by Mark Bailey
Founded by Texas entrepreneur Joseph Drown in 1946, the Bel-Air was built on the far end of the personal estate of oil magnate Alphonzo Bell, who in 1921 purchased more than 1,700 acres of land in west Los Angeles, 600 of which he intended to develop as a new neighborhood catering to the film-industry elite. (Not that he’d sell to just anyone: When William Randolph Hearst went house-shopping for his mistress, Marion Davies, Bell—a devoutly religious man and also a business rival of Hearst—refused to accommodate the man.)
Construction began with the conversion of what had been Bell’s sales office. A stable the family owned, once used to store horses that appeared in cowboy movies, became one of the more popular guest suites. What had been a riding ring was turned into a pool. When Bell’s son Alphonzo, Jr., met Marlene Dietrich at a Palm Springs party years later, he had to fight back the urge to let her know her favorite room had once been a manure depository. (That’s Hollywood for you—turning horseshit into gold.)
One particular story, involving Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson, pretty effectively sums up the Hotel Bel-Air experience. It seems one night in 1990, Taylor and Jackson were scheduled to meet for dinner at the hotel’s restaurant. Taylor arrived on time, but Jackson kept her waiting for an hour. She waited patiently for a while, eating caviar and drinking champagne, but by the time Jackson finally arrived, she was livid. Her anger only intensified when she found out the reason for his tardiness: He’d been sitting in the parking lot the whole time, on the phone in his Rolls Royce, talking to Jackie Onassis. “I will not play second fiddle to any woman,” she barked, “not even that woman.” Jackson, as a peace offering, reached into his coat and took out a pair of turquoise earrings—they were loose in his pocket—embedded with diamonds. Taylor snagged the earrings, gathered her belongings, and stormed out without saying another word.
Presently owned by Hassanal Bolkiah, the Sultan of Brunei, after a two-year renovation (at an unconfirmed cost of $100 million), the hotel reopened in 2011 to much acclaim. Actor Robert Wagner perhaps put it best, “They just take care of people—the very best way they can be taken care of.”
JACK PALANCE
1919–2006
ACTOR
“Alcohol, after all, is good for nothing except when you need a bullet removed from your behind.”
Best known for tough-guy roles in Westerns and noirs (Shane, Sudden Fear) and for his one-handed push-ups after winning the 1991 Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Jack Palance worked in the Pennsylvania coal mines and briefly as a boxer before entering the Army Air Forces in World War II. After studying drama at Stanford postwar, his big break came as Marlon Brando’s understudy in the Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). His first movie role was Panic in the Streets (1950). Palance was nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor for his third movie, Sudden Fear (1952), as well as his fourth, Shane (1953). He became a fixture of action movies and Westerns over the next several years, also playing a Hollywood producer in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (1963, released in America as Contempt). Having achieved early success in television, winning a Best Actor Emmy in 1957 for a Playhouse 90 production of Requiem for a Heavyweight, he returned to the medium as his film career slowed. Palance’s tenure as host of Ripley’s Believe It or Not (1982–1986) put him back in demand as an actor, a resurgence that culminated with his third Oscar nomination and first win for a supporting role, in City Slickers (1991).
THEY SHOULD PROBABLY HAVE called it a night hours ago. The evening had begun, after all, with a brawl at a charity dinner set up by RKO’s publicists. (The dinner, that is, not the brawl.) Jack Palance and Robert Mitchum, currently in Mexico City filming Second Chance, were supposed to present the local chapter of Boys Town with a $5,000 donation on the studio’s behalf. That part of the event had gone just fine. But then some American college students showed up, and one of them, eager to see just how tough a guy Mitchum really was, challenged him on the way to the men’s room. Mitchum, of course, laid him out. When the kid’s friends decided to make a bigger issue of it, Palance and Mitchum were ushered out the back door—and taken (for some inexplicable reason) straight to a nightclub on the Reforma.
So began round two.
