Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  Coppola spent part of the typhoon with a porn actress he had met during Godfather II. They were at a hotel in Olongapo, when skylarking actors and stuntmen broke down the door of his room to throw him in the pool. He just had time to wrap himself in a sheet.

  The storm forced the production to shut down. On June 8, Francis dismissed the cast, returned to San Francisco with ninety hours of rushes, and only eight minutes of usable, cut film. It was the end of Phase I. The production was six weeks behind schedule and $3 million over budget, hemorrhaging dollars. However, the break gave Coppola some breathing space to regroup and rethink the script.

  Many on the production who were laid low with tropical diseases, exotic parasites of various stripes, took the opportunity to get medical treatment. There was no doctor on the set, and people had simply poured diluted Clorox and vodka on their cuts and sores. Bottoms had hookworm, which wrecked his liver. Fred Forrest had collapsed, his ears oozing blood. A Filipino construction worker died of rabies, and was buried in his Apocalypse Now T-shirt.

  Coppola was scared and depressed. Land-rich and cash-poor, he found that his home phone in Napa had been turned off because he had failed to pay the bill. He picked up a $3 million loan from UA, but the company drove a hard bargain. If the film didn’t exceed $40 million in rentals, he would be held personally liable for the overages. If Apocalypse just did good, but not great, business, if it did not become a blockbuster, he stood a reasonable chance of being wiped out.

  BY THE SECOND HALF of the decade, America finally seemed ready to deal with Vietnam, at least on a movie screen. While Francis was foraging for money, Hal Ashby was going ahead with Coming Home, which starred Jane Fonda, Jon Voight, and Bruce Dern, and was shot by Haskell Wexler. It was also set up at UA by Jerome Hellman, who had produced Midnight Cowboy.

  Hellman had loved The Last Detail, had written Ashby a fan letter. The two men met. Like Zaentz before him, Hellman had a hard time figuring out if they were on the same wavelength. But he liked Hal, and decided to take a chance. “We had a couple of tough times,” the producer says. “Hal tended to view any comment, or a suggestion even, as criticism, an incursion into his domain. We were friends for years and years, and we worked together intimately, but I would only know if he was upset with me because he wouldn’t want to see me, but as to what was bothering him, I’d never find out. Once I had to go into the steam room at his house, fully dressed, and confront him there in the nude, and demand to know why he was suddenly trying to have a screening without me. Of course, he denied it. ‘Oh, nooo, Jerry, I don’t know where—I wouldn’t do that to you.’ Of course, I knew it was true.”

  Ashby and Mimi Machu were still living together in Malibu. The relationship had turned stormy. During post-production on Bound for Glory, at the Appian Way house, she threw an ashtray at the screen of his Advent, denting it badly. “He found it very difficult to be loved,” she says. “That really scared him, having someone too dependent on him, and as much as he loved the person, he would do things to drive them away. Hal was a very jealous man. He was jealous of all my past boyfriends, couldn’t stand to hear anything about my son’s father, [Sonny Bono]. It drove him crazy. We’d have big fights and then make up.”

  When Coming Home opened in early 1978, it was a surprise hit. Ashby had again worked his magic in the editing room. Says Wexler’s son Jeff, who did the sound, “After we were done shooting Voight’s speech to the high school at the end, I turned to Haskell and I said, ‘We’re in big trouble, it just doesn’t work.’ Hal had let Jon ramble on, and Jon did a lot of stuff that was really stupid, that would have been an embarrassment had it ended up in the movie. Pop said, ‘Give it a chance. You know the way Hal is in the editing room.’ Sure enough, he put together a great scene that probably won Jon the Oscar.”

  Ashby went on to direct yet another film, Being There—starring Peter Sellers in a script by Jerzy Kosinski—that opened to enthusiastic reviews. He started his own company, North Star, with a deal at Lorimar. Then the bottom fell out. Recalls Peter Bart, who was head of production at Lorimar, “After Being There, Hal got more and more isolated, stayed around the house too much. When I talked to him, I was obviously talking to somebody who was smoking dope all the time.” He became increasingly eccentric. It got to the point where Hal would not allow anyone to see him eating.

