Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  Judy Feinberg, who grew up in neighboring Scarsdale, and went to Fieldston, was quite the catch. Her family was even wealthier than the Schneiders. Judy first met Bert when she was fifteen, on a double date at his fraternity, while he was home from Cornell for Christmas. She had a curfew, Bert had the car and was upstairs necking with his date. When it came time for her to leave, her date was afraid to interrupt Bert, so she marched upstairs and did it herself. “I wasn’t going to be grounded and have my Christmas vacation ruined,” she says. “I guess Bert was fascinated by that.” They got married on Christmas Day 1954, while she was a student at Sarah Lawrence. He was twenty-one, she eighteen.

  Bert was expelled from Cornell for gambling, girls, and bad grades. But it didn’t much matter, because there was always the family business. He started at Screen Gems in 1953 at the bottom, schlepping cans of films around the city. Bert and Judy’s life together was ’50s picture postcard perfect. They had two children, two years apart, a boy named Jeffrey and a girl named Audrey (after Judy’s favorite actress, Audrey Hepburn). Bert looked and behaved like a Young Republican. He held relatively commonplace views on most things, and could look forward to a bright and uncomplicated future. “I was into the American dream,” he said. “I pushed my political instincts into the background. I wanted a family, career, money, the whole bit.”

  Says Toby, “Bert and Judy went out to L.A. in this splendid decade of hope, found the great house in Beverly Hills, the wonderful schools for the kids. They were blessed, these people. It was like the Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Bert, and his princess Judy, were truly Jewish royalty. Then slowly we all began getting into all these strange self-destructive, quirky, unpredictable areas of life, that ultimately destroyed everyone, destroyed the fabric of what was.”

  Buck Henry recalls a celebratory dinner, held just before they left New York. It was small, just three couples, Bert and Judy, Bob and Toby, Buck and his wife, Sally, whom he had met when she was Mike Nichols’s secretary. They went to a club. Buck was watching Bert do the twist, chuckling to himself over how geeky he looked, thinking, Gee, there’s an awful lot of noise coming from Bert’s pockets. He’s gonna have to learn to take the keys and the change out before he starts to really swing in L.A. “Within three or four years, Bert, who I don’t think had ever smoked a joint at that time, knew more about exotic drugs than any human being who had ever walked the earth,” says Henry. “For the nice Jewish boys from New York, going to L.A. was like going to the New World. They stepped off that plane and put on funny suits, and bought funny cigarettes, and found very young blond girls. It was a comic version of the guys who came out here originally and made the business.”

  But there was nothing funny about what Bert and Bob did when they got there; they made money, lots of it. One day, Bob walked into Blauner’s office and said, “I want to make Hard Day’s Night as a TV show.” He and Bert persuaded Screen Gems to back it. They put together an ersatz group called the Monkees. The show was an immediate, if unlikely, hit. Rafelson taught himself how to direct simply by doing it. It seemed for a while that the Monkees might be a training ground for other young directors. Martin Scorsese came by, William Friedkin, but neither connected. Friedkin, who was not to be outdone in the hip department, told Rafelson and Schneider, “This is lame, nothing more than a Beatles ripoff, four bourgeois guys running around, chasing their wallets.”

  The Monkees introduced Schneider and Rafelson to the fast-lane music scene. Schneider acted as though he was born to it. He grew a beard, let his hair fill out until it became a dramatic, curly blond mane, which stood in striking contrast to his richly colored velvet suits, black and dark green. When Bert made an entrance, it changed the chemistry of the room. He had the charisma of a movie star, but it was not just looks; he was possessed of extraordinary personal authority. Ostentatious about smoking pot, he puffed away with the zeal of a recent convert, as if he had personally discovered marijuana. He is said to have even passed out joints at a Columbia board meeting.

  Jaglom, who had traveled west from New York in 1965, became fast friends with Jack Nicholson, and fell in with Rafelson, was astonished to hear that Bob’s partner was his old camp counselor. He became both Bert’s court jester and one of a series of younger brothers or wayward sons Bert attracted. Jaglom favored long scarves dramatically flung over his shoulder, as well as extravagant, floppy hats. He also befriended Orson Welles, a vast, damaged vessel adrift in a hostile sea, perennially in search of a safe harbor. Welles was venerated by the New Hollywood, and the wreckage of his career was regarded with horror and indignation as the most egregious example of how the town destroyed the auteur.

