Robert Sellers

by Hollywood Hellraisers

  I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.

  The film that threw a lifeline to Marlon Brando’s floundering career was never seen as anything particularly special. ‘Everyone forgets Paramount had no faith in The Godfather,’ says its producer Albert Ruddy. The studio had bought an option on Mario Puzo’s book prior to publication but done absolutely nothing with it. ‘Because they’d made a gangster movie called The Brotherhood three years earlier that was a disaster,’ Ruddy continues. ‘And they said, who wants to do another fucking mob movie, we don’t care how good Puzo’s book is. But when it came out, the damn thing never dropped off the bestseller list, so they finally said, fuck it, let’s do this, but do it as a cheapie.’

  Every director Paramount approached turned them down. Finally, studio head Robert Evans insisted an authentic Italian get the job, if audiences were to ‘smell the spaghetti’. Francis Ford Coppola’s name cropped up. Evans wasn’t sure: he’d only made three pictures and none of them had done any business, but at least he was an Italian. ‘And he was born to do The Godfather,’ says Ruddy.

  So, I guess, was Brando born to play Don Vito Corleone, the mobster boss, arguably his most famous and certainly most lampooned characterisation. Coppola’s determination to cast Brando put him on a collision course with Paramount. ‘Marlon had a bad reputation and was death at the box office,’ says associate producer Gray Frederickson. ‘He was kind of washed up.’ At a meeting with executives Paramount president Stanley Jaffe slammed his fist hard on the table and decreed that Brando would be cast in The Godfather over his dead body. It was a statement that saw Coppola succumbing to what seemed like an epileptic fit.

  While Coppola put his career on the line for Brando, the actor repeatedly spurned his advances; he wanted no truck with a film that celebrated the Mafia. It was Marlon’s assistant Alice Marchak that pestered him to read Puzo’s bestseller. At one point he threw the book back at her howling, ‘For the last time, I won’t glorify the Mafia!’ Marchak realised he’d warmed to the notion when she arrived at Mulholland Drive one afternoon to see Marlon sporting a drawn-on pencil moustache and asking, ‘How do I look?’ Every time she turned up at the house for weeks after he was wearing a different gangster-style moustache.

  So keen was Brando now to play Don Corleone that he personally visited Bob Evans at his Paramount office. ‘I know a lot of people in Hollywood say I’m washed up,’ Evans would recall him saying. ‘And I know you’ve heard a lot of stories about me, and some of them are true. But I can play that part, and I can do a good job.’

  The studio power brokers were still to be convinced, so Coppola asked Brando if he might come over to Mulholland where they could do a little improv and put it on video to show his doubters. While Coppola set up his equipment Brando put shoe polish on his hair, stuffed a pillow up his jumper and pushed tissue paper in his cheeks. His idea was that Corleone had been shot in the throat years before, so muffling his voice. He also wanted the Don to speak quietly. Powerful people don’t need to shout. As he looked at himself in the mirror, there was Don Corleone staring back at him. ‘That’s it,’ Marlon muttered to himself. ‘The face of a bulldog, mean-looking but warm underneath.’

  Coppola took this footage over to New York to personally show Charles Bluhdorn, the Austrian CEO of Gulf+Western, who owned Paramount. Setting up the video monitor in a conference room, Bluhdorn poked his head round the door. ‘Francis, vat are you dooink?’ Suddenly Brando’s face appeared on the screen. ‘No! No! Absolutely not, I don’t vant a crazy guy.’ Bluhdorn changed his mind when he saw the transformation into Don Corleone. Coppola had got his man.

  Francis faced another stiff battle over his casting choice for the key role of Michael Corleone, inheritor of the family business. Evans wanted Beatty, Jack, Redford . . . anyone except Coppola’s favourite, Al Pacino, whom he felt didn’t radiate star quality. ‘We tested Al three times,’ says Ruddy. ‘The second time they said, forget it, why are you testing him, he’s a fucking midget. Francis is pulling his hair out, we’re gonna start shooting soon. I said, “Francis, let’s do one more test, put the camera on the ground and shoot up so he looks like Clint Eastwood.” I get a call from Bob Evans. “Ruddy, I run the fucking studio, right? I go to the dailies, what do I see? Fucking Al Pacino, the fucking midget again. Get him the fuck out.”’

