Many overdoses are simply accidental. Dorothy Dandridge, the first African-American actress to be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, died from a pills overdose in 1965, aged 42, while 33-year-old John Belushi died in 1982 from injecting cocaine and heroin. He’d been visited that evening by Robin Williams, who also had a cocaine habit. Williams soon gave up the drug, but in 2006 entered rehab for alcohol addiction.
River Phoenix, A former child star, collapsed, aged 23, outside LA’s Viper Room nightclub with a heart attack brought on by heroin abuse. Heath Ledger died, aged 28, in 2008 from an overdose of prescription pills, some of which had not been prescribed by his doctors.
Coming from a showbiz world where her mother was actress Debbie Reynolds, her father was singer Eddie Fisher and her mother’s best friend was Elizabeth Taylor – for whom Fisher subsequently left Reynolds – Carrie Fisher’s path into movies may not have been difficult, but her path through life has been rocky. From smoking marijuana intensively as a teenager, she moved on to hallucinogens and painkillers while making the Star Wars films and has been diagnosed as suffering from depression. However, while her later acting work has only been occasional, she has used her, at times, traumatic life as raw material for a second career as a candid writer. ‘The symptoms are sexual promiscuity, excessive spending and substance abuse,’ she says of her bipolar disorder. ‘I know – that’s a fantastic weekend in Vegas for some people.’
Marlon Brando, despite his obesity, lived until he was 80, but two of his 15 children didn’t see 50. In a drunken row at Brando’s LA home in 1990, his son Christian shot dead Dag Drollet, the boyfriend of Christian’s half-sister Cheyenne. Then, while Christian was serving a prison sentence for manslaughter, Cheyenne lost custody of her child by Drollet and committed suicide, aged 25. Having been released from prison, Christian Brando later pleaded no contest to charges of spousal abuse of his wife Deborah Presley. He was placed on probation and ordered to alcohol and drug rehab. He died of pneumonia in 2008, aged 49.
Garbo understood what was being implied and rather than getting any older on screen, retired from acting after that film. She was 36.
Marlon Brando and his son Christian Brando in court in 1990. Christian later served a prison sentence for drunkenly shooting dead his half-sister’s boyfriend, Dag Drollet.
Body Beautiful
One day during the filming of Two-Faced Woman (1941), its star, Greta Garbo, saw some of the footage they’d already shot. ‘What on earth is the matter with Joseph [Ruttenberg, the movie’s cameraman]?’ she said. ‘He makes me look so awful!’ After a pause, someone said: ‘Well, Greta, Joseph’s getting older, you know…’ It seems Garbo understood what was being implied and rather than getting any older on screen, retired from acting after that film. She was 36. As Ava Gardner said: ‘Actors get older, actresses get old.’
Following success in silent movies in Sweden in the 1920s, Greta Garbo moved to Hollywood, although at first she spoke no English. There she was a star of silent, and, later, talking pictures, but retired at 36 before her status waned.
Cinema is a cruel business that celebrates youthful beauty. Anne Baxter signed with David O. Selznick at 17, and made more than 40 films in 20 years, being nominated for an Oscar for All About Eve in 1950. ‘Those years between 35 and 45 which should be the filet mignon of one’s life are a “no woman’s land”,’ she said. Baxter kept working, but in smaller roles and in television.
Baxter’s experience remains true today. Major roles for women still dwindle when stars hit their forties, so it’s understandable that when they have their faces projected on to vast cinema screens around the world, they want to look their best.
‘Those years between 35 and 45 are a “no woman’s land”,’ said Anne Baxter. And still today, major roles for women dwindle when stars hit their forties.
But while the general public may want to look like movie stars, many movie stars themselves don’t naturally look like movie stars.
Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey in Dirty Dancing. A few years after the film had established her, Grey had a nose job that left her unrecognizable – even to friends.
