by Marc Eliot
BY EARLY WINTER 1969, after endless battling between Hopper and Fonda over every detail, including the film’s sudden, shocking ending—Hopper had wanted them instead to ride off into the sunset, an argument Fonda won—Easy Rider was finally ready for release. Raybert held a first screening at Columbia and of the few executives who bothered to attend, almost all left by the end of the first half hour, not willing to sit through any more of a movie that clearly had no beginning and no middle, and felt as if it would never end.
Raybert reluctantly took the film back and asked Hopper to recut it. He did, again and again. He was obsessed with editing a film he couldn’t finish. He took whole scenes out, put them back in, rearranged them, added outtakes. When Fonda saw Hopper’s new version, he angrily complained to Schneider that all of his scenes had been cut out by Hopper, and all of Hopper’s were left in.
Karen Black defended Hopper’s version of the film. “I feel Dennis was enormously inspired. He had incredible intention, like a machine. He was going to get his vision of life on film, no matter what. That’s why the film is great. I kind of loved Dennis.”
She was in the minority.
AN INCREASINGLY EXASPERATED Schneider then sent Hopper and Fonda to neutral corners and hired Henry Jaglom to take over the editing of the film. According to Jaglom, “[Schneider] told me, ‘We’re having a little problem here with Easy Rider, it’s four hours long and Dennis loves it the way it is. Would you take a look at it? I can’t release a four-hour film.’ … I went to a screening and for reasons I still don’t understand, I was the only one who wasn’t stoned. Everybody else [was and] loved it. Each scene went on for twenty minutes, and the riding shots dragged on for three or four [soundtrack] songs. [When I began to cut the film] Jack [who was a pretty good editor, and whom Schneider allowed to edit his own scenes] was in the next room with his editor, and we were working from front to back and back to front.”4
Hopper’s version differs from Jaglom’s: “I edited it for a year, and then Bert Schneider said he didn’t like it the way it was at that time. He came in himself and did some things on it. Henry Jaglom did some things on it. Bob Rafelson did some things on it. There were quite a few different people who worked on it … the scenes that are in it are the same as when I had it in my film.”
The group managed to get the film down to ninety-five minutes. This version completely freaked out Hopper, who screamed to Schneider, in front of Fonda, that his cinematic work of genius was ruined, that his movie looked now like a made-for-TV film. “His movie,” Fonda muttered after Hopper’s outburst. “I thought it was our movie.”
COLUMBIA’S EXECUTIVES reluctantly returned for another screening and this time approved the new, much shorter edit, although they remained mystified as to what the film was about and expressed their concern that it wouldn’t find an audience. In the weeks that followed, as they struggled to figure out how to position the picture for release, a buzz spread through Hollywood about a new biker film coming out with Bob Dylan’s songs (sung by others) on the soundtrack and a performance by Jack Nicholson that was so great it was going to bury everything else that year. Not long after, Abe Schneider remarked to his son that he didn’t know what the film was about but he was sure it was going to be a hit.
According to Peter Biskind, when Bruce Dern was making Sydney Pollack’s 1969 They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? with Jane Fonda, they were talking during a break about what new films were coming out and she said, “Wait’ll you see Peter’s movie, you’re gonna freak out, ’cause there’s a guy in that movie who is so fantastic! Somebody has finally made a good biker movie.”
Bruce jerked his head back. “Whaddya mean a biker movie? We made all the biker movies. I did eleven of them. It’s over for biker movies.”
“This one is different.”
“Who’s in it?”
“Dennis, and this guy Jack Nicholson.”
“Jack Nicholson? I gotta pay attention to Jack fuckin’ Nicholson?”
