wall to see exactly what went down. It was a woman executive. ‘And quite early on she complained that it was too hot in the room,’ recalls Stanley. ‘Marlon turned up the thermostat. “If you turn that up any more I’m going to go to sleep,” she said. And he just continued to edge it up very slightly, during which time he scarcely made eye contact with me. I was totally nervous; I don’t think we exchanged a single word. Instead he made light chat with this woman, all the time gradually edging up the heating, and within about twenty minutes she was completely unconscious. That was weird. He just put her to sleep. As he turned up that dial she just got drowsier and drowsier until she was gone and right out of the meeting. At which point he looked at me and we started talking.’

  Successfully. Stanley was back on his own movie, Brando was happy and New Line had to lump it, for the time being, at least. He returned to Mulholland Drive several times. ‘After one meeting I was given a ride back to my hotel by his daughter Cheyenne. I remember as I was getting out of the car she looked at me and said, “Are you afraid?” I said, “Of what?” But she didn’t answer and I still don’t know what she meant by that, and it was the last time I heard from her. She was dead not so long afterwards.’

  Things looked good for Stanley, that is until he actually started making the movie. He lasted about four days before New Line finally got their way. Since subtlety hadn’t worked, they simply fired him, bringing in veteran John Frankenheimer, who had the script completely rewritten. Incensed by the way he’d been mistreated, Stanley sneaked back onto the set. ‘I was curious. I wanted to see what was going on. It was a good thing to see because it was such a shambles, just complete chaos.’ There were days when the crew didn’t know what scenes were scheduled to be shot, actors would be in make-up for five hours being transformed into Grizzly Man or Rhinoceros Man only to find out they weren’t needed that day. It was just a complete mess. And Brando was also up to his old trick of baiting his director, according to cameraman William Fraker. ‘Marlon was tough to work with, no doubt, if you were a director or producer. He’d want to hear the director’s ideas for a particular scene and then he’d have an explanation as to why he thought that was all wrong. And they’d sit down for hours and talk. In fact on one day during Moreau we sat down for eight hours while Marlon and Frankenheimer worked it out. So directing Marlon was a chore, really tough.’

  David Thewlis was hired for one of the leads and on the night he arrived on location Marlon told him, ‘David, go home. This is not a good film t
o be on. It’s cursed.’ It ended up driving Thewlis pretty nuts, but he did later recall one amusing incident. Brando still used a radio earpiece that an assistant used to feed him his lines. Suddenly in the middle of one scene he started getting police messages. ‘There’s a robbery at Woolworth’s,’ he announced to everyone.

  One night Stanley managed to get into Marlon’s trailer and they talked for hours. ‘He was in a bad way. Christian was in jail and then Cheyenne had killed herself; it all started to get on top of him and he was pretty much broken. What was happening to him was a million times worse than what was happening to me. I was losing my movie, he’d lost his daughter. It was very sad. He offered me a lot of money which I now really regret not taking.’ And Stanley’s pretty sure why Marlon was offering the cash: ‘Guilt. He knew I’d been screwed, he’d seen it all happen and he knew he hadn’t helped me and he knew he could have helped me. But he just didn’t have the fight left in him to try and keep me on the project or to stop New Line from tearing the movie apart.’

  If you’ll notice the arterial nature of the blood coming from the hole in my head, you can assume that we’re all having a real lousy day.

  Making movies has always been Dennis Hopper’s crusade, his true vocation. During interviews he’s never shy in pointing out that he’s a talented director (and he is), or that he should have been allowed to make more movies (and he should). Back in the days of Easy Rider he told everyone about his dreams of changing Hollywood, of changing the way movies were made. Dennis was at a dinner party one night with Peter Bogdanovich, the new vanguard, and George Cukor, who represented the old. Hopper couldn’t resist sticking it to him. ‘Old Hollywood,’ he kept saying. ‘We’re going to bury you, man.’ And what happened? Not a lot. All the things he was going to do. ‘I was full of shit,’ Dennis admits.

  His final feature to date as a director came in 1994. Chasers was a pretty lowbrow comedy knock-off of Jack’s The Last Detail about a pair of US Navy police escorting a beautiful female prisoner, played by Erika Eleniak, an American Playboy Playmate best known for her role in Baywatch. Her chest is the best thing about the film.

  It was as an actor that Dennis still fared best, picking up supporting roles in blockbusters, still cast as the crazed loon. In Speed (1994) he played a nut who puts a bomb on a bus that will explode if the vehicle goes below 50mph. Dennis tells Keanu Reeves’s gormless bomb-disposal cop: ‘A bomb is made to explode. That’s its meaning, its purpose. Your life is empty because you spend it trying to stop the bomb from becoming.’

  As soon as he got on the set Dennis realised that first-time director Jan De Bont was making a hell of a movie. ‘It had so much energy. It was like a big rollercoaster ride.’

  Audiences certainly reacted that way to it, turning Speed into a massive success. Executives knew they were onto a winner when at the test screenings audience members would walk backwards when they needed to go to the bathroom so as to miss as little as possible.

  It wasn’t much of a surprise, having played so many screen nutters, that Dennis might attract a real-life loon. Sure enough in 1994 he was the victim of a stalker who believed he was the reincarnation of James Dean. Dennis took out a court order to stop the guy coming anywhere near his home.