  In the end Coppola won, as he did on practically everything else. He was a force of nature you couldn’t compete with; battling to shoot on authentic New York locations, battling for more money, his energy and stubbornness turned The Godfather from a low-budget picture into a seminal event. But the first week of shooting was disastrous; they got behind schedule and the studio hated the footage they were seeing. Worse, Brando adopted a stray cat he saw wandering round the set and insisted on using the animal in a scene where he addresses a group of gangsters. ‘The problem was, the fucking cat was purring so loud you couldn’t understand Marlon,’ says Ruddy. ‘Evans went, “Is this movie going to have fucking subtitles or what! We can’t understand what the hell he’s talking about.”’ Rumours circulated that Coppola might get the boot, with Elia Kazan ready to step in. ‘If you fire Francis,’ Brando threatened, ‘I’ll walk off the picture.’

  Could things get any worse? Well yes, a whole lot worse. Suddenly the real Mafia showed up, unleashing all sorts of threats against a production they didn’t want to see happen. Evans was frantic after a series of bowel-loosening phone calls from hoodlums and told Ruddy to sort it out. Joe Colombo was the local mob boss and Ruddy got in touch to organise a meeting at his office so the mobster could look over the script. ‘At three o’clock the next day Joe Colombo and two other guys arrived in my office. I gave him the script and he put his glasses on. It’s a hundred and fifty-five fucking pages, right? He looks at page one for about five minutes and says, “What does this mean, fade in.” With that he throws the script in the air. “You read it, Frankie,” he says. “Why me, boss? Give it to Louie.” And they start throwing the script around. Finally, it lands on my desk and Joe says, “Wait a sec, do we like this guy?” They say, “Yeah we trust him.” Joe said, “Let’s make the fucking deal.” Just the threat of making them read a script, I made the deal. Fucking amazing. But believe me, I would rather deal with a mob guy than a Hollywood lawyer any day.’

  The problems facing the film only brought the cast and crew closer together and Marlon was, for many, a role model, certainly for the younger actors like Pacino, James Caan, Bobby Duvall and Diane Keaton. ‘It was like acting with God,’ said Pacino. Although God was far from perfect, sometimes not reporting for work on Mondays and altering his own dialogue, but Marlon revelled in his newfound role of Svengali.

  At first Pacino and the rest felt intimidated when Brando arrived on the set. ‘It was like Christ coming off the cross,’ says Ruddy. ‘And then Marlon started being funny. He’d be mooning everybody, he’d start cracking jokes, got everyone to loosen up, it was a real love fest. He liked all the guys and they just adored Brando, he was very generous to them.’

  The actors mooning at each other became a feature of the production. ‘It started out with Jimmy Caan driving home one night and he had his butt hanging out the window, so they started mooning each other,’ says Frederickson. ‘And then Brando, during the big wedding scene, stood up on the stage and mooned the whole crowd.’

  There was general ribbing amongst the cast, too. In one scene Lenny Montana, playing a hoodlum, stuck his tongue out at Marlon; the guys had written ‘fuck off’ across it. Brando loved that. According to Robert Duvall Brando talked about nothing else but, ‘fucking Indians’ for an entire week. As he left the studio to go home Duvall said goodnight to the crew and then to Brando. ‘Have a good weekend, Philosopher King.’ Marlon held up his middle finger and said, ‘Sit on this and rotate.’ Every once in a while it was good to stick it to each other. ‘It was all ultimately in a good spirit,’ says Duvall.

  Marlon remained playful throughout the shoot. In the scene where he retur
ns from the hospital on a stretcher, the extras playing the orderlies were struggling a little bit so Coppola asked the strongest crew hands to take over. While they left to get into costume Marlon ran over and grabbed weights off the camera crane and loaded the stretcher with them and then laid back down on top. On ‘action’ the crew were in hysterics as these hefty guys failed to lift the thing. ‘That was Marlon,’ says Frederickson. ‘He wanted to have fun on set. But he was a serious professional. And he worked eleven hours, no more, no less. At the end of eleven hours he would finish the take but if you wanted another take, it was automatic, he would just say, “Goodnight, gentlemen,” get up and walk off the set. There was nothing you could do.’

