Dark History of Hollywood: A Century of Greed, Corruption and Scandal behind the Movies (Dark Histories)

by Kieron Connolly

  Nor is it always the person in a position of power making the advance. ‘In my own 18 years as a studio executive,’ wrote Peter Bart in GQ in 1996, ‘I noticed that tactful “approaches” were made towards me not just by wannabe actresses but by women with scripts to sell, pictures to produce or projects to package.’ Hollywood is populated by some aggressively ambitious men and women. Success can mean immense fame and wealth. For some of them, sex is just a means to that end.

  ITALIAN STALLION

  BEFORE SYLVESTER STALLONE made his name with Rocky in 1976, he appeared in a softcore porn film, The Party at Kitty and Stud’s (1970). Once he became a star, the porn film was quickly re-released under the title Italian Stallion. Although he appears nude in the film, by today’s standards, says Stallone, the film would receive a PG rating. Broke and sleeping in a bus station when he was offered the work, Stallone said: ‘It was either do that movie or rob someone because I was at the end – at the very end – of my rope.’ For the two days’ work it required, he was paid $200 and found himself somewhere to live.

  Hollywood’s Whores

  Although movies might have become more moralistic after the introduction of the Hays Office rules, that didn’t change the behaviour of Hollywood people. They just had to be more discreet. The hypocrisy of off-screen vice but on-screen virtue actually increased.

  Many, on arriving, realized that, while they’d been the prettiest girl in their small town, in Hollywood they were just one of hundreds and that there were others who were better actresses.

  Not all the pretty girls who headed to Hollywood made careers as actresses. Many, on arriving, realized that, while they’d been the prettiest girl in their small town, in Hollywood they were just one of hundreds and that there were others who were better actresses. Most just gave up, left town or did something else. But some became prostitutes and made a good living at it. On Sunset Strip in the 1930s, there was a brothel run by Lee Francis where Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Jean Harlow were among the customers. It’s claimed that 40 per cent of the profits went to pay off police and politicians, but Francis’s luck ran out in 1940 and she was convicted for running a house of ill repute. Around the same time, Mae’s was a brothel where the girls were made up to look like movie stars, such as Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow and Ginger Rogers. According to author E.J. Fleming, it was run for MGM by actress Billie Bennett, whose career had died with the coming of sound.

  Mae’s was a brothel where the girls were made up to look like movie stars, such as Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow and Ginger Rogers.

  By the 1990s, the major brothels were run by Madam Alex Adams and Heidi Fleiss, who, though she wouldn’t name other names, counted Charlie Sheen among her business’s many Hollywood clients. ‘In Hollywood, it’s a status symbol to even have been on Alex’s list of customers,’ said writer William Stadiem, co-author of Adams’s memoir Madam 90210. Men were happy to pay a few thousand dollars to meet a woman for the first time and then see if they could get her to sleep with him for free the second time.

  Nor had the Fleiss women fallen into prostitution as a last resort. Among them, Stadiem met lawyers, accountants and development girls from the studios. ‘They find it an amazing way to make a lot of money in a very short time,’ he said. Fleiss’s prostitutes have also succeeded in moving out of prostitution into Hollywood properly, becoming, it is said, producers, studio executives, actresses or models, as well as marrying men in the movie business.

  Today, as much as ever, for some ambitious producers or studio executives too absorbed in work to embark on a proper relationship, hiring prostitutes has become accepted practice. In a community that values power and money so much, paying for sex can be just another business transaction.

  End of the Production Code

  After the studios lost control of many of the cinema circuits in the late 1940s, more independent exhibitors sprang up who would show foreign-language films, and, not being part of the Hollywood system, didn’t have to comply with the Production Code. Then, in 1953, after the Supreme Court gave movies freedom of speech under the First Amendment, film-maker Otto Preminger defied the Production Code by distributing The Moon is Blue without its seal of approval. The Hays Office had wanted to change six lines of dialogue, but Preminger refused. The film went on to be a success.

