These scenes played around with Dennis’s own sexuality and reputation as a ladies’ man. He’d always had a large sexual appetite and thought himself pretty irresistible to women. ‘Dennis thinks he’s very sexy,’ says Carson. ‘And so he will eyeball the women around him, and if they’re in a room with him then they’re sort of looking for the exit door because they know they’re gonna have to get out of there sooner or later. But he’s not pushy about his randiness. But it’s there. It’s one of the amusing things about being around him, just watching him thinking, he’s the hottest dick in the room.’
And of course there were the drugs, lots of drugs. Amazingly, though, Carson didn’t think that the inordinate amount of drugs Dennis was consuming altered his personality at all. ‘By that time in his life he’d done so many varieties of drugs they didn’t have a noticeable effect on him. Drugs were all over the place, mescaline, marijuana, speed, there was a lot of alcohol, too. One time a reporter from Rolling Stone arrived and went off on a mescaline trip; she walked out of the house and no one could find her. I went out scouting and found this journalist staggering around in the nearby desert. Years later she credits me with saving her life. She was stoned out of her mind.’
It was a weird existence at Taos, then probably the last vestige of the sixties left on the planet. ‘Actually Dennis was the perfect host for you to experience the sixties with,’ says Carson. ‘It was like the final scenes of Withnail and I where they’re trying to count down the end of the sixties but they really can’t.’
Taos had been a strange place anyway to build a fortress of hippie power. The local populace largely resented them moving in, these strange people dressed in flower beads talking bollocks. It was rather a rough town, too, the last place you’d want to huddle round a campfire with guitars singing ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. It was so enclosed an environment that when someone was shot, which happened rather too frequently for comfort’s sake, you knew the person who’d been shot, and you knew the guy who’d done it and why he’d done it.
When Dennis first came out to Taos to set up his commune, ‘it was bad, man. Suddenly there was me, this movie freak and all these hippies around, and the locals didn’t dig it.’ Many times when Dennis and others walked the streets cars would pull up with guys yelling from the windows, ‘Hey, we’re gonna rape your wife and your sister!’ Dennis claimed that groups would go hitch-hiking in the mountains and get the crap beaten out of them by high-school kids while the cops watched. Rape was going on, too. Finally, one night Dennis said, fuck it, and got a gun. Walking in the street, he and his younger brother David were stopped and hassled by some local kids. ‘OK, everybody up against the wall,’ yelled Dennis, brandishing his gun. ‘I’d seen too many John Wayne movies.’ There and then he made a citizen’s arrest and held them all at gunpoint until the cops arrived. When they did they were accompanied by a large mob, ‘something like 150 people wanting to hang our asses. It looked like a scene out of Viva Zapata — pitchforks, machetes, the works.’
Naturally the police arrested Dennis and his brother rather than the baying crowd. They posted bail and were let out through a side door of the local jail, where sixty locals still held vigil. Some guys told Dennis to his face, ‘We’re going to kill you.’ When Dennis pointed out this threat to the police they told him to shut up.
OK, thought Dennis, this is war. He made calls to some stunt buddies of his back in Hollywood. ‘Look, I need your help because the police sure aren’t gonna help me.’ Then he and David visited a local sportinggoods store and bought every fucking gun in the place. ‘Back at the house we set up machine-gun nests,’ said Dennis. ‘And rifles on the rooftops — good fields of fire.’ It was like the Alamo. Kit Carson recalls, ‘It got to the point where Dennis was carrying a loaded gun all the time. That was kind of interesting. In the house he’d be looking out the windows with a gun like it was a fort. The town was a little bit afraid of Dennis, actually; that was good, he liked that.’
Next Dennis and David, with guns hidden under their ponchos à la Sergio Leone, visited the high school and gatecrashed their assembly. Dennis bounded up onto the stage. ‘Look,’ he told the kids, ‘I’m here and here I’m going to stay. What’s more, there are more freaks coming in over the next few months, and though they may have long hair, they are not the love generation. They’re back from Vietnam, and they’re hard dudes. They will have weapons — like these.’ With that Dennis and David whipped open their ponchos to reveal a mini arsenal. ‘Macho is macho,’ Dennis continued, ‘and if this keeps up, somebody is going to get hurt around here. Just because these hippies are dropping acid, that doesn’t give you the right to rape their women and cut their balls off.’ According to Dennis, ‘They listened, and they finally got the message.’