  Lookin’ to Get Out, a film about four gamblers, starring Voight, was not a promising script, but Hal thought he had a charmed life. He had gone into production on Coming Home with only a handful of pages of shooting script, and the movie had become a success. (The script actually won an Oscar.) “One of the reasons he made Lookin’ to Get Out with a lousy script, Second-Hand Hearts the same way, was he was very arrogant about what he could fix in the editing,” says Haskell Wexler. “Rather than try and rewrite it, he would say, ‘We’ll shoot this, and I’ll cut to the reaction of this guy, it’ll be fine.’” Rumor had it that he prepared for the film on the six-hour drive from L.A. to Las Vegas. Adds Wexler, “There were a lot of bad vibes coming from that picture. Hal went crazy. We had this casino set, and we spent ten, twelve days with multiple cameras, shooting inserts—dice, cards. Hal wanted the second camera guy to pan to one card, and the guy missed. Hal got furious, fired him right there. I just felt Hal had lost it. Something flipped.” Indeed, Ashby was getting still deeper into drugs, freebasing and smack. After a night of hard partying with Mick Jagger and company while he was shooting his Stones documentary, Let’s Spend the Night Together, he OD’d and collapsed at Sun Devil Stadium in Phoenix. He had to be wheeled out on a gurney with an I.V. stuck in his arm.

  Hal hired all his old girlfriends and put them on the editing payroll. It was his way of saying he was sorry, of taking care of them. None of them knew anything about editing, nor even showed up, outside of Machu. Still an insomniac, he’d arrive at the cutting room at 4:00 A.M. wearing his embroidered Levi’s jacket, or maybe the towel he’d wrap around him like a skirt, attached at the front with Velcro. “When he showed up, you never knew what Hal had had, whether he had eaten mushrooms, whether he was on acid or coke,” recalls Janice Hampton, an editor. “We would hear his Mercedes, and we would say, Here comes Captain Wacky to the bridge. He would walk in, barefoot, no ‘Hello, how are you.’ He’d sit down, look at film for two or three hours and never say a word. It was like watching an insane genius, back and forth, back and forth. He’d light up a joint, and if he knew you smoked dope and didn’t smoke with him, he would pout, wouldn’t talk to you. He watched the reflection in the screen of the KEM as everybody would take a hit. Once he knew you were high, he started in with the mind games, he’d really try to fuck you over. Sadistic. ‘Okay, if I do this and I do that, how much have I taken out and how come we’re still in sync.’ But he could never stay in sync himself, he was too loaded. This is how our days went, like Chinese water torture.” He would often lose his temper if he couldn’t find something or someone didn’t move fast enough, and heave the heavy splicer through the air in the direction of the offending party. Once, in a relaxed moment, he told a story on himself about how he’d decided to commit suicide by swimming out into the ocean, then went shopping for the right bathing suit. He couldn’t find one he liked, so he never followed through on the suicide.

  Still, Hampton liked him. A redhead, she first met him in the bedroom of his Malibu home where she had come, notebook clutched in her hand, all business, to discuss the editing. He was sitting shirtless and cross-legged in the middle of a king-sized bed with wisps of graying blond hair hanging down over his face like tassels of corn, resembling an Indian guru, surrounded by jars full of different kinds of marijuana, rolling joints from a silver bowl full of loose grass. “I think that everything I’ve learned of value I learned from Hal,” she continues. “He had an eye like nobody I’ve ever seen in my life.” He came on to her, of course, but she always kept her distance. “There was always that fine line with Hal,” she says. “You had to keep him interested, but not really get involved
with him, otherwise he got bored.”

  On Lookin’ to Get Out, Ashby disappeared for two months after the production ended, leaving the editors unsupervised. When he returned, with a stoner’s attention to detail, he spent weeks cutting seven-, eight-minute montages—a dozen versions—of Vegas nightclub acts set to the Police’s “Message in a Bottle” that the editors knew would never be used. “I don’t remember ever sitting down and looking at the entire movie,” says Eva Gardos, one of Hal’s cutters. It was nearly two years in the editing room.

