Finishing off his screenplay for The Trip (1967), Jack gave it to Corman. ‘I thought it was terrific,’ says Corman. ‘The only problem was Jack had written stuff that we couldn’t shoot, it was impossible to do. If you’ve taken LSD the images are so phenomenal that there’s no way you can put them on the screen, even if you had all the money in the world. I thought we came pretty close with The Trip, but then the studio took out most of the psychedelic trips that took place and I was really disappointed because they were the core of the film.’
Jack’s script was also enthusiastically received by stars Peter Fonda and Dennis, pot heads and acid takers themselves. Fonda, who’d dropped acid with the Beatles, drove over to Jack’s house to congratulate him personally on producing a script that was, ‘right on the nose’.
Everyone, however, was less sure about Corman’s counterculture credentials. By the director’s own admission he was, ‘the straightest man in a fairly wild group’. So, figuring he couldn’t make a film about LSD without trying it himself, Corman dropped a tab. ‘A whole bunch of other people who were wavering took it with me. We went up to Big Sur, because you’re supposed to take it in a beautiful place. It’s on the coast in northern California. And we had so many people in cars driving up that it became a caravan. We had to schedule the trips, almost like scheduling a motion picture because you always had to have somebody as the designated straight person in case somebody did something that might get out of control.’
Even forty years later Corman can recall the images and emotions he experienced. ‘I remember one of them very vividly, and I was reminded later of the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, because I remember seeing a great sailing ship coming towards me in a red sky and as it came closer the sails turned into jewels, all glittering in the setting sun, and then the sails turned into the curves of a woman’s body. I thought that was kind of a pleasant experience. But that was only one of a continual stream of images, but they weren’t images, you felt that you were in them, that it was reality.’
Jack had written a role in The Trip expressly with himself in mind, that of a hippie guru, but Corman refused to cast him, hiring instead Bruce Dern, who remembers Jack being mightily ‘pissed off’ over the decision. Still, he hung around for the shooting and got pally with Fonda and Hopper, who were given a camera by Corman and sent out to the California desert to capture some weird imagery for the LSD montages, an experience that perhaps whetted their appetites to one day move into direction themselves.
The Trip caused a mild flash of controversy when it opened; amazingly it wasn’t passed by the British censor until 2003, due to the belief that it was an advertisement for drug taking. Jack’s script worked, then.
Listen, man . . . if you want to try anything freaky, you don’t do it with her.
Way back in the early sixties Marlon Brando had become one of the first actor-activists to march for civil rights. Criticised by some as an outsider, another knee-jerk white liberal, others applauded his participation and personal appearances at demonstrations in the Deep South. When Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968 Brando was amongst those who walked through Harlem in a successful bid to calm riotous unrest and even announced that he was temporarily leaving movies to devote himself to the civil rights movement.
His screen abstinence didn’t last long. Maybe it would have been for the best if it had because by the end of the sixties Marlon’s choice of movie roles was making even his staunchest fans scratch their heads in befuddlement. What on earth induced him, for example, to appear as a mystical guru in Candy (1968), a comedy about the sexual misadventures of a naive girl played by Ewa Aulin? In one scene Marlon, dressed in ceremonial robes and with Indian make-up, attempts to seduce Candy and, according to production manager Gray Frederickson, the actress got the shock of her life. ‘The story is that Marlon actually tried to have sex with Ewa for real on camera. I remember she had a bad reaction to it. Well, she freaked out.’
Candy was based on the novel by comic writer Terry Southern, who, towards the end of his life, taught screenwriting classes at Columbia University. One student recalled Southern electrifying a class with a story about a party at Marlon’s house in the sixties. None of the students ever found out if it was true or not — hopefully not — but Southern relayed the story as if it really had happened. ‘Brando’s housekeeper’, he said, ‘miscarried his baby, right there at the party, this right rave-up. So, dig, Marlon scoops the stillborn infant into a coffee cup, and he proffers this mug to all of the guests, instructing them to “taste the zygote”.’
