Before the likes of Coming Home and The Deer Hunter made films about Vietnam fashionable, that particular conflict was seen as pretty much a taboo subject, so audiences stayed away from Tracks. ‘The only thing Hollywood wanted less than a Vietnam War movie,’ said Jaglom, ‘was a Vietnam War movie with Dennis Hopper in it. But even though he fought me during filming he helped me enormously to get at the inarticulate rage of those men coming home from that misbegotten conflict. I realised much of Dennis’s true genius on that film when we showed it to audiences made up of Vietnam veterans and I watched their faces looking at his face and understanding. In fact, understanding things that I would never, thankfully, have to understand.’
You ever listen to women talk, man? They only talk about one thing, how some guy fucked ’em over, that’s all I ever hear about!
Early in 1977 it was reported that Warren Beatty’s affair with Michelle Phillips was now ‘friendly rather than romantic’. Soon stories were running about Warren and Kate Jackson, star of Charlie’s Angels. Joan Collins once said that ‘Warren always had to be with the girl of the moment.’ Well, Charlie’s Angels was the smash TV show of the moment, and Warren had three to choose from. He hit on Jaclyn Smith first, but she didn’t return his call. Kate Jackson was more receptive and so began a brief affair. He never got round to Farrah Fawcett-Majors.
Not surprisingly, Warren and Michelle eventually split after three years. The fact it had lasted that long, she said, ‘was a miracle’. Ultimately she’d been driven to despair by his lack of commitment, his belief that marriage or a one-woman relationship wasn’t a happy, productive way to live. ‘He feels that it’s shallow and meaningless and boring,’ said Michelle. So he went around having shallow, meaningless affairs. ‘He also makes a point of not getting too close to you.’ The closer he got, she felt, the more afraid he got, so off he went again on another affair. After a while, ‘I couldn’t live under the same roof with him; we were fighting all the time.’ It was obvious Warren was never going to finish the relationship, so Michelle did it for him and walked, realising he didn’t want to take the responsibility for their relationship breaking down.
A pattern was emerging here with Warren. Yet when his affairs ended it hurt, ‘Even the promiscuous can feel pain,’ but the truth was that whenever a relationship finished the decision was never his; ‘It’s always been the other person’s.’ A few of his girlfriends raised their eyebrows at that statement. Michelle Phillips claimed that she ‘fell off the couch laughing’ when Warren trotted out something similar on a TV show. Warren was rarely ungentlemanly enough to walk out on women; he conquered them, they fell in love with him, and he’d either overpower them or grow restless, bored even, and not be very good at concealing it. So in effect, Warren was right: the women did break up with him. ‘That,’ said Michelle, ‘is what Warren makes his women do.’ In a rare moment of honesty Warren once said, ‘I’m really a bum of sorts.’
So, with Michelle gone it was open season as Warren’s name was linked with almost every Hollywood beauty and beyond. They didn’t have to be famous actresses, supermodels did just as well. And one of the biggest supermodels of the time was Texas-born Jerry Hall. Her encounter with Warren took place at a private party in a Manhattan restaurant. Engaged at the time to Roxy Music frontman Bryan Ferry, Jerry’s not inconsiderable assets quickly brought her to the attention of another rocker, Mick Jagger, who promptly began chatting her up. Warren walked past Mick and Jerry, probably did a double take, gave Jerry the once-over and ingratiated himself into the conversation. Lord knows what Jerry was thinking with these two ageing studs drooling over her. Mick, totally ignoring his rival, whispered into Jerry’s ear. When Warren attempted to butt in Mick snarled, ‘She’s with me.’ Undeterred, Warren looked at Jerry, hoping for a sign that Mick wouldn’t be getting any oats this time. In fact, neither would. ‘I’m not with anyone,’ she announced. ‘And I’m engaged.’ This didn’t deter Mick, of course, who was full of English spunk. Still thinking he had a shot with Jerry, he pulled Warren over to a telephone booth. ‘Now, Warren, listen, man . . .’ he said, calling a friend of his to fix up the actor with another model for the evening.
