Another rising star, Sean Penn, turned up one day to watch filming. He’d never met Dennis before and was fascinated to see the old pro in action. The scene they were working on had Dillon’s character talking about his mother. ‘Was our mother crazy?’ Dennis is supposed to reply, ‘No, your mother wasn’t crazy. She just saw things differently than other people.’ Coppola demanded quiet, then, ‘Action.’ Dillon asked the question. ‘Dad, was our mother crazy?’ Dennis looked him in the face. ‘No, your mother wasn’t crazy! She just saw things — she saw — she saw a buffalo’s feet on an elephant! Have you ever seen rainbows going up a duck’s ass? No, your mother wasn’t crazy.’ The crew fell about. As for Penn, ‘Now I knew that everything I had learned about acting I could just throw out.’
When Dennis arrived on the set of Coppola’s movie he’d been off the booze for months. The reason? His father lay dying, ‘and I wanted him to see me sober for the last year of his life’. There had been very little contact between father and son up until that point, or with his mother, even after the success of Easy Rider and the birth of grandchildren. At least there was some form of reconciliation prior to his death. ‘He was really a decent guy,’ Dennis would say of his dad. ‘I just didn’t know him.’
Although he was temporarily off the sauce, Dennis’s belief back then was that for some scenes you had to be authentically rat-arsed on camera, not act drunk. There was one such moment in Rumble Fish, a scene in a bar. ‘If we don’t get it after the third take,’ Dennis told Coppola. ‘I’m going to start taking shots of cognac.’ Coppola was horrified. He didn’t want Dennis back on the bottle, at least not on his film. After Coppola had calmed down they shot for eighteen hours. ‘I consumed a bottle of cognac,’ said Dennis. ‘And I stopped drinking again the next day.’
But on the set of his next film, the Sam Peckinpah thriller The Osterman Weekend (1983), one journalist recalled interviewing Hopper in his dressing room and he was drinking beer and pulling on a joint at the same time. Dennis was facing his demons again. Amazingly it still didn’t affect his work. He was on time and did the job at hand, the perfect professional, although sometimes when he hit the stuff hard no one knew who was going to come out of the dressing room, Dr Jekyll or Mr Hyde.
But his personal life was a real mess, ‘a nightmare’. Back in Taos, Dennis’s girlfriend was becoming ever more perturbed by his habit of firing guns into the wallpaper. He imagined intruders or phantoms hovering about the rooms. It was said that he slept with a gun under his pillow. It was the same old paranoia. Dennis was himself hovering pretty close to insanity and planned to demonstrate it to a disbelieving world by literally blowing himself up with dynamite as the culmination of an exhibition of his art work, aptly called ‘Art on the Edge’. As a boy Dennis had watched in awe as a stuntman performed this daredevil feat at a rodeo in Kansas, surrounding himself with sticks of dynamite and emerging from the smoke unscathed after they had detonated. It was an illusion, of a kind, but a dangerous and seriously misguided one. The basic theory is that the blast from twenty sticks of dynamite placed in a circle will shoot outwards, creating a central vacuum like the eye of a storm, leaving anything there intact. That is, if everything goes as it should. Some small oversight or miscalculation, or a few sticks failing to detonate simultaneously, and you could be blown to bits.
It wasn’t just the public who crowded into a speedway track in Houston, Texas to see Dennis kill himself; friends had flown in for the party, too. Was this all a giant charade, the artist’s ultimate statement? Or was he literally on the edge, now, as never before? ‘People,’ he reasoned later, ‘were worried about my sanity.’ George Hickenlooper, who made a documentary on Dennis, believes he was ‘at the nadir of his existence then. He was on drugs, his career was in the toilet, he was living on the edge, and it was a way for him to garner some attention, I guess, or at the same time end his life. He would have appreciated either at the time, considering the state he was in.’ So if he lived it was a piece of art; if he died it would be a glorious exit.
The crowd watched with bated breath as Dennis strapped himself into a chair, the explosives arranged around him and then — ka-boom! When the smoke cleared, Dennis was unharmed, although his tongue was left so numb that he lost the power of speech for several days. When asked years later if he would ever repeat it he deadpanned, ‘No. I don’t think I’ll try that again, thank you.’