Marlon continued to scrape the barrel with The Night of the Following Day (1968), a suspense thriller that he later claimed ‘made about as much sense as a rat fucking a grapefruit’. Again he clashed with his director, Hubert Cornfield, who accused Brando of trying to seduce his wife and then having the gall to tell him all about his failed effort. By the end Marlon insisted the final scenes were directed by his co-star Richard Boone, as he could no longer stand the incompetence of Cornfield.
Burn! (aka Queimada!, 1969) was another misfire, however appealing the subject matter: colonialism and the exploitation of blacks by whites. As part of his research Marlon met Bobby Seale, a co-founder of the Black Panthers, a group that revolutionised the civil rights campaign in the USA and turned Seale into public enemy number one on the FBI’s computer. Fascinated with the group, Marlon began speaking out in their defence. When Panther members were busted he posted their bail, and even attended the funeral of a fallen comrade. It was to be a brief dalliance; Marlon distanced himself when the group succumbed to radicalisation.
For Burn! it was off to the jungles of Colombia, and pretty quickly things turned nasty. For a start Brando was convinced the indigenous cast and extras were being exploited and mistreated by the filmmakers, which was pretty ironic, given that the film was about exploitation of the Third World. He also suspected that most of the crew were perpetually stoned on the local grass. Next, director Gillo Pontecorvo made Marlon stand in the searing heat in front of a blazing cornfield and perform forty takes of a scene. It was the last straw. Brando made for the airport and only the personal intervention of the crew got him to change his mind and come back. The truce didn’t last long. Feigning illness, Marlon legged it and this time he’d no intention of returning. For months the film was in limbo, until Marlon agreed finally to finish it. He needn’t have bothered, Burn! was a complete flop, his tenth in a row. Hollywood producers were now better disposed to catching a dose of the clap than to hiring Marlon Brando for a movie.
The only way out for me and my people is to either snuff you out or to sell you.
Back to The Trip, which was an important film for Dennis Hopper as well as Jack. In it Hopper played a drug pusher with an eye-catching necklace made from human teeth. Since he was playing a dealer who sells Peter Fonda’s character some acid Dennis thought, quite naturally, that he really ought to try the stuff first. ‘I’d taken peyote pretty early on in life and had a really bad trip. I saw the whole world charred and burned, and people hanging off trees. It was awful, a terrible nightmare kind of thing. So I wasn’t ready to jump into LSD. But I thought I’d better try this before I play the acid dealer. I got some acid from director Bob Rafelson and I took it. And it was an incredible trip. I went back to being a cave man. It was amazing.’ He was recommended to Corman by Peter Fonda, but the director was reluctant to hire him, aware of his reputation. ‘I know Dennis is a good actor,’ he told Fonda, ‘but we’re shooting this picture over three weeks; we just don’t have time for any problems. He’s gotta come in and do the performance.’ All three went to dinner to see if anything could be worked out. ‘And I alluded as tactfully as I could to his reputation,’ says Corman. ‘Dennis understood immediately what I was hinting at. “Roger,” he said, “there will be no problem, I assure you.” And he was as co-operative as any actor I’ve ever seen. He may have caused problems on other pictures, but he understood this was a group of young guys ma
king an inexpensive picture on a subject he himself was involved with and that it was important that he do it right and not do anything to upset the shooting, and he was perfect.’
One scene had Dennis give a two-minute monologue to a group of hippies sitting round him in a circle. Corman didn’t want to hold on Dennis the whole time so gradually moved his camera away from him and around the people in the circle and then back on Dennis at the end. ‘I was concentrating so much on the movement of the camera,’ says Corman, ‘that afterwards I just said print it and we went to the next set up. Dennis sounded fine to me. Then the sound man came to me just before we shot the next scene and said, “I played back that tape and I think Dennis has broken the all-time record for saying the word ‘man’ in one monologue.”’
Dennis was now appearing in big mainstream Hollywood movies, albeit in very minor roles. He got shot pretty early on in the Clint Eastwood western Hang ’Em High (1968) and hardly says a word in the Paul Newman prison classic Cool Hand Luke (1967). Dennis enjoyed recalling that on that picture everyone wore their chains and prison clothes all the time, in restaurants, nightclubs, even slept in them too.
