I had to smile. Her lines were too on-the-nose. “You’re beautiful and I’m probably a fucking idiot, but I’m going to go home.”
With car key in hand, I started moving past her, but she tapped my elbow. “You and Evans ... what a team,” she said, and she, too, was grinning. “The only reason guys go to work at a studio is to get laid—is that news to you?”
“Like I said, I’m an idiot,” I replied, as I started my car.
The incident stuck in my mind because the girl surely had a point. Hollywood’s dream factories have projected an aphrodisiacal aura from their inception. The business is all about marketing romance and sexual fantasy, and the frumpy old guys who ran the business in Old Hollywood were eager to exploit their fringe benefits.
Given this atmosphere, the sexual revolution of the late sixties and early seventies hit Hollywood with a special forcefulness. Virtually every encounter between a man and a woman, even if it was a straightforward negotiation about a deal, carried a sexual subtext. Suddenly the casting couch seemed like a pathetic anachronism. You didn’t need to pretend to be casting a movie to justify an advance. It seemed as though society as a whole was going through a midlife crisis.
The manifestations were everywhere. The uniform of the day, even in Hollywood’s executive offices, was jeans (preferably old, scruffy, and skintight) and hippie-style shirts and maybe some love beads. If you had hair, you wore it long and maybe affected a ponytail. The mandate was to look hip and talk hip; even the straightest of attorneys called you “man” and told you what they were smoking and what music they were listening to.
It was a few months into my Paramount gig when I succumbed to the inevitable: I decided that I needed a makeover. I looked like a stereotypical New York journalist, replete with dated sport jackets and baggy tan trousers.
I dropped into Carroll & Company, the prestigious Beverly Hills clothier of the moment, to seek sartorial advice. The salesman quickly assessed my wardrobe and suggested I try on one of their new line of blue blazers. I told myself I was heading in the wrong direction.
My mind flashed on a hot clothing store I’d been passing on the Sunset Strip. The place looked trendy—intimidatingly trendy—and I noticed it was open late into the evening. That night after work I decided to mobilize my courage with a quick vodka and stroll into the store, hoping that no other customers were present at that hour.
I was greeted by a very beautiful black woman swathed in red who looked about six foot five, but probably was shorter. The place was empty. I took a breath. “I’ve got a new job, I’m working with a lot of hip people and I look like someone’s loser accountant,” I said, the words clotted together so that they doubtless were marginally incomprehensible.
The tall lady looked down on me with what I felt was a mixture of amusement and pity. “You looking for a new wardrobe, boy?” she said.
“I need a wardrobe. I need a look.”
“Where you say you’re working?”
“A movie studio. For real.”
“You come to the right place,” she said. “My name is Rita, you get your ass into that dressing room and strip.”
I felt a tug of abject panic. “Strip?”
“Down to your little jockeys,” she commanded.
For the next forty-five minutes I stood shivering in Rita’s dressing room as she and yet another very tall black woman paraded in and out with trousers, jackets, and shirts, all of them very trendy and also very tight. They carefully inspected me, gave their assessments, and kept coming. The tab kept mounting, but, looking in the mirror, I began to feel like I was getting geared up for my new life.
I bought a lot of clothes that evening, and Rita and I developed a healthy rapport. As she accepted my credit card, she jotted down the names of a barber and eyeglass store, which she urged me to patronize, and also tossed in, free of charge, several pairs of brightly colored socks and underpants. “The hair has to grow, and lose the glasses and the jockeys,” she admonished.
I left the store feeling oddly liberated. I had no desire to become another Bob Evans, but it was time to acclimate to my new surroundings. Molting season had arrived.
To be sure, Evans and I were destined to remain the odd couple—that much I accepted. Even though he was intently focused on his new responsibilities, a corner of Evans’s brain, or some other organ, kept scrupulous watch over his sex life. There was a girl almost every night, and there was scant time for repeat business. Evans needed women; that had been his way of life since adolescence. And the affection, if that’s what it was, was reciprocal. In all the time I spent with him, whether evening or morning, I never overheard a scene, with a girl screaming about a betrayal or a forgotten commitment, but I did witness fond farewells. It was almost as though there was an understanding within Evans’s pulchritudinous inventory that these were to be one-night stands and that all emotions expressed therein were perforce evanescent.
