by Mark Bailey
Anyway—the luggage rack. Marvin’s car was parked at the end of a pier jutting into the ocean. Boorman figured if he drove the length of the pier, he could demonstrate he was serious about this, and Marvin would relent. So he gave it a shot, to no avail. Before reaching the actual road, Boorman got out and asked Marvin if he was ready to come down. Marvin snarled. Boorman got back behind the wheel. It was late. The Pacific Coast Highway was practically deserted. And Marvin had left him no choice.
Boorman turned onto the highway and slowly headed toward Marvin’s beach house. It wasn’t long before rolling lights appeared in the rearview mirror. The police. Boorman pulled over. An officer approached the car, assessing the scene. Finally, he looked at Boorman and asked his first question: “Do you know you have Lee Marvin on your roof?”
DAN TANA’S
9071 SANTA MONICA BLVD.
OPEN!
BATHED IN BORDELLO RED and adorned with checkered tablecloths, Dan Tana’s tiny dining room could pass for any number of East Coast family-run Italian pasta joints. But in keeping with Hollywood’s taste for reinvention, the restaurant’s namesake and owner not only isn’t from New York or Italy—he’s a former Yugoslavian soccer player who immigrated to Los Angeles in the 1950s.
Before opening his own humble establishment in 1964, Dan Tana worked in a variety of restaurants (and briefly as an actor). The place is famous for its steaks and martinis, but initially the restaurant’s hours were its main appeal. In a city where even the most popular eateries shut down by 11 p.m., Dana Tana kept the kitchen open late. (Last seating is at 1 a.m., making it especially attractive to patrons leaving the Troubadour, located just down the block.)
Deliberately unfussy and stridently old-school, Dan Tana’s has remained a favorite of L.A. celebrities young and old for nearly fifty years. MCA power broker Lew Wasserman was a regular up until his death in 2002. Fred Astaire and John Wayne loved the place. Drew Barrymore claims she’s been going there so long, her diapers were changed in one of the booths. Dabney Coleman, James Woods, George Clooney, and Karl Malden all have items on the menu named after them, as does former L.A. Laker Vlade Divac. Phil Spector had drinks there the night he shot Lana Clarkson.
With the restaurant’s “seen it all” cool, simply being famous is not enough to get you a table: seating is limited, and if you’re not a regular, you may have a long wait ahead of you. Ask John Travolta: at the height of his Saturday Night Fever fame, he showed up one night with a date but without a reservation. When told it would be two hours before he could be accommodated, Travolta dropped his name with a defiant “don’t you know who I am?” tone.
“Well, for you, Mr. Travolta,” the maître d’ allegedly replied, “it will be three.”
STEVE MCQUEEN
1930–1980
ACTOR
“When a horse learns to buy martinis, I’ll learn to like horses.”
Known for his quiet cool and an affection for motorized vehicles, as showcased in The Great Escape (1963) and The Getaway (1972), Steve McQueen performed many of his own stunts. Abandoned by his father as a boy, he was remanded to reform school as a teenager and worked as a janitor in a brothel, a lumberjack, and an oil rigger before enlisting with the Marines at seventeen. After an honorable discharge in 1950, he went to New York to study acting. McQueen gained notoriety in B-movies (most notably The Blob, 1958) and television (Wanted: Dead or Alive) before The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Great Escape established him as a major movie star. He had a string of successes throughout the decade and received his lone Oscar nomination for The Sand Pebbles (1966). By the time he made The Getaway, directed by Sam Peckinpah and costarring McQueen’s future wife Ali MacGraw, he was the highest-paid movie star in the world. But he retreated from Hollywood shortly after release of The Towering Inferno (1974), appearing in only three movies over the next six years while battling cancer. His final picture was The Hunter, in 1980. McQueen’s status as avatar of all things cool remains rock solid, as evidenced in the film The Tao of Steve (2000).
THE ROOM HADN’T SEEN many happy endings, but Steve McQueen intended to change that. After countless drinks and a couple tabs of acid, he and cheesecake actress Mamie Van Doren were alone in a bedroom at the home of hairdresser-to-the-stars Jay Sebring.
This had once, long ago, been the bedroom of MGM producer Paul Bern and his wife, Jean Harlow. As the story goes, Bern shot himself in the house because he was physically incapable of pleasing Harlow in the bedroom—this bedroom, the very one in which McQueen and Van Doren, after a promising first encounter, were now tripping.
