The film’s director didn’t mean to be ironic. He reveled in being the trailblazer, the provocateur, the hornet in the studio ointment. Buoyed by the New York response, Cammell dreamed of cult status for his long-gestating baby.
The Warner Bros. fuzz, on the other hand, simply saw a box-office disaster, and it didn’t help when the MPAA slapped an X on Performance, as much for its violence as its sex. The Rolling Stone reviewer pretty much concurred with that ruling, writing: “This is a weird movie, friends. . . . Use Only As Directed. One of the attributes of evil is ugliness and on one level Performance is a very ugly film. Hallucinating though it may be, I would not recommend viewing it while tripping.”
In 1969, the X didn’t hurt Midnight Cowboy.
In 1970, the X meant pornography. Even so, Americans saw more than the Brits did when the film opened across the Atlantic, where the censors excised a few minutes. Most of the lost footage had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the scene in which James Fox and his cohorts torture a gangster’s limousine driver. The BBFC’s Sir John Trevelyan wrote that the scene was “brilliantly shot by Nicolas Roeg,” but violence-wise it was “worse than any that I had seen before. We had to cut it, and, although our cuts were strongly resisted, we insisted on them; even in its modified form the scene was shocking.”
If Cammell would remember the disastrous Santa Monica preview with perverse delight, Roeg had his own guilty pleasure when it came to seeing his work trashed. For several months after the film’s release, he carried Richard Schickel’s pan review from Life magazine in his coat pocket.
Performance turned into an obsession for Schickel and his middlebrow, status-quo-pandering publication. When he reviewed Gimme Shelter, the Maysles brothers’ documentary on the 1969 Stones tour and the Altamont murder, the clairvoyant Schickel saw Mick Jagger’s future, and it didn’t include the rocker’s footprints in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. “Finally, one imagines he will withdraw physically, as he already has psychologically, from his public—just as the character he played in Performance did,” Schickel wrote of Jagger.
First, James Fox, who continued his Christian missionary work in South America. Now it would be Mick Jagger’s turn to retreat from a film career, as evidenced by the one-two blowout of Performance and Altamont. The most notable casualty of the rock star’s turnabout was Lieberson and Cammell’s film adaptation of Michael McClure’s The Beard, a snippet of which had achieved minor movie immortality in Agnès Varda’s Lions Love. The play, about a sexual encounter in hell between Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow, had already been busted fifteen times in Los Angeles alone due to its graphic depiction of oral sex. In London, the Royal Court Theatre converted into a private club to be able to stage the show, just as it had done with John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me.
Cammell savored the challenge of bringing The Beard to the screen. “I discovered that I shared one or two fetishes with Michael McClure,” revealed the director, who claimed a personal identification with Jean Harlow, as well as Billy the Kid. “It’s not necessarily a war,” he said of the characters’ love-hate relationship. “You can see the consummation of it as being an orgasm. If you look at the whole play as being a fuck, then the seduction at the end of the play corresponds with the orgasm at the end of a sexual encounter.”
Cammell couldn’t wait to make The Beard.
Jagger could. After the twin nightmares of Performance and Altamont, he retreated from another brush with filmmaking for the remainder of the decade.
With little fanfare, Paramount Pictures unveiled its utterly incompetent screen adaptation of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer that February, and despite its being the first major American release to feature the word “cunt” (uttered several times by narrator Rip Torn, and taken verbatim from Henry Miller’s much-banned novel) and the pubic hair of Ellen Burstyn (best known heretofore as a showgirl on The Jackie Gleason Show) the film played only one week in one theater, according to its godfather, Paramount Pictures’ head of production. Robert Evans had made a bet with his old friend Henry Miller, wagered over two games of Ping-Pong, that Tropic of Cancer could not be made into a movie. Evans, as well as Paramount, lost that bet.
LIKE SO MANY ONCE-TABOO subjects, blowjobs continued to present sizable problems for filmmakers in 1970.
