Sexplosion

by Robert Hofler

  Edith Head was much more worried about the vulgar part than the outrageous part. She’d designed costumes for a few hundred movies during her four-decade career in Hollywood. If the two female stars of Myra Breckinridge weren’t speaking to each other, their costume designers were. One day, Head asked the other costume designer on the picture, “Thea, do you think we’re working on a dirty movie?”

  “Yeah, I think we are,” replied Van Runkle.

  That conversation took place on the day of the orgy. The scene created such a stir on the Fox lot that Welch, who wasn’t scheduled to perform, went so far as to cancel her hair appointment so she could watch the shoot. Mae West did more than watch; since she had script approval, she wrote herself an entrance to the orgy: “Oh, this must be what’s called letting it all hang out!”

  “The set was closed, but it was the hottest thing in Hollywood if you could get onto the Fox set that day,” Rex Reed later reported in Playboy. “There was one girl walking around, a suit drawn on her body, with four sequins pasted on for buttons. A man in an Indian hat had pinned an enormous fur contraption over his genitals. A singer named Choo Choo Collins wore nothing but a polka-dot bikini painted on her body. There was a man in a jockstrap with a fingerlike thing hanging down from his crotch. A group of nudes stood around a grand piano singing ‘The Star Spangled Banner,’ and there was one man in a bra and panties and another in a half-slip.”

  Since West came armed with her own one-liner, Sarne also let his extras improvise their dialogue for the orgy. “Do you masturbate in the shower?” one girl asked. “Let’s burn all the pubic hair off her body with lighter fluid,” said another.

  Visitors to the set that day included Robert Fryer, who hadn’t spoken to Sarne in weeks, telling Variety, “We just disagree on everything.” Fryer, who tried to have Sarne replaced by Hair director Tom O’Horgan, arrived at the orgy with two executives from Fox in tow, and as the three of them looked out over a sea of naked bodies, one of the suits remarked, “Well, it’s a today picture.”

  “Bullshit!” Fryer harrumphed. “Midnight Cowboy didn’t have pubic hair and filth in it.”

  DESPITE HIS RESERVATIONS, THE beleaguered producer of Myra Breckinridge was in good company that autumn. Just two weeks shy of their first wedding anniversary, Jackie and Aristotle Onassis attended a midafternoon screening of I Am Curious (Yellow) at the Cinema 57 Rendezvous on West Fifty-Seventh Street in Manhattan, the same theater where Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls once played. Vilgot Sjöman’s film about a very sexually active young woman named Lena had become a cause célèbre when the U.S. Customs Office seized I Am Curious (Yellow), deeming it obscene. If the movie itself didn’t appeal to prurient interests, the legal proceedings did, and Grove Press, the film’s distributor, publicized the court case up until the day the Supreme Court found the movie not obscene. Finally, I Am Curious (Yellow) was allowed to play in Manhattan, and Mr. and Mrs. Onassis were there on October 5 to buy tickets to watch, among other things, an actress kiss her costar’s flaccid penis. Jackie and Aristotle arrived in separate cars, and it wasn’t until she left the Rendezvous theater halfway through the movie that photographers, alerted by the theater’s management, blinded her with flashbulbs. Mel Finkelstein, a Daily News photographer, tried to take photos of the former first lady inside the lobby. Outside the theater, he continued his quest when, according to Finkelstein, “she grabbed my right wrist . . . put her leg out and flipped me over her thigh.”

  A Rendezvous doorman told a slightly different story. He said that Finkelstein tripped taking a photograph of Mrs. Onassis, who was wearing a short leather skirt, dark stockings, a ribbed sweater, and a multicolored scarf with zodiac signs tied over her hair. With Finkelstein splayed out at her feet, she walked down the street, turning I Am Curious (Yellow) into one of the most successful foreign-language films of 1969.

  Aristotle Onassis stayed behind in the theater to watch the entire film undisturbed, leaving an hour after his wife, at which time he was accompanied by two bodyguards. Photographers did not hang around the theater to record his exit.