  His next essay in nutballism was on the infamous Kevin Costner action epic Waterworld (1995). Prior to Titanic the most expensive movie ever made, everything that could go wrong on location in Hawaii did go wrong: crew injuries, tsunami warnings, the main set sinking, a budget that ballooned from $100m to God knows what and rumours that director Kevin Reynolds walked off the set with two weeks of filming left, leaving Costner to complete the film. Joss Whedon flew out to do last-minute rewrites on the script. He later described it as ‘seven weeks of hell’.

  Dennis had a ball, though; there are worse things than having to stay for months on end in Hawaii. It shows in his performance as a scuzzy pirate and leader of a gang of cut-throats who roam the sea on a flooded planet Earth in a polluted future. ‘Dennis was great,’ recalls Kevin Reynolds. ‘I’ll never forget when I met him, we talked for a moment and I guess knowing that his reputation precedes him, he said, I won’t give you any trouble, and he didn’t, he was a total pro. Needless to say Waterworld was an incredibly difficult shoot, but Dennis was a trooper. What I admired about him was, this kind of role, which was so over the top and could be really intimidating to a lot of actors, the kind of thing that you have to throw yourself into completely or it won’t work, he wasn’t the least bit intimidated and really went for it and that’s what made it work.’ Even more impressive as Dennis wasn’t Reynolds’ choice but the studios and was parachuted into the film after they’d already begun shooting. Immediately Dennis seized on the comic potential of the character and Reynolds allowed him free rein to run with it. ‘As a director you’re hoping that a guy like Dennis will show up who will bring a lot to the set and be inventive. The last thing you want to do, especially on a movie like Waterworld where you’ve got a million other things to deal with, is to have to stop and try to push buttons to get a performance out of someone. That was never the problem with Dennis, he showed up and got it, and when you have a guy like that you just turn him loose.’ It’s a cartoon villain and a suitably cartoonish performance, with one eye and scarred features. ‘I’m ugly, man,’ said Dennis. ‘This guy is really bad news!’

  Inevitably, considering the obscene amount of money spent on the film, it was seen as a financial failure, despite a solid box-office performance. Unfairly it was dubbed ‘Fishtar’, after Warren’s box-office bomb Ishtar. ‘At the time so many people were gunning for us,’ says Reynolds. ‘But particularly gunning for Kevin, who had reached that point in his career where the press decided it was time to knock him off his pedestal. So because of the cost Waterworld just became this huge thing that the press wanted to hate. I’ll never forget the first screening in New York, they wanted it to be a bomb and afterwards one of the critics walked out and said, with disdain, well, it didn’t suck. It was like damning with faint praise.’

  You know that I’ve never been faithful to anyone in my whole life.

  Warren Beatty had taken to fatherhood with a delight and joy that surprised many. Not least sister Shirley, who once couldn’t imagine Warren with children. ‘When he first met my daughter, he examined her quietly as though she were just a specimen of human life instead of his niece.’ In the end he and Annette had four kids. ‘Warren’s a blithering nut,’ said Jack. ‘He just turns into a goo machine around his children. Nothing’s come close to making Warren as happy in his life as these children. Nothing.’

  Annette once laughingly revealed that when one of the kids asked her dad what an orgasm was his unusual terminology for it was, ‘It’s a sexual sneeze.’ Some wag suggested that before marrying Annette Warren must have suffered from chronic hay fever.

  Not unnaturally, tensions existed in the marriage, namely about how Annette could juggle motherhood with movies, for she undoubtedly still wanted a career and she is an exceptionally fine actress. There was also an attempt to establish them as a screen partnership, misguided at best both artistically and commercially. Love Affair (1994) groaned under its own autobiographical weight in its story about a one-time lothario who meets his match. Everyone said it was a mistake; Variety called it ‘a textbook exercise in narcissism’. But after the darkly gothic Bugsy, Warren wanted to make an unashamedly light romantic movie.

  Yet again, his vision caused friction with his artistic partners. Originally Robert Towne was set to both write and direct the film, marking the first time they’d worked together since Shampoo. Months into the process Towne complained that Warren was encroaching too much, trying to modernise what Towne felt was essentially a traditional period piece. They argued. Towne was also playing around with Beatty’s suave screen persona, having his character endure an on-screen proctology exam, for example. After numerous drafts Towne either walked or was asked to leave. There were also reports that in post-production Beatty too
k over the creative reins from director Glenn Gordon Caron, who was hardly seen.

  According to some sources, Love Affair did not entirely live up to its title, in that it put undue strain upon the couple’s marriage. There was a report about a shapely blonde Warren hadn’t seen in a while visiting the set. Just to be polite he invited her inside his trailer for a chat, but Annette saw them leave and went off the deep end. ‘You don’t take bimbos to your dressing room,’ she decreed. Annette had to admit she didn’t think Warren had changed all that much since their marriage; he still eyed the pretty girls, quite naturally. ‘What has changed, I hope, is that he doesn’t seem to have that urge to bed these ladies. And Warren respects me.’

  Maybe it was because age was finally catching up on him. More than one critic commented that perhaps Warren was getting a little too long in the tooth to be playing romantic leads. And he was obsessing more than ever over diets and health foods. In one hotel in New York, after ordering an oil-free egg-white omelette with vegetables, he went into the kitchens to supervise the cordon bleu chef himself. Annette sometimes kidded Warren about his scrupulously healthy habits. Few colleagues have seen Warren put anything gastronomically indecent in his gob. At a restaurant he was eyeing a particularly tasty looking titbit on his wife’s plate. ‘What is it?’ he enquired, finally. ‘Goat cheese,’ she replied. He reached over with his fork and said, ‘I think I’ll try some.’ ‘Good,’ said Annette. ‘Live it up, Warren.’