Warren also had a soft spot for middle-aged divorcees and, shall we say, ‘more mature’ celebrities; deluxe milf, we could call them now. HRH Princess Margaret certainly qualified on that score. The Queen’s sister was in LA on royal business and attending a special private dinner. The organisers had seated Frank Sinatra next to Mags at the top table, but she went out of her way to rearrange the seating plan so she ended up next to Warren. According to British royal journalist Richard Mineards Margaret was, ‘A very unhappy woman. She was looking for some sort of solace, be it sexual or otherwise, and I remember there were two names that came up a lot: Warren Beatty and Mick Jagger.’ According to Mineards, Warren visited the Caribbean island of Mustique, one of the world’s most glamorous playgrounds for the rich and famous, where Margaret had a home.
Even Warren drew the line somewhere. That line was Julia Phillips, who is a member of the very small band of women who Warren preferred not to fuck. She was certainly successful enough, an Oscar-winning producer. At a party she spied Warren and started flirting with him. She got off to a bad start by dissing Julie Christie, whom she found nice enough but not very communicative. ‘Let me put it this way,’ said Julia. ‘I did all the giving and she did all the taking — does that turn you on?’ It didn’t. And they didn’t have sex, which must have been a major disappointment for Julia as she later wrote that ‘Warren tries to fuck everybody.’
Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. As Warren once said, ‘If I tried to keep up with what was said about me sexually I would be speaking to you from a jar in the University of Chicago Medical Center.’ Warren did boast, however, of a photographic memory and could recite the phone numbers of most of the beautiful women in Beverly Hills. Variety editor Peter Bart tested him once and recalled, ‘Of perhaps two hundred names, Beatty faltered only five or six times while smiling smugly.’
One young lady told Playgirl in 1976 of the time Warren called her up at a rather inopportune moment. After a few seconds or so Warren said, ‘You’re making love? Don’t let me disturb you,’ and hung up. ‘That was Warren,’ the girl said to her lover, who was doing very well indeed before the call and then lost all momentum. ‘There went the evening,’ the woman sighed. ‘I guess men have a problem competing with Warren’s image.’
What are you doin’ here? You oughta be out in a convertible bird-doggin’ chicks and bangin’ beaver.
In the midst of his Oscar success there was talk of Jack and Anjelica marrying; his friends said they’d only believe it when they saw him actually walking down the aisle. As Jack himself once joked, ‘Marriage in Hollywood is like a nice hot bath, it cools off after a short while.’ Harry Dean Stanton was convinced Jack had already decided never to marry again. His long romances with Mimi and Michelle might very well have resulted in marriage, followed by, let’s face it, divorce. So by his late thirties Jack could conceivably have had three ex-wives. It was this fear of failure that put him off, and what he saw as the inequality of the divorce laws, that an ex-wife had the legal right to financially screw him to the wall.
Anjelica felt much the same way about marriage. She knew all about the pain of divorce, her father having been through numerous wives. She also knew what it was like to be referred to only as the offspring of a famous father, and the pattern was repeating itself, except that now she was Jack Nicholson’s girlfriend rather than John Huston’s daughter. It also irked her that Jack sometimes took her for granted, and for a period their relationship was on a decidedly unpredictable course. It didn’t help that Jack was up to his old tricks. In New York promoting Cuckoo’s Nest he went ‘wild’, a friend told Cosmopolitan magazine, with a couple of models. Back home in LA, when Anjelica wasn’t around, there were frequent female visitors in the evenings or he’d be out hitting the nightclubs with a string of dates on his arm. ‘I’m such a
wag!’ he claimed, winking. ‘I’m a scamp. I don’t deny it. I like myself.’
Anjelica soon got fed up and moved into her own apartment, then jetted over to London, telling friends, ‘What’s good for the gander . . .’ Jack wasn’t far behind, incensed at reports that Ryan O’Neal was sniffing round his old lady. Jack was hurting. Anjelica’s desertion, as he saw it, hit him harder than even Mimi’s or Michelle’s. He flew off to San Tropez, hiding out on Sam Spiegel’s yacht. When he heard that a gang of press photographers were on the nearby quay he dropped his trousers and mooned them.
