by Mark Bailey
Mindlin knew all of this. It was impossible to visit the set and not know. So as embarrassing as Burton’s public puking might have been—and even Burton himself felt humiliated—it didn’t come as a total shock. Mindlin just walked Burton and Taylor to the elevator, wished them a good night, and told them he’d see them for the Sullivan interview tomorrow.
The next morning, Peter Glenville, the director of Becket, phoned Mindlin and urged him to schedule the Sullivan taping before lunch. Burton and O’Toole sometimes went to a local pub, the King’s Head, on their break, and if that happened, there was no telling what shape they’d return in. Mindlin arranged for everyone to meet at the studio at noon. Ed Sullivan was there on time. So was O’Toole. No Burton. For hours. Around 5 p.m., Burton and Taylor finally arrived, epically sloshed. Burton, attempting to put on his Becket costume, kept trying to pull his tights over his trousers. Taylor laughed as though she’d never seen anything so funny. Sullivan began the interview by asking Burton if this was the first time he and O’Toole had worked together; Burton slurred that it was, and would “prolly fucking be the lashed.” Tape rolled for another fifteen minutes before everyone involved gave up. Suffice to say, the segment never aired.
NIGHT OF THE IGUANA (1964)
When filming began on Tennessee Williams’s Night of the Iguana, director John Huston gave each member of his principal cast the gift of a gold-plated Derringer. One each for Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Sue Lyon, Richard Burton, and finally, Elizabeth Taylor (who wasn’t in the movie, but was hanging out because she was in love with Burton). Inside the box for each gun were four bullets engraved with the names of the other costars. By the time all was said and done, he figured the bullets might come in handy.
The location for Night of the Iguana was Mismaloya, a remote village in Mexico, a few miles off the coast of Puerto Vallarta. Huston’s plan was to house the cast and crew in the village, and to that end he ordered the construction of a small American suburb: a restaurant, bar, and living quarters; roads, power plants, and water storage facilities; plus an editing room and the film’s one set, an old hotel. It was a beautiful setting, but there wasn’t a lot to do besides work. And drink. This would seem to be a theme of many of Huston’s productions.
Despite an entire cast of all-star tipplers, the lion’s share of the drinking fell to Burton and Taylor, at that time the most gossiped-about couple in the world. (That Taylor was still technically married to singer Eddie Fisher only added grist.) The day the couple arrived in Mexico, the mob that swarmed them was so overwhelming that they were forced to run from the plane to their car, with Taylor being groped and Burton punching anyone who got in their way. Later, Burton issued a statement to the press: “This is my first visit to Mexico. I trust it shall be my last.”
But to their surprise, Burton and Taylor fell in love with the place. Specifically Casa Kimberley, a house they’d rented in Puerto Vallarta (they had refused to stay in the primitive Mismaloya digs), which they promptly announced their intention to buy. The only drawback to staying in Puerto Vallarta was the trip across the water to the set each morning. This journey involved wading out to a canoe, then paddling over to a motorboat that, after crossing a short patch of Pacific, would land at the foot of what was more or less a rope ladder. The ladder led to a wooden staircase that was then climbed to a rough footpath. When Taylor heard Gardner whining about how unpleasant the boat ride was, she suggested Gardner water-ski across instead. Which is exactly what Gardner started doing: one hand holding the towline, the other a cocktail. Given the heat, the discomfort, and the boredom, cocktails only seemed to help.
Drinking started early and never stopped: Burton insisted that the set of stairs he had to climb at the Mismaloya boat-landing be equipped with two bars: one at the bottom, one at the top. Taylor, since she wasn’t working, began her days at 10 a.m. at the Oceana Hotel bar, starting with vodka, then moving on to tequila. Burton would start his day with beer, this at 7 a.m., so that by the time shooting was over he would have polished off a case. Joining Taylor at the bar, he would shift to hard liquor. There was a joke around the set—to make a Burton cocktail you first take twenty-one shots of tequila. Quite literal, the joke stemmed from the time Burton took twenty-one shots of tequila. His one big booze discovery in Mexico—a cactus brandy called raicilla, which he swore you could feel move through your intestines, though somehow that doesn’t seem so pleasant.