The locals pretty much left Dennis and co. alone after that. The authorities, however, still viewed him with suspicion. One time he was arrested by police in the main plaza of Taos for possession of a loaded .357 Magnum revolver.
Hey, stealing’s a business, not a crusade.
After McCabe, Warren Beatty swapped Julie for the endearingly kooky Goldie Hawn. They made for a fun team in crime drama Dollars (aka The Heist, 1971), but the movie itself was poor, certainly not worth dying for, as Warren so very nearly did. Filming on some train tracks, Warren stumbled into the path of an onrushing locomotive. The crew were set up some distance away and could only look on in horror as an injured and groggy Warren staggered up, saw the train approaching at some speed and somehow summoned up the strength to hurl himself out of the way.
Missing Julie, Warren flew from the location in Germany to London every weekend to see her. Such strong attachment, however, didn’t deter him from seducing Goldie, who at the time was in an ‘open’ marriage to director Gus Trikonis, the ‘open’ part of it being entirely Gus’s idea. Gus was around the Dollars set quite a bit, but the moment he turned his back Warren and Goldie slipped into his trailer to make out.
With Dollars, Warren’s choice of material was once again seriously affecting his career. He continued to play a blinder, however, when it came to turning down hit movies. Now it was the turn of The Sting to pass like sand through his fingers. He said he didn’t want to do it because he kept dozing off while reading the script. The Godfather, too, was declined. To be fair to Warren, he’d no clue that these movies were destined for greatness, and during this period he was turning down something like seventy-five scripts a year.
Barbra Streisand was after him to co-star with her in The Way We Were. He didn’t fancy it, though he definitely fancied her and happily succumbed when Babs, refusing to take no for an answer, indulged in a brief fling, perhaps hoping that as his lover she could change his mind. Warren did what he did best: fucked, wavered and waffled. Finally fed up, Barbra turned to Redford, who, according to director Sydney Pollock, found making the movie ‘Like doing overtime at Dachau.’
Warren continued, in the words of Natalie Wood, ‘to go through women on an industrial scale. Although he does it with great charm.’ At one Hollywood party an actress sat in a deserted screening room watching a movie. Suddenly Warren walked in with a giggling girl and despite the acres of empty seats sat down right in front of her and proceeded to noisily make out, all the while winking at the actress over his date’s shoulder, as if to say, ‘How am I doing?’
But even Warren had the odd failure. At another party he met Kim Novak and, mistaking her natural exuberance for sexual interest, asked if he could go home with her. He ended up pounding on her bedroom door even after she bolted it against him.
Actress Lee Grant, who’d appear with Warren in Shampoo, assessed that his conquest success rate was about fifty-fifty. Those he couldn’t conquer didn’t want to be part of a crowd — one of Warren’s girls. ‘But the Peter Pan quality in Warren is very attractive to some,’ she told Time in 1978. ‘He teaches them to fly, and they have extraordinary experiences with him. Then they grow up and go on, and he keeps flying. Like Peter Pan, he always comes back
to another little girl who’s ready to fly off with him to Never Never Land.’
Politics was back in his life, too. In spite of the debacle over Hubert Humphrey, Warren joined another political bandwagon, this time for George McGovern, who was seeking the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination. As proof that this was a man he believed in, Warren took a whole year out of his movie schedule to travel across the country drumming up support, personally raising $2m. Warren’s fundraising prowess was extraordinary. Democratic pollster and future producer of TV’s The West Wing Patrick Caddell relates the occasion he witnessed Warren forcefully persuade a rich businessman to contribute to the McGovern fund. The man happily wrote a cheque for $50,000. According to Caddell, Warren berated the guy. ‘I don’t want your fifty thousand. People in your position give a hundred thousand.’ Embarrassed, the businessman swiftly wrote another cheque for $50,000.