McQueen and Van Doren had met exactly two nights prior, at the Whisky a Go Go. McQueen was a regular, with his own permanently reserved booth. There’d been dancing and booze, and a drunken tryst back at Van Doren’s house that hadn’t gone quite as far as McQueen had hoped. But Van Doren promised there’d be other nights, and tonight was turning out to be one of them.
Just like before, they’d met at the Whisky. McQueen suggested they go to a party Jay Sebring was throwing at his house. The Bern-Harlow house. There, while drinking and hanging out by the pool, McQueen dug into his pocket and pulled out some LSD. Van Doren was hesitant. “No bad trips,” McQueen assured her. “This stuff’s pharmaceutical. It makes sex a totally new experience.”
If there were two things McQueen lived for, they were sex and new experiences. Although a guy who drank Old Milwaukee by the case when he first arrived in Hollywood (and never stopped), by the late 1960s he was open to every substance that came his way: peyote, hash, cocaine, amyl nitrate. As for women, they were in no short supply. Friends would tell stories of casual evenings they’d had with McQueen while he sat across the room, going at it with two, three ladies at a time. “Look,” McQueen would say, “a certain type of broad goes to a movie and there’s this guy on the screen—it’s like seeing a rock at Tiffany’s. They go after what they want…. I’m being chased around by them.” And he wasn’t going to let his marriage get in the way.
* * *
If there were two things McQueen lived for, they were sex and new experiences. A guy who drank Old Milwaukee by the case when he first arrived in Hollywood (and never stopped), he was open to every substance that came his way by the 1960s.
* * *
McQueen and Van Doren were in bed together by the time the acid kicked in. She would later describe the experience as flashes of light skyrocketing around the room. And that afterward, with McQueen asleep at her side, she hallucinated a nude Paul Bern in a full-length mirror across the room, a mask over his eyes, a gun in his hand.
WHAT’S THERE TO say? It is hardly novel. But then again, given all the craft/micro/artisanal beers out there—the pale ale, blonde ale, brown ale, oatmeal stout, dry stout, sweet stout, porter, wheat, etc.—maybe Old Swill has become novel. After all, Pabst Blue Ribbon has enjoyed a resurgence, made hip by Dennis Hopper in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet: “Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!”
Besides, Old Milwaukee was always good enough for McQueen.
OLD MILWAUKEE
Drink in four swallows or less. Crumpling can is optional.
WHISKY A GO GO
8901 SUNSET BLVD.
OPEN!
IT WAS DURING A TRIP across Europe in 1963 that former Chicago cop Elmer Valentine stumbled upon the germ of an idea that would transform the culture not only of Los Angeles but of the United States.
Traveling with money he’d made selling his interest in the restaurant P.J.’s in West Hollywood, Valentine stopped one night at a discotheque in Paris, where the sight of young people enthusiastically crowding the dance floor motivated him to return to the states and open his own club, one so closely modeled after its inspiration in Paris he even stole the name: Whisky a Go Go.
Though nominally a discotheque, Valentine’s Whisky specialized in live music: opening night, 1964, featured Johnny Rivers (“Secret Agent Man”), whom Valentine had signed to a one-year performance contract. Between sets, a DJ in a s
lit skirt shook and shimmied while spinning records in a cage suspended high above the crowd—a happy accident (the cage was planned; the skirt wasn’t) that spawned the go-go dancing craze of the 1960s.
But the Whisky proved to be much more than a gimmick: historically, it’s one of the most important rock venues of all time. When the Doors were still practically unknown, even in Los Angeles, Valentine hired them as the house band. (He later fired them, after hearing a drunk Jim Morrison sing the lyrics to “The End.”) During a single two-week stretch in 1966, the band would open for Buffalo Springfield, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, Love, and Them (featuring Van Morrison). The Byrds could be seen at the club on a regular basis, as could Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. Alice Cooper, Led Zeppelin, the Kinks, the Who, the Animals, Cream, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, the Velvet Underground, War, the Zombies, King Crimson, Fleetwood Mac—name a band of the era, they played the Whisky.
