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

by Kieron Connolly

  Marlon Brando’s early success in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire on stage and screen and the movie On the Waterfront didn’t sustain throughout his career. While no star can be expected to follow success with repeated success, Brando seemed to lose interest in acting. He was the first actor to be paid $1 million for a movie with 1960’s The Fugitive Kind, but the 1960s also saw him star in a series of box-office failures and now largely forgotten films. By the time he was cast as Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather (1972), he might still have been regarded as the world’s greatest screen actor but he had a reputation for being difficult and box-office poison. Initially Paramount didn’t want him for The Godfather, but he was cast and won an Academy Award for his role. Controversially he then refused to appear at the ceremony, sending Sacheen Littlefeather, in Apache dress, to make a statement criticizing Hollywood’s depiction of Native Americans.

  Making Last Tango in Paris, Brando hadn’t learnt his lines and would rely on hidden cue cards as prompts.

  In the same year, when he starred in the sexual drama Last Tango in Paris, it might have seemed that, although now in his fifties, his career was back on track. But again his attention didn’t last. He hadn’t learnt his lines and would rely on cue cards hidden out of view of the camera as prompts.

  Marlon Brando won an Oscar in 1973 for his role in The Godfather, but refused to appear at the ceremony. Instead he sent Sacheen Littlefeather (right) to read out a statement about Hollywood’s misrepresentation of Native Americans.

  When it came to collaborating again with The Godfather’s director Francis Ford Coppola on Apocalypse Now (1979), Brando was asked to lose weight for the part of a renegade Special Forces officer, and to read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, on which the movie was loosely based, as preparation. Instead, Brando arrived on location overweight without having read the book or, again, having learnt his lines. Rather than act, he would engage Coppola in long discussions about his character when they should have been shooting. ‘I was good at bullshitting Francis,’ wrote Brando, ‘but what I’d really wanted from the beginning was to find a way to make my part smaller so that I wouldn’t have to work so hard.’ Not looking convincing as a menacing soldier, he was replaced in wide shots with a slimmer double, and in close-up was filmed in deep shadow to hide how fat he actually was. Coppola was so fed up with his star’s selfish behaviour that he left the set, letting his assistant direct Brando’s final shot.

  REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE

  REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955) tells the story of three troubled teenagers in LA over one 24-hour period. By the time of the film’s release, its star, James Dean, was already dead, while its two other principal actors, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo, would also become closely identified with the movie and die young.

  Dean’s face is world-famous, his influence as an actor is huge, and yet he made only three films. After the smooth delivery actors gave in movies during the studio system, Dean, like Brando, spoke and moved the way people did in real life. Dean’s most notable roles were playing two disaffected youths in the same year, in East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause, but then his career ended before he had a chance to play much else. Speeding to a race event in his new sports car, he was killed in a crash aged 24.

  After Rebel Without A Cause, Mineo (below left) struggled to escape playing teenage delinquent roles and his career foundered in the 1960s. Openly gay, his career had begun to pick up in his mid-thirties, but in 1976 he was stabbed to death outside his house by a pizza deliveryman.

  Natalie Wood’s other most notable roles were in Splendor in the Grass and as Maria in West Side Story (both 1961), before moving into television and taking time off to have children. But in 1981, the 43-year-old star was making movies again, and, with her co-star Christopher Walken and her husband Robert Wagner, sailed to Catalina Island on her yacht for an evening. By the following morning, Wood had drowned, her body being found a mile away, with a dinghy from the yacht nearby.

  No one said they’d seen Wood enter the water, although Wagner later admitted that he’d had a fight with his wife that night. There was a scratch across her cheek and bruising on her torso and arms, which the coroner suggested as possibly being caused by slipping while trying to climb back aboard the boat. Along with having alcohol in her blood that was twice the drink driving limit, she had taken a motion sickness pill and a painkiller, which would have increased her sense of intoxication.