  Lorimar finally tried to seize the film, particularly humiliating for a fine editor like Ashby, and took legal action to prevent him from working elsewhere, one reason he lost Tootsie. Ashby carried the reels around in the trunk of his car for a month, but finally gave them up. It was something he would never have allowed in the past. Now, however, he just holed up in his beach house, wouldn’t speak to anyone. Voight talked the studio into letting him cut his version, with Bob Jones. Recalls Jones, “I called him, said, ‘Hal, we’re screening this, I want you to see it,’ and I couldn’t get any response. ‘Hal, it’s being released,’ no response.”

  Hal was bitter, blamed his lawyer, Jack Schwartzman—who was married to Coppola’s sister, Talia Shire—for his financial troubles. “But Hal was so zonked out of his mind,” says Bart, “he didn’t need any help self-destructing.” Adds Jeff Berg, who was his agent, “More often than not, you couldn’t reach him. You left a message, guy didn’t call back. I had to drive out to the beach and knock on his door. I said to myself, What is this about? What Hal really meant was, ‘Yes, you are my agent, you’re my link to the world of commerce, you are my facilitator, but you’re not on my side.’ No one was on his side.”

  AT THE END OF JULY, Coppola, Ellie, and their daughter, Sophia, returned to the Philippines for the beginning of Phase II. Nobody wanted to go back, and many didn’t. Sheen was particularly reluctant. “When Marty came home after the typhoon, he was real scared,” recalled Gary Morgan, a friend. “He said, ‘I don’t know if I am going to live through this. Those fuckers are crazy.’ At the airport, he kept saying goodbye to everyone.”

  Until Apocalypse, Coppola had never done much in the way of drugs. “I started smoking grass,” he said. “The grass affected me a little bit: I was more able to say how I felt. It was like Vietnam—it was there, and everybody was doing it. I also started getting very paranoid.”

  Dennis Hopper had known Coppola since the late ’60s, when Francis was writing Patton. Hopper arrived, drunk and stoned, at the beginning of September. Throughout the late ’70s, he had continued his downward slide, in and out of rehab; nothing worked. At one point, he decided he was essentially an alcoholic, and stopped drinking, while continuing with drugs. He would show up at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with half an ounce of coke in his pocket. He was so out of it that sometimes he’d show up at Narcotics Anonymous meetings by mistake, look around him at the waxy faces of the ex-junkies and dramatically announce, “I’m an alcoholic.”

  Hopper would shortly appear in his usual regalia—cowboy hat and boots—stoned, at his daughter Marin’s graduation from the prim and proper Wooster Academy, near Ridgefield, Connecticut, and, according to his ex-wife, Brooke Hayward, “He tried to seduce her best friend, it was a nightmare. We’re talking about children who were sixteen, seventeen years old. Dennis always had that thing about young girls.”

  After Marin graduated, she paid him one of her rare visits. (Her mother says she always became catatonic when his name came up.) Her plane was late, and Dennis had plenty of time to get loaded at the Albuquerque airport bar. On the way to Taos, he stopped at a house by the side of the road to pick up something, possibly a gun. It was already dark. Hopper’s girlfriend tried to get the car keys away from him, but he threw them into the bushes. When they were out of the car, recalls Marin, “he fired shots over our heads with this gun he had in the car. Amazingly, he found the keys and drove off, leaving us there.” Later, Brooke got a call while she was at a dinner party in Southampton. She remembers a friend saying, “‘You’ve got to get Marin out of here. Dennis has gone berserk again.’ I thought, Oh, no, will it never end?” (Hopper denies this event took place.)

  Hopper appeared in the Philippines with his companion, Caterine Milinaire, a photographer and the daughter of the Duchess of Bedford. Several people recall seeing a flaming mattress fly out of a window and hearing a shot during one wild night at the Pagsanjan Rapids Hotel where everyone was staying, although she denies he fired at her. Others saw her with a black eye the next day. “She definitely was hit across the face, had a nice shiner,” says one former crew member. (Milinaire refuses to comment.)

  The Kurtz compound was finally ready. It was strewn with corpses, many of which were real. Recalls Frederickson, “It turned out that the guy procuring the dead bodies who said he was getting them from a medical research lab, had actually been robbing graves.”