  Jaglom used to hang out at the house of Donna Greenberg and her millionaire husband on La Costa beach in the Malibu Colony. Donna wasn’t in the business, but she was clever, wealthy, attractive, and had a wonderful home, with rooms and more rooms for guests, a swimming pool on the beach, and an expansive patio. Donna used to have the Rafelsons over regularly, along with Buck and Sally, and John Calley, who had just come to Warners to head production. Julie Payne, daughter of actor John Payne and child actress Ann Shirley, dropped by too. Julie, a Hollywood brat, knew everyone. She had a perfect American body, sinewy and tanned. High cheekbones and eyes at a slight slant gave her an exotic look. Julie was fierce and wild, chain-smoked cigarettes, drank a lot, was apt to burst into Donna’s house at 1:00 A.M., screaming, “I want to use your swimming pool to have a good fuck.” Rafelson was very much the alley cat, tried to nail anything that moved. Even Julie was shocked. “He was always pawing me,” she recalls. “I was in the pool, three feet from where Toby was sitting, and he paddled up to me and grabbed my breast. Nobody had ever done that to me before. I certainly wasn’t going to scream, right there in Toby’s hearing. I couldn’t believe that he had done that, it was so gross.”

  Rafelson and Schneider considered themselves, and indeed behaved like, sexual outlaws, for whom nothing was taboo, nothing too flagrant. When Toby had to leave a party early to relieve the baby-sitter, Bob would call a girlfriend, who would invariably arrive moments later to seat herself in Toby’s chair, still warm. He had innumerable affairs, and one relationship with a black woman named Paula Strachan that must have lasted nearly half a decade. Bob met Paula, who was nineteen, when he and Jack were auditioning dancers for Bob’s first feature, Head. “They were princes,” says Strachan. “I was very young and very stupid.” Says a friend from those days, “Bob was a role model for drug taking and promiscuity. He had a group of young people who adored him. I think a lot of young lives were harmed by Bob Rafelson.”

  “These were people who didn’t feel authentic,” adds Toby. “Artists suffer, and upper-middle-class Jewish boys from New York didn’t feel they had, at least not in the same way. They’d missed the civil rights movement because they hadn’t gotten to the point where self-indulgence was less important than putting yourself on the line. By the ’70s, we were still trying to act like the adolescents we had never been, when we were in our thirties.”

  Schneider doubtless began his strange voyage merely enjoying the advantages nature had so lavishly bestowed upon him—his looks, his intelligence, his charisma—all gilded by wealth and an innate sense of privilege, unclouded by self-doubt, a dynastic assurance that everything he did was right. Bert was so relentless that he came on to almost every pretty woman who came his way, like Linda Jones, wife of Monkee Davy Jones. One affair, with Toni Stern, was serious and lengthy. (Bert hooked her up with Carole King, and she wrote King’s big hit, “It’s Too Late.” She refused to comment.) Nicholson is said to have once warned a friend, “Never bring a woman that you’re serious about around Bert or Bob.” Or, as Bert’s brother Harold put it more succinctly, “Bert would fuck a snake.”

  Judy Schneider was a class act. Jaglom, who had dated Natalie Wood and was close friends with Candice Bergen, thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. But as Bert embarked on the ’60s trip, he began to make fun of Judy�
�s bourgeois refinement, liked to rattle her cage with real and contrived vulgarities. He had the ability to fart at will, and did so at inopportune moments, never failing to upset her. He would try to shock her by introducing locker room language into conversation. Money—how much who was getting paid for what—was a private affair, but sex was a publicly traded commodity among the Raybert guys, sexual exploits a variation on who could piss further. No one would hesitate for a moment before discussing the texture and flavor of his wife’s or girlfriend’s vagina; Bert’s favorite term for it was “poozle.” The BBS house style of discourse was brutal. Half playful, half hostile, the guys routinely traded extravagantly nasty epithets. Bert in particular had a gift for nailing people at their weakest points, and he would take no prisoners. If they failed to respond in kind, showed fear or anger, or worse, were intimidated into silence, they were “lame-o’s” (Nicholson’s phrase), as in, “get this lame-o away from me.” It was as if they were re-creating the high school locker rooms they were never in.