Dennis’s life at this point was about as unbalanced as it had ever been, his consumption of booze and drugs frankly frightening. He really was on course for hell and damnation. The statistics were awesome. At his peak Dennis was consuming daily — wait for this — a half-gallon of rum with a fifth of rum on the side, in case he ran out, twenty-eight beers and three grams of cocaine, ‘lines the length of a fountain pen every ten minutes’. These are amounts that would kill most people.
His paranoia was working overtime, too. For some reason he believed there was a contract out on his life. Even the sanctuary of Taos felt unsafe. He had to get out, so called on a bunch of friends to form an armed escort to the local airport. He fled to LA, where he booked into a hotel and called over some female company for a welcome-home orgy. Between bouts of wild sex Dennis was snorting his way Scarface-like through vast quantities of cocaine. He was even shooting the stuff, taking coke directly into his bloodstream. (The effect was instantaneous and dramatic, but it left his body just as quickly.) At times he was shooting it every ten minutes, plus speedballs, coke and heroin mixed, the lethal combination that had killed John Belushi only a few months earlier.
Still convinced there was a contract out on him, Dennis moved from town to town. At one point he confronted a local mobster he believed was out to get him. The meet was in a deserted parking lot and Dennis wanted answers to questions. When he wasn’t satisfied with the answers he pulled a knife. Luckily the crook felt pity for the miserable Dennis and didn’t have him killed on the spot.
Let’s face it, I fucked them all.
Following her romp with Jack, supermodel Janice Dickinson managed to snare Warren Beatty next. They kept bumping into each other in New York and Janice invited him to the notorious nightclub Studio 54. Warren declined, that just wasn’t his scene. She’d got his attention, though, and Warren invited her to his suite at the Carlyle, where she’d romanced Jack. Warren’s suite was considerably bigger, she noticed.
Warren got chatting to Diane Keaton on the phone as Janice made herself comfortable. Just then the second line rang; it was new conquest Mary Tyler Moore. Deftly Warren put Diane on hold and proceeded to make Mary ‘feel deeply loved, too’, recalled Janice, who watched, marvelling, as he telephonically juggled both women for a few minutes.
Eventually royally seduced, Janice recalled that Warren hung on her every word, making her feel like the centre of the universe, and when they made love she wasn’t disappointed. ‘He knew where everything was and what to do with it. Of course he’d had lots of practice. I tried not to think about just how much.’ Janice woke up at around 3 a.m. to find Warren wasn’t in bed; instead he was standing admiring himself in the mirror. When she asked what he was doing he said, ‘I’m trying to get that just been fucked look.’ Janice dated Warren for the next few months before their passion petered out naturally. ‘I never let myself fall in love with him,’ she said. ‘As I knew he was making half a dozen women feel the same way at the same time.’
Including Sylvia Kristel. Warren bumped into the Emmanuelle star at an LA party and called her a few days later. Sylvia felt seduced almost by his voice alone, writing in her autobiography: ‘When you hear him murmur “It’s Warren Beatty” you immediately realise he’s actually saying: might the prospect of sleeping with me be agreeable to you?’
Sylvia agreed to meet Warren at a luxury hotel, despite a friend’s warning that he always carried the key to a suite, just in case he got lucky. They had lunch, though Sylvia was curious that he’d brought along another woman, ‘That week’s conquest.’ Sylvia later found out that Warre
n thought she was bisexual and was hoping . . . well, Warren lived in eternal hope. She arranged another meeting with him, but this time with the caveat that ‘Sylvia is not Emmanuelle.’ So began an affair that lasted a few brief though memorable months. Sylvia saw that for Warren the pursuit of women was ‘an irrepressible urge, an endless hunting ground’. She found it amusing to watch Warren constantly on the lookout for new prey like an animal, knowing that few women could resist but that all would suffer the ‘frustration of becoming no more than a memory a few hours later’.