There’d been drinks at the dinner, of course, and more at the club. Mitchum’s wife, Dorothy, had tagged along, as had Emilio “El Indio” Fernández, a famous actor and director of Mexican cinema. The trouble began when a drunken general approached the group’s table. Palance and Mitchum would offer differing versions of exactly what happened next. Mitchum said the general hit Fernández in the head with the butt of a .45. Palance told Mitchum biographer Lee Server that the general tried to hug him (Palance)—and that he’d pushed him—and the general, being drunk, had fallen. However it actually happened, as Palance would note, “suddenly there was this big drama going on.”
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However it actually happened, as Palance would note, “suddenly there was this big drama going on.” And by “drama,” he meant “machine guns.”
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And by “drama,” he meant “machine guns.”
Two machine guns, courtesy of the general’s entourage. By the time bullets started to fly, Mitchum and Dorothy were already in the limousine. Palance was still inside—though not for long. He picked up a table, hurled it at one of the general’s men, then hurried through the kitchen, while Fernández, who apparently also had quite a temper and carried a pistol at all times, provided cover. Once Palance was out, Fernández followed. Mitchum said Fernández made it to the limousine and promptly collapsed—”a delayed knockout from the general’s strike.”
It was now time for Palance to disappear. The general, not surprisingly, had a nasty reputation (false arrests, torture), so Palance switched hotels, registered under an assumed name, and kept as low a profile as possible until RKO spread enough money around to make the problem go away.
“Of course, when I got back to the States,” Palance later said, “I found old Mitchum had taken all the credit for my rescue.”
ANTHONY QUINN
1915–2001
ACTOR
“Life is what you do, till the moment you die.”
Known for exotic starring roles, Anthony Quinn was born in Chihuahua during the Mexican Revolution (his father rode with Pancho Villa). He moved with his family to El Paso, then to Los Angeles, where his father found work as a cameraman. Initially, he went into acting as a way of overcoming a speech impediment. By his early twenties, he had befriended both John Barrymore and W. C. Fields, becoming the youngest member of the Bundy Drive Boys and making his big-screen debut in Parole! (1936). He appeared in more than fifty films over the next decade—primarily in “ethnic” roles—before Elia Kazan cast him as Stanley Kowalski in a lengthy touring stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire (1948). Quinn returned to movies in the early 1950s and won his first Oscar for Best Supporting Actor opposite Marlon Brando in Kazan’s Viva Zapata! (1952). He won a second such Oscar with his brief performance in the Van Gogh biopic Lust for Life (1956) and was nominated as Best Actor the following year for Wild Is the Wind. Quinn reached the pinnacle of his career in 1964 with what became his trademark role, Zorba the Greek, for which he received yet another Oscar nomination as Best Actor. He continued to work until his death, with parts in Jungle Fever (1991) and Last Action Hero (1993). Quinn was also an accomplished painter, with numerous international exhibitions, and the author of two memoirs.
ANTHONY QUINN WAS DOING HIS BEST to keep it together, but it wasn’t easy. Quinn, Errol Flynn, and Gene Tierney were doing a live radio broadcast promoting war bonds and blood drives in St. Louis. Quinn hated this kind of crap, hated selling himself to the public, especially when it involved travel. So the night before, he and Flynn (a fellow Bundy Drive Boy) had gone out and gotten all tore up, finally climbing into bed just before dawn. At around seven in the morning, Flynn—chipper as a jaybird, somehow—wandered into Quinn’s room and told him the radio spot, originally scheduled for 11 a.m
., had been moved up, and they had to get to the studio immediately.
So now here Quinn was in the broadcast booth, head pounding, trying to get through this whole business as quickly as possible. “You go to a place, you give a pint of blood, it’s very simple,” he said into the microphone. “They give you a very nice big glass of milk afterward—”
“Is there brandy in it?” Flynn suddenly chimed in.
“I beg your pardon?” Quinn replied. What the hell was Flynn doing?
“Is brandy in the milk? They call that a Velvet Cow in Australia.”