  I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW) was well on its way to grossing $20 million in the United States alone. Russ Meyer’s soft-core Vixen, made the year before for only $26,500, had already grossed $6 million. That phenomenal forty-to-one return on investment was second only to Gone with the Wind’s success, according to the Wall Street Journal, and that was good enough for Twentieth Century Fox, which had recently lost millions on such big-budget turkeys as Dr. Dolittle and Hello, Dolly! Whether it was respectable money or not, the studio needed to tap into some of that low-risk lucre.

  As the Myra Breckinridge shoot wound down in December—“Everyone has quit three or four times,” said Richard Zanuck; “I think I’ve quit once or twice myself as studio chief”—Fox geared up a sequel to its 1966 hit The Valley of the Dolls. Since King Leer, otherwise known as Russ Meyer, had performed the box-office miracle of Vixens, Zanuck and David Brown thought he could direct Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Its shooting schedule overlapped only slightly with that of Myra Breckinridge, but for those two weeks, from December 2 to 18, the air on the Fox lot was redolent with the scent of burning marijuana despite Mae West’s contractual decree that no one be allowed to smoke, not even cigarettes, anywhere near the set of her picture.

  Hollywood’s old-timers were aghast that Twentieth Century Fox, the once-proud studio of All About Eve and The Grapes of Wrath, had descended to making a Russ Meyer skin flick. Not that Meyer had any intention of turning himself into Joseph Mankiewicz or John Ford the minute he arrived on hallowed studio ground to direct the sequel to The Valley of the Dolls. “It seemed to me it presented a good basis for a teenage soap opera,” he said of his first studio film.

  It wasn’t a sequel. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was only a title. As Meyer was quick to point out, “The previous film didn’t leave us many characters to deal with. Two of the three leading women appeared to be killed off, though Patty Duke only collapsed on the street.”

  A chubby twenty-seven-year-old film critic from Chicago had the honor of writing the script to the title, and his one-line synopsis summed up why he got the job. “It’s a camp sexploitation horror musical that ends in a quadruple ritual murder and a triple wedding,” Roger Ebert told Time magazine. It helped that Ebert also shared Meyer’s major passion in life, but with a twist.

  “I’ve considered full and pendulous breasts the most appealing visual of the human anatomy,” Ebert revealed. “Russ saw them differently, somehow considering a woman’s breasts part of her musculature.”

  The movie’s triple-wedding centerpiece was Ebert’s idea, and the quadruple ritual murder was something he ripped from the headlines that summer as soon as he got to Hollywood, the Charles Manson “family” having killed Sharon Tate and others. None of which had anything to do with Jacqueline Susann’s The Valley of the Dolls, especially after her two attempts at writing a sequel had met with the same success at Fox as Gore Vidal’s two Myra Breckinridge scripts. But quadruple ritual murder, together with a big wedding, sure sounded like good box office.

  Ebert’s script boasted no fewer than eleven principal characters and “eighteen couplings,” said Meyer. He especially liked the couplings. “20th is letting me film stronger sex stuff for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls than I’ve ever put in my movies,” he told reporters. “But I’m covering myself with plenty of cutaway shots on the bed scenes in case they chicken out later.”

  They didn’t.

  As the filming progressed, Meyer noticed a “current of confidence” growing among the crew; in his expert opinion, they saw that he knew what he was doing. It helped, too, when Richard Zanuck stopped him on the streets of the back lot to say, “The rushes look damn good.” It converted a few Fox executives into believers, even those who didn’t considered Myra Breckinridge a “today” picture.

  Nothing would be more today than the violent rock ’n’ roll story that Ebert delivered. Just one week into shooting Beyond
the Valley of the Dolls, on December 6, the Rolling Stones performed at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival.

  EVEN AT THE END of a normal week, the Altamont Speedway Free Festival would have been a must for Lance Loud. But it had been a really bad week, and more than ever Lance needed a reason to get out of Santa Barbara. There at the local high school a classmate had told him, in front of a roomful of students, “Why don’t you give someone a blowjob behind the bleachers.” And in English class, his assignment to interpret a song hadn’t gone well. He chose the Velvet Underground’s “The Gift,” about a man who mails himself to his girlfriend and gets killed when she opens the box with a sheet-metal cutter. Reciting Lou Reed’s lyrics, Lance pulled out a knife and stabbed the desk. “You took the performance just a little bit too far,” warned his English teacher.