By the eighties, of course, Warren’s reputation as a ladies’ man was already legendary. ‘But it was a puny thing compared with the reality. It really was,’ says screenwriter Trevor Griffiths. ‘He used his sexuality the whole twenty-four hours of his day. It really was like Shampoo; there was no way of getting away from the next erection. We’d be driving down Sunset Boulevard or wherever, and he’d stop next to some woman in her Mercedes. He’d just look at her, she’d look at him, and something would happen behind their eyes. He’d mouth “hello” and they’d pull over and there would be an exchange of telephone numbers. Now, you imagine that and put yourself in his position and that is a very strange life to lead.’
Rolling Stone magazine had fun revealing some of Warren’s chat-up lines – ‘You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve met who’s not an actress or model,’ or, ‘Your grandmother, she was one of the sexiest women I ever knew.’ Amazingly, he still succeeded in avoiding marriage while remaining friends with many of the women in his life. ‘No matter what has happened,’ he once revealed, ‘I’ve never felt very apart from any of the women with whom I have been involved. Some feeling always remained.’
If you wanted to get me on my back, all you had to do was ask me.
It wasn’t often that Jack Nicholson scooped up a Burt Reynolds cast off, but that’s exactly what happened with Terms of Endearment (1983), and he ended up with a second Oscar. It was a gem of a role, Garrett Breedlove, a pot-bellied, balding, hard-drinking ex-astronaut who chases young women around. Perfect casting for Jack, you might think, but director/writer Jim Brooks, who’d come from a highly successful career in TV with Rhoda and Taxi, initially offered it to Reynolds. After the mustachioed one turned it down Jack was happy to come on board, not giving a rat’s arse about what the role might do to his image. Indeed, critics praised him for taking a part that called for an overweight, middle-aged man, just the sort of casting many Hollywood leading men actively avoided. And Jack went all out with the role, asking Brooks on set, ‘How much gut do you want?’ It also represented a nice change of pace after playing an assortment of sex maniacs and nut jobs. ‘I was looking for a slightly more socially redeeming character,’ Jack said.
As filming began tension emerged between Jack’s co-stars Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger, playing mother and daughter. The two women did not get along and Jack often had to act as mediator. While watching rushes one day, Shirley reached over to touch Debra’s arm. She missed. ‘You grabbed my tit!’ Debra shrieked, and to the amazement of everyone punched MacLaine and had to be pulled off her by crew members. If anything Debra’s behaviour became more deranged. During Jack and Shirley’s love scene the actress crept under the bed sheets with them and licked Shirley’s leg. Fuming, Shirley got in her car and made to drive off. Brooks couldn’t have his star go AWOL so one of the producers threw themselves onto the hood of the car to stop her leaving.
Shirley’s relationship with Jack was far more positive. Although she was Warren’s sister, Shirley didn’t know Jack at all well before starting work on Terms of Endearment but it ended up being a dream partnership. ‘To have Jack in bed was such middle-age joy.’
Regardless of the frictions, Terms was a huge box-office success and won a clutch of Oscars. Strolling over to the podium to pick up his best supporting actor award Jack punched the air and roared, ‘All you rock people down at the Roxy and up in the Rockies, rock on.’ Not your typical acceptance speech.
While publicising the film in Britain, Jack discovered that his reputation was beginning to get in the way of his work. A British tabloid claimed he’d had a ‘string of drug busts in America’. Jack sued, and the paper was forced to pay him substantial damages. Maybe someone forget to tell Jack that if you dance with the devil, expect to get pricked by his horns. Maybe someone forgot to tell the paper, too.
It wasn’t only on the cinema screen where you’d catch Jack; he often took a starring role courtside at home games for his beloved Lakers. A basketball fanatic, Jack sees his local team as often as work permits, sometimes chartering his own plane to away games for himself and select buddies. He’s gone down in Lakers history as their number one fan, entering the arena sporting sunglasses to huge cheers. Sports Illustrated feels that Jack’s affection for basketball is just part of his ‘successful project to have more fun than anybody on the planet’.
