Out on location Brando out-Leaned David Lean, waiting hours for the right kind of light or cloud formation before shooting. A two-month schedule dragged on to nearer six, and the budget ballooned from $2m to $6m. Brando was out of control and the studio got nervous, very nervous. In the end the head of Paramount himself, Y. Frank Freeman, arrived on the set to personally read the riot act to Brando, since no one else could summon up the courage. ‘You’re going to see how to deal with Marlon Brando.’ Freeman told his fellow executives.
Marlon was sitting on a fence as Freeman approached, the crew looking on and waiting for the fireworks to begin. ‘Marlon,’ said Freeman. ‘I saw the dailies.’ There was a pause, the tension was unbearable. ‘They’re brilliant. I want to tell you what a great job you’re doing.’ The crew nearly died laughing. Freeman was so intimidated by coming face to face with Marlon, who hadn’t even opened his mouth, he couldn’t say anything bad. ‘Everyone forgets Marlon was a big powerful man,’ says Godfather producer Albert Ruddy. ‘Believe me, you wouldn’t try to push him around; this guy was a boxer, he had fucking arms on him bigger than most people’s legs. No one ever tried to intimidate him. And they didn’t, because his presence overwhelmed them.’
When Brando got back to Hollywood his first cut of the movie ran five hours. Agonising for months trying to trim it down, in the end Marlon gave up and let Paramount make the final edit. The film never found an audience. ‘Marlon admitted to me that he found directing tough, an ass-breaker,’ says Tom Mankiewicz. ‘Very few actors have become really good directors because it’s a completely different deal. You see, when you’re acting, everybody takes care of you; when you’re directing, you have to take care of everybody else. It’s just a totally different job. And Marlon said, “I did the one picture and never again.”’
According to Karl Malden, during the shooting of One-Eyed Jacks Brando would have, ‘two steaks, potatoes, two apple pies and a quart of milk’ for dinner, necessitating constant altering of his costumes. Even before he let himself get obese and ballooned up to Hindenburg proportions, over 350 pounds, Marlon’s eating habits were legendary. Close friend Carlo Fiore told how as early as the late fifties and early sixties Brando went on crash diets before shooting movies, but when he lost his willpower would gorge himself on huge breakfasts consisting of corn flakes, sausages, eggs, bananas and cream, and a huge stack of pancakes drenched in syrup. During a birthday party for Brando on One-Eyed Jacks a sign was placed below the cake saying, ‘Don’t feed the director.’ It was an amusing aside, but Marlon’s battle with his weight had only just begun.
Had to shoot me a Mexican.
When Rebel Without a Cause hit cinemas James Dean had been dead for only a month, but the legend was already growing out of control. Elvis Presley saw the film forty-four times; he was obsessed with it and when he came to Hollywood sought Dennis Hopper’s friendship because he’d been close to Dean. After two weeks of hanging out Elvis asked Hopper for some acting advice. He’d just read the script for his debut movie Love Me Tender and saw major problems over a fight scene involving his leading lady. ‘I’ve never hit a woman and I never will,’ Elvis fretted. ‘I don’t know how I’m gonna do that scene.’ Gently Dennis tried to explain. ‘Well, Elvis, we don’t really hit people in the movies. We fake all that.’ Elvis was convinced Dennis was pulling his leg. ‘Yeah, next thing you’re gonna tell me is those ain’t real bullets I see hitting the ground.’ ‘No, Elvis,’ said Dennis, dumbfounded at the pelvis thruster’s utter naivety. ‘I’m gonna let that one slide.’
Not long after Rebel came the premiere of Giant. The studio demanded Dennis take Natalie Wood as his date, but he refused, escorting instead the then unknown and future Mrs Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, who he had the hots for. Afterwards Dennis insisted on taking Joanne home, and then tried to sweet-talk himself through the door of her apartment. Joanne barred the entrance with her arm but Hopper wouldn’t budge. Finally she’d no choice but to physically throw him down the stairs. For years Dennis never figured out why, until Newman told him that he was waiting for Joanne inside that night. ‘I was behind the door. We both had a good laugh.’