  It was obvious to everyone that Marlon was creating a classic film character; his on-screen transformation was extraordinary. Out went the Kleenex tissues, replaced by a special mouthpiece, wrinkles were added by his make-up man and weights put in his shoes to make him walk slowly. ‘It was ironic,’ says Frederickson. ‘On The Godfather Marlon had gone on a diet and showed up lean and mean and young-looking and we had to pad him up and make him look fat and older, and then later when we wanted him to look mean and lean on Apocalypse Now, he showed up weighing three hundred pounds and looking like Orson Welles.’

  He was still trying to figure out a way to stop eating, though. He had this plan. He’d say to his assistant, ‘Listen, after nine o’clock I want you to lock up all the cabinets and no matter what I say don’t give me the key.’ Then, come 9.20, he’d say, ‘Alice, give me the key.’ ‘No.’ His voice now trembling. ‘I swear to God I’ll fire you.’ ‘No.’ So he went and got a crowbar and just busted all the locks.

  True to the method, Marlon remained pretty much in character all the time, talking to the crew in that famous guttural voice. Refused to learn his lines, though. ‘He came on the set and there would be a big card he would read off,’ says Ruddy. ‘But it didn’t matter, he was Don Corleone, he was the man. It was just a fucking amazing experience to watch.’ Actually Marlon had cue cards secreted everywhere, pasted on tables, on fruit in a bowl, written on the back of his hand or shirtsleeve, like a kid with exam answers.

  He also invented a whole batch of quirks and mannerisms for Corleone, not least for his famous death scene where he collapses with a heart attack after playing in the garden with his grandson. The child actor wasn’t reacting very well, so Brando stuck an orange peel in his mouth to look like monster teeth, something he’d done to amuse his own kids. Although the result makes him look like a Halloween version of Godfrey from Dad’s Army there’s something unsettling watching this evil bastard tearing around a garden chasing a giggling child

  That scene was Marlon’s last in the can. Like a lot of things on The Godfather it presented its own special set of problems. Coppola had been growing a nice little tomato patch to double for the garden, but on the eve of shooting a torrential downpour all but destroyed it. Because Marlon only had one day left, per his contract, and it looked unlikely they could shoot on the set, some quick thinking was called for. ‘We had huge financial constraints on that movie,’ says Ruddy. ‘Marlon got a deal of fifty grand but if the film went over schedule we had to pay him another hundred. So I went to the hotel and said, “Marlon look, the set’s wrecked, but if we have to shoot on it we will because we don’t have the money to pay you the extra fifty. But if you care to give us a break and leave now, I’ll pay your flight back here again when it’s tarted up and looks good.” He thought about it and said, “Well, you guys have been good to me, OK.” His agent called me the next day and said, “You fuck, hustle my goddamn client.” I said, “I didn’t, I told him the truth, and it was his choice. He was kind enough to help out.” The thing with Marlon and a lot of huge stars, they become highly distilled neurotics obviously, but they have built-in radars, they sense if you’re trying to bullshit them, and if you try to bullshit them you are D-E-A-D, dead. If you’re honest with them and tell them the truth, they’ll go out of their way to help you. Marlon was great to everyone on this goddamn movie.’

  The Godfather was an instant classic when it opened early in 1972 and a worldwide box-office smash. Ruddy remembers attending the first public screening with Al Pacino. ‘We left halfway through to have a few drinks and returned for the final few minutes. When the movie was over there wasn’t one clap, no applause. Al said, “It’s a fucking disaster.” He didn’t realise they were stunned. The audience were wiped out.’

  The Godfather turned Coppola from a flop director into Hollywood’s hottest talent and created stars out of its young cast, but it was Brando’s movie. His performance remains iconic, even carrying favour with real-life mafiosi, who told him they loved the picture because he’d played the Godfather with dignity. For years Marlon couldn’t pay a bill in any restaurant in New York’s Little Italy.