I understood Evans’s modus sexualis, was grateful that it did not interfere with the work, and I had no intention of emulating it. Given the massive neuroses confronting me each day, my marriage and my two small children seemed all the more important as anchors of reality. I also observed the risks of entrapment. I knew several executives at other studios whose lives had been entangled in sexual favors or who had been caught in blatant “setups.” And the industry had its own folklore of top executives, like Jim Aubrey of CBS, whose careers had been undermined by scandal.
I knew that my behavior probably was regarded as prudish. I felt like a teenager who’d been invited to an orgy but was too timorous to partake. And the temptations were abundant. Virtually every party, and they were almost nightly, had their standard offerings—lines of cocaine and piles of joints. And it was customary to strip down after dinner and climb into the hot tub. As a completely nonaddictive personality, I smoked the joints and welcomed an occasional cocaine high after an arduous day, and the hot tubs became habitual, as did the subsurface wandering hands. I was having a very good time and was keenly aware that I seemed to be perpetually surrounded by uncommonly attractive people.
But an incipient lunacy seemed baked into the lifestyle. People who should have known better were betraying their loved ones and destroying their careers. Parties were ending in screaming fits of domestic betrayal. Movies were being abandoned by filmmakers who were ODing on drugs they knew nothing about. Lurking beneath the atmosphere of prurience and play was a chasm of self-destruction.
By the early seventies, I could already foresee both the promise of the period and the seeds of its destruction. Some brilliant work was emerging from the playpen that was seventies Hollywood, but the achievements would be ephemeral.
If social Hollywood was consumed with sexuality, so too was the studio. Everyone seemed to be balling everyone else. Bluhdorn was being serviced on his travels as a matter of course, with executives routinely organizing his assignations. Even the gruffly impersonal president, Martin Davis, was engaged in an affair with the vivacious young head of casting, Andrea Eastman. After an especially unpleasant meeting with Bluhdorn and Jaffe, one of their secretaries matter-of-factly asked me if I shared her interest in oral sex and would like to participate that evening. Even as she plugged in another call, she told me casually, “I give great blow jobs.”
One morning I’d had an intense negotiation at the Beverly Hills Hotel with an attractive female literary agent on rights to a hot novel. I’d been so stubborn over the deal points that, over a final sip of coffee, I said, “I feel bad—you didn’t get much out of this breakfast.”
“That problem can be solved,” she said, gingerly plunking her room key in front of me. “I have forty-five minutes if you do.”
For Evans himself, the lexicon of sex was as routine as the lexicon of filmmaking. His frustration, however, was that he was not able to find the connective energy between his two favorite domains. “The audience doesn’t want to see actors fucking,” he would say to me. “The smart director understands what to s
how and what to cover up.”
On the other hand, movies about sex fascinated him. “Ellen Burstyn picks lice out of her pussy, but other than that the movie is a goddamn bore,” he announced to me one morning as he climbed into my car for our morning drive to work.
“What the hell are you talking about, Bob?”
“I made a deal for Paramount to release Tropic of Cancer,” he explained. “I didn’t tell you about it. I forgot. I knew it was a stupid deal so I didn’t say anything.”
“You’re talking about Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer,” I said in disbelief. “How can you make a movie of a Henry Miller novel?”
“You can’t,” Evans replied. He explained that he had a long-standing friendship with Miller, the sexual rebel whose work had been labeled obscene by the defenders of morality. Another Evans friend, Joseph Strick, had raised the money to shoot the movie, provided he could direct it, and now Paramount would have the privilege of distributing it. Except the studio wouldn’t, because it was lifeless. I screened Tropic the next day and agreed with Evans’s dire assessment; I couldn’t even find interest in the Burstyn scene.