The couple’s public spat lasted a whole summer, with Jack even seeking Papa Huston’s advice. ‘Be firm with her,’ he ordered. So Jack demanded Anjelica’s swift return to America. She knew by the tone of his voice on the telephone just how much he was missing her. ‘I felt so crummy abandoning him — men like Jack you just don’t find any more.’ It wasn’t long, though, before there was yet another bump. Jack left to go skiing in Aspen, holidaying with a group of friends that included ex-Bond girl Jill St John. Anjelica meanwhile was preparing to move her things out of Mulholland Drive. Jack expected an empty house to greet him when he got back, not for it to become the scene of one of the greatest scandals ever to rock Hollywood.
Since Chinatown, Jack and Polanski had remained friends. In March 1977 Polanski was bumming around Hollywood trying to set up movie deals, and shooting a photographic feature on adolescent girls for French Vogue, a nice excuse you might think to meet nubile Lolitas. He took one young wannabe model, just thirteen years old, to Jack’s pad, gave her champagne and half a Quaalude, took risqué shots of her in various poses around the house, and then had sex with her. He was arrested the next day.
While this was all going on Jack remained in Aspen, heeding advice that he stay as far away from Mulholland Drive as possible to avoid even remote association with the scandal. But the police wanted his fingerprints to see if they matched those found on a box containing hashish that detectives had found in his house during a search. When after a couple of weeks Jack had still not returned, the police obtained a warrant authorising detectives to obtain his fingerprints. Jack complied willingly, asking the Aspen police to take his dabs, which in the end didn’t match those found on the hashish container. He was soon cleared of any suspicion in the case and eventually flew back to LA, keeping a very low profile.
Polanski, though, was in deep shit, despite loyal friends talking up the theory that he’d been set up by the girl and her mother. He pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with a minor and the trial judge, Laurence J. Rittenband, wanted Polanski locked up for ninety days to evaluate whether or not he was ‘a mentally disordered sex offender’. Polanski had no choice but to agree and on his last night of freedom Jack and an intimate group of friends threw a small dinner party for him. The rest of Hollywood, though, turned on him. The joke going around town was that his next film would be Close Encounters of the Third Grade.
After forty-two days in prison Polanski was released temporarily as his lawyers set about organising a plea bargain that in the end both sides were happy with, especially the prosecution, who had no desire to see the young girl face the horror of going to court and being publicly examined over the case’s lurid details. Then, incredibly, the night before the hearing the judge changed his mind and decided he wasn’t going to play ball; now he was gunning for the maximum sentence of fifty years. Polanski felt he’d no choice but to bolt and flew immediately to Paris, where, as a French passport holder, he was safe from extradition.
Jack remained on friendly terms with the director, occasionally visiting him and reportedly using his influence with the LA judiciary to end his exile, without success. But the whole sordid episode, played out as it was in the public arena, affected him greatly, though he never admitted as much. As for Anjelica, she went back to Ryan O’Neal. Years later O’Neal’s film-star daughter Tatum revealed that Anjelica ‘became the official joint roller in our household because she was the best at it’. By early 1978 she’d returned to Jack’s home; though tension remained. Attending a party given by Andy Warhol at which O’Neal was a fellow guest, the pop artist wrote in his diary that ‘everyone was trying to keep Jack and Ryan apart so they wouldn’t see each other’.
The horror . . . the horror.
If things had worked out differently Apocalypse Now (1979) would have been directed by George Lucas guerrilla-style, in Vietnam itself while the conflict was still raging. Rightly, no studio would finance such an exploit, for fear that Charlie might dislodge the filmmaker’s lower intestines with a well-aimed bazooka blast. Imagine that: no Phantom Menace! Coppola’s vision was far greater, far more artistic, far more bonkers. As he later raved during a Cannes press conference, his film wasn’t about Vietnam, ‘It is Vietnam!’
Based loosely on Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now was about an officer called Willard sent upriver to find and kill Green Beret Colonel Kurtz, who had gone AWOL and nuts. Coppola had tried to lure big stars like Steve McQueen and Jack to the project. Pacino turned him down, saying, ‘I know what this is going to be like. You’re going to be up there in a helicopter telling me what to do, and I’m gonna be down there in a swamp for five months.’