Quinn tried to steer the conversation back to the blood drive, but Flynn was just getting started. “As a matter of fact,” Flynn went on, “you know this program” (meaning the radio show they were appearing on), “you know damn well it’s a lot of crap.” He was on a roll now. He referred to Quinn as “this fucking Indian” and “the son-in-law of that son-of-a-bitch Cecil B. DeMille.” (Quinn was married to DeMille’s daughter Katherine.) Of Tierney, Flynn said into the mic, she was a “real fucking sweetheart” and that he had no intention of sleeping with her, “but if she would like to try to change my plans, I would be open to suggestions.” Quinn couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Neither could the studio director, who stormed into the control room, demanding they be taken off the air. Flynn responded by wrestling the man to the ground.
By the time Quinn returned to his hotel, word of the radio fiasco had apparently already reached Hollywood. Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper had both left messages. DeMille—to whom Quinn rarely spoke to apart from work and family functions—called to tell him how badly this reflected on the family, and how he worried Quinn wasn’t serious enough to have a real career. Then his wife Katherine called, then Quinn’s agent. And then, lastly, Flynn called—apparently, he had one thing he needed to say.
“Gotcha, Tony.”
The whole thing—the early start time, the lack of script, the profanity, the fight, the phone calls—had been one big ruse orchestrated by Flynn. They were never on the air. Quinn was relieved. Because not only was his career not in peril, but if all these important people were willing to go to this much trouble to prank him, his career must be going pretty damn well.
VILLA CAPRI
1735 N. MCADDEN PL.
6735 YUCCA ST.
IT’S NOT HARD TO GUESS how the modest Italian joint Villa Capri became one of Hollywood’s favorite haunts when it launched in 1950: the owner, Patsy D’Amore, was generally thought to cook the best pizza west of the Hudson after he opened his Farmers Market booth in 1949. Frank Sinatra liked it so much he became a partner in the restaurant. With him came the usual suspects, the Bogarts and Bacalls, the Garlands and the Lufts, the Joey Bishops and the Bobby Darins. But it was a relatively unknown actor who became the restaurant’s most famous patron.
During the short time between his arrival in Los Angeles (1954) and his death (1955), James Dean became such a fixture at Villa Capri that he had a booth permanently reserved for him. Once he got famous, he entered through the back door, and if he didn’t find any of the Rat Pack at the restaurant, he’d sit alone, smoking and drinking scotch and water. At the time of his death, Dean was even living in a house he’d rented from the restaurant’s maître d’. Dean’s passing drew legions of fans to the place.
Villa Capri moved to Yucca Street in 1957, and Sinatra hosted his radio show there for a couple of years. The restaurant closed in 1982, but D’Amore’s daughter Filomena still serves her father’s recipe at the Farmer’s Market, using the same red-brick oven they’ve had since 1949.
NICHOLAS RAY
1911–1979
DIRECTOR
“I haven’t had a drink for fifteen months. If I had, I would be dead now, and that would make me furious.”
Darling of auteur theorists, Nicholas Ray created stylish paeans to the alienated and disaffected that were a huge influence on Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders, and Jim Jarmusch (Ray’s assistant at the time of his death). A Wisconsin native, he studied architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright as a Taliesin Fellow before transitioning into theater. He moved to New York in 1932, where he came under the tutelage of Elia Kazan and John Houseman. Ray directed his first Broadway production in 1946, and his first feature, the Houseman-produced They Live by Night—considered a forerunner of Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands—the following year. (Night would be remade by Robert Altman as Thieves Like Us in 1974.) He directed Bogart in one of his most underrated performances, In a Lonely Place, in 1950, and in the mid-fifties directed his two signature pictures: Johnny Guitar (1954) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). But Ray’s proclivity for alcohol and drugs resulted in his marginalization within the industry. He was dismissed as director of 55 Days at Peking (1963) after collapsing on set and never completed another feature. He turned to academia in the 1970s, teaching at Binghamton University, the Lee Strasberg Institute, and NYU.