Evans said he’d learned his lesson about sex movies. Shortly thereafter he returned from Paris, however, with a new passion project. He had seen a rough cut of Last Tango in Paris starring Maria Schneider and Marlon Brando, and was convinced the movie would find a big audience in the United States. “Brando fucks her on the floor. He fucks her in the ass. The movie is amazing,” Evans rhapsodized.
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, Last Tango stirred both alarm and fascination in the international film community. To Hollywood’s young filmmakers, Bertolucci had managed to merge art with porn. It was an act of singular cinematic defiance. Further, he had hired one of the mythic stars of the movie world, Brando, and had told him to break all the rules.
In Hollywood’s sacrosanct celebrity screening rooms, Last Tango was the hottest picture since Gone with the Wind. But in New York’s corporate boardrooms, the movie sent up red flags. The official mantra: America’s shareholders didn’t want to be in the porn business.
“To the New York bankers, Hollywood has gone over the edge,” Martin Davis lectured me during a trip to New York. “The money men are only comfortable backing a company that makes family pictures. Mary Poppins is a product they’re comfortable with. That’s where the money is.”
I stared at Davis for a moment. It was as though he knew what I was going to say, and almost dared me to go there. “Marty, we both know that there’s only one movie in release with lines around the block. And it’s not Mary Poppins.”
Davis paused. “Gulf & Western isn’t in the porn business,” he snapped, and walked away.
What had prompted my remark was simply this: I had heard that Davis himself had been seen in line a week earlier to see Deep Throat. I’d wondered whether the Gulf & Western COO had worn his usual navy blue uniform or had tried to blend in with the great unwashed. But the fact that Davis had been impelled to see the new porn epic underscored the ambivalence of the corporate players toward the booming porn industry. At this moment in 1972, Deep Throat was generating more heat than any movie Hollywood had produced in years. And with the nation sliding into a recession, the revenues from porn were delicious to behold.
To the movie industry, Deep Throat was confounding for several reasons. At a time when Hollywood was still throwing big budgets at brash musicals, Deep Throat looked like what it was—a home movie made on a dime. It had no stars; its principals were not even professional actors. Neither Linda Lovelace nor Harry Reems even professed to be proficient at oral sex, according to their interviews.
To Hollywood CEOs, however, the biggest frustration stemmed from the revelation that the Mafia essentially owned Deep Throat. Gangsters had not only succeeded in buying up the lion’s share of the rights, but were craftily managing its release. In market after market, the pattern was the same: Deep Throat would open in a single theater and the cops, who’d been tipped off beforehand, would promptly shut it down. The local newspapers would herald the censorship fight and within a week or so the local authorities would invariably retreat from the free speech advocates. When Deep Throat reopened, long lines would form outside the theater thanks to all the free publicity.
The Mafia understood a prime rule of marketing: that the surefire way to lure an audience is to announce that the “authorities” don’t want them to see something. In one town after another across the U.S., the censors played into the hands of the Mafia.
The reaction of the Hollywood studios to all this was similar to that of the audiences. Porn both scared and enticed them. They had all subscribed to the traditional view that mainstream filmgoers coveted romance and happy endings, but not the types of “happy endings” that now played out on the big screens. They did not want to see penises entering mouths, vaginas, or other human orifices.
Or did they? In Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door (also released that year), and a sudden parade of other porn films, explicit sex scenes were not only splayed across the wide screen, but the box office returns were downright exultant. Porn was suddenly serious competition.
And though Bluhdorn and Davis officially parroted the industry position on porn, Paramount nonetheless had quietly become part of the porn world. Within weeks after the shady Italian financiers of Immobilière acquired a principal stake in the Paramount back lot on Melrose Boulevard, its mammoth soundstages were being rented out to porn producers. On the same soundstage where Roman Polanski had labored with Mia Farrow on Rosemary’s Baby, pornmeisters were shooting hard-core scenes.