At Twentieth Century Fox, Michael Sarne was having his own tussle with a scene in which Raquel Welch’s Myra had been assigned the improbable task of performing oral sex on Rex Reed’s Myron. His solution involved getting the studio to give him the run of its film archives, and it was Sarne’s idea to insert a number of classic black-and-white vignettes from old movies into the most colorful action of Myra Breckinridge. The inserts, working as comic comment, would lighten the graphicness of certain scenes. At least, that’s what he told them at Fox. Of special concern was not only the scene in which Myra penetrates a young man named Rusty with a strap-on dildo, but the moment when Myra miraculously goes down on herself as a man. Sarne found an old Fox movie in which the young Shirley Temple milks a goat and squirts herself in the face by mistake. He plugged that old gem into the Myra/Myron blowjob scene and nearly laughed himself into a coma.
The scene was also a favorite for the preview audience of three thousand gay men in San Francisco, where Fox chose to test Myra Breckinridge. In homage to Mae West and other legendary ladies of the silver screen, a number of moviegoers in attendance that night dressed up as their favorite star of the opposite sex. According to Sarne, the screening was everything he, David Brown, and Richard Zanuck could have hoped for. Then little Shirley milked her goat.
“At that point the fucking theater exploded. It went ‘Boom!’ like an atom bomb,” said Sarne. “Zanuck is holding his sides—he can hardly sit in his seat . . . the gays were loving it—everybody was loving it.”
Testing Myra Breckinridge with a bunch of gay guys in Frisco was a little like testing Performance with a bunch of stoned rock journalists in Manhattan.
Neither demographic is a general moviegoing audience.
A few days later, back in Los Angeles, Zanuck was no longer laughing at Myra, Shirley, and the goat. He called Sarne into his office to tell him that the entire blowjob scene had to go.
Sarne wouldn’t hear of it. “Sorry, bubby,” he told his boss. “It’s staying, it’s the best scene in the film, the biggest laugh in the film.” He reminded Zanuck, “In San Francisco, you were pissing yourself laughing. I remember, you had to go to the toilet.”
According to Sarne, Zanuck revealed that no less a person than the president of the United States, Richard Nixon, had called Zanuck’s father, Darryl Zanuck, to complain about the scene. It seemed that little Shirley Temple had grown up to be a delegate to the United Nations. “And that it’s got to go,” Zanuck demanded.
THE OTHER BLOWJOB BALLYHOO that February involved, of all revered organizations, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. The people who gave out the Oscars were petitioning John Schlesinger to cut the Jon Voight/Bob Balaban encounter from Midnight Cowboy. Schlesinger’s “dirty” picture had been blessed with seven Oscar nominations that winter, including one for best picture, and the Academy did not think it becoming to have one of its nominated films carrying the suddenly sullied X rating. The MPAA announced that it would give Midnight Cowboy the less restrictive R rating—if the blowjob scene disappeared.
Schlesinger kept it simple. “No way,” he said.
MIDNIGHT COWBOY’S JON VOIGHT and The Damned’s Helmut Berger found themselves in competition with each other at the 1970 Golden Globes, for the Most Promising Newcomer Award. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which gives out the honors, is an organization of journalists who write about films and otherwise spend their weekends at press junkets held in posh hotels around the world, where they interview movie actors and eat free food and drink free wine provided by the motion picture companies. Although Berger didn’t exactly talk about his ongoing relationship with Luchino Visconti, he also didn’t exactly hide h
is sexual orientation when it came to promoting his performance as a Nazi degenerate in The Damned.
“I am somewhat of a devil. I can’t help it. It’s the way I live,” he told one journalist. “I must experience everything at least once. It’s my curiosity and also my needs. I’m not different from a lot of men, but I admit what and who I am and what and who I need. I now have a very lovely girlfriend, Marisa Berenson. Maybe you saw us on the cover of Vogue? She understands me and what love is all about. She is not shocked because I need a man I love and I also need a woman I love! Does that shock you?”