  Her death was declared an ‘accidental drowning’, but in 2011 the yacht’s captain, Dennis Davern, said that he’d lied on his first statement to the police and a new investigation was begun. In 2012, the death was reclassified as caused by ‘drowning and undetermined causes’.

  Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun (1951). In 1956 Clift crashed his car and suffered facial lacerations. After surgery, he developed an addiction to painkillers.

  After that, Brando’s Hollywood career was largely squandered, taking big cheques for easy work in cameo performances, most notably as Superman’s father in the 1978 film – for which he was paid $3.7 million plus 11.75 per cent of the gross profits for 13 days’ work, a record at the time.

  Brando, it seemed, simply didn’t care about movies. He took the money, he lived partly on an atoll in Polynesia that he owned, and he overate, by the mid-1990s weighing more than 21 stone (136kg). While flashes of his ability could still occasionally be seen in his infrequent film roles, he treated Hollywood with disdain.

  Montgomery Clift

  ‘The only time I was ever really afraid as an actor was that first scene with Montgomery Clift,’ said Burt Lancaster about making From Here to Eternity (1953). ‘I was afraid he was going to blow me right off the screen.’ And at that time, Lancaster was the big star, in the big-star role, and Clift the newcomer. Clift, however, didn’t become a huge star. Firstly, that was because he could afford to be picky about his roles. ‘Monty could’ve been the biggest star in the world if he’d made more movies,’ said his friend Elizabeth Taylor. And, secondly, because he wasn’t well enough. In 1956, he crashed his car on leaving a party at Taylor’s house. He required major plastic surgery and the pain from his injuries led him to rely on alcohol and painkillers, as he had done after an earlier bout of dysentery left him with chronic intestinal problems. This led to an addiction which culminated in a fatal heart attack ten years later.

  Natalie Wood

  But what about child stars? Natalie Wood found fame when she was nine with the release of Miracle on 34th Street (1947), and worked in film and television, before successfully, unlike many child actors, making the transition to more grown-up work at 16 with her role in Rebel Without a Cause.

  James Dean (left) looks on while director Nicholas Ray (hands on hips) smiles at Natalie Wood (back to camera) on the set of Rebel Without A Cause. At the time the 43-year-old director was having an affair with the 16-year-old actress.

  That Natalie Wood was only 16 didn’t stop her 43-year-old director Nicholas Ray from beginning a relationship with her.

  In the eyes of Californian law, Wood was still a child and was required to be tutored for three hours a day until she was 18. But that didn’t stop the 43-year-old director of the movie, Nicholas Ray, from beginning a relationship with her during the making of the film. (Ray’s former wife Gloria Grahame had, of course, earlier been sleeping with his 13-year-old son from his first marriage.)

  Natalie Wood’s mother, along with the cast, was aware of the relationship with the director, but when she made a complaint to the studio, it was regarding Wood’s simultaneous romance with 19-year-old co-star Dennis Hopper rather than the director, and it was Hopper who was told to cool off. Like many relationships that take place while films are being made, Natalie Wood’s relationship with her director was finished by the time the movie was released.

  Judy Garland was 16 when she played Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. In an effort to keep their child star a child, MGM painfully trussed up Garland’s breasts and put her
on a diet to stall her physical development.

  Judy Garland

  The problem with child stars is that they stop being children so quickly. After working in vaudeville, Judy Garland arrived in Hollywood in the early 1930s when she was already 12, which didn’t leave much childhood in her. Nevertheless, MGM’s Howard Strickling put her on a diet of soup and cottage cheese to try to stall her growth. When she played Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Garland was 16 and her breasts had to be painfully trussed up to make her appear childlike.

  Apart from trying to hide her sexuality, MGM treated the actress’s already fragile nature by feeding her a cocktail of pills – uppers to keep her alert for shooting, followed by downers in the evening to overcome the uppers. By 1940 she was an amphetamine addict.