Equally unpleasant was the smell of Burton. Apparently, he consumed so much alcohol throughout the day and well into the night that his 80-proof sweat threw off an incredibly foul odor. Working under a hot Mexican sun, this posed a unique challenge to his costars. Still, Taylor put it up with it, as she did his rudeness. Though deep in the throes of courtship and soon to marry, the couple found time to fight, publically and awfully. When Taylor paraded around set in ever-more revealing bikinis, Burton would comment that she looked like a tart. During a conversation at a dinner party in which Taylor insinuated Burton might be an opportunist for getting involved with her, Burton brought her to tears with his response: “You scurrilous low creature, you.” So irritated did Burton get with Taylor’s constant fussing over him that once, after she insisted on fixing the job his hairdresser had just finished, he poured an entire beer over his head and asked, “How do I look now, by God?”
Luckily, it seems the golden bullets were forgotten somewhere along the way.
RICHARD BURTON’S DRINKING ability was nothing less than miraculous, described by biographer Robert Sellers as “one of the wonders of the twentieth century.” Alan Jay Lerner, the creator of Camelot and one of Burton’s drinking mates, when looking for an explanation for his friend’s gift, went so far as to consult a doctor, who said, “Welsh livers and kidneys seem to be made of some metallic alloy, quite unlike the rest of the human race.” But really there is no explanation. Add to this that until the age of forty-five, Burton claims to have never had a single hangover.
One of his favorite drinks in those early years was a Boilermaker—a sudsy speedball of booze that combines a glass of beer and a shot of whiskey. There are several methods for tossing this mixture back, but Burton’s method, appropriately dramatic, was to line up pints of beer threaded in shots of whiskey, then go chugging down the row. He once took on a rugby team of Welsh miners, managing to kill off nineteen such Boilermakers. Details remain fuzzy as to exactly who won.
Changing genres, there is also a comedic Boilermaker to be had. In The Nutty Professor, Jerry Lewis, as Buddy Love, orders one, saying, “I’ve decided that I shall not continue the flight on the gas I’ve got, so give me a Boilermaker, and heavy on the boil.” Unfortunately, we never get to see the results. But in the opening credits of The Bad News Bears—the wonderful comedy created by Bill Lancaster and based upon his father, Burt—Walter Matthau couldn’t be more obliging. As the booze-soaked Coach Buttermaker, he makes his own uniquely hilarious Boilermaker, this in the front seat of his car.
And finally, one last genre: horror (or maybe more accurately, tragedy). When Bela Lugosi, B-movie star of Count Dracula fame, among other monsters, wasn’t on screen sucking on necks, he was off screen sucking down Boilermakers. Lugosi was also a well-known morphine addict and, in later years, nearly destitute. Ed Wood, B-movie director and himself a fiend with the bottle—whether wearing a skirt and pumps or not—recounts one particularly frightening tale.
It was three in the morning, and Wood had been asked to bring the Prince of Darkness some scotch, only to find him in his living room standing behind the curtain. This was where Lugosi would go when he wanted to fix. Having shot up, the Count stepped out, his body shaking and his face streaked with tears. In his hand there was a gun and it was pointed at his friend. “Eddie, I’m going to die tonight. I want to take you with me.” Fortunately Wood, who had taken several bullets in WWII, kept cool enough to see a way out—Boilermakers.
That night Lugosi would forsake glassware. The canned beer was to be room temperature—the Count was Eur
opean after all—the scotch he just drank from the bottle. Soon enough, Lugosi put the gun away in a drawer and continued to drink his Boilermakers. At least the two old friends, the unemployed monster and the angora fetishist, had each other. After a while, Lugosi started to mix paraldehyde in with the beer, which he drank with the scotch. A sedative used to treat alcoholics for delirium tremens, paraldehyde smelled a bit like ether and helped induce sleep. The sun, after all, was just breaking and the Prince of Darkness would soon be heading off to bed.
RICHARD BURTON’S BOILERMAKER
1 OZ. WHISKEY
1 PINT LAGER BEER
Pour whiskey into a shot glass and beer into a pint glass or mug. Throw back the shot and chase it with the beer.