The club was enough of a sensation to attract such Hollywood elite as Steve McQueen and Cary Grant, and even drew a reservation from President Lyndon Johnson (which he made only to appease his daughters; he never showed). The Whisky was eventually franchised across the country, with sister locations in Atlanta and San Francisco. When punk and new wave overtook metal and hard rock in the late 1970s, the original Whisky didn’t miss a beat, booking the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, and locals such as the Germs (who recorded a live album there) even as they packed the place with future arena rockers like Mötley Crüe and Van Halen. As the novelty of punk started to wear off, however, the Whisky started to lose steam. Valentine, who by then had also opened the Roxy Theatre and the Rainbow Bar & Grill to tremendous success, eventually sold his share of the club. Though still active most nights of the week, today the club’s glory is but a memory.
SAM PECKINPAH
1925–1984
DIRECTOR AND SCREENWRITER
“I can’t direct when I’m sober.”
Best known for The Wild Bunch (1969)and Straw Dogs (1971), Sam Peckpinpah was given the nickname “Bloody Sam” due to the violence in his films. A descendent of Western pioneers, his grandfather was a cattle rancher, superior court judge, and U.S. congressman. Peckinpah, who was frequently in trouble as a teenager, finished high school at a military academy, then obtained a master’s degree at USC. He broke into television as a screenwriter in the late fifties, and on the recommendation of Brian Keith, star of The Westerner, landed his first feature directing job, The Deadly Companions (1961). His second film, Ride the High Country (1962), quickly became his calling card, but erratic behavior on the follow-up, Major Dundee (1965), which was plagued by budget overruns and delays, severely harmed his reputation. The runaway success of what would become Peckinpah’s most famous film, The Wild Bunch (1969), earned him his lone Oscar nomination, for Best Screenplay. The early 1970s proved to be his most prolific and inspired period, as he completed four features—The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), Straw Dogs, Junior Bonner (1972), and The Getaway (1972)—in just three years. His next two pictures, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), proved to be the last worthy efforts of his career, as booze and drugs took their toll. He was known to carry a gun on set.
WHAT HAVE WE GOTTEN ourselves into? Bob Dylan didn’t say it, but he didn’t have to—the look on his face said it all. He was in a projection room in Durango, Mexico, watching the first batch of dailies from Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Beside him were the film’s star, Kris Kristofferson, and the film’s director, Sam Peckinpah. Peckinpah was drunk and angry. After more than a week of shooting, Peckinpah declared every bit of footage unusable: “Can’t I expect fucking focus?”
Dylan had been a last-minute addition to the cast. It was 1972, and Peckinpah was in that rare class of people who seemed never to have heard of him. But Rudy Wurlitzer, the film’s screenwriter, and Gordon Carroll, its producer, were both fans, and they’d hoped to persuade Dylan to provide a few songs for the soundtrack. Through Kristofferson, a friend of Dylan’s, they’d gotten Dylan a copy of the script, which he read and liked. After screening The Wild Bunch in New York, he signed on.
Peckinpah’s first introduction to Dylan was over Thanksgiving weekend in Durango. After a ribald dinner, Dylan had played two songs he’d written for the movie, which sold Peckinpah on him immediately. Shortly thereafter, it was decided that including Dylan in the film itself could only help its commercial prospects, and so what had been a small part—Alias, a member of Billy the Kid’s gang—was expanded and given to the singer. His scenes were among the first to be shot when cameras finally started rolling.
But the production of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid was pure chaos from the get-go. Peckinpah, as had been the case for years, was drinking heavily and second-guessing plans he’d long since approved, from locations to costumes. Actor James Coburn, a loyal pal who had been cast in the role of Pat Garrett, put it well, “Peckinpah was a genius for four hours a day. The rest of time he was drunk.” When Peckinpah’s production manager suggested at one point that the director was “drinking this picture into the toilet,” Peckinpah fired him. Then, at some point early on in the filming, the camera was apparently dropped, and unbeknownst to everyone, its mounting frame was bent.
Because the masters had to be sent to Los Angeles for developing, a week’s worth of film was shot before anyone laid eyes on the footage. When it was finally screened (the episode described above), Peckinpah realized that half the frame was out of focus—in every scene! The entire week would have to be reshot.
Bob Dylan looked on as Peckinpah—disgusted and drunk—grabbed a folding chair and pulled it close to the screen. He climbed up, nearly falling as he did so, unzipped his pants, and proceeded to urinate his first initial all over the flickering images.
“From then on,” second-unit director Gordon Dawson later said, “we watched dailies with this S-shaped piss stain on the screen.”