  The studio also spied on her. Betty Asher, an MGM publicist, was assigned to befriend the star, soon becoming Garland’s confidante, assistant and lover. In addition to her pills addiction, Garland also began drinking. A nervous breakdown followed and she was unable to complete a movie. Even when supposedly in better health, she was repeatedly late or didn’t appear on set. By 1950, MGM had had enough and fired the 28-year-old star. In response, she attempted to slash her throat, Strickling having to pull in celebrity journalist Hedda Hopper to write that it was only a minor scratch. Other journalists, however, were on to the story and it became front-page news.

  Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra. At 16, Taylor had wanted to leave film-making but her mother had said that it was her responsibility to Hollywood to continue working.

  After leaving MGM, she made A Star Is Born for Warner Bros. in 1953, but didn’t work again in Hollywood until 1958. Later her addictions lead to tardiness and incoherence in some of her stage performances and she was sometimes heckled and booed by audiences. In 1969, she died from a barbiturates overdose.

  Elizabeth Taylor

  Elizabeth Taylor became a child star at 12 in National Velvet, but by the time she was 16 she told her parents she wanted to leave Hollywood behind and have a normal childhood. ‘You have a responsibility,’ replied her mother Sara Taylor. ‘Not just to this family, but to the country now, and the whole world.’ Taylor remained an actress, but in later life would become friends with Michael Jackson, who, like Taylor and Garland, complained that early stardom had robbed him of his childhood.

  Still, Taylor made the successful move to adult actress, matching Brando’s $1 million fee when she was hired for Cleopatra (1963). Marrying eight times to seven men (she married Richard Burton twice), in 1983 she admitted to having been addicted to sleeping pills and painkillers for 35 years, and was treated for alcoholism and prescription drug addiction.

  Jackie Coogan

  Today all Hollywood child actors have reason to thank Jackie Coogan. Best known in later years as Uncle Fester in the 1960s TV series The Addams Family, Coogan had been a child star in the silent era, playing Charlie Chaplin’s child sidekick in The Kid (1921). Although Coogan earned more than $3 million as a boy, his mother and stepfather spent the money on their own luxuries. So, in 1938, when Coogan was 24, he sued them. ‘No promises were ever made to give Jackie anything,’ said his mother. ‘Every dollar a kid earns before he is 21 belongs to his parents.’

  After deductions for legal expenses, Coogan received only $126,000 from the suit. But his case led to the introduction in the following year of the California Child Actors Bill – also dubbed the Coogan Bill – in which 15 per cent of a child actor’s earnings must be protected in a trust by the employer.

  Child actor Jackie Coogan with his mother and father (right) in 1922. Sixteen years later he took his mother to court after she’d spent the $3 million that he’d earned. She denied any fault.

  Home Alone star Macaulay Culkin retired from movies as a millionaire when he was only 14. In his twenties, he received a suspended prison sentence for drug possession. He now runs an art collective.

  Bobby Driscoll

  Bobby Driscoll had been a Walt Disney child star in films such as Treasure Island (1950), but his career faded when he reached his teenage years, and, losing his way, he was soon doing heroin and marijuana. Pursuing fine art, he joined Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York in 1965, but left a couple of years later penniless. In March 1968, some months after he was last seen, his body was found in a deserted tenement. He’d died from a heart attack caused by long-term drug addiction, but the body then remained unidentified for a year. As a child star, Driscoll’s face was known across America. When he died, aged 30, no one missed him.

  Macaulay Culkin

  Today’s child stars are paid more, and, free from supervision by the studios, are often vulnerable to the temptations of the idle young and rich. Macaulay Culkin shot to fame as the ten-year-old star of Home Alone in 1990 and retired as a millionaire four years later. What to do next? While he began acting again in his early twenties, it was in smaller roles in smaller movies. And when not acting? He was arrested for possession of marijuana and two prescription drugs, receiving a suspended prison sentence, while in 2012 photographs of him looking skeletal were followed by worried rumours. By 2013, however, he seemed to be in better health as he accompanied musician friends on tour, while also writing and running an art collective. Perhaps he had found a new purpose in life.