IN THE SPRING of 1969, Bert Schneider brought Easy Rider to Cannes, where Jack, Peter, and Dennis were treated like rock stars. It was there that Jack first met Peter Guber, who would play a significant role in Jack’s future: “I had just become chairman of Columbia Pictures that year, which was why I went to Cannes. That’s where I first met Jack Nicholson, because Easy Rider was being distributed by us.” They were up against Costa-Gavras’s uber-political Z, which would go on to win the Jury Prize over Easy Rider. Lindsay Anderson’s If won the highest prize, the Palme d’Or. Nonetheless, it was Easy Rider that caused a near riot among audiences. Dennis Hopper easily won Best First Work (Prix de la première oeuvre) by a new director, and the French film festival’s recognition of his performance instantly converted Peter Fonda from a journeyman B-movie actor into the “John Wayne of biker films.” (For however briefly it lasted, Fonda was a legitimate Hollywood sensation.)
But it was Jack, at that first screening, who felt the excitement from the audience from the first time he came onscreen. He heard the room laugh out loud at his goofily charming monologue by the campfire and then gasp in horror at his unexpected and brutal murder. As the lights came up and he stood to take a bow, the crowd was screaming and cheering. He grinned and thought to himself, I’m a movie star!
* * *
1 In 1967 the Monkees reportedly outsold the Beatles’ and the Rolling Stones’ albums combined.
2 Hopper appeared on The Tonight Show in 1994 claiming Torn hadn’t quit but was fired because Torn had pulled a knife on him. Torn sued Hopper for defamation and won a $475,000 judgment against Hopper. It is unclear if he ever actually collected the money.
3 An easy rider is a man who lives off a hooker’s earnings. He isn’t a pimp, but a boyfriend or a husband whose partner’s earnings make his life an easy ride. Southern maintained throughout that despite quitting, he had written the entire script. The screenwriter credit on the film went to Southern, Fonda, and Hopper, but the only money Southern ever saw from Easy Rider was his initial $3,500 payment. When he quit, he surrendered his agreed-upon percentage of the film’s future profits.
4 Schneider offered Jaglom either a small salary or nothing up front and a percentage of the film. Jaglom took the salary, a decision that would eventually cost him millions.
CHAPTER
“Since my overnight stardom, if you can call it that, I can’t go around picking up stray pussy anymore.”
—JACK NICHOLSON
AS HE KNEW IT WOULD AFTER THE REACTION AT CANNES, EASY Rider made Jack Nicholson Hollywood’s newest golden boy. Now every studio and producer wanted him. One thing Jack was sure of, he would never again embarrass himself playing a doofus in the service of a Barbra Streisand in a dopey film like Clear Day. Those days were over.
Jack then received a call from his sister Lorraine. Less than a year after he had bought her the trailer, Mud was back in New Jersey, in a hospital in Allenwood. She was dying, Lorraine told him, and he needed to come back immediately. Jack was surprised; not only did he not know she was sick, but with all that was going on he wasn’t even aware she had left L.A. Nor did he have any idea what happened to the trailer. Jack was not the kind of son to call his mother every day or go over for dinner on Sunday.
He went to Rafelson, who arranged a mini-publicity tour for Jack in Manhattan, and as soon as he arrived in New York, after checking into his hotel, he hired a car to take him to the New Jersey nursing home three miles from the house where he had grown up. He got there just in time to watch her die. Mud passed away on January 6, 1970. When Jack returned to Los Angeles he talked to no one about it.
Early that same year, the Academy announced its nominations for the past year’s best movies and performances. Jack was thrilled to learn he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. The first thing he did was call Mimi Michu, who was still in Florida. Now that he was successful, he felt ready to ask her to come back to L.A. and be with him. For her part, with nothing else going on, whatever it was t
hat had caused her to dump Jack was no longer an issue, so she decided a free trip to L.A. might not be so bad. She hung up the phone, packed her bags, and started making arrangements to fly to L.A. on Jack’s nickel of course
Bert, for one, was not surprised. He knew she still rang Jack’s bells the way few other women could. As she once described their sexual proclivities, “We were two maniacs.” Jack concurred: “I’m interested in sex. I’m preoccupied with sex. I love it.”
He welcomed her back to Los Angeles with outstretched arms, and once again they became inseparable.