  As the Production Code was being successfully flouted and more risqué European films were being distributed in the US (such as the nudity seen in Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika, released in America in 1955), the studios themselves began to make more daring movies, adapting Tennessee Williams’s plays Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly Last Summer (1959), both of which dealt with homosexuality. As Suddenly Last Summer ends with a homosexual man being eaten by men he’s trying to procure for sex, the Production Code felt that the film was sufficiently damning of homosexuality to allow it to be made into a movie.

  While Billy Wilder hadn’t been allowed in 1955 to suggest adultery in The Seven Year Itch, the whole subject of his film The Apartment, made just five years later, was adultery. The movie tells the story of an office worker who gains career advancement by loaning out his apartment to senior colleagues as a place to conduct their extra-marital affairs. It was an idea Wilder had had in the mid-1940s, but he’d known then that it wouldn’t have been permitted by the Production Code.

  As attitudes became more liberal throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Production Code was undermined until it was replaced in 1968 with the ratings system based on ages, which, with amendments, remains today.

  As the Production Code was being successfully flouted and more risqué European films were being distributed in the US, the studios themselves began to make more daring movies.

  Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss. When Charlie Sheen testified at Fleiss’s tax evasion trial, he was asked if it was true he’d spent $50,000 on Fleiss’s services. He grinned: ‘It does add up, doesn’t it?’

  William Holden, Maggie McNamara and David Niven in The Moon Is Blue, which, due to its ‘unacceptably light attitude towards seduction, illicit sex, chastity and virginity’ was released without the Production Code’s seal of approval.

  Invited to guest edit an issue of the French edition of Vogue magazine in 1977, Polanski approached 13-year-old Samantha Geimer…

  Roman Polanski

  When director Roman Polanski was invited to guest edit an issue of the French edition of Vogue magazine in 1977, he approached 13-year-old Samantha Geimer (then Gailey) to do some modelling. With the permission of the girl’s mother, the 43-year-old director took some photographs, and although Samantha later said she’d felt uncomfortable when he’d persuaded her to pose topless, she agreed to a second photo shoot.

  During the second session, Polanski gave her champagne, which she was photographed sipping, and they shared a Quaalude sedative. As Polanski made sexual advances, she said that she protested, but had been scared. ‘I didn’t know what else would happen if I made a scene,’ she said in an interview in 2003. ‘After giving some resistance, I figured well, I guess I’ll get to come home after this.’ Polanski, in his autobiography, argued that she wasn’t unwilling and the probation report stated that there was evidence that she was willing. Nevertheless, she was 13, and Polanski performed oral sex on her, as well as having vaginal and anal sex.

  Roman Polanski in 1977 after being sentenced to 90 days in a correctional facility. He was to be psychologically evaluated to determine whether his sentence for unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old should be more severe.

  THE MANSON MURDERS

  ‘I’M THE DEVIL, and I’m here to do the devil’s business,’ said Tex Watson as he broke into Roman Polanski’s house in Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles, on 8 August 1969. Polanski was away, but his wife, model and actress Sharon Tate, was at home with three friends. Watson and his two associates, Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel, together with Linda Kasabian, who was the getaway driver, had been instructed by cult leader Charles Manson
to destroy everyone in the secluded property.

  Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant, was stabbed 16 times; her friend Abigail Folger was stabbed 28 times; Folger’s boyfriend Voytek Frykowski was shot and then stabbed 51 times, and celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring was shot and stabbed seven times, while a passer-by, Steven Parent, was shot and killed.

  It was a crime that shocked and frightened not only Hollywood, but the entire United States and beyond, and has since become seen as the moment the drug-taking, free-living era of the Sixties came to an end in an orgy of pointless violence.

  In 1968 Charles Manson, 5ft 2in tall and having spent more than half his life in and out of young offenders’ institutions and prisons, had recently managed to tap into the hippie scene. His ambition was to become a singer-songwriter, and one of his songs even appeared as a Beach Boys B-side after he temporarily befriended one of the group. But his real talent turned out to be the manipulation of unstable young minds, and soon he was collecting druggie drop-outs in San Francisco and LA.