COACH BUTTERMAKER’S BOILERMAKER
12 OZ. CAN OF BUDWEISER
2 OZ. JIM BEAM
Open can of Budweiser and take a good sip. Refill with Jim Beam. Drink down.
JOHN CASSAVETES
1929–1989
DIRECTOR AND ACTOR
“I don’t really have to direct anyone or write down that somebody’s getting drunk; all I have to do is say that there’s a bottle there and put a bottle there and then they’re going to get drunk.”
John Cassavetes forged one of the most unique careers in the history of cinema, capitalizing on his success as a character actor in traditional Hollywood pictures to direct a series of revolutionary, personal films that set the course for modern American independent filmmaking. A fixture of television in the 1950s, he made his feature debut with Sidney Poitier in Edge of the City (1957), a drama about interracial relationships. Cassavetes returned to that same subject matter with his first directorial effort, Shadows (1959), a largely improvised, low-budget affair shot with handheld cameras on the streets of New York. He was hired to direct two Hollywood features, Too Late Blues (1961) and A Child Is Waiting (1963), but frustrations with studio interference inspired him to swear off the traditional system for all future endeavors. As a means of financing his own work, Cassavetes took roles in such movies as The Killers (1964) and The Dirty Dozen (1967), for which he received an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor. His next film as a director, Faces (1968), was nominated for three Oscars: Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor (Seymour Cassel), and Best Supporting Actress (Lynn Carlin). Gena Rowlands and Cassel, along with Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara, made up the core stable of actors Cassavetes would utilize throughout his singular and influential career. At the time of his death, he had written more than forty unproduced screenplays.
HE REALLY WANTED HER TO WIN. He knew how much it would mean to her. It was morning at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and later that night, the 1974 Golden Globes ceremony were taking place not far away, at the Beverly Hilton.
Cassavetes and his wife, Gena Rowlands, had both been nominated for A Woman Under the Influence: her for acting, him for writing and directing. The night before, at the Polo Lounge, Cassavetes had thrown a few back with Richard Harris, who was in town as a scheduled presenter. What they had talked about, Cassavetes couldn’t precisely recall, but here this morning was Harris again, in a slightly more sober state, to refresh his memory. Unfortunately.
It seems that when Cassavetes found out Harris was presenting the award for Best Actress, he’d drunkenly let slip just how badly he wanted his wife to win. The conversation had gone something like this:
Harris: “You want her to win it?”
Cassavetes: “Of course”
Harris: “Okay then, she’s won it. I’ll just pull the envelope out of my pocket, open it, and say she’s won. You want me to do it?”
Cassavetes: “Yes … definitely.”
Presumably they then celebrated with another round.
But now, in the harsh light of day, Cassavetes wanted to take it back as quickly as possible. He begged Harris not to go through with it. “Don’t worry, it’s no big deal,” Harris said. “They won’t find out until it’s over, and then I can just say I made a mistake, or I couldn’t read, or I’m dyslexic, or something.”
Hours later, during the ceremony, Cassavetes and Rowlands were seated at a table right in front of the stage when Harris came out to present the Best Actress award. Cassavetes immediately started shaking his head, “No no no.” Harris opened the envelope, smiled and announced the winner: “Gena Rowlands.”
Afterward, Cassavetes asked who really won the award.
“Faye Dunaway,” Harris replied, “for Chinatown.” The director spent the next few hours in a spiral of guilt and shame. Imagining his friend’s state, Harris decided to help. In the wee hours of the morning, a huge floral arrangement and a bottle of champagne were delivered to Cassavetes and Rowlands at their hotel room. They were from Harris. And there among the flowers was the card he’d read from during the ceremony. The name on the card: Gena Rowlands.
SAMMY DAVIS, JR.
1925–1990
SINGER AND ACTOR
“Sober up, and you see and hear everything that you’d been able to avoid hearing before.”