PRIOR TO THE night of the 1970 Oscars, Rex Reed wrote a profile of Jack for the New York Times and gave him a light corrective knuckle-rapping, while expressing more than a little disdain for the independent movies that had made him: “… Nobody ever noticed him until Easy Rider. The movies he’s been in have all been low-budget go-out-and-grab-a-movie B flicks. Motorcycle flicks. Beach blanket bikini flicks. Horror flicks. The kind of trash only a mother or a Cahier critic could sit through and love. Yet, out of the anti-establishment Easy Rider he became a hero for two cults. The anti-establishment B-flick underground digs him because he’s the proof that something good can come out of all that American-International garbage. And the over-30 crowd digs him too … There was something so touching about his alcoholic Southern aristocrat searching for a philosophical grass-roots identity with the new hip and the new cool in his faded fifties Ole Miss football jersey, that made them want to revel in their own squareness …”
Mimi accompanied Jack to the Old Gray Lady, in New York’s mid-town, where Reed conducted the interview. She sat behind Jack and to the right, directly in Reed’s line of sight. She flirted outrageously with him, something that Jack quickly became aware of that made him furious. The angrier he got, the funnier Mimi thought it was, both the flirting and the anger. None of it had any effect on Reed, other than to confirm to him that Jack must have been desperate for attention when he met this one.
THE ACADEMY AWARD ceremonies were held on April 7, 1970, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, part of the Los Angeles Music Center. For the second consecutive year the Academy departed from tradition and instead of having one host to lead the audience through the numerous awards and ludicrous dance numbers designed more for the TV audience ratings than anything to do with the movies, they used what they described as “Seventeen friends of Oscar.” Unfortunately, Jack couldn’t be there because he was on location with a new film, Drive, He Said, that he was directing but not appearing in. He took Mimi with him on location, to ease the pain of missing the big night.
Peter Fonda did show and so did Dennis Hopper, with Michelle Phillips on his arm. Hopper wore a velvet double-breasted tux and white ten-gallon cowboy hat and looked completely out of place at the ceremony. Hopper couldn’t resist poking his finger in the eye of the Hollywood mainstream. Henry Fonda, one of the giants of that mainstream, there to support his son, was outraged when Hopper put his hat on at one of the postceremony dinner parties and kept it on the entire meal. “Any man who insists on wearing his cowboy hat to the Academy Award ceremonies and keeps it on at the dinner table afterward ought to be spanked.”
Easy Rider was nominated for two awards—Jack’s performance and Best Original Screenplay (Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Terry Southern). The latter went to William Goldman for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—the consensus being that Goldman won because Easy Rider sounded too improvised to have been a real screenplay.
Jack lost Best Supporting Actor to Gig Young for his portrayal of a sleazy contest runner in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, a period piece about Depression-era marathon dancing contests. The crowd roared when Young’s name was announced, demonstrating how the old-school voting members of the Academy felt about the new independent film movement and especially the game-changing Easy Rider. But it really didn’t matter. Everyone knew what film and which actor was that year’s real winner. Among the Best Supporting Actor nominees—Anthony Quayle, Elliott Gould, Rupert Crosse, and Young, Jack was the only one whose star was on the rise.1
Shortly before the night of the awards, Jack shared his feelings about them with one reporter. Speaking of his own experience: “I’ve always wanted to be a movie actor and the only kind to be is a big one.” Meaning he would like to win. After he lost, he told another, “I liked the part [in Easy Rider] but I didn’t know it would change my life … There was no demand for what I did, I always had to fight for what I got. [Before I did it] there was no demand for young unknown actors anywhere. In fact, you’re suspect. People think you’re avoiding going to work. In Los Angeles you say you are an actor and they think you’re a gigolo of some kind, it’s a way of impressing girls.” No matter how self-righteous the rest of it sounded, the impressing-girls part was right on the money.
Not long after the Awards, Schneider changed the name of their company from Raybert to BBS (Bert, Bob, and Steve Blauner, who was made a one-third partner. Bert considered Steve a valuable asset and didn’t want to lose him to another company). They moved into plush new digs on La Brea, not far from Charlie Chaplin’s original studios, complete with a fifty-seat private screening room.