  As the ’60s progressed, Bert went far beyond cuckolding his friends, which presented, after all, little challenge, and helped himself freely to the decade’s smorgasbord of liberation theologies, spiritual and corporeal, developing a highly evolved ideology of promiscuity to justify his behavior, not that it needed much justification in the days of free love.

  Despite the counterculture’s official ideology of love, things were getting weird. Donna Greenberg’s house was always open to anyone who dropped by. “One beautiful, sunny Sunday morning, I was having breakfast on the patio with my four-year-old, the nanny, my husband, and our oldest son, who was thirteen or fourteen,” she recalls. “We had just had a paint-in, painting our seawall with peace signs, graffiti, that sort of thing. Suddenly, the most frightening group of hippies walked onto our patio, stood around and stared at us, wandered through our house. I was petrified, but I didn’t know what to say, and it was also the ’60s, being nice to people who wore lots of beads and jewels and bandannas. There was a piano covered with all the pictures one collects of children and family and loved ones and everyone I knew. In little silver frames. They gathered around the piano and looked at the pictures. Then they walked out, leaving us shaken. They got down to the end of the beach, but they couldn’t get out, and a police car came, and I found myself walking down there and telling the police to let them go, they were my guests. Don’t ask me what the impulse was. It was the Manson family.”

  THE WILD SUCCESS of the Monkees was making everybody connected with them rich. Bob and Toby bought a Spanish-style home on Sierra Alta above Sunset, near Graystone, the old Doheny mansion leased by the American Film Institute (AFI), then in its infancy. The Rafelsons’ house was a corner of New York in L.A., stuffed with African artifacts, glossy coffee-table books on Japanese printmaking, photography, antiques. It became a hangout for an odd assortment of New Hollywood kids: Dennis and Brooke, Bert and Judy, Buck Henry, and Jack Nicholson and his girlfriend, Mimi Machu. Toby was the den mother. She filled the house with candles, supplied sweets and good dope, made sure everybody was happy. Rafelson, always in search of la différence, had come across some welding glasses with small dark lenses and flaps on the sides that became a permanent feature of his face. He sat on the floor, listening to jazz, smoking “jayskis,” as he called them, maybe dropping some acid in the Jacuzzi behind the house, maybe eating a few mushrooms, taking a little mescaline or hash.

  Despite his success, Rafelson was dissatisfied. After two seasons, word was out that the “Prefab Four” didn’t play their own songs on their recordings. The phenomenon was pretty much over, and the truth was, the Monkees had become an embarrassment. As a sometimes musician, self-proclaimed hipster, and professional outsider, he hated everything they stood for. Friedkin was right. As someone said, if whitebread could sing, it would have sounded like the Monkees. Besides, Rafelson was tired of television; he wanted to direct features. Why not turn them inside out, show the world that they, and more important he, was in on the joke, nay, had authored the joke. “I think that repudiating the very thing the Monkees stood for, using them in order to do this, which he didn’t mind doing, shows you what his colors were, which was that his own image of himself was more important than the product,” says Toby. “I think the need to feel cool, in the minds of guys like Bob and Bert, was terribly, terribly important.”

  The film was Head. Like nearly every other aspiring young director, Rafelson fancied himself a European auteur; with characteristic arrogance, Head was to be his 8½ the summation of his career and his meditation on his art. Unlike Fellini, however, there was nothing to sum up, it being his first feature. Rafelson asked Nicholson to write it. At this point, Nicholson’s acting career appeared to be over. After a decade of B pictures, he had barely made a dent. Jack used to hang out at the Raybert offices, had become good friends with Bert. They went to Lakers games together, where Bert had expensive, courtside seats, and ostentatiously sat through the National Anthem. So Jack and Bob fired up some joints, dropped acid, took a walk on the beach, and came up with the novel idea of deconstructing the Monkees in a mélange of music, Vietnam footage, and kitschy pop culture artifacts.

  While Rafelson and Nicholson were shooting, Schneider was watching Walter Cronkite on CBS news. It was not a pretty picture. The conflict in Vietnam, the so-called living room war had taken up residence in the place where people lived, and seemed like it was going to go on forever.

  Up north, in Oakland, a Black Panther named Huey Newton got into a scuffle with a couple of cops in October of 1967. Police officer John Frey ended up dead, and Newton was arrested on a murder charge. The Panthers, who advocated armed self-defense, had become the darlings of the white New Left a few months before by descending on the statehouse in Sacramento dressed in black berets and black leather jackets, armed to the teeth. After Newton was jailed, brightly colored orange buttons featuring a black panther and the words “Free Huey” blossomed on dashikis and tie-dyed shirts all over California. On September 10, a jury found Newton guilty of voluntary manslaughter and remanded him to the Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo for two to fifteen years.