There was also a return match with John Wayne in arguably Duke’s most famous film, True Grit (1969), leading to a legendary story that Wayne chased Hopper around Paramount studios with a loaded gun. It wasn’t quite like that. Wayne used to arrive every morning on set via helicopter, a .45 strapped to his hip, wearing army fatigues. This particular day he wanted to know where ‘that Pinko Hopper’ was hiding. Dennis was indeed hiding, in Glen Campbell’s trailer. The Duke was screaming, ‘My daughter was out at UCLA last night and heard this Black Panther leader cussing, and I know he must be a friend of that Pinko Hopper! Where is he? I want that Red motherfucker!’ So, though not literally ‘running around with a gun’, Wayne was certainly on the lookout for Hopper with a loaded .45 at his side. ‘But I think he wanted to have a political discussion,’ Dennis said, ‘as opposed to committing actual manslaughter! That was just Duke.’
Whenever Dennis landed a leading role, it was in some exploitation or drive-in type movie like The Glory Stompers (1968), where he’s the leader of a motorcycle gang waging war with a rival group. It’s one of Quentin Tarantino’s favourite films and, according to Dennis, he drove the director to a nervous breakdown and ended up taking over the movie. ‘That was my first directorial job.’
Drugs, however, were still an important part of Dennis’s day-to-day existence, but he did draw the line somewhere, refusing to do acid trips with Doors frontman Jim Morrison because ‘he was always blowing every acid trip I was on. Suddenly the police were there because Jim Morrison was bouncing up and down naked on a Volkswagen.’ Ahh, the sixties.
I ain’t good. I’m the best!
After proving that he could be a class actor and producer with Bonnie and Clyde, Warren Beatty became a social gadfly again as the sixties drew to a close, often bumping into old flames at social gatherings. In a Paris restaurant one night he was little more than sandwich filling wedged between wholesome bloomers Natalie Wood and Julie Christie, each desperate to claim his attention all for herself. Reporter Thomas Thompson recalled the evening: ‘The two women threw verbal poison darts at one another from the crudités to the crème caramel. Warren sat uneasily in the middle.’
Warren had the knack of seduction, a talent that made him almost irresistible; he made the woman he was about to go to bed with feel like the most beautiful and desirable woman in the world. And when he flirted with her he did it in such a tender way that she’d melt and do anything he asked for. He tells her she’s fantastic and beautiful, the girl he’s been looking for all his life. You name it, he says it. And he got so good at it, women believed him. It was hard for a woman not to sleep with Warren when he wanted her to. Just ask Tom Mankiewicz. ‘Warren was devastatingly charming with women, especially when he wanted to be; he could turn it on and off like a stereo set. I remember one woman, who has to remain nameless, that I was living with and she was talking about Warren one night and it was so clear that she’d slept with him, and I said, “Jesus Christ, you slept with Warren.” And she said, “I don’t think you understand, everybody has to sleep with Warren. It’s like the mumps or chickenpox, either you do it and you wind up in love with him or you do it and then you’re immune.” It was like that in those days.’
By far Warren’s most noteworthy conquest of the period was Brigitte Bardot, at the time Europe’s number one sex symbol. They met in Paris and quickly became lovers, Brigitte being, if anything, even more sexually brazen than Warren. She probably scared him half to death. This was a woman who told reporters she was looking for a man who could ‘make me vibrate fully as a woman’.
Brigitte was perfect for Warren. Neither was looking for any sort of commitment from the other and so they became occasional fuck buddies, a situation that lasted on and off for the next few years. ‘Warren had a ferocious charm that was impossible to resist,’ she claimed. One memorable evening the couple were invited for dinner with Brigitte’s former husband Roger Vadim and his current wife Jane Fonda. Warren complimented Jane on the excellent gourmet meal she’d served up then, looking over at Brigitte knowingly, announced that he knew of something that tasted even better. ‘In that area,’ said Vadim, ‘Jane is not quite in Brigitte’s class.’ Bardot smiled in satisfaction; Jane was more ready to serve divorce papers than dessert.