Bewildering as it may have been to him that Joanne preferred Paul Newman, female company was hardly a problem for Dennis; there were rumours of romantic trysts with Joan Collins and Ursula Andress. ‘None of these affairs were too serious,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think there was a starlet around who could have been had in those days that I didn’t have.’
With Dean dead, Dennis saw himself as the natural inheritor of his rebellious mantle. He made this very obvious to Dean’s old friend John Gilmore when they bumped into each other again. ‘Dennis was peeing in the long trough in a men’s room on the Warners lot one afternoon. He was coming on very strange, like, fuck Warner Brothers, they’re not gonna tell me what to do, blah, blah. He was doing a Jimmy Dean kind of thing, but it didn’t work at all.’ Dennis was determined to be the new rebel in town and give the executives hell. ‘Only they don’t know it yet,’ he said to Gilmore, wagging his cock in the direction of the front office. ‘But they’re going to find out, man.’
Dennis had plenty to rebel against, like the old-timers who’d been running the movie business for decades and grown fat and complacent on past successes. He was going to give it to ’em, but good. ‘I was temperamental,’ he later confessed. ‘I figured I knew a hell of a lot more about acting than they did. Which was probably true.’ Not just Dean, Hopper also looked to the likes of John Barrymore and Errol Flynn, the rebels of Hollywood’s golden age, and saw that it was a great actor’s responsibility to raise hell. Maybe the studio would take you more seriously the more outrageously you behaved.
Quickly Dennis acquired a reputation as a perfectionist and screwball. When he was late on set one time, according to Gilmore, Warners sent a letter detailing the expense this had cost the studio in the cast and crew having to hang around, a not inconsiderable sum. Dennis framed it. He revelled in his nickname of ‘Dennis the Menace’, bragging that Warners now knew they had another volatile talent on their hands who needed special handling the same as Jimmy Dean.
Not everyone thought this rebellious attitude was a good idea. Jack Nicholson was at a party at Dennis’s house once, listening to the man rant and rave, condemning his paymasters, the fat, useless moguls, and clearly saw that this wasn’t an ideal course of action. When Dennis left the room to find more dope, Jack turned to Gilmore and said, ‘Man, this is suicide! What the fuck’s he doing?’ Other friends felt the same way. Gilmore recalls noticing a silver tray at the home of Rebel screenwriter Stewart Stern that had a peculiar dent in it. ‘Joanne Woodward told me that at a dinner party there one evening she’d become so impatient with Dennis’s “moaning drivel” about cutting Hollywood down to size that she grabbed the tray and smacked him on top of the head as hard as she could, “Hoping in some way,” she said. “To knock sense into him.”’
A head-on collision was inevitable and it arrived when Dennis was loaned out to 20th Century Fox to work for Henry Hathaway on a movie called From Hell to Texas (1958). Hathaway was just the sort of old-school director Dennis abhorred, the kind who didn’t understand, or want to understand, new approaches in acting. ‘I walked off the picture three times,’ said Dennis. ‘I wouldn’t take direction.’ What cheesed off Dennis the most was Hathaway’s habit of telling his actors where to move, how to walk, how to talk. Inspired by Dean, Dennis was now trying to, ‘live in the moment’, do things with his acting without preconceived ideas. ‘Look,’ said Dennis, ‘I’m a method actor. I work with my ears, my sight, my head, and my sense of smell.’ Hathaway must have thought he had a real nutcase on his hands.
On the last day of shooting Dennis decided to make a stand and refused to perform a scene Hathaway’s way. ‘Listen,’ said the director, ‘I own forty per cent of this studio and you’re going to do the scene how I want it.’ It was a battle of wills. Whose would crack first? They started at seven in the morning. By lunch Denni
s was still defiant; by dinner he was still giving Hathaway the finger, doing the lines his way; by 11 o’clock, after eighty takes and fifteen hours, it was Dennis who caved in, physically and mentally drained. In tears, he asked Hathaway how the director wanted him to play the scene. He did it and then walked off the set. Not before he heard, ringing in his ears, Hathaway’s curse: ‘You’ll never work in this town again, kid! I guarantee it!’