By this time, the Paramount production staff—a much slimmed down team—had moved off the lot to a compact little building on North Canon Drive in Beverly Hills. Once the lot had been sold, it seemed like an excellent opportunity to streamline costs and move to smaller quarters. Initially, I was troubled by the move. I loved strolling the studio’s faux neighborhoods, but most of the stages were now empty and so were most of the dressing rooms. I was on the lot one day when I came upon an argument between a director and an actress outside a dressing room. The director, a sleazy looking guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt, was unhappy with his buxom blonde star because she’d apparently been late for her morning call. “Professionals are never late,” he ranted. “We got only four days to shoot this fucking thing.” I quickened my stride; I didn’t want to know about four-day porn shoots on a Paramount soundstage.
All this underscored for me the value of the move to Beverly Hills. We were beginning a new chapter in the bumpy history of the studio. And while the mandate had been set forth that the studio would not be in the porn business, our new array of films still registered a rather fervid sexual temperature. Shortly after moving into my tidy new office on Canon Drive, I found myself entangled in a fight over the sex scenes in a thriller called Don’t Look Now.
Based on a deliciously creepy short story by Daphne du Maurier, Don’t Look Now, was about a married couple who, having lost a child through a drowning accident, take refuge in Venice to recover their bearings. Three financing entities had agreed to fund the picture, which was directed by Nicolas Roeg and starred Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland.
When I visited the set in Venice, I had no idea that this would turn out to be an auspicious day—one that would foreshadow future controversy. I was greeted by Roeg, a gracious if artistically demanding former cinematographer who had codirected Performance with Mick Jagger. It was the middle of the afternoon and Roeg explained that they were about to shoot an important love scene.
“Good day to come by,” Roeg remarked, and as he spoke, I could tell that, consistent with his reputation, he had fortified himself with a cocktail or two. “The scene is supposed to be semierotic, and we’ve rehearsed it so everybody’s fine with it,” Roeg said. “Fortunately, Julie and Donald are getting on quite well. There’s nothing worse than a love scene involving two actors who hate each other.”
I told Roeg about my experience watching the f
laccid Julie Andrews–Rock Hudson love scenes and, amused, he assured me that this one would definitely not be a repetition. As “action” was called, I retreated behind the camera as the two actors arrayed themselves with a cool professionalism, their expressions purposeful. Now suddenly they were into their characters, registering passion, if not lust. They were clearly naked, which surprised me. I had assumed that the usual skincolored panties would cover their privates.
As the scene progressed, my mind drifted. I had a plane to Paris to catch; and as I peeked at my watch I also glanced at the open script, which was perched on the script supervisor’s desk. The scene was about action, not dialogue, and the action was now continuing, unabated for several minutes. I stared at Roeg, who was looking on passively. My gaze shifted to the actors, and I was riveted.
“Nic,” I whispered to the director. “Don’t they expect you to say ‘cut’?”
“I just want to be sure I have the coverage,” he mumbled.
“Cut,” said Roeg. The actors did not seem to hear him, or simply didn’t care. I decided to make a run for my plane.
Several months later, back in Beverly Hills, my assistant told me that Warren Beatty was unexpectedly in the reception room and wanted to see me urgently. Beatty was not one to turn up on a whim; I had gotten to know him pretty well when we worked on The Parallax View, months earlier.
Beatty was all business. “I am here to protect Julie,” he explained, referring to his then girlfriend, Julie Christie.
“Protect her from what?” I asked.
“Nic Roeg exploited her in Don’t Look Now,” Beatty said darkly.
“I haven’t seen the cut yet,” I replied.
“Then you will see what I mean,” Beatty said ominously.
“I’m afraid I’m a little dense about this,” I protested. “What’s the issue here?”
Beatty sucked in his breath. He was clearly an angry man. “The love scenes. You can see her pussy.”
It all started clicking for me. I now remembered the love scene, which had gotten out of control, and apparently Nic Roeg had not cut it judiciously. “Look, Warren, I appreciate your concerns. You are being the protective boyfriend, and I get that. I promise you that I will talk to the editor and we will deal with the problem.”
Peter Bart Page 9