  Perhaps the biggest irony of all was that here was a man who’d suffered perhaps the worst ever run of flops now starring in the biggest hit since Gone with the Wind. It was a remarkable resurrection, culminating in his Oscar for best actor. But when his name was read out as the winner there was genuine surprise when instead of Marlon a young woman in full Native American dress came onto the stage to tell the audience he couldn’t accept the award owing to his concerns about the mistreatment of the American Indian. ‘We really didn’t know that Marlon planned not to show up,’ recalls Gray Frederickson. ‘Everyone was shocked when that woman appeared. But he really believed in those causes. When we were filming Godfather his big cause was the unfairness of the caste system in India, then he switched to American Indians by the time the Oscar came round.’

  Marlon’s stance didn’t find much sympathy from his fellow performers. Michael Caine said that if Brando felt so strongly on this issue he should have had the guts to stand on the stage himself, not send a trembling squaw. Clint Eastwood joked, ‘Maybe we should give an Oscar to all the cowboys shot in John Ford movies.’

  But what happened to the Oscar itself? Actor Marty Ingles can throw some light on the mystery. ‘For a time I was a celebrity broker and I came across a guy who had in his possession the Academy award that Brando turned down. This guy was there on Oscar night, he was in the wings and when the girl walked off with the award she didn’t know what to do with it. My friend said, “I’ll take it.” Years later the press got to hear about it and I got some correspondence from Brando by fax which said: “I’m under the impression you have access to the award, I’d like to have it back.” I’m a sweet guy but I’m not an idiot, and I replied, “Mr Brando, the law says it doesn’t belong to you any more. You publicly gave it up. So it’s not yours, let’s make that clear, with all due respect to your genius. I think it would be nice if, maybe, we used it to bring something to humanity, like a giant fundraiser for the cancer foundation, perhaps even a fundraiser for the very Indians that you wanted to speak of.” And he wrote back to say he wanted to give it to his daughter. I replied, ‘Mr Brando, I love you dearly, but you did what you did and now I want to make it work for humanity, and I’d like to see if perhaps we can really do something good for some people that need it. And if you won’t do that, then I keep the Oscar.” And that’s the way it was. My friend still has it.’

  Good for nuthin’s good enough fo’ me.

  After yet another two-finger salute to the ruling class in Hollywood, Dennis Hopper packed his bags and went into exile in Taos. He was bitter, he was paranoid, and he was deeply pissed off. What he viewed to be his masterpiece had been shat on from a quite considerable height. Would he ever direct again? Would anyone even want to hire him again?

  He took solace, almost inevitably, in booze and drugs, while the artistic commune he’d hoped to establish at Taos began to crumble all around him. It was full of wasters, hangers-on and sycophants who did nothing much else but smoke dope with him. As Universal executive Ned Tanen said, ‘It was hippie heaven. Dennis was the friend of every freak who was trying to get back and forth across America.’

  One visitor was Kit
Carson, former journalist turned filmmaker who’d decided to make a documentary on Dennis and his crazy world at Taos. Carson first met Dennis when he interviewed him at the time of Easy Rider. ‘He loved the article and so did his friends. I sat with Dennis and Jack Nicholson going over the edit of the interview and Nicholson kept saying, “He makes you sound like you make sense, Dennis. It’s really hard to do.”’

  While filming the documentary, Carson got to like Dennis enormously and enjoyed his playfulness. At one point Dennis said, ‘Why don’t you guys go get a whole bunch of girls and bring them up here for me.’ Carson and his crew were up for that. ‘OK,’ they said. ‘If you’ll walk naked down the local high street then we’ll go get your girls.’ Dennis did just that. ‘And in the documentary,’ says Carson, ‘there’s this moment where Dennis gets out of a car, strips naked and hustles down a block, then we cut to three carloads of girls showing up and we had this sequence of Dennis playing with all those girls. Dennis was someone who rises to dares, that’s who he is.’

  Carson’s documentary The American Dreamer is full of such eye-popping moments. Bearded and bleary-eyed (one reporter at the time thought he resembled, ‘some kind of maniac bomb thrower’), Dennis babbles about his childhood, fires off semi-automatic weapons and shares a bathtub with three naked young ladies. There’s also a nice caring, sharing moment where Dennis declares, ‘I’d rather give head to a woman than fuck them. Basically, I think like a lesbian.’