A highly vocal fan, ranting and raving at the referee or opposing players, stories of Jack the fan are legion. Back in 1980 when the Washington Bullets were playing the Lakers a lively exchange broke out between Jack and the visitors’ coach, Dick Motta, who claimed Jack made a grab for his leg. ‘You touch me again and you won’t need a frontal lobotomy,’ Motta yelled, alluding to Jack’s Cuckoo’s Nest role. Jack hit back, saying it was Motta who was breaking the rules (he had strayed out of his coaching area). ‘Say, pal,’ Motta responded, ‘if you wanna be a coach, buy me a team and I’ll make you my assistant. Now sit down.’ ‘Sit down yourself,’ said Jack. ‘I pay money for these seats and, by the way, pal, it’ll take somebody bigger than you to make me sit.’
The crowd loved it, of course. Jack’s antics are usually deliberately orchestrated to raise the temperature of a game, firing up both the team and the fans. Once his courtside tantrum was so heated, screaming at a ref who had penalised a Lakers player, that the official warned security that if Jack threw another fit he should be escorted out. It did the trick, though; the Lakers stormed to victory. His gamesmanship is equally outrageous at away games, most notably against arch rivals the Boston Celtics, where he reportedly mooned at thousands of their fans at the Boston Garden Stadium. Red Auerbach, the Celtics general manager, told Sports Illustrated, ‘I’ve seen a lot of fans in my day, and to me there’s a difference between being an ass and being a fan.’
After that incident Jack was public enemy number one with the Celtic fans, but still enjoyed the away games in Boston. ‘Until you’ve had 15,000 people in Boston Garden screaming, “Fuck you, Jack!” you haven’t lived.’ It’s all good-natured banter, and as he takes his seat he gestures obscenely to the baying crowd and laughs at their hostile banners – CHOKE ON YOUR COKE, JACK. But even in this maelstrom of hate he had his supporters, two teenagers standing in the corner, wearing dark clothes and sunglasses. As Jack saw them they flipped over a small cardboard sign that read NICHOLSON YOUTH.
You know in 15 years, you’re going to be playing soccer with your tits. What do you think of that?
Besides not making films, Marlon Brando was still trying, unsuccessfully, not to gain the proportions of a humped-back whale. One of his girlfriends apparently dumped him when he failed to keep his promise to lose weight. He said he was dieting, but never seemed to get any thinner. She later found out that deliverymen were throwing bags of Burger King Whoppers and McDonald’s Big Macs over the gates of his Mulholland Drive estate at night to relieve his hunger pangs.
Tales emerged that Marlon’s idea of a snack was a pound of cooked bacon shoved into an entire loaf of bread. Hardly surprising, then, that he was hit by a series of grave illnesses, though somehow he always managed to survive. ‘He has the constitution of a horse,’ said friend Phil Rhodes.
At Mulholland Drive there were rumours that he’d stay in his bedroom for days on end, a loaded pistol and 12-gauge shotgun tucked under his bed. When he went out it was usually in disguise, once with his whole face wrapped in white gauze, like the invisible man. He really would have been better off making movies,
but his hatred of the profession, or those in charge of it, never left him. ‘I notice,’ he once said, ‘that the width of a Hollywood smile in my direction is commensurate with how my last picture grossed.’
As a novice actor Marlon became a great observer of people, watching and mimicking their quirks and gestures. When fame came along that particular weapon was ripped from his actor’s armoury and instead he became the observed. Or maybe he never forgave acting for stripping him of what he held most precious – his privacy. ‘Acting is a bum’s life in that it leads to perfect self-indulgence.’
Producer Albert Ruddy recalls one day sitting with Marlon when they were shooting scenes at a New York hospital for The Godfather. He’d taken a shine to a little Puerto Rican boy who ran the elevator and they were all chewing the fat when this kid confided in Marlon that he wanted to be an actor. ‘And Marlon berated him,’ says Ruddy. ‘He said, “You want to live your life as an actor, having other people put lines in your mouth?” I was stunned, it was like Frank Lloyd Wright asking, “Why do you want to be an architect?” I was shocked. But that’s how he felt. That’s why he was frustrated and got involved with the Indians and all that. He felt he was pigeonholed and just didn’t want to repeat this success over and over as the greatest actor in the world. The guy had accomplished everything that any actor ever did in their life.’
Robert Sellers Page 28