  Charles Manson on trial in 1970. The following month he carved an X into his forehead. The female defendants soon copied him.

  Prophesying a black–white race war based on his insane interpretation of the Book of Revelation and a unique reading of the Beatles’ 1968 song ‘Helter Skelter’, Manson had a dark charisma so mesmerizing that at its largest, his ‘Family’, as the cult that had developed around him had become known, had 35 members.

  Sharon Tate’s body is removed from her Los Angeles home following the Manson Murders in August 1969.

  The house where Polanski and Sharon Tate were living at the time of the murders was known to Manson as it had formerly been occupied by Terry Melcher, a record producer friend of the Beach Boys and the son of Hollywood singing legend Doris Day. But there seems little reason as to why Tate and her friends were targeted, or why the following day Manson and ten of his family murdered a supermarket executive, Leno LaBianca, and his wife Rosemary, a dress shop co-owner. The LaBiancas were completely unknown to Manson.

  Even after being arrested, Manson’s hold over the Family continued. Its members often acted in unison in the courtroom, while other members of the cult who hadn’t been involved in the killings didn’t quickly disband once Manson was no longer there to lead them. Manson and the others accused were eventually all given death sentences, commuted to life in 1972 when California banned the death penalty.

  Five years after the murders, Polanski returned to Hollywood to film Robert Towne’s screenplay Chinatown. In it, John Huston’s villain says to Jack Nicholson’s private detective: ‘Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and right place, they’re capable of anything.’ All it had taken for some Sixties’ drop-outs to become mass murderers was to fall under the spell of Charles Manson.

  Nastassja Kinski as Tess of the d’Urbervilles in 1979. Seventeen at the time, Kinski was in a relationship with her director, Roman Polanski, who’d fled the US two years earlier while on bail for rape charges with a 13-year-old girl.

  Polanski, a French citizen, fled to France. He hasn’t returned to the US or Britain since, and France has denied requests to extradite him.

  Polanski was later arrested on multiple charges, including rape by use of drugs, perversion, sodomy, lewd and lascivious act upon a child under 14, and furnishing a controlled substance to a minor. In a plea bargain he pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with a minor, with the other charges being dropped. He was sentenced to serve 90 days at Chino State Prison, during which he was assessed by a psychiatrist to determine if he was likely to be a repeat offender.

  The psychiatrist, the probation officer and the victim were all against Polanski having to serve a jail sentence and it was believed that he would receive probation. But as the court hearing drew closer, word spread that the judge had decided to sentence Polanski to imprisonment followed by deportation. Fearing this, Polanski, a French citizen, fled to France. He hasn’t returned to the US or Britain since, and France has denied requests to extradite him.

  Samantha Geimer sued Polanski in 1988 for sexual assault and they settled out of court, with part of the deal being that he hand over the photographs from the two sessions. Polanski has said publicly that he has regretted the incident, while Geimer has forgiven him: ‘He made a terrible mistake, but he’s paid for it.’ Polanski has tried repeatedly to have the charges dropped, and, in 2009, Geimer filed to have the charges against him dismissed, saying that decades of publicity as well as the prosecutor’s focus on lurid details continued to traumatize her and her family. In response, the judge admitted that there had been misconduct by the original judge, but Polanski would have to appear in court to apply for dismissal.

  In September that year, more than 32 years after the assault, Polanski was arrested on arriving in Switzerland. While US authorities attempted to extradite him, he was placed under house arrest and only released the following July when the Swiss authorities rejected the extradition bill. In 2013, Geimer published her autobiography, subtitled ‘A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski’. On the jacket, she used one of the photographs the director took of her.

  Samantha Geimer sued Polanski in 1988 for sexual assault and they settled out of court in 1993, part of the deal being that he hand over the photographs from the two sessions.