  Drew Barrymore became a child star in E.T. in 1982. While her teenage years were marked by more than one spell in rehab, by her twenties she’d become a successful comedy actress.

  Macaulay Culkin was arrested for possession of marijuana and two prescription drugs, while in 2012 photographs of him looking skeletal were followed by worried rumours.

  Drew Barrymore

  Having become famous when she was seven with the release of E.T. (1982), Drew Barrymore was smoking cigarettes at nine, drinking alcohol at 11, smoking marijuana at 12 and snorting cocaine at 13. Even when still a little girl, her stardom gained her admission to the Studio 54 nightclub. Rehab was followed by a suicide attempt and a further spell in rehab, while her first two marriages didn’t last more than 12 months put together. However, having grown up quickly, in her twenties her career stabilized and she became a successful romantic comedy actress and producer of the Charlie’s Angels films.

  ‘You can’t do this to me, I’m Kirk Douglas’s son.’ A voice in the crowd quickly shouted out, and, in reference to the ‘I’m Spartacus’ scene from Kirk Douglas’s 1960 movie, said: ‘No, I’m Kirk Douglas’s son.’

  Stars’ Children

  There’s a story that when Kirk Douglas’s son Eric was trying to make it as a stand-up comedian in the 1990s, he became exasperated with his unresponsive audience one night and said: ‘You can’t do this to me, I’m Kirk Douglas’s son.’ A voice in the crowd quickly shouted out, and, in reference to the ‘I’m Spartacus’ scene from Kirk Douglas’s 1960 movie, said: ‘No, I’m Kirk Douglas’s son.’ He was soon followed by many members of the audience, all announcing that each was Kirk Douglas’s son.

  One hopes that Eric Douglas took the heckle in good spirit, but he never really succeeded as a comedian or as an actor, which he also tried. His life was beset by drugs and arrests, his father saying that he and his wife had taken Eric to rehab 20 times, but nothing had helped. He died from an accidental drug overdose in 2004.

  Eric’s half-brother Michael Douglas managed to escape his father’s shadow and become a star and a producer in his own right, but Michael’s own son Cameron was caught dealing cocaine and in possession of heroin. On Cameron’s sentencing, Michael Douglas blamed himself as a bad parent for his son’s problems, adding that without prison, Cameron ‘was going to be dead or somebody was gonna kill him’. But progress wasn’t quick: in 2013, having served three years, Cameron Douglas’s sentence was extended by another three years when he was found to have taken drugs in prison.

  Kirk Douglas (centre) with his sons in 1987. Left to right: Peter and Joel, both producers, Michael, actor and producer, and Eric, who died of an accidental drug overdose in 2004.

  Occasional parent Orso
n Welles with his daughter Christopher in 1952. Years later a friend of Orson’s told her: ‘He said that even though he hadn’t been a good father to you, you’d been a very good daughter to him.’

  Smoking marijuana intensively as a teenager, Carrie Fisher moved on to hallucinogens and painkillers while making the Star Wars films.

  In the Star’s Shadow

  Apart from talent and luck, actors become stars by being dedicated to themselves and their peripatetic job, which might not leave much time for their families – ‘An actor’s a guy, who, if you ain’t talking about him, ain’t listening,’ said Marlon Brando in 1956. At school, Orson Welles’s daughter, Christopher, yes, his daughter Christopher, refused requests from classmates for her father’s autograph, not out of unwillingness, but, as she wrote, ‘because I had no idea when I would see my father again’. Married decades later, it was still five years before Welles met her husband, whom Welles talked at rather than with, telling anecdotes, as his daughter remembered, ‘that we’d heard before – with greater aplomb – on television’.

  DRUG OVERDOSES

  WHILE HE’D BEEN a popular actor in the 1940s, Alan Ladd’s career had waned by the late 1950s and in 1962 he shot himself in the chest. He survived, but just over a year later, aged 50, he was found dead from an overdose of alcohol and three other drugs. Although his death was ruled as accidental, the suspicion of suicide lingered.