JEAN SEBERG AND THE FBI’S DIRTY TRICKS
BEST KNOWN FOR her roles in Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (Breathless – 1960) and Bonjour Tristesse (1958), Jean Seberg became a target for the FBI’s counter-intelligence programme in the late 1960s because of her support for the Black Panther Party. Estimating that she’d given $10,500 to the Black Panthers, the FBI tapped her phone. Then, when she was pregnant with her second child in May 1970, they leaked a smear story that African-American Black Panther Hakim Abdullah Jamal was the child’s father rather than Seberg’s husband Romain Gary, a French writer and diplomat of Lithuanian Jewish origin. In the words of the FBI documents, the aim was to ‘cause her embarrassment and serve to cheapen her image with the general public’. That August, Seberg gave birth prematurely to a baby girl, who died two days later. To prove that the child was not mixed race, Seberg held an open-casket funeral and she and Gary (pictured with Seberg) later successfully sued Newsweek magazine for libel.
In August 1979, Seberg, then 40 and living in Paris, committed suicide with an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol. After her death, Romain Gary said that every August, around the time of the death of her daughter, she’d tried to commit suicide. In response to her death, the FBI released documents admitting their role in trying to smear her name, but stated that such tactics were a thing of the past. ‘We are out of that business forever,’ said FBI Director William H. Webster.
Enter the surgeon’s knife. When it comes to plastic surgery, it might be easier to say which actresses don’t appear to have had rhinoplasty – it being suggested that many leading Hollywood actresses, from Angelina Jolie to Nicole Kidman to Gwyneth Paltrow to Halle Berry to Jennifer Aniston and Scarlett Johansson have all had nose jobs – generally quite slight adjustments to give them narrower, less bulbous noses. Among the men, it’s believed that Tom Cruise, Ryan Gosling and John Cusack have all had plastic surgery on their noses. Then there’s Botox to keep the skin wrinkle-free into their forties and injections to plump up lips.
Unfortunately, we notice plastic surgery when it goes wrong, such as Meg Ryan’s trout pout or Jennifer Grey’s nose job. Best known for starring in Dirty Dancing (1987), Grey was a pretty actress with a distinctive, some might say big, nose when, rather oddly given that she was already successful, she had a nose job, giving herself not only a cute nose like so many other actresses in Hollywood, but making her unrecognizable even to close friends. ‘I went in the operating room a celebrity – and came out anonymous,’ she later said. ‘It was like being in a witness protection program.’ She no longer looked like ‘That girl in Dirty Dancing’ and, despite a second operation rectifying the damage done by the first, her career stalled.
‘I went in the operating room a celebrity – and came out anonymous … it was like being in a witness protection program.’
Plastic surgery isn’t something new to Hollywood. Rita Hayworth had her hairline raised and Marilyn Monroe had a slight overbite corrected and her nose pinched. In earlier days, with less sophisticated technology, the surgeons may have been less adventurous and done better jobs. The pre-surgery teenage Monroe was a pin-up, but the Hollywood Monroe was a star.
The Scientology of Tom Cruise
He’s been married to three actresses, but Tom Cruise has still been subject to speculation that he’s gay, though when accusations have been made, he has successfully sued. His married life has also led to some interesting conjectures. How, following his divorce from Nicole Kidman, did he set about finding a new wife? Well, according to journalist Maureen Orth in an article in 2012 in Vanity Fair magazine, the Church of Scientology, in which Cruise is a senior member, began auditioning Scientologist actresses to be Cruise’s spouse. Among these was Nazanin Boniadi, who was already in a relationship with another Scientologist. That is, until the Church persuaded her to end it by showing confiden
tial material from Scientology files about her boyfriend’s misbehaviour.
Told she’d been selected for a secretive Scientologist project, Nazanin Boniadi was flown to New York, where she was introduced to Cruise. They soon began a relationship.
Told she’d been selected for a secretive Scientologist project, Boniadi was flown to New York, where she was introduced to Cruise. They began a relationship where for three months she was seldom alone with him except when they were in bed. Cut off from her family, not allowed to tell her mother whom she was seeing for part of that time, she had to sign non-disclosure agreements, copies of which she never saw.