  Schneider appeared to be increasingly uncomfortable over what the Weathermen would later call “white skin privilege,” a common ailment in the movie industry where the rain of money took its toll. Says Buck Henry, “A lot of that stuff came out of middle-class guilt: ‘How come we’re rich, and maybe a little bit famous, when our grandfathers had to struggle so much, and how come we’re telling people what to do all the time, when we just came over on the boat.’” Years later, after the South Central riots of 1992, while his contemporaries were buying guns to protect their Bel Air mansions, Schneider is said to have told a friend, “I wish they’d come up here and burn my house down.”

  ONE DAY, Hopper, Fonda, and playwright Michael McClure dropped into the Raybert offices to pitch an idea. AIP was dragging its feet on Easy Rider, and nobody else in his right mind would put up hard cash for bad-boy Hopper to direct. “You know Dennis,” laughed Nicholson. “You don’t exactly just turn over some money to him and say, ‘No problem,’ you know what I mean?”

  Rafelson had met Hopper in New York, through Buck Henry. Bob had literally tripped over him on the floor at a party at Buck’s girlfriend’s apartment in the East Village. Hopper was pitching Rafelson McClure’s play The Queen, which featured the principals of the Lyndon Johnson administration—Johnson, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, and Robert McNamara—in white, off-the-shoulder beaded gowns, eating lobster and planning the assassination of JFK. Schneider limped in, his leg in a cast, and sat down at a desk in the back. Fonda and Hopper were about to go into Nicholson’s office to smoke a joint, but Rafelson introduced them to Schneider, saying of Hopper, “This guy is fucking crazy, but I totally believe in him, and I think he’d make a brilliant film for us.” Schneider looked them over—Hopper, short and dark, in his filthy jeans, denim jacket, beard, ponytail, headband, his darting eyes shining with a paranoid glitter, a f
urrow slicing his brow like a knife; Fonda, tall and storklike, strikingly like his father, except for the long blond hair, fringed jacket, and rawhide moccasins—and listened to their rap. The Queen seemed a little much, even for Bert and Bob, and when Hopper asked for $60,000, Rafelson changed the subject, asked, “How’s your bike movie coming?” Fonda replied, “Oh, AIP is just dickin’ us around, man, puttin’ all these restrictions on us, it don’t look too good there.”

  “Get the fuck outta my office and talk to Bert.” They did, and Bert agreed to finance The Loners, as it was then called, to the tune of $360,000. He did not have a studio lined up to distribute the movie, and he was using his own money to back Dennis and Peter, neither of whom had a track record directing or producing, but did have reputations as trouble. In other words, based on little more than a hunch, he was crawling very far out on an extremely thin limb. Moreover, he promised not to interfere. The idea behind Raybert, after all, was to enfranchise directors. Later, even when Bert disagreed with the casting of his movies, he backed down, saying, “What makes us right?”

  With eleven points* each (Southern may or may not have had the other eleven), and Schneider the rest, Fonda and Hopper were ready to go. Bert wrote them a personal check for $40,000 so that Hopper could film somes scenes at Mardi Gras. It was sort of a test; if he passed, he could go ahead. But Fonda got the dates wrong. They thought they had a month to prepare; suddenly they realized they only had a week. Hopper scrambled to gather friends who had 16mm cameras. They also realized they needed a proper producer, preferably someone who knew his way around Hollywood. Paranoid as always, Hopper wanted to surround himself with relatives and friends. He called his brother-in-law Bill Hayward, and hired him for $150 a week. They quickly assembled a crew. There was a production meeting in Hayward’s office the night before they were set to leave. Everyone had long hair, was sitting on the floor. The meeting was very loose, very casual, very ’60s. At one point, toward the end of the meeting, Hopper said, “All right, man, we don’t have a gaffer. Who wants to be the gaffer, man?” like he needed a blackboard monitor. Recalls Hayward, “Some broad says, ‘I’ll be the gaffer!’ She was a girl that had been sent out from New York to do still photography. Dennis said, ‘Fine. You want to do that? I can dig it. You’ll light the picture.’