Soon enough the halls were filled with producers, writers, editors, and directors walking determinedly in and out of offices and hallways, calling one another “babe” and “doll.” Secretaries yelled out loud about long-distance calls to their bosses. Gorgeous actresses nervously sat in a reception room that was decorated by Schneider with French posters from the student riots of 1968, framed splendidly in chrome, and a large black-and-white Peter Max mural.
Jack, although he was not an official member of the new company, shared free office space with filmmaker Henry Jaglom. Schneider and Rafelson loved having the creative energy of Jack’s newfound success in the house.
Jack, meanwhile, after the Awards, had found a real house for himself that he liked, but because he was still broke—his earnings from Easy Rider, especially the piece of the back end given to him by a grateful Schneider after Jack was nominated, still hadn’t started coming his way—Schneider gave him a $20,000 advance to buy the $80,000 two-story, eight-room A-frame atop Mulholland Drive, with sliding glass doors and a swimming pool that offered a spectacular view of both the Hollywood side and the San Fernando Valley that at night turned Jack’s backdrop into a gorgeous blinking light show.
And it had something else. On a slightly elevated plot of land, next door and half a level up, on the other side of where the road forked, lived Marlon Brando. That sealed the deal for Jack.2
This generous like-a-brother aspect of Schneider’s relationship with Jack offered an insight into both their personalities and backgrounds. Bert was from a privileged background; his father helped grease a lot of skids for his son to become a success in the movies. Jack was born into near poverty and had no father to speak of. As was true of many young men of the wealthy, Schneider liked to give his friends extravagant gifts. That was the bright side of it.
The darker side was the need to purchase friendship and, in Jack’s case, loyalty. Schneider’s new star had had a hand in every previous BBS production—he had helped write Head, he played a crucial role in Easy Rider, had directed Drive, He Said, and he was about to star in Five Easy Pieces. Bert knew everyone in Hollywood was going to come after Jack, and he wanted to exploit their emotional tie to ensure their business one.
After closing, Jack promptly furnished his new digs with used props, a gigantic bar, an original Marilyn Monroe nude calendar that hung in the living room, and a large jar filled with shredded dollar bills, his favorite conversation piece. Not long after, studio executive Peter Guber came to pay him a visit at his new home and got lost on Mulholland Drive trying to find the fork in the road that led to it. “I had the address,” Guber recalled. “It wasn’t very far from my house. I drove down his road but couldn’t find the number. Then I saw a big, fat guy planting roses on the side of this road. I called out, ‘Mister, mister.’ He didn’t turn around, but aske
d me what I wanted. ‘Where’s Jack Nicholson’s house?’ At that point he stood up, and I saw who it was. ‘Oh fuck,’ I said to myself. ‘It’s you! Marlon Brando!’ ‘Who did you expect?’ he asked. I said, ‘Jack Nicholson,’ and he said, ‘Well, I ain’t Jack Nicholson. He lives down there.’ He pointed down the road, then turned his back and went back to his roses.
“I eventually found the house, and Jack invited me in. I was there to talk about some project, I don’t recall which, it was early on, and as we talked I couldn’t help notice all these [Fernand] Légèrs leaning against the walls, on the walls, like a bunch of old newspapers. ‘You’re into art,’ I said to him. He smiled and said, ‘You might say that.’ ”
Jack’s first big checks had just started to arrive and he had gone on an art-spending spree; the paintings were the only things he owned that he really cared about. The rest of the house looked like it was furnished from a thrift shop. Mimi helped him pick out the junk, not the art.
As money continued to roll in, Jack added a balcony off the second-floor bedroom at the far end, above the pool. He liked to wake up, open the new doors, and dive into the deep end. He also added a black open-air Jacuzzi, which took three years to finish because of the difficulty of getting it to pass code in earthquake-prone L.A. Eventually they had to cut its base directly into the house’s bedrock foundation. When it was finally completed, Jack liked to take a swim, relax in the Jacuzzi, and dry himself in the warm late-afternoon breezes. Life was good.