At the 1972 Democratic convention in Miami there was a young campaign worker for Senator McGovern whose job it was to garner dissenting voters. He zeroed in on this 19-year-old woman from his own home state of Arkansas and was determined to get her vote. She refused. ‘Well is there any way in the world I can convince you to vote with us?’ She said, ‘Yeah, if you get Warren Beatty to walk on the beach with me.’ By pure chance thirty minutes later he got into an elevator and there was Warren. He explained the deal and Warren said, ‘Sure I’ll do it.’ Later that afternoon Warren walked a hundred yards on the beach — that woman voted for the Democrats on every single amendment. Subsequently she became a school teacher and was always a keen supporter of the young campaigner. In 2008 he was in southern Missouri and there she was. ‘I can’t believe you’re still here after all these years,’ he said. Smiling she replied, ‘I’m still paying off the beach walk.’ The young impressionable campaign worker was Bill Clinton.
Taking a much more hands-on role in this campaign, becoming a strategist in such fields as public relations and the media, McGovern found Warren’s ideas and advice both shrewd and valuable. ‘He has a political maturity astounding in someone so inexperienced.’ When he spoke at a rally and was roundly booed, Warren realised the public weren’t interested in listening to film stars pontificate so wielded his power and influence behind the scenes, practically inventing the political fundraising concert. Pulling in favours, he managed to get Barbra Streisand and Simon and Garfunkel on stage, with the likes of Paul Newman, Raquel Welch, Dustin Hoffman, Goldie Hawn and Jack acting as ushers.
Inevitably, Warren’s choice for president ended up losing to Nixon, who was returned to office with a landslide victory for a second term, where the Watergate scandal was waiting for him. Some colleagues even urged Warren to run for the US Senate, but that kind of public service required supreme selflessness, time and energy, none of which Warren could afford. He didn’t like the mud-slinging that went on in politics either. Sure, that happened in his own profession, too, but ‘I’m used to those showbiz interviewers who not only ask me who I slept with last night but in what position. In politics it’s much tougher than that.’ No, the more he thought of a political career, the harder the task seemed. He already knew friends were getting more than a bit tired of his politicking. Even Jack, who’d placed a halo above Warren’s head, said that on certain subjects he could ‘bore the shit out of me’. Jack’s never been much of a political animal, preferring to stay at home and drag on a spliff rather than join an anti-war demo, shag a woman rather than campaign for some senator. For him celebrities and politics don’t mix.
And what of Julie? Maybe as a way of compensating for the time he’d spent away, the subject of marriage was raised again, but the same old problems were still there.
Such statements as ‘monogamy requires genius’ and ‘I’m not going to make the same mistake once’ only reinforced what Julie had known all along: Warren was best not as a husband, but as a lover, and a shortterm one at that. He was seeing other women, of course, like the future Mrs Richard Pryor, Jennifer Lee, who at the time was quite content to be part of the Beatty harem. ‘The last stop before the ball and chain main squeeze, which is what Julie is.’ Jennifer was also enjoying affairs with Ryan O’Neal and Art Garfunkel. One time Warren and Garfunkel were both staying at the same hotel in New York. Jennifer spent part of the evening with Garfunkel, then after a modest interval popped upstairs for part two with Warren, knocking on his door saying, ‘Just happened to be in the neighbourhood.’
There was also a brief fling with Carly Simon, which, according to the singer, was not especially profound. ‘I never took him seriously. He was great fun and very bright. But noooo . . . as a boyfriend.’ It did, however, result in one of the great musical mysteries when Carly recorded the hit single ‘You’re So Vain’ and refused to divulge exactly who it was about. Most people assumed it was Warren, as indeed did he, calling her up and saying thanks. ‘You’d gone with him?’ enquired one reporter. ‘Hasn’t everybody?’ Carly replied.
While all this was carrying on Julie continued to love Warren deeply, and to be fair it was genuinely reciprocated. Warren reportedly proposed to her on more than one occasion but she always sensibly backed off, still suspecting that he could never be faithful. ‘You can’t just go swanning off with everyone who attracts you,’ she said. ‘It’s greedy and selfish. It sounds great to do whatever you want. But it never works out in real life — only in the movies.’