Born to a vaudeville family, Sammy Davis, Jr., spent his childhood as part of the Will Mastin Trio, named after his uncle and also featuring his father. He struck out on his own in the 1950s, with solo records and a starring role on Broadway in Mr. Wonderful (1956). Later he would become a top attraction in Las Vegas as part of the Rat Pack, along with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. Davis had a successful (if not terribly distinguished) film career, most notably appearing in the Rat Pack vehicle Oceans 11 (1960) and the Cannonball Run series. He scored a surprise number-one radio hit with “The Candy Man” in 1972 and became a regular fixture on television through the 1970s and 80s, guest-starring on sitcoms (All in the Family, The Jeffersons, The Cosby Show), game shows (Family Feud), even soap operas (General Hospital, One Life to Live). Davis shared one of the first interracial onscreen kisses, with Nancy Sinatra during a 1967 television special, but his romantic relationships with white women—including a marriage to Swedish actress May Britt—were a constant source of controversy. So, too, was his conversion to Judaism and his public support of Richard Nixon. Despite it all, Sammy remained to the end one of the country’s most beloved performers.
IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE the happiest day of his life. Almost midnight at the Copa, January 10, 1958, and Sammy Davis, Jr., had just gotten married. The lucky woman was Loray White, a singer at a Vegas nightclub called the Silver Slipper. They’d met three years earlier in L.A., dated for eight months, then gone their separate ways—until a week ago when Davis came looking for her and proposed.
She showed up for the wedding an hour late. Both were so nervous, they accidentally called her “Leroy” on the marriage-license application. The ceremony lasted two minutes. And now, at the Copa, he’d just finished his regular evening performances and everyone around him was celebrating his marriage, his shows, his success. But all Davis could do was cry. Cry and drink himself stupid.
What made the occasion particularly strange is that just ten days prior, on New Year’s Day, a Chicago Sun-Times columnist named Irv Kupcinet had leaked the news that Davis was intending to marry actress Kim Novak, whose family hailed from Chicago. Novak had denied the story, but Kupcinet claimed he’d found an application for marriage with both their names. The story made headlines the world over. But now Davis was marrying another woman?
Rumors of a Novak-Davis affair had been floating in gossip columns long before Kupcinet reported it. The two met sometime in 1957 at a party thrown by Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, and spent the evening chatting away. The next morning, word was in the papers. Davis realized the harm this could do to both their careers, so he called Novak to assure her he hadn’t planted the information. She invited him over for spaghetti. And thus a clandestine relationship blossomed. Being driven to see her, Davis would lie on the floorboard of the car, a blanket draped over him.
But no level of discretion was going to keep the Novak-Davis pairing a secret for long. When word got back to Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn—who�
��d been grooming Novak as the studio’s new “it” girl (a replacement for the uncontrollable Rita Hayworth)—he had not one, but two heart attacks. Literal put-you-in-the-hospital heart attacks. Fearing the harm the story might do to Novak’s career (read: his investment), Cohn hired some tough guys to drive Davis out to the desert and explain things. But Davis was tipped off to the plan and fled to the Sands in Las Vegas, under the protection of mob boss Sam Giancana.
Eventually, all parties decided the best way to put this whole business behind everyone was for Davis to pay another woman to marry him as quickly as possible, a black woman. (This would also have the added advantage of quieting the black press, which was livid over Novak.) Davis sat down and started flipping through his address book, looking for a wife. And then he came upon White.
The happy couple would divorce a few months later. For her trouble, White received $25,000. Cohn, despite securing his investment, would die of a heart attack the next month. As for Sammy—his heart would only be broken.
THE MAGIC CASTLE
7001 FRANKLIN AVE.
OPEN!
PRIVATE CLUBS IN LOS ANGELES have found varying levels of success over the years (the Clover Club worked where the Embassy Club didn’t), but the mysterious and legendary Magic Castle, located in the Hollywood Hills, has been going strong for over fifty years.
The name’s no joke: Originally built in 1909 as the private estate of banker/developer Rollin B. Lane, the chateau—a replica of the landmark Kimberly Crest house in Redlands, California—was leased by television writer Milt Larsen (of Truth and Consequences fame) in 1961, with the express of purpose of converting it into an exclusive hangout for magicians. (Larsen’s father had been one).