  No wonder Lance needed to unwind at the upcoming Altamont rock festival. He left Santa Barbara High School that Friday afternoon with his good friend Kristian Hoffman, son of the heiress to the Knudsen dairy fortune, and rather than a quick stop at their respective homes, they wasted no time, heading up north on Highway 101 to Tracy, a town fifty miles to the east of San Francisco. Actually, they weren’t going to Tracy but rather the nearby Altamont Speedway, a race track that had opened three years earlier. The Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead were hosting a rock concert there that was being touted as Woodstock West, and featured other rock groups as well, among them Jefferson Airplane and Santana.

  Looking back at his friendship with Lance, Kristian recalled that he was the one with the car, a green Volkswagen bug. “I was conscripted as his chauffeur for these wonderful adventures,” said Kristian. “Lance had this sense of destiny, of being where precisely you were meant to be. Lance took that hunger and turned it into reality. If you were lucky enough to spend part of that quest with him, you didn’t question it—his intent and charisma were so powerful that you were a helpless convert to his belief in that sense of place. He believed there was this moment that was waiting for him, and one had to do anything—one had to abuse your wit, your soul, and any small skill you had—to rise to and grasp that moment.”

  The moment to be seized that particular Friday night was Altamont.

  “Lance and I found this crazy field in the middle of nowhere,” said Kristian. “We brought our sleeping bags, and got there the night before. We were by this cyclone fence. They didn’t let you in.”

  Suddenly, amid the rolling, parched hills of a cattle field, Lance and Kristian were engulfed in a stampede of not cows but people as they rushed the fence, breaking through it and running to the stage. Like it or not, Lance and Kristian barely had time to grab their sleeping bags. “Hey, you dropped this!” someone shouted at Kristian. There in the melee, a man had taken the time to retrieve Kristian’s wallet with all his money and a gasoline credit card. “It was a very hippie moment for this guy to tell me I’d lost my wallet, and for him to return it to me in the middle of that huge surging crowd,” he recalled.

  Fortunately, that minor detour in their journey to Altamont did not prevent Lance and Kristian from securing a spot on the ground very near the stage. While the Rolling Stones arrived five hours late, the Hells Angels appeared right on schedule as they proceeded to drive over people with their motorcycles and clobber skulls with pool cues. Concertgoers taking pictures had their cameras opened up and emptied, and at one point in the ensuing riot, Kristian found himself on the ground with his feet in the air as Lance tried to prevent people from stepping on him. “It was a moment like we’re in Vietnam,” said Kristian. “It was horrifying, scary, adrenaline-pumping—the most transformative event in my life.”

  Mick Jagger, surrounded onstage by Hells Angels, thought it was pretty intense, too. “Either those cats cool it or we don’t play,” he warned the increasingly unruly crowd. An Angel in black leather backed him up: “Do you all want to go home or what?

  Jagger mused, “Every time we get to a number, something happens.”

  What happened is that someone pulled a gun and an Angel stabbed the man in the back and neck, but the man died before a helicopter could airlift him away. Horrified at the violence—in addition to the homicide, there were three accidental deaths and dozens of injuries—the Grateful Dead quickly withdrew from the concert, never to appear at Altamont. Amid the mayhem, Lance and Kristian somehow were able to record a new Stones song.

  Back in Santa Barbara, the two teenagers quickly added “Brown Sugar” to the sizable repertoire of songs they’d written for their garage band. People who heard those songs weren’t that impressed, Kristian recalled. “But everyone said we really had something with that ‘Brown Sugar.’ ”

  IF ANYTHING, THE ALTAMONT homicide made Warner Bros. even more wary of Performance—and they pushed the Mick Jagger picture even further back on the shelf, if that were possible. The studio executives were sweating enough over the release of Luchino Visconti’s The Damned, which the studio found almost as controversial. At least that story, a roman à clef of Germany’s once-powerful Krupp family, made dramatic sense, unlike the narrative jumble that was Performance. But the movie executives were making demands on Visconti. As the Italian director complained to his star, Dirk Bogarde, “I have bad news. From the Warner Brothers in America. They like very much our film but they wish to make more cuts in it than I agreed. They will butcher me, my work, everything for the dollar. I hate this business: it is always the money. Will the film be understood in Wisconsin?”