For some reason, she seemed to fail the test and the relationship abruptly ended, with Boniadi sent from Cruise’s home in LA to Scientology’s Florida centre for treatment. Part of her punishment there was to scrub toilets with toothbrushes. While former members support Boniadi’s stories, the Church of Scientology itself denies them. And if the Church really had been auditioning Scientologists for the role of Cruise’s wife, it seems they gave up. A few months after the relationship with Boniadi ended, Cruise announced his engagement to Katie Holmes, a Roman Catholic.
There is a theory that Tom Cruise and John Travolta, who is also a Scientologist, have never won Oscars because Hollywood is scared of the Church gaining any more power than it already has. Scientology’s Hollywood members are major donors and also a wonderful advertisement for the Church – until the relationship sours. When Paul Haggis, who won Oscars for the screenplays for Million Dollar Baby (2004) and Crash (2005), left Scientology in 2009, he rather undermined the organization’s endeavours to call itself a church when he announced: ‘I was in a cult for 34 years. Everyone else could see it. I don’t know why I couldn’t.’
It has been claimed that after Tom Cruise’s divorce from Nicole Kidman in 2001 (pictured with Cruise), and a subsequent relationship with Penélope Cruz, the Church of Scientology began auditioning among its members for a new wife for the star.
Mickey Rourke ruined his sex symbol looks by taking up his passion for boxing again, but later reconstructive surgery seemed to make things worse. His new appearance, however, worked in his favour for his lead role in The Wrestler.
A STAR’S ENTOURAGE
STARS DON’T ONLY add to the cost of a movie in their pay, but also in the perks they demand – trailers and trainers, assistants and personal chefs, preferred make-up, hair and wardrobe stylists. Plus a number of flights home for them all. How much does all this amount to?
‘Add a third for the shit,’ is a saying from production managers who calculate the nitty-gritty of a film’s budget. As much as that. But then we didn’t really think that stars look that good on screen without any wholesale effort, did we?
‘I was in a cult for 34 years,’ said former Scientologist Paul Haggis. ‘Everyone else could see it. I don’t know why I couldn’t.’
Career Suicides
Twenty-first century teenagers would be hard pressed to believe that Mickey Rourke was a pin-up star in the mid-1980s. So what happened? At the age of 40, he returned to his first love – boxing. The fights, however, led to facial injuries that required extensive reconstructive surgery, remarkably changing his appearance. ‘I went to the wrong guy,’ he said. He no longer had the looks to play a normal leading-man type, but after a few straight-to-video movies, Rourke’s career did revive, allowing him to make a virtue of his oddly reconstructed face in his Oscar-nominated lead role in The Wrestler (2008).
‘It’s like I’ve got a shotgun in my mouth with my finger on the trigger,’ Robert Downey Jr told a judge. ‘And I like the taste of the gun metal.’
Ten years after Mickey Rourke dropped off the radar as an A-list leading man, Robert Downey Jr’s career began to fall apart. Feted as an up-and-coming talented actor in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was then repeatedly arrested on cocaine, heroin and marijuana charges. ‘It’s like I’ve got a shotgun in my mouth with my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gun metal,’ he explained to one judge. Failing to report for drugs tests, he was sentenced to three years at the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison. After one year he was released and returned to work, but was arrested again in 2001 and returned to rehab.
It seemed Downey Jr might not overcome his addictions or that, even if he did, his career would never fulfil its early promise. But not only did it take off again, by 2012 he was the highest-paid star in Hollywood. At first, he struggled – Woody Allen was unable to cast Downey Jr in 2004 because no one would insure him – but, little by little, things picked up, and respected supporting roles were followed by his surprise casting as Marvel Comics’ superhero in Iron Man in 2008. With Iron Man sequels and another hit franchise in the Sherlock Holmes films, Downey Jr, according to Forbes magazine, made $75 million (£49 million) in 2012.
The Egos Have Landed
Movie stars play heroic roles, but becoming accustomed to being pampered by their entourages and their industry, can, at times, make them behave most unheroically. Writer David Mamet has compared movie stars to two-year-olds: ‘a being imagining itself to have vast power, and ignorant of responsibility, enraged by the least human noncompliance as with the broken top that refuses to spin.’