Few in Hollywood had ever known a young actor behave like this. In the past the industry forgave unspeakable things in the name of genuine, saleable talent, but the consensus was that Dennis Hopper didn’t have any such talent, so Warners dropped him as quickly as they would a dog-shit sandwich. In the words of studio executives, he was dead meat. ‘I was blackballed, which means the executives call each other and say, don’t hire this kid — he’s a nightmare.’ Dennis didn’t make another Hollywood movie for seven years.
Disillusioned, he headed east to New York, where he stayed with John Gilmore. ‘When he flew in Dennis had this BOAC bag that was half full of marijuana. And he was totally stoned all the time, and drinking, just incredibly stoned.’ His sex drive was enormous, out of control. According to Gilmore, ‘Dennis would stop girls on the street and say. “Hi, I’m Dennis Hopper. Do you wanna fuck?” They’d laugh or just glare with indignation — “Who the hell is Dennis Hopper?”’
A friend of Gilmore thought it might be a good idea to get a couple of nuns from a nearby convent to come by and try and save the soul of Dennis. They arrived decked out in traditional black habits and clutching their rosaries. Out of it on dope and booze, Dennis wasted little time in propositioning the younger of the two sisters to a romp with a ‘live pulse’. Gilmore’s friend stepped in. ‘Excuse me, Sister,’ he said, and picked Dennis up and threw him onto a bed, warning, ‘Don’t move a muscle. I’m escorting the sisters out of here.’ Before leaving the nuns turned to the bedraggled form of Dennis. ‘I can see he’s in pain. We will pray for him.’ Considering what was to befall Dennis over the next couple of decades, they obviously didn’t pray hard enough.
Gilmore continued to see Dennis on and off for the next few years but the two men fell out over a film script and never spoke to one another again. ‘Dennis liked to probably sell the idea that he was this wild Hollywood rebel,’ says Gilmore. ‘He was wild. At parties he’d get weird and piss on the wall, but he really wasn’t a rebel, he was just this self-destructive asshole.’
In New York Dennis studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio and guest starred in the odd TV series, ‘strictly for the bread, man’. More often than not he appeared in the pilot episode, ‘usually as the bad guy who’d get knocked off by the hero before he got his own series’. Most of these shows were westerns, such as Wagon Train, Bonanza and Gunsmoke, and Dennis enjoyed standing in front of mirrors to practise his quick draw. ‘I almost shot my toe off once.’
Mostly he soaked himself in the underground culture of the Big Apple, floating in and out of jazz clubs where the atmosphere of drugs, broads and booze appealed. He met fellow purveyors of decadence, hard drinkers and druggies who, like Dennis, could stay up all night drinking and still be standing upright, just, by dawn. He went beatnik basically, grew his hair long and started a Marlon Brando for President campaign.
Most importantly for his sanity, Dennis discovered a real passion for art and became a self-confessed ‘gallery bum’. Hardly a day went by that he wasn’t wandering around the city’s many art galleries. Frustrated by the deliberate stifling of his film career, Dennis turned to art and photography for creative stimulus, beginning with abstract subjects like walls and landscapes. Dennis was reluctant to photograph people — from his own experience in Hollywood he knew how intrusive a photojournalist’s lens could be — but gradually he began to document with his camera the burgeoning sixties vibe, especially the new bohemians he hung out with, an arty crowd of abstract expressionists and pop-art artists that included Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns. Dennis was at the cutting edge, if you wanted to know something about what the scene was, Dennis could tell you.
So how about making up your mind: are you my girl or aren’t you?
Aside from early forays into television, Warren Beatty managed some theatre, too, and in the summer of 1958 a production took him out to Connecticut, where he met a remarkable young woman destined, like himself, to become an icon — Barbra Streisand. Her plain looks and foghorn nose didn’t put Warren off; far from it, he was quite definitely turned on by the sixteen-year-old high-school student. Finding out where she was babysitting that evening, Warren turned up and they chatted for hours, but his intentions weren’t exactly honourable: he wanted her there and then, nappies or no nappies. Barbra was no pushover and Warren’s pants stayed firmly on. ‘She seemed to be a person of strong moral convictions,’ Warren said later. ‘One of her convictions seemed to be that with the recent loss of my virginity, I might be experiencing too much of a good thing.’ Indeed, it was hands off when it came to Barbra, at least for now.