THE GETAWAY (1972)
When Steve McQueen and publicist-turned-producer David Foster went in search of a director for The Getaway, a planned adaptation of the 1958 Jim Thompson novel, they had their sights on Peter Bogdanovich, fresh off his directorial breakthrough, The Last Picture Show. But Bogdanovich proved unavailable—officially, because he wanted to make What’s Up, Doc?; unofficially, because he couldn’t cast his lover, Cybill Shepherd, as the female lead. McQueen then suggested the hard-drinking Sam Peckinpah, with whom he’d recently worked on Junior Bonner, as a suitable replacement. Somehow, legendary Paramount producer Robert Evans agreed. And that little twist is what makes the production of The Getaway so interesting.
Let’s back up a moment, because this is important. The bit where Bogdanovich wanted to cast Shepherd and couldn’t? This was because Evans had his wife, Ali MacGraw, in mind. MacGraw, a relatively inexperienced actress but a bona fide star after the runaway success of Love Story, hadn’t been in a movie in almost two years. At the time, she was waiting around on a Truman Capote–penned adaptation of The Great Gatsby, which Evans had planned to produce with MacGraw in the role of Daisy. But Gatsby was dragging on, and Evans was losing his mind fighting with Francis Ford Coppola over the editing of The Godfather, and ultimately, it seemed like the best possible thing for both of them was if she just went away to Texas for a couple months to make a picture. Unfortunately, with both a costar and a director who drank their way through every film they’d make—so would she. As you might guess, the film ended up destroying Evans and MacGraw’s relationship.
The ensuing affair between MacGraw and McQueen is undoubtedly the best-known behind-the-scenes story of The Getaway. When Evans finally reunited with his wife after the picture wrapped, Evans found MacGraw “had as much interest in being with me as being with a leper. She was looking at me and thinking of Steve McQueen’s cock.” MacGraw eventually divorced Evans and, in 1973, married McQueen.
But the other story of The Getaway—as was typically the case
on any film he directed—was Peckinpah’s own insane boozing, by this point more out of control than anyone could have imagined. In the mornings, his hands would shake until he got a few eye-openers in him. Throughout the day, he called upon a prop-master—who had loaded up one of those trays beer-and-peanut vendors use at baseball games with a bucket of ice and assorted bottles of alcohol—to refill the tumbler of booze he kept in the drink-holder of his director’s chair. The full extent of Peckinpah’s drinking shocked his new bride, Joie Gould. “That he could stand up straight every day was extraordinary,” she said.
According to biographer David Weddle, not only was Peckinpah able to stand up straight, he was remarkably productive. The Getaway was never meant to be high art. At the onset, Peckinpah himself had declared, “We’re not doing War and Peace … get it on, get it over with, and get the fuck out.” And even as the production traversed the Texas landscape, from Huntsville to San Antonio, from El Paso to the Mexico border, he kept things running smoothly, eventually wrapping the picture after two months of shooting, only four days behind schedule.
Because of the affair backstory, public anticipation for The Getaway was so high that it made more than twice its budget (pegged at just under $3 million) in exhibitor guarantees before a single theater screened it. By the end of its first year in release, it had grossed nearly $20 million, making it the biggest commercial success of Peckinpah’s career, and the worst personal failure of Evans’s.
BY MOST ACCOUNTS, Sam Peckinpah was a wildly indiscriminate drinker, downing his own lethal mixture of whatever was on hand: vodka, gin, whiskey, tequila, brandy. His gray hair wrapped in a bandana, his blue jeans grubby, sometimes carrying a pistol, sometimes throwing-knives. Peckpinpah would start drinking early—brandy and coffee, or maybe vodka and tonic, or maybe grenadine and water. By late morning, he might find some “alcoholic equilibrium,” enjoying a few hours of focus and lucidity until at around 3 p.m. or so, when his cup runneth over. One type of liquor that seems to have played a starring role was Campari. A strong, bitter taste, you tend to either love it or hate it—like Bloody Sam’s films, you’re never ambivalent. On the set of The Getaway, Peckinpah would drink Campari with vodka and soda water. Pretty much as bitter as it gets. It’s not a bad drink, if you like Campari, but maybe try a Negroni first. For that, just add sweet vermouth and while you can keep the vodka if you want, gin is more traditional.