Bonnie and Clyde came out in the middle of the sexual revolution, and its real originality lay in the fact that it recognized that in America fame and glamour are more potent than sex. “Andy Warhol was giving parties at the Factory with Viva, Edie, Cherry Vanilla, the fifteen minutes of fame bit,” says Newman. “None of those people did anything; they just wanted to be celebrities. Likewise, our take on Bonnie and Clyde was that they wanted to be celebrities. They saw in each other the mirror of their own ambitions. Although they were both at the bottom of the shit heap, in each other they saw someone who validated an image of what they could be. He creates for her a vision of herself as a movie star, and from that moment on, even though he couldn’t fuck her, he’s got her.”
Moreover, from the moment Clyde introduces himself and his partner, saying, “I’m Clyde Barrow and this is Miss Bonnie Parker. We rob banks,” the movie brazenly romanticizes the outlaws—bank robbers and killers. In the crucible of the Vietnam War, and without the old Production Code to keep movies on the straight and narrow, the line between good guys and bad guys had become increasingly tenuous. In 1962, James Bond, with his “license to kill,” coolly executed a larcenous metallurgist in Dr. No, even though he knew the man’s gun was empty. But Bonnie and Clyde went considerably further, reversing the conventional moral polarities. The bad guys in this film were traditional authority figures: parents, sheriffs.
However, it is not only the violence of Bonnie and Clyde, not only their refusal to say they were sorry that antagonized “them”; it was the flair and energy with which the film pits the hip and the cool against the old, straight, and stuffy. It says “fuck you” not only to a generation of Americans who were on the wrong side of the generation gap, the wrong side of the war in Vietnam, but also a generation of Motion Picture Academy members that had hoped to go quietly, with dignity. Bonnie and Clyde made that impossible, brutally shoving them out the door, and the people of that generation understood perfectly. On some level, Crowther must have seen himself in Sheriff Hamer, and must have been angered by it. By doing it differently, and in most ways better, Beatty and Penn, Benton and Newman thumbed their noses at the people who had come before them. If the Bond films legitimized government violence, and the Leone films legitimized vigilante violence, Bonnie and Clyde legitimized violence against the establishment, the same violence that seethed in the hearts and minds of hundreds of thousands of frustrated opponents of the Vietnam War. Newman was right. Bonnie and Clyde was a movement movie; like The Graduate, young audiences recognized that it was “theirs.”
AS A RESULT of Bonnie and Clyde, Beatty became, if not necessarily an auteur, one of the most powerful figures in the industry. He was sent every script in town. He rented a second suite in the Beverly Wilshire, and hired an assistant, Susanna Moore, a nineteen-year-old sometime model who grew up in Hawaii and later would become a novelist. She went up to see him, nervous, the phone ringing off the hook, Warren very flirtatious. At the end of the interview, as she was about to leave, he stopped her, walked over and said, “There’s one last thing I haven’t checked yet—I need to see your legs. Can you lift up your skirt?” Moore duly lifted her skirt. “Okay, you got the job.”
Beatty used to go to parties at the Château Marmont, where Roman Polanski and his girlfriend, Sharon Tate, Dick Sylbert, and Paul, Dick’s identical twin brother, also a production designer, and Paul’s wife, Anthea, all had suites. Polanski, funny and elfin, loved to perform. He told stories that went on and on, twenty, thirty minutes. “You couldn’t get a word in edgewise,” recalls Dick, who designed Rosemary’s Baby, which they had just finished. “The guy was like those kids who get up at bar mitzvahs and dance and sing. Drive people crazy. And competitive. You told a joke, he told a joke. But he was a sweetheart.”
Polanski had a rather European attitude toward women. He always spoke to Sharon as if she were a child, insisting that she wait on him, rarely lifting a finger to help himself, as in, “Sha-ron, get more wheeskee for Deek.” Recalls Sharmagne Leland-St. John, a sometimes actress and Playboy bunny who would later marry Dick, “Sharon was the sweetest creature I had ever met, very smart, but very stupid too. Once she was sitting on a chair, and watering this plant. She would empty a pitcher, and go for some more water, and do it again as we sat there wondering when it would occur to her that the water was going straight through the pot down onto the carpet.”