Eventually he settled on Harvey Keitel as Willard and managed to lure Marlon on board as Kurtz with a mammoth deal. Dennis Hopper was also amongst the cast. Before going to the Philippines to start shooting Coppola called Roger Corman, who’d shot several films in the country, for advice. Corman’s advice was simple – ‘Don’t go.’ Too late, Coppola was already committed. Corman said he was going during the monsoon season, the worst time. ‘It’ll be a rainy picture,’ said Coppola.
It was expected to be a fourteen-week shoot beginning in the spring of 1976, but logistics, weather and general disasters conspired against the film and turned it into an utter mess. Worse, Coppola fired Keitel after just two weeks, replacing him with Martin Sheen, who was at the time fighting his own alcoholic demons. When Sheen arrived he found chaos: Coppola was writing the movie as he went along and constantly firing personnel; people were coming down left, right and centre with innumerable tropical diseases and the helicopters used in the combat sequences were constantly being recalled by President Marcos to fight his own war against anti-government rebels.
As for the crew, they worked hard and boy did they party hard. Doug Claybourne, a Vietnam vet, was brought in as production assistant and was one of maybe two or three people working on the movie who’d actually been involved in the war. ‘At the hotel where the crew were based, it was party heaven,’ he recalls. ‘We’d have a hundred beers lined up around the swimming pool, there were people diving off the roofs, it was crazy.’ Then a typhoon hit, battering one of the locations, and the whole production was temporarily shut down.
After a month regrouping at his base in San Francisco to rethink his battle plan, Coppola returned to the jungle. Some of the crew mutinied and didn’t go with him. Sheen went somewhat reluctantly. ‘I don’t know if I’m going to live through this,’ he told friends. ‘Those fuckers are crazy.’
Work now began on the sequences set around Colonel Kurtz’s compound, where a shocking discovery was made. One morning, Sheen’s wife woke up co-producer Gray Frederickson. ‘You’ve got to come with me.’ She took him down to the temple set, which was strewn with rubbish and smelled terrible. ‘You’ve got to clean this up,’ she said. ‘It’s a health risk, I won’t allow Marty to work here.’ So Frederickson went to the production designer Dean Tavoularis. ‘They’re complaining about you; there are dead rats in there.’ Looking not bothered, Tavoularis said, ‘That’s intentional, it gives it real atmosphere.’ ‘Well you’re gonna lose the actors,’ said Frederickson. ‘They’re not happy working in those conditions. ’ There was a prop guy standing close by who muttered, ‘Wait till he hears about the dead bodies.’ Frederickson cried, ‘What!’
He’d heard the rumours about dead bodies being on the set but discounted them as plain ludicr
ous. ‘And they took me there,’ Frederickson recalls. ‘There was a marquee where we all ate dinner and then behind it was a tent where they stored props and we went in there and I saw this row of cadavers all laid out, all grey-looking. I said, “You guys are nuts. Where did these come from? We’ve got to get rid of this immediately.” They said, “No, no, they’ll be very authentic, we’ll have them upside down in the trees.” I said, “You can’t do that.” It turned out they’d got them from a guy who supposedly supplied bodies to medical schools for autopsies, but the police showed up on our set and said that this guy was robbing graves. Then the police said to us, “How do we know you guys haven’t had these people killed because they’re unidentified?” And they took all of our passports; I was worried for a few days. But they got to the truth of it all and put the guy in jail. And they showed up with a big truck and these soldiers were loading the bodies inside and they came over to me and said, “Where do we take these.” I said, “I don’t know, the cemetery.” Turned out they couldn’t take them to the cemetery because it costs money to bury them. “Oh, don’t worry,” they said, “we’ll dump them somewhere,” and they drove away. I don’t know what they did with them. So for the scenes in the movie we had extras hanging from the trees, not dead bodies.’
When Marlon arrived he shocked everybody — he was like a blimp, maybe three hundred pounds; that’s an awful lot of peanut butter. ‘He was huge,’ says Frederickson. ‘You couldn’t see around him.’ This gave Coppola palpitations, for he’d envisioned Kurtz as a lean and hungry warrior. Also, what the hell was he going to wear? There was no Green Beret uniform on earth big enough!
Robert Sellers Page 23