It wasn’t just women who were occupying Warren’s time; politics was beginning to take a firm hold on him, growing eventually into a consuming passion that preoccupied him for months and sometimes years at a time, severely curtailing his film output. When in 1968 Robert Kennedy denounced America’s involvement in Vietnam and declared his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination Warren was amongst the first of Hollywood’s liberals to offer his support. After his brutal slaying an outraged Warren became a vocal gun-control advocate. He spoke to a large crowd before a football game, but they didn’t take kindly to an actor who’d just made a film about gangsters lecturing them on the perils of owning a rifle. As someone rather succinctly put it: ‘Here was Clyde Barrow himself, blathering on about gun control, when only recently we’d watched Faye Dunaway caressing his rod.’
For a time, Julie Christie accompanied Warren on some of his gun-control lectures. They’d met again in San Francisco, where Julie was filming Petulia. Being fully aware that she was still in a serious relationship with the artist Don Bessant didn’t stop Warren begging her to go out with him, describing how he wanted to do something less selfish with his life besides the soulless and single-minded pursuit of women and fame. Don’t knock it, it worked. Eventually she caved in and, you never know, Warren might even have meant it! After Petulia was in the can they ran off to Mexico and Bessant was history. Back in LA Warren rented a house that he and Julie could share, but refused to give up his suite at the Beverly Wilshire, in whose corridors Julie was sometimes spotted wearing a see-through white cotton sari.
Warren’s suite at the Beverly Wilshire has passed into Hollywood folklore. It comprised three penthouse rooms and was aptly named El Escondido (‘The Hideaway’). For such a meticulous person in habits and outlook, the place was a tip: half-eaten room-service sandwiches adorned most surfaces, books, scripts and unopened mail lay in heaps. British playwright Trevor Griffiths, when he worked with Warren on Reds, dubbed the suite ‘The Pit’. People scratched their heads in bewilderment as to why Warren, a millionaire many times over, preferred to live in these slovenly kept rooms, slipping in and out of the hotel garage to avoid the paparazzi. It was freedom and independence, I guess; the fact he could at a moment’s notice just pack up and leave. ‘Any need for possessions or roots is unnecessary.’
Maybe Julie was the one to change all that. She was a blast of fresh air for Warren, just the woman he needed, and he loved her inability to bullshit. ‘She saves me from my vanity.’ As for Julie, Warren’s unconventional, rebellious spirit and proud rootless nature had been hard to resist.
Less so his womanising. Even while in relationships Warren sought out the company of other women. Playing around on his current girlfriends became almost a way of life for him, and a thrill. Twenty-one-year-old Jaid Mako, Drew Barrymore’s future mum, remembers arriving in Hollywood in the late sixties and finding a job as a waitress at the famous Troubadour, the town’s ‘in’ music venue. The first guy to hit on her was Warren. (Actually, when you think about it, the odds of that happening to young, buxom new arrivals in Hollywood aren’t really all that long.) Accompanied that night by Julie Christie, when Warren saw Jaid’s dark smouldering Hungarian looks he walked over to her and immediately began flirting. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ she later recalled. ‘Here he was, so handsome and with this beautiful girl, and he’s coming on to me.’
Jaid went on to enjoy numerous whirlwind Hollywood romances but Warren never lost interest in her, nor, once she was old enough, in her star teenage daughter Drew. Both were at a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard when Warren invited them over to his table. ‘He got very flirtatious, ’ said Jaid. ‘He started kissing and caressing me and eyeing Drew. Finally, he said he was very much into sleeping with one of us, or even both of us.’ His offer received a polite but firm refusal.
Jennifer Lee was another new arrival in Hollywood and soon began a tempestuous affair with Warren, claiming that during sex he took calls from Julie Christie. She was also disturbed by his habit of constantly monitoring his partner’s responses in bed, analysing what turned them on and giving directions, not only about positions, but about how to feel and react. ‘The pressure to have the biggest, most earth-shattering orgasms can get a little relentless,’ said Jennifer
Robert Sellers Page 13