Leland-St. John was then living at the Château with Harry Falk, formerly married to Patty Duke. “Sharon said to Harry, ‘Roman wants to marry me, I don’t know what to do.’ Harry gave her some fatherly advice, and she said, ‘Thank you, I really appreciate it, you saved my life, I’m not going to throw my life away by marrying this little putz,’ and a couple of weeks later, there she was, getting married in London.” But, according to writer Fiona Lewis, who knew them well, “They were crazy about each other. Roman worshipped her.”
BONNIE AND CLYDE would go down as the first script Towne “saved,” the first notch on his gun. He once said, “I don’t know what would have happened if it had been arbitrated,” implying he might have gotten a writing credit if he had tried. But he never demanded credit, he says, because Beatty asked him not to. Privately, Towne told at least one person he had written the movie, and he carefully nurtured a reputation as a script doctor. He worked behind the scenes like a shadow, careful not to leave footprints. It was by no means all calculation; he couldn’t help himself. He was a born kibitzer. And he was generous. He mentored Jeremy Larner, who won an Oscar for writing The Candidate. “I couldn’t have written it without him,” says Larner.
Despite the sound and the fury over Bonnie and Clyde, Beatty and Towne found time to labor over the script of Shampoo. It was not a happy collaboration. Over the course of a few months in 1968 and 1969, they met repeatedly for lunch, usually at the Source or the Aware Inn, downing cup after cup of chamomile tea. After these sessions, Towne would go home and write. But it soon became evident to Beatty that something was wrong; the script wasn’t happening. Towne suffered from writer’s block. “Bob would love to work for money on rewrites on which he got no credit, and would do it quickly,” says producer Jerry Ayres. “Over three weeks, he’d have a whole new script ready. But something that had his name on it would become all involved in the neurosis of completion and failure, and take forever.” Paramount production head Robert Evans, who later hired him to write Chinatown, said, “Towne could talk to you about a screenplay he was going to write and tell you every page of it, and it never came out on paper. Never.”
Towne had two weaknesses. He was poor at structure, a serious problem for a writer who would become notorious for his windy, 250-page scripts. And for all his facility with words, he was not a born storyteller. He had difficulty imagining the simplest plots, the most rudimentary sequence of events. He anguished over what he felt was his poverty of imagination. “Robert had written a script that was very good in atmosphere, and in dialogue, but very weak in story, and each day the story would go in whatever direction the wind was blowing,” says Beatty. “He just never wound up with anything.”
From Towne’s point of view, Beatty was too linear. “He would not allow me to stop and think about everything and nothing,” he says. “Nietzsche or Blake said, ‘The straight roads are the roads of progress, the crooked roads are the roads of genius.’ Warren will not knowingly go down a crooked road.”
Finally, Beatty lost patience. He was tired of sitting around in restaurants, munching carrot sticks and tossing around ideas that came to nothing. He said to Towne, “Look, I don’t wanna keep waiting for what you’re gonna do. Finish by December 31, and show it to me. If you don’t do it, let’s forget it. I’m gonna do it myself.” December 31 rolled around, and there was no script. Beatty was angry, and they didn’t speak for months. Towne thought Shampoo would never be made. Eventually, Beatty decided to do another movie, McCabe & Mrs. Miller.
Two:
“Who Made Us Right?”
1969
• How BBS kicked off a director’s cinema in Hollywood with Easy Rider, while Dennis Hopper became a drug-crazed guru of the counterculture, and Bert Schneider the éminence grise of the American New Wave.
“Nobody had ever seen themselves portrayed in a movie. At every love-in across the country people were smoking grass and dropping LSD, while audiences were still watching Doris Day and Rock Hudson!”
— DENNIS HOPPER
Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson were strolling in Central Park. It was the early ’60s, and both men were unhappy, for different reasons. Bert had risen quickly through the ranks of Screen Gems, the TV arm of his father’s company, Columbia Pictures. At a tender age, he had reached the lofty perch of treasurer, and had been selected to head the division, but in a bit of reverse nepotism, his father blocked his further advance. Bert was frustrated and angry. Rafelson, meanwhile, had drifted from job to job. He felt he was too smart and hip for the work he had been doing, was cut out for better things.