Berger’s admission might have shocked—or perhaps, disgusted—Dr. David Reuben. His how-to manual Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) had recently risen to the top of the bestseller lists. In addition to advising readers on such topics as oral sex and the joys of consecutive rather than simultaneous orgasms, the doctor got very graphic on the subject of homosexual males and the various objects they engorged in their respective anuses; these were acts of self-abuse, wrote the doctor, that often required the aid of emergency-room medics when it came to removing these makeshift dildoes. Unfortunately for Dr. Reuben, no less a personage than Truman Capote took note of the book’s strange fixation on homosexuality, and when the bestselling doctor unceremoniously canceled an engagement on The Dick Cavett Show to appear instead on the rival Tonight Show (“Dr. David Reuben came down with a better engagement,” said Dick Cavett), the Cavett producers quickly booked Capote, a frequent guest, to fill the empty spot. It didn’t take long for Cavett to get his revenge. One of the first questions he asked the author of In Cold Blood was if he had learned anything from reading Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex. Capote said no, then he attacked, saying the book had “one whole chapter on homosexuality of which not one word is true.” The censors at the ABC network went into overdrive and bleeped out most everything else Capote had to say that night, which sent the studio audience into paroxysms of shocked laughter. “Oh, you’re ornery tonight!” Cavett said with a smile.
Shocked or just plain ornery, the Golden Globes voters gave their coveted award to Jon Voight, not Helmut Berger.
CHAPTER TEN
Spring 1970, Kisses
John Schlesinger decided not to attend either the Golden Globes or the Academy Awards, even though he’d been nominated as best director by both confabs. On the evening of April 7, otherwise known as Oscar night, the director remained in London with boyfriend Michael Childers, who had put his Oh! Calcutta! connection to good use and been hired by Kenneth Tynan to be the National Theatre’s staff photographer, the first American to hold that position. Schlesinger didn’t expect to win the Oscar—he’d already lost the Golden Globe to Charles Jarrott, director of Anne of the Thousand Days. And besides, he was too busy to make the brutal twenty-four-hour round-trip flight to Hollywood and back. He was well into production on Sunday Bloody Sunday, and for him, it was a very personal project.
As Schlesinger explained it, the film’s genesis went back to the early 1960s when he was directing his first play for the Royal Shakespeare Company, which was a one-act play by John Whiting, author of The Devils. “I had a very intense affair with one of the actors, a man who was bisexual,” Schlesinger recalled. “We had a lot of fun and liked each other enormously, but I was more smitten than he was, and something told me that this might be something that I shouldn’t pursue, I don’t know why, but I did anyway.”
What gave the story a twist suitable for retelling onscreen was that Schlesinger’s boyfriend had another lover: an actress. It was a terribly unconventional yet somehow comfortable arrangement. “We laughed so much at the situation together,” said Schlesinger. “Then he’d go off the next weekend with his girlfriend,” whom the director later cast in one of his films.
Essentially, that was the story of Sunday Bloody Sunday—with minor adjustments of poetic license: A fiftyish doctor and a thirtyish career woman share a twentyish bisexual artist. No studio wanted the project, which Schlesinger had been working on since 1966, one full year before Britain’s Sexual Offences Act legalized homosexuality between consenting adults. His collaborator on Sunday Bloody Sunday was Penelope Gilliatt, who, as film critic for The New Yorker, had trashed his first two films, A Kind of Loving and Billy Liar. The success of Darling changed her mind about Schlesinger’s considerable talents, and it helped, too, that he liked her novel A State of Change, about a ménage à trois. She and he weren’t friends, but they were effective working partners, even though he occasionally did refer to Gilliatt as “that cunt.”
The film was both easy and difficult to cast. After Larry Kramer showed him a rough cut of Women in Love, Schlesinger immediately cast Glenda Jackson. He liked her intensity and thought she’d bring real backbone to his long-suffering Alex, whom he didn’t want to come off as a masochist.
Casting the role of the confirmed homosexual Dr. Daniel Hirsh proved the more arduous task. Paul Scofield, who’d recently won an Oscar for portraying Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, was offered the role. Once a saint, never a sinner, Scofield refused. He sent Schlesinger a simple letter of rejection. “I don’t suppose you want to know the reasons that I don’t want to do this,” he wrote.