  Despite this experience, youth remained Polanski’s taste. After fleeing America, his next film was an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles, starring 17-year-old Nastassja Kinski, with whom Polanski was having a relationship. His 1988 film Frantic co-starred Emmanuelle Seigner, who was 21 when she began a relationship with the then 54-year-old film-maker. They married and have two children.

  Woody Allen

  Throughout the 1980s, Woody Allen’s girlfriend was actress Mia Farrow, who appeared in all his films at the time. They didn’t live together, but had a son together, born Satchel Farrow in 1987, and adopted two children, Dylan (now Malone) and Moshe (now Moses). Farrow had also already adopted three other children, including a daughter, Soon-Yi.

  In 1992, Farrow found photographs Allen, then 56, had taken of the then 19-year-old Soon-Yi posing naked. It was then revealed that Allen had begun a sexual relationship with Soon-Yi. As Farrow and Allen broke up, a vicious custody battle began. Allen lost all contact with his children – Soon-Yi’s step-siblings. He later married Soon-Yi and they adopted two children. Allen’s biological son by Farrow, Satchel, who in distancing himself from his father, now goes by his middle name Ronan, tweeted on Father’s Day 2012: ‘Happy Father’s Day – or as they call it in my family, happy brother-in-law’s day.’

  CELEBRITY SEX TAPES

  BEFORE THE DEMOCRATIC National Convention in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1988, Rob Lowe met two girls at a bar, and, later that night, filmed them having sex with him. One of the girls was only 16. The girls stole the tape and when the younger girl’s mother found it, charges were pressed.

  Lowe settled out of court. A new type of scandal had been born: the celebrity sex tape. Lowe later quipped that being the first to do something is not always an honour.

  Later sex tapes scandals would involve Pamela Anderson and her first husband Tommy Lee (below), Colin Farrell and a Playboy model and Jennifer Lopez and her first husband Ojani Noa. For film stars the advice might be: ‘Don’t film yourselves having sex, because the tape might find its way into the wrong hands’. But for others lower down the greasy pole of fame one might question how unintentional it is that footage of their private life has suddenly put them in the news again.

  Woody Allen and his wife Soon-Yi Previn in 2011. She is the adopted daughter of his ex-girlfriend Mia Farrow, as well as being step-sister to Farrow and Allen’s son Ronan, and two children that they jointly adopted.

  It was thought that Woody Allen’s career as a film-maker, which had included many romantic comedies, would not recover from the scandal. But while there were hits and misses along the way, his productivity didn’t waver, and in 2011�
�s Midnight in Paris he produced his most commercially successful film ever. Allen’s audience seemed prepared to ignore the man and just enjoy the movies.

  Riding in Cars with Boys

  One night in the summer of 1995, police officers on routine patrol near Sunset Boulevard were alerted to a parked car on which the brake lights were being flashed on and off. Inside were Hugh Grant and prostitute Divine Brown, whom the star had picked up earlier on Sunset Strip. The police arrested them both and charged Grant with lewd conduct.

  Hugh Grant after his arrest in 1995 for lewd conduct when he was caught with a prostitute in his car. The scandal didn’t hurt Grant’s career and also made the prostitute, Divine Brown, a celebrity for a while.

  Until the following day, Divine Brown still had no idea that her English client was famous. Within 24 hours, however, with Grant fulfilling his commitments to complete the rounds of chat shows to promote his new film, the scandal made news headlines. ‘I did a bad thing,’ was Grant’s explanation. ‘It was me that helped his career,’ said Divine Brown in 2010. Certainly, his arrest didn’t stop him being a popular romantic comedy leading man.

  Divine Brown’s fees from TV appearances talking about the incident were useful, too, helping, she said, to put her two older daughters through college.

  Divine Brown also became a celebrity from their $50 encounter, at least for a short time. Her fees from TV appearances talking about the incident were useful, too, helping, she said, to put her two older daughters through college. Looking back on her encounter with Hugh Grant 15 years later, she said: ‘That was the trick that changed my life.’