It was a phone call that ended it, from Julie. Warren was alone at his suite in the Beverly Wilshire, a place that had come to almost symbolise his rootlessness. Although they remained friends, the emotional loss was crippling. Simon Relph, a producer on Reds, said the break-up with Julie was ‘the only one that Warren still speaks of with regret’. His parents were upset too when Julie left; of all their son’s girlfriends she’d been their favourite. ‘I can’t think of anyone I’d rather he married,’ Ira Beatty said at the time. ‘But I wonder if Warren will ever settle down. He’s a nomad, like Shirley.’
In a bid to stave off the chill of loneliness Warren partied and cruised around with Polanski, but more specifically now with Jack. They had become the new deadly duo. In her autobiography Faye Dunaway wrote that she was wary of hanging out with either star. ‘Jack was bemused that he and Warren, at different points in their lives, often ended up with the same woman. It didn’t make him happy.’
It was ironic that here was Warren, one of the biggest sex symbols in the world, loved by millions of strangers, but by no one individual, in the truest sense. Julie, like Leslie Caron, had so far been his only hope for a meaningful and continuing relationship. With Julie now out of his life he’d come to realise, perhaps for the first time, that his hedonistic lifestyle had left him in an emotional vacuum. ‘I have led a very indulgent life,’ he admitted. ‘Almost indescribably indulgent.’
He was about to bring a little bit of that hedonism to life on the screen in one of his most famous films.
I am the motherfucking shore patrol, motherfucker.
Jack Nicholson’s friendship with Henry Jaglom went back further than their editing duties on Easy Rider. They used to hang out together in all-night restaurants on Sunset Strip, spending hours ‘dreaming our movie dreams. Jack was an extraordinarily bright, funny and charismatic guy from the moment I met him. He and I were the two in the crowd who were most focused on becoming directors.’
Both had long since agreed that they’d act in each other’s first film as a director. Jack beat Jaglom to the gun with Drive, He Said, in which Jaglom appeared. ‘Now, a year later, when I directed my first film, A Safe Place, in 1971, Jack returned the favour — in spades. I no longer could afford to use him in my film as he had become a gigantic star, much to everyone’s amazement. And yet, fulfilling our agreement, he made it possible for me to have him act in my first effort as a director by waiving the million-dollar fee he was entitled to and doing the part for a new colour TV set of his choice.’
Jaglom’s directorial debut, a non-narrative story of the emotional vulnerabilities of a you
ng girl, received a heated reception at the New York Film Festival. People screamed at it, praised it, condemned it and several stormed out. All of which surprised Jaglom as several European filmmakers had been working along the same lines and greeted warmly for their films. ‘Jack suggested immediately one of the canniest ideas I have ever heard,’ recalls Jaglom. ‘He said we should pull the film, dub it in French, put English subtitles on it and change my then unknown name to Henri Jaglom. He insisted that it would be a huge hit if we did that. It was a commercial disaster of unbelievable proportions at the time.’
Jack was still hitched up with Michelle Phillips when he agreed to make Bob Rafelson’s The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), playing a late-night radio DJ. Michelle visited the Atlantic City locations and her strong personality was sometimes overpowering. If she didn’t get her way she tended to explode, calling Jack a stupid Irish Mick in front of everybody. It was an odd relationship: half the time she had him wrapped round her finger, the rest of the time it was a standoff. She wanted to rent a beachfront house; Jack preferred dossing in hotels. She left in a strop and Jack went back to the guys and hanging out with groupies. ‘The minute she was gone,’ said one crew member, ‘he had his little entourage.’ He and co-star Bruce Dern also hung out a lot. When actress Ellen Burstyn celebrated her birthday both of them and Rafelson surprised her with a serenade in the nude.
Marriage may never have been on the cards for Jack and Michelle, which is not surprising since they never actually lived together. At the time married life didn’t appeal to either of them. ‘I don’t have a marriage policy,’ was Jack’s flippant response to matrimonial press enquires, ‘thinking that was the more intelligent approach to life’. The inevitable did eventually transpire, and after two years the couple drifted apart. Michelle later revealed that it was Jack’s jealousy and possessiveness that drove her away. ‘He was always peering in the windows to see what I was up to.’ She also objected to his continuing habit of sleeping around and hanging out in nightclubs until all hours, coming home stoned and drunk. Jack’s house was party central and not for nothing did Rolling Stone magazine nickname him the ‘Great Seducer’.
Robert Sellers Page 19