Schlesinger didn’t need to ask.
Alan Bates, whom Schlesinger directed in A Kind of Loving and Far from the Madding Crowd, agreed to play the Hirsh role, then quickly discovered he had other commitments. With production about to commence, Schlesinger finally went with Ian Bannen, an original member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. The results were disastrous. Even the auditions proved a trial for the forty-one-year-old Scottish actor.
Hiram Keller, fresh from Fellini Satyricon and Hair on Broadway, was one actor who tested to play Bob, the young male bisexual. He tested twice for the role, both times with Bannen. Schlesinger kept telling Keller, “Play it for real love and sympathy.”
Keller didn’t see it that way. “If I were in that position and I was sleeping with a man and a woman at the same time and I had told them both about it, obviously, I’d be some sort of a little hustler and I’d be playing them both off for sex,” said the actor.
Schlesinger definitely didn’t see it that way. The auditions proved that Keller wasn’t the right actor—nor was Bannen, who had to be well lubricated with gin to play the homosexual love scenes, even when auditioning. Schlesinger had to tell him, “Look, Ian, this is not your test. I’ve already signed you. This is Hiram’s test. Can’t you straighten up enough to help Hiram?”
The problem wasn’t Bannen’s being an uptight heterosexual; rather, he was an uptight homosexual who’d spent a long, distinguished career trying to convince directors, playwrights, producers, and audiences that he could be convincing in heterosexual roles. Suddenly, he was being asked to play a homosexual, and he just couldn’t do it.
“Ian wasn’t free and out enough to act this part,” said Michael Childers. “He just froze up. We thought the studio might cancel the film.”
Schlesinger had no choice but to fire the actor, although the report to the press was that Bannen had developed viral pneumonia. Producer Joseph Janni put out a frantic calls to an agent, Olive Harding, who in turn phoned her client Peter Finch in Rome. “You must fly to London at once, Peter,” she ordered. “Joe Janni and John Schlesinger are in a mess. An actor has fallen ill and they want you to come and play Daniel Hirsh in Penelope Gilliatt’s Sunday Bloody Sunday.”
Finch had already read the script and passed on it. Besides, he hated airplanes and didn’t want to fly back to London. He also repeated his other major reservation. “I’m not a queer,” he told his agent.
“No, dear,” said Harding, “but I’d like to see you play one to prove you are an actor.”
Back in London, having overcome his fear of flying, Finch met with Schlesinger and Childers at the Sloan Square Hotel. It was a nice tea—until Childers brought out his camera and started taking pictures of Finch. The actor waved away the photographer.
�
��Dear John,” Finch began, “I’m here in front of you. If you think I look too old, just say so. I’m right in front of you.”
After just one day of shooting with Finch, Schlesinger could finally relax. “That’s exactly what I wanted for the part: a pair of open arms,” Schlesinger said of the actor’s performance. There was no method about it. “Peter plunged right into his part and there was no time to talk it over with him. He knew the character in some way without, I think, ever having experienced any of it.”
Sunday Bloody Sunday filmed at the Bray Studios, where they also made the Hammer horror films. The cast and crew had the place to themselves, and, as Schlesinger recalled, “we became like one big family,” with no interference from United Artists despite the long six-month shoot.
If there was any bump in the production, it was “the Kiss,” as Schlesinger put it, shared by the doctor and his young lover, Bob. The scene occurs early in the film, right after Bob has momentarily left his girlfriend, Alex, to make an impromptu visit at the doctor’s home. In fact, the problem with the Kiss started even before Bannen.
Gilliatt and Schlesinger vehemently disagreed on how the Kiss should be presented. “I didn’t think that it should be portrayed with any kind of apology,” said Schlesinger. Gilliatt, on the other hand, wanted it done in a long shot, with the two male actors kissing in silhouette. “I wanted the doctor to greet his lover, as if it were the normal thing to do.” Schlesinger insisted, “If we start putting it in silhouette and long shot, it’s a special pleading and coy.”
He was the director. She was the writer. He won.
Gilliatt wasn’t the only one with reservations.
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