THOUGH THE ICONIC 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause now plays like a quaint relic, the story of the man who directed it grows more unlikely (and insane) with each passing year. Such was the life of Raymond Nicholas Kienzle, known to cinema buffs as Nicholas Ray. Ray’s filmography is a study in intelligent and ambitious eccentricity, from the talky Bogart noir In a Lonely Place (one of the best films of the era; see it immediately) to the feminist Western Johnny Guitar, to the endless (and endlessly wacko) Jesus biopic King of Kings. Even his worst films were intensely personal—if nothing else, because it was no great leap to believe they’d been made by a crazy Midwesterner who’d stalk his sets always drunk, turning every obstacle into an argument. Director Jim Jarmusch, one-time student of Ray’s, described him as “my idol—a legend, the outcast Hollywood rebel, white hair, black eye-patch, and a head full of subversion and controlled substances.”
Predictably, the thing that makes Ray’s work so great—his absolute and steadfast refusal to do anything at less than full-bore crash-and-burn intensity—made his personal life an epic mess. An example: In 1948, Ray married the actress Gloria Grahame. She gave birth to their only child six months later, which might have led people to conclude they’d gotten married because she was pregnant—except Ray had already been telling this to anyone who’d listen since the wedding was announced. It was his way of declaring his unreserved contempt for her. And instead of doing something simple—like maybe not marrying her—Ray made a further and very public display of his feelings when he gambled and lost his entire life savings playing roulette the night before their wedding because (he claimed) he “didn’t want this dame to have anything of mine.” That plan didn’t quite work out: three years later (and still somehow married to Grahame), Ray came home to find her in bed with a teenage boy: his thirteen-year-old son, from a previous marriage. Ray moved out the next day. While Grahame would in fact marry the son, nine years later.
* * *
Predictably, the thing that makes Ray’s work so great–his absolute and steadfast refusal to do anything at less than full-bore crashand-burn intensity–made his personal life an epic mess.
* * *
So yes, you’d be correct in assuming that Ray’s relationship to booze wasn’t confined to the occasional Mint Julep over Derby weekend. After divorcing Grahame, Ray would shack up with a woman named Hanna Axmann. A German dabbler in film acting and screenwriting, with some success, she recounted her time with Ray thusly, “The hundreds of nights I spent, with Nick drinking … at four or five in the morning he’d start talking nonsense; by seven he’d be more or less fresh, contemplating his feet a bit to get back to earth. Then he would go off every morning to his psychoanalyst, Dr. Vanderhyde, come back and start drinking.”
Admittedly, Ray may have been in a dark place at the time, given the wife/son thing. Yet, consider this final example, in the fall of 1973, more than twenty years after the Grahame episode. Tom Luddy of Pacific Film Archives invited Ray to Berkeley, California, for a retrospective of the director’s work. By this point, Ray was half-blind from an embolism, still near always drunk, an
d fond of toting a briefcase filled with needles, pills, speed, and hash. Before he arrived in Berkeley, while teaching at Harpur College at Binghamton University in New York, he and his students had shot an experimental feature called We Can’t Go Home Again. For some reason, Ray had the notion to finish it in Berkeley. Francis Ford Coppola, who was cutting The Conversation at the time, offered use of his editing suite to Ray during the off-hours, from midnight to 8 a.m.
Not surprisingly, Ray immediately became a squatter at Zoetrope: sleeping in screening rooms during the day, then getting up to work in the middle of the night. It was supposed to just be a short stay, but three weeks after Ray arrived, it became apparent to Luddy that Ray had no intention of folding up his tent. Some days, they’d find Ray passed out with a bottle of Almaden Mountain Rhine wine beside him. On the rare occasion that he’d actually leave the building to go drinking, Ray would set off Zoetrope’s complex security system, costing the company money with each false alarm. Adding to this, Ray started making expensive phone calls on Zoetrope’s dime. Finally, after Ray somehow broke the editing machine, Coppola pulled the plug on the arrangement.
By the time Ray left Berkeley, the only thing he’d accomplished was alienating everyone who’d tried to help him. He once asked Luddy if he knew where he could get $36,000. When Luddy said no, Ray replied, “How about six dollars? If I had six dollars, I could buy a hamburger and a bottle of Almaden.”