Schneider and Rafelson were in the habit of getting together at lunchtime, bitching about their jobs and talking about their dreams. Rafelson’s dream was a company of his own. “The problem in moviemaking,” Bob told Bert, “is not that we don’t have talented people; we don’t have people with the talent to recognize talent. Take France, with the New Wave, or England, with Tony Richardson’s company, Woodfall, the neorealist films of the Italians—these people exist here as well, but the system for allowing them to flourish doesn’t exist, there’s no encouragement for them. What this business needs is not better directors, but better producers who are willing to give directors with the ideas a chance to do films their own way. It’s not just final cut, it’s final everything.”
Bob liked Bert precisely because he had short hair, didn’t smoke dope, and knew the business end of the business. He listened to Bert complain about the management of his own company, then said, “Why don’t you quit?”
“And do what?”
“Start a company with me.”
Schneider did quit Screen Gems, in 1965, and joined Rafelson in L.A., where they did form a tiny company, Raybert—later renamed BBS with the addition of Schneider’s friend Steve Blauner—that transformed the industry.
IN THE BEGINNING, Rafelson was the one with the ideas. He was the one who haunted the Thalia and the New Yorker, the one who was a cousin of the legendary Samson Raphaelson, writer of Ernst Lubitsch’s comedies. With his older brother, Donald, he grew up at 110 Riverside Drive, on 81st Street. The family was comfortably middle-class. Bob’s father manufactured hats. Bob went to private school, Horace Mann, and his parents belonged to a country club in Westchester.
Toby Carr had her first date with Bob when she was thirteen. He took her to “the house of a friend of his where there was a girl he was interested in,” she recalls. “He and the girl wound up necking on the couch all night, while I stood by his friend’s piano and listened to him play Rhapsody in Blue over and over again. At the end of the evening, when I got out of the cab, I mouthed these polite words, like Thank you very much, I had a very good time,’ which of course wasn’t true, and he just kind of leaned over and pulled the cab door closed and sped off. Like, ‘Yeah,’ slam. I should have known something right then. When I look back on that night, it was all so obvious. I was definitely looking for trouble.”
Rafelson’s mother liked to drink. She went on alcoholic binges, holed up in her room for days on end. She was alternately abusive and seductive. “Bob was sort of like that too,” says Toby. “He could lead you along a path, thinking one thing, and then he’d do a 180 on you, leaving you unhappy or mad or hurt, betrayed, like he was playing with your mind. I think he learned that from her.”
Bob was supposed to go into the family business, but he despised hats and desperately wanted to get away. When he graduated from high school, he went to Dartmouth College. It was the ’50s, and he wore black turtlenecks, read Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jack Kerouac. He was handsome in the Jewish way, a shock of dark brown hair over a high forehead, rosebud lips frozen in a permanent pout under a fighter’s battered nose. He was tall, thin, and powerfully built, coiled so tight he seemed to vibrate with an electric charge. He was invested in being hip, looked to black people—both male and female—for validation, the kind of person for whom Mailer’s “White Negro” was written. There was an intense, brooding quality about Bob, and a cruel, predatory streak that could be attractive, although years later, when his prospects had dimmed and his career was nowhere, he just seemed depressed.
While Bob was at Dartmouth, Toby was at Bennington College. Despite their unpromising first date, through a series of fluky circumstances right out of Carnal Knowledge, they ended up as a couple. “He had that kind of vitality, the ability to take you on his trip, turn you on, which was very compelling,” says Toby. “He was kind of a bad boy, a troublemaker, which, combined with his storytelling talents that probably came from a need to escape his own reality, made him extremely provocative.”
Bob and Toby were married in the mid-’50s, had a son named Peter. In New York, they were friends with Buck Henry, who had been a couple of years ahead of Rafelson at Dartmouth. “Bucky was incredibly funny, very repressed, very prurient, almost like an adolescent,” recalls Toby. “He was always interested in fringe people, strippers and weirdos.” He lived in a hole-in-the-wall basement apartment on 10th Street in the Village. There was a life-sized stuffed gorilla seated on the living room floor. Buck never took off his pajamas. When he went out, he simply flung his street clothes over them.
Rafelson, meanwhile, in his early twenties, got a job through friends of his parents from the country club at Channel 13’s Play of the Week where he wrote additional dialogue for Shakespeare, Giraudoux, Ibsen, Shaw, and so on. In June 1962, the Rafelsons made their way to Hollywood, where Toby gave birth to her second child, a daughter named Julie. Bob and Toby blossomed in the California sun, he tall and muscular, she pert and raven-haired. Bob landed a job at Revue Productions. Revue was the TV arm of Universal, which had just been taken over by MCA, run by Lew Wasserman and Jules Stein.