Ultimately it was theatre that brought about Warren’s big breakthrough, appearing in a touring play in New Jersey at which the first five rows were full of agents. ‘I really thought I was hot shit.’ It was South Pacific director Joshua Logan who first spotted Warren’s talent, along with gay playwright William Inge. Much salivating must have gone on in the stalls when the beauteous Warren entered stage left. Inge, amongst America’s most celebrated playwrights, was, according to Logan, in love with Warren at first sight, gushing, ‘I absolutely must have him,’ a statement that can be given two quite different though probably equally accurate interpretations. It was Logan who had Warren first (professionally, that is), flying him out to Hollywood for a screen test opposite another celluloid virgin, Jane Fonda. The audition was a love scene, ‘We were thrown together like lions in a cage,’ recalled Warren, and it went so well that the young couple were still swapping tonsils long after the director yelled, ‘Cut! Stop! That’s enough!’ As Jane later recalled, ‘We kissed until we had practically eaten each other’s heads off.’
Hollywood was Warren’s kind of town and he was quickly snapped up by MGM, who put him under contract at $400 a week. Flush with money, he checked into the Chateau Marmont off Sunset Boulevard and exploited his sister’s fame by gatecrashing industry parties where he could network and hunt pussy at the same time. His lifetime pursuit of Hollywood’s most glamorous women had begun.
First on the Beatty conveyor belt was British sexpot Joan Collins, who found him, ‘appealing and vulnerable’. Their eyes first met across a crowded restaurant one night in 1959. Dining with Jane Fonda, who, according to Joan, ‘hung on to Warren’s every word’, the Lothario couldn’t help sneaking the odd appreciative peep over at Joan. At one point she returned his gaze and Warren, playing it cool, smiled and raised his glass. They quickly hooked up, and on that first night hit the sack and were still rutting in the early hours of the morning. We know this thanks to Joan’s gleeful confession to a friend that she was amazed at the man’s stamina and that, if Warren kept up such bedroom activity, ‘in a few years, I’ll be worn out’.
It was love, addictive love, for Joan, who was twice suspended by 20th Century Fox, with whom she was under contract, for refusing film roles in order to be with Warren. Considering his sex addiction, which meant they got down to it four or sometimes five times a day, every day, it’s no surprise that Joan never wanted to be out of his sight, presumably fearing that he might end up rutting the sideboard or an innocent maid who had only popped in to turn down the beds. Joan had good cause to worry about Warren’s roving eye: he’d tried to bed starlet Mamie Van Doren, without success. ‘Warren drools a lot,’ Mamie would say of him. ‘He has such active glands.’ Joan observed another habit, that Warren talked on the phone during copulation.
Dating a sex bomb like Joan Collins gave Warren his first taste of celebrity, but his career had stalled. Over at MGM he was picking up his weekly cheque but sitting on his arse doing nothin
g. ‘I felt I was turning into a very large piece of citrus fruit.’ With borrowed money Warren bought his way out of his MGM contract and sought out a mentor. William Inge was only too happy to oblige, casting him in his latest Broadway play A Loss of Roses. Rumours quickly spread backstage that the eager young star did very little to discourage Inge’s obvious infatuation and jealous friends labelled the ageing playwright ‘Warren’s fairy godmother.’ Safe in this position, Warren started throwing his weight around, debating the meaning of the dialogue, showing up late for rehearsals. It got so bad that his co-star, veteran Broadway actress Shirley Booth, quit in protest. The play opened in the winter of 1959 to poor reviews and closed after just three weeks, ending Warren’s first and, as it turned out, only Broadway appearance.
Recovering fast, Warren got a semi-regular role in a new popular TV comedy, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, starring Dwayne Hickman as a girl-chasing teen. Warren played the neighbourhood ‘rich kid’ Milton Armitage, and although he appeared in only six episodes made a lasting impression on Hickman. ‘Warren Beatty has always acted like a movie star, even when no one knew who he was. He had great confidence in himself and seemed assured of his success, and the fact that he wasn’t well known didn’t matter.’
Robert Sellers Page 7