  Too well, the Warners executives feared.

  To depict the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler’s 1934 purge of the SA (Sturmabteilung, or “brownshirts”), Visconti staged the prelude to those multiple assassinations by the SS as one long drunken brawl that began with a drag show and a nude frolic in the lake and ended with a gang rape of a beer maid and multiple homosexual assignations—and, of course, lots of naked, blood-splattered male bodies and a slow pan to Dirk Bogarde’s smoking gun and angst-ridden face.

  Warners ultimately forced Visconti to cut more than five minutes from the extended Knives episode.

  But there was plenty more where that came from. Even in its bowdlerized state, The Damned offered an operatic brew of incest, transvestism, homosexuality, rape, and child molestation that only a story ripped from the pages of the Bible—or the diaries of some Nazi—could get away with. Visconti even introduced a character that took the kitchen-sink approach to sex. Not only did Helmet Berger’s Nazi have sex with a male servant in his family’s baronial estate; he also kept a mistress in the city, molested two little girls, raped his mother, and, to tweak his steel-magnate grandfather’s moral outrage, dressed up in Marlene Dietrich drag.

  At least when it came to Dietrich, Warners didn’t pull back. Ready for a Christmas release, they wrapped the film in that Blue Angel aura, using the cross-dressing Berger as its poster image together with the tagline: “He was about to become the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany.”

  Adding to the onscreen sexual frisson was the offscreen romance: The sixty-three-year-old Visconti had taken the twenty-five-year-old Berger as his lover. Theirs was a colorful pairing, especially after the director said of his lover that he visually embodied the “demonic, insane, and sexually perverted.”

  Visconti left all that perversion intact onscreen, but played the studio game elsewhere by making a few judicious cuts. According to Bogarde, he had his motives.

  “Visconti wondered if he made more cuts to The Damned if Warners would agree to let him make Death in Venice,” the actor wrote in his memoir. Indeed, Warners green-lit Death in Venice. Visconti’s cuts to The Damned had nothing to do with that decision, however, and everything to do with the surprisingly good box office for The Damned. In New York City, the film opened right before the year-end holidays. “We were the hit of the season and Visconti put it down to the fact that New York was a predominantly Jewish city (as were many of its critics),” reported Bogarde, “and the film was splendidly anti-German.”

  CHAPTER NINE


  Winter 1970, Outrage

  Twentieth Century Fox wasn’t the only studio going through the dry heaves of near-bankruptcy. Warners’ financial straits led it to acquire a new, better-heeled partner. The executives of Kinney National Services, expert in the matters of paper towels and parking lots, were immediately intrigued by the name Mick Jagger, and wanted to see Performance, which was buried in a vault and forgotten somewhere in the concrete and asphalt of Burbank. They found the film. They screened it. They liked what they saw. “Doors started opening and money to flow again,” said the film’s producer, Sandy Lieberson.

  Suddenly, Performance looked almost mainstream. Almost. Redolent with sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, and violence, the film now possessed a prescient glow when viewed in the aftermath of the Rolling Stones/Hells Angels/Altamont murder and Charles Manson’s mangling of the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” lyrics to reference a racial-war apocalypse. Rock music and violence were a marriage made in tabloid heaven.

  A preview screening of Performance in New York City signaled a big hit. Young music journalists and film aesthetes, psyched by Hollywood’s embrace of edgier fare like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider in the previous decade, proved the ideal audience. Too ideal, perhaps, to be an accurate gauge of the film’s future success at the box office.

  A much older, less rock-savvy crowd three thousand miles away in Santa Monica, California, presaged the film’s eventual commercial defeat. “Most of the audience ran screaming out of the theater,” said director Donald Cammell. “I don’t think you could have a much better reaction than that. I was enjoying it in the back of the theater with my employers, the authorities—the Warner Bros. fuzz.”