Rafelson was assigned to a show called Channing, set on a college campus, for which he hired playwrights like Edward Albee and Jack Richardson, a mischievous move a little bit akin to hiring Norman Mailer to write The Flying Nun. He finally collided with Wasserman over an episode in which he wanted to hire an actor named Michael Parks to play opposite Peter Fonda. Parks had less than perfect skin, and Wasserman, a tall and intimidating man, took exception to him. Given to volcanic rages he telegraphed by tapping a dagger-sharp letter opener on the mirror finish of his desktop, Wasserman had a large, wedge-shaped head under a shock of prematurely white hair. His nose seemed slightly out of focus, a protuberant smudge perched above thin lips compressed in a line of anger. He wore heavy, oversized glasses that gave him the look of a malevolent owl. He fixed Rafelson with a glare, his eyes swimming behind the lenses, and bellowed, “I don’t want to see these degenerate stories anymore, and I never want to see an actor who has pimples on the back of his neck. What the hell does that got to do with anything real?”
“This is real?” exploded Rafelson, wrathful in the righteousness of his convictions, pointing to the awards, medallions, souvenir ashtrays, and other tchotchkes on the vast expanse of Wasserman’s desk. “What’s this fuckin’ bullshit?” he roared back, leaning over and sweeping them onto the floor with his arm. “Don’t hire an actor with pimples? Jesus fucking God!” Wasserman uncharacteristically put a fatherly arm around his shoulders, escorted him out of his office and off the lot. Once he cooled down, Rafelson realized that his brilliant career might very well be over. He found a bathroom and threw up.
BERT SCHNEIDER WAS the young businessman with the house in the ‘burbs, the wife and kids. Born in 1933 in the lap of luxury, he was sandwiched between two brothers, Stanley, the elder, and Harold, the younger. His father, Abe, was reputed to have started at Columbia Pictures sweeping floors. When the beastly
Harry Cohn died, he ascended the throne, with Leo Jaffe as his lieutenant. Abe was a magisterial presence. He was tall, spoke in measured tones that appeared to convey great wisdom.
Stanley was stolid and unimaginative, a conventional soul who would lead a conventional life. Harold was angry and volatile like Sonny Corleone, and wounded and resentful like Fredo. In fact, “it was all like The Godfather, very dynastic, very Mafioso-like,” says someone who knew them well. “It was almost like you mingled your blood with Bert when you were his friend or business associate. He’d do anything for you if you were in trouble, but if you made any mistakes, you were dead.”
Bert was raised in New Rochelle. He was tall, six foot four, and skinny, which accentuated his height. Strikingly handsome, with high cheekbones, icy blue eyes that conveyed a sly, faintly amused look which said he knew more than anybody else in the room, full, sensual lips, and a long, narrow face topped by a tangle of blond hair, he affected a languid air, laid-back and cool. Nothing got to Bert. When he sat down, he spilled into a chair like a rag doll, no sharp angles or joints. Director Henry Jaglom remembers him from Camp Kohut, for Jewish kids in Oxford, Maine, where he was Jaglom’s counselor: “He was the All-Star, Mr. America, the blond, baseball-playing, heroic kid that everybody either wanted to grow up and be like, or have as their big brother.”
Bert’s best friend and main man was Steve Blauner. When Steve arrived on the scene, Harold became the odd boy out. “Steve was Harold,” as Bert would say later, explaining a lot of things about his relationship with his younger brother. As teenagers, Bert and Steve would steal away from their comfortable homes and hang out at the Italian bookie joints in White Plains. One afternoon, when Steve was seventeen, he was watching a tennis match from the umpire’s chair at the club, when he spied a stunning girl in a cute white outfit and flaming red hair walk onto the court behind him. She had perfect features—big brown eyes, freckles, small, regular teeth, and a full, ripe figure. “I kept turning around so much I was embarrassed, so I got off the stand, and went down and sat behind the courts so nobody would know who I was looking at,” he recalls. “Afterward, I asked, ‘Who’s that girl?’ Somebody said, ‘That’s the girl we’re trying to get Bert to take out.’ So I ran over to Bert and said, ‘You gotta get a look at this girl!’”
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls Page 7