If stars want to take the morning off shooting, they can; if they sense that their trailer is smaller than their co-star’s, they’re not too ashamed to be seen pulling out their tape measure. If Robert Redford isn’t happy, rather than face a confrontation, it is said he’ll disappear. Three days before John Travolta began working with Roman Polanski, they had a falling-out, and, before efforts could be made to repair the damage, Travolta quickly left and the project collapsed.
Unlike the rest of us, says screenwriter William Goldman, stars ‘live in a world in which no one disagrees with them’. And Hollywood lets them get away with bad behaviour because even if the star costs a great deal and their tantrums, sulks or whims add to the budget, they’re still usually worth the investment. With a star playing on his star strengths – Tom Cruise in an action role, Ben Stiller in a comedy, not vice versa – they can guarantee that a film will make more of a splash in its opening weekend, that foreign markets will buy the movie, that distributors will invest in it and that the Press will pay attention. The film may not turn out to be a hit, but the star’s presence increases its chances.
Unlike the rest of us, says screenwriter William Goldman, stars ‘live in a world in which no one disagrees with them’.
When Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith set up their own studio, United Artists, in 1919, Metro’s Richard Rowland said that the lunatics had taken over the asylum. Today’s stars don’t have their own studios: they don’t need to. Unlike the big names under the studio system, they are immensely wealthy, and, not locked into long-term contracts, can instead make massive demands that the studios will indulge. They may be mad and maddening to work with sometimes, but on screen they can be magic.
MAD MEL
‘F**KING JEWS… the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world,’ wasn’t, unfortunately, the rant of an anti-Semitic character Mel Gibson was playing, but the star’s own drunken words when his speeding car was stopped in 2006. Gibson, whose 2004 film The Passion of the Christ was also criticized as anti-Semitic, later apologized for his comments saying they were ‘blurted out in a moment of insanity’. He’d also previously suffered from alcohol addiction, and, while drunk, had made derogatory remarks about homosexuals in an interview in 1991.
The day after Gibson’s drunk-driving arrest, his wife Robyn Moore Gibson filed for divorce. Her settlement was said to be around $400 million. Then, in 2009, Gibson had a daughter with Oksana Grigorieva, before separating the following year, with each subsequently filing a restraining order against the other. Following claims that Gibson had been violent towards Grigorieva, Gibson pleaded no contest to a misdemeanour battery charge.
There was a professional fall-out from Gibson’s behav
iour, too. When his relationship with Grigorieva began to disintegrate, a tape was released of Gibson ranting, which included racist remarks and slurs such as: ‘You look like a f**king pig in heat… if you get raped, it will be your fault.’ While Gibson’s lawyers claimed the rant was edited to make it sound worse than it was, and that Gibson was neither racist nor misogynistic, his agency, William Morris Endeavor, whose chief had earlier publicly criticized Gibson for his 2006 anti-Semitic outburst, dropped him as a client.
The generations meet: 29-year-old Francis Ford Coppola directs 69-year-old Fred Astaire in Finian’s Rainbow in 1968. Where Hollywood studios had once been factories of cinema, when Finian’s Rainbow was made, there were no other films shooting on the Warners’ lot.
VIII
HOLLYWOOD
MODERN HOLLYWOOD
With the passing of the first generation of film-makers, slicker, business-educated money men moved into the studios. But could they balance the equation of Hollywood – making something commercial that is also creative? Where, a century after it was founded, is the power in Tinseltown today? And what might become of Hollywood tomorrow?
‘Escapist movies tell you more about a country than political ones.’
When the studios realized in the 1950s that television would pay to show their movies, they no longer regarded it as a threat and embraced it, with Paramount selling off all its pre-1950 films for $10 million. That was a lot of money, but perhaps leasing the libraries rather than selling their assets would have been a better deal in the long run. Classics such as the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (1933) and Double Indemnity (1944) are now lost to the studio.
Dark History of Hollywood: A Century of Greed, Corruption and Scandal behind the Movies (Dark Histories) Page 17