  When Brando arrived in early September, four months late, the cost of the production went from $100,000 a day to $150,000 a day. He insisted on sleeping on a houseboat, which had to be carried overland to a nearby lake. Coppola realized immediately that Brando had not read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, had done absolutely nothing to prepare himself for playing Kurtz. Francis disappeared into his trailer and never came out, as one person put it. “Everybody was waiting to shoot, hundreds of people, while Francis and Brando were play-acting, Brando playing Westmoreland, and Francis playing Ho Chi Minh,” says a crew member. According to Hopper, Coppola spent days actually reading Brando Conrad’s novel out loud. When it came to the last shot of the last day of Brando’s scenes, Coppola turned the direction over to the AD and left in his helicopter. It was his way of saying “Fuck you” to Brando.

  Meanwhile, with excruciating slowness, Coppola puzzled his way toward a denouement. Willard, embracing primitivism, finally kills Kurtz. But then what? He could not come up with an ending. The film had been freighted with so much Significance, so much Joseph Campbell, what with ritual sacrifices, magical beasts, and dying gods, that the rather conventional battle scene of the script seemed hardly adequate. “Letting the movie get more surrealistic, more heightened, I was painting myself in a corner and I had no way to get out,” he explains. Coppola’s moods continued to swing wildly between deliriums of self-intoxication and black depression.

  Francis had been carrying on various affairs with the women on the set, complaining that he wanted to have more children, but Ellie refused. In addition to the porn actress, he had an affair with a nubile young starlet playing one of the Playboy bunnies, Linda Carpenter, who had been a Playmate of the Month in August 1976, under the name of Linda Beatty. (Coppola denies that he had affairs with the porn actress and Carpenter.) Then there was Melissa Mathison, whom Francis had asked to do a rewrite on the script of Black Stallion, who occasionally visited the set.

  Once, Mathison accompanied Francis and a few others when he screened footage for President Marcos and his wife, Imelda. “The palace was like a fortress, a den of evil,” she recalls. “There was a huge dining room table, twenty feet long, that was covered with row after row of candy bars, a hundred Clark Bars, a hundred Three Musketeers—for us. Imelda came in from one side of this giant room, with all of her ladies-in-waiting dressed to the nines in Chanel, while we were wearing Vietnamese black pajamas. Then Marcos came in from the other side, with all of his men. They nodded politely at each other. Obviously they hadn’t seen each other in about three years. Vittorio set up this little projector in the back, while Francis was making a speech and Imelda’s ladies were giggling and eating candy bars. She was sitting in front of me, and every time a handsome actor appeared on the screen, she’d say, ‘Is that Marlon Brando?’ It was surreal.”

  Coppola didn’t much bother to conceal his dalliances from Ellie, nor did he treat her with much consideration. Says one crew member, “She was quiet, hung in the background and seemed to take a lot of abuse. It was embarrassing.” According to another so
urce, he would watch dailies seated in the first row, flanked by his editor on one side and his female flavor-of-the-week on the other. Behind them were ten or fifteen chairs for Storaro and the camera crew, and others. Ellie would wander in late, sit on the floor in the back. One day, like others, Francis arrived at the set in his plane. He jumped out, followed by his pilot and a girlfriend. Then the crew unloaded whatever equipment they had brought. Then came Ellie. People joked that she must have ridden in the cargo bay. Like Sandy Weintraub, it was hard for her to live with a man who was constantly the center of attention, who was always being told he was a genius. She felt forced to counterbalance the flattery by withholding her approval—which he resented, because she was the person whose approval he craved most. “I never felt that my wife had any confidence in me,” he complained. “I felt she was meddling and lining up with the people that I—My wife [is] like a regular person. So she has the same kind of doubts about me as the so-called they at large.”

  Mathison’s wide-eyed adoration, on the other hand, dispelled his self-doubts, was an aphrodisiac. It was “like the girl who has a crush on her professor” he explained. “Her confidence in me made me feel confident.... Confidence is a very important thing. When everyone is saying, ‘You’re going to fail....’ That’s why... [she] always made me feel like a million dollars, in terms of ‘I was talented, and I could do it.’ ”