How would you like to have more fun than you’ve ever had in your life?
As the eighties continued it was a miracle Dennis Hopper’s liver and kidneys hadn’t divorced themselves from the rest of his body, which was in remarkably fine fettle, considering. But it was his mind that went AWOL first. He’d gone to Cuernavaca in Mexico to make a film called Jungle Warriors (1984), playing of all things head of the US drug enforcement agency. He arrived smashed out of his skull on booze and drugs. Checking into his hotel he convinced himself that people were being tortured and burned alive in the basement. Sensing he was next in line for similar treatment, he made a bolt for it, out into the warm Mexican night, stripped himself naked and wandered into a forest. He spent the whole night there, totally out of his mind. He sensed bugs and snakes crawling over and inside his skin, he had visions of an alien spacecraft landing and followed the glowing lights. ‘I thought the Third World War had started. I masturbated in front of a tree and thought I’d become a galaxy – that was a good mood!’
By dawn, his revelries in the wood over, Dennis wandered back into town, still naked. Some police tried to dress him but Dennis screamed at them, ‘No, shoot me like this! I want to die naked.’ Wrestled into the local jail, the hallucinations continued. Telephone wires started talking to him and he heard friends of his being lined up outside and machinegunned. Fearing that they might soon have a dead film star in their cells, the police dumped him into hospital. There Dennis watched terror stricken as doctors approached him with needles. In his paranoid state he thought they were part of the great conspiracy to kill him.
It didn’t take the film’s producer long to conclude that Dennis was in no fit state to take part in his movie and organise two hulking stuntmen to accompany him back to the States. On the plane Dennis was convinced he was being filmed by Francis Ford Coppola and Wim Wenders, because he’d seen them with cameras as he was boarding. He hadn’t, of course, but Dennis’s life had become its own mad movie. Waiting for take-off, Dennis peered outside and in his raddled mind saw the wing catch fire. He broke free from his bodyguards and tried to open the escape hatch. ‘I was just totally gone,’ he later related. ‘But it’s always very impressive when you do things like that.’ The airline company said it would ground the flight unless Dennis was securely restrained for the whole journey.
Back in LA friends checked Dennis into rehab. ‘Really a drag,’ Dennis called it. ‘Not cool.’ He was still in a bad way, hearing voices and secret messages being passed down to him via telephone wires. Friend Paul Lewis visited him. ‘He reached the point where he was insane. I’d say hello to him and between hello, how are you, was maybe ten minutes; for three words.’ Dennis’s daughter Marin later remembered doctors telling her that her father was practically brain dead and they were moving him to an insane asylum. While there he somehow got hold of a pair of hedge clippers and went wild with them until a pair of orderlies put him in a straitjacket. Staff placed Dennis on a regimen of anti-psychotic drugs but for months he had the shakes and found it difficult to string a simple sentence together, nor could he eat properly, unable to manoeuvre a fork into his mouth. His friend Bud Shrake, who wrote Kid Blue, visited Dennis at the hospital and saw a pathetic figure. He guessed they must have given him the wrong kind of medication because his arms were drawn up like a praying mantis’s and he was trembling as if suffering from Parkinson’s disease. At one point they gave him another drug and he froze completely. Doctors would also march him round to different groups of patients, his tongue hanging out, and say, ‘Now how many of you have ever seen Easy Rider?’ They’d all hold up their hands. The doctor would say, ‘Well, this is one of the guys who starred in it. You see what drugs will do to you.’
Still suffering the symptoms, Dennis checked himself out of the clinic and was driven back to Taos by his girlfriend. He could barely speak, nor even steady a cigarette in his mouth long enough to light it. How the hell was he ever going to act again? He felt depressed and suicidal. ‘I can’t go through life like this,’ he said. The girlfriend was suitably alarmed to take Dennis to a doctor, who put him on a new course of drugs which seemed to calm him down; at least he could light a cigarette now. ‘That was the start of my coming back.’
It had been a horrific experience and one Dennis had come to realise had been induced more by alcohol than by drugs. ‘Alcohol drove me insane.’ To eradicate booze from his life Dennis went into an Alcoholics Anonymous programme and came out determined to quit. His warped strategy to stay off booze was to keep doing drugs. ‘So rather than having a beer in the morning, I would have cocaine.’ Sounds logical, if you happened to be Dennis Hopper circa 1983. (The logic being he could stop cocaine anytime.) The flaw in his plan was that he was getting through half an ounce of cocaine every two or three days. He’d turn up at AA meetings piously admitting ‘I’m an alcoholic’ with half an ounce of cocaine in his pocket. He was heading for oblivion.
Dennis remained at Taos into 1984. He played a small role in a Robert Altman movie, O.C. and Stiggs that tanked big time. He hit the bottle again and the hallucinations returned. So too the voices, voices of people suffering torture and murder. ‘And the radio was talking to me and the electric wires – boy, I was out of it.’
In April 1984 Dennis checked himself into rehab again in LA. The hallucinations by this time were so powerful that the staff feared he would commit violence upon either himself or a fellow patient. He was put on anti-psychotics again and transferred to a psychiatric ward at a state hospital, where he wandered about the place like an extra in Dawn of the Dead, zonked out on a cocktail of prescription drugs for a change. He was essentially trapped there. There was no family to take responsibility for him: his daughters were too young, his father dead, his mother remarried and no longer part of his life. And certainly Dennis was in no fit state to check himself out.
Bob Rafelson went to see him one day and was appalled that the hospital was pumping more drugs into him. He got him out of there and took him to the home of Bert Schneider, Dennis’s old Easy Rider producer, who gave him sanctuary and the right environment to begin the long road to recovery. Friends like Dean Stockwell were there for him, too, lending moral support. And slowly but surely Hopper’s mind balanced itself out again, found its natural plateau of normality. But it was that old cliché of one day at a time. He went back to AA, this time with the guts to admit he was a drug addict as well as a boozer. He faced the truth about himself and it wasn’t pretty, but it was enlightening. He went back over his life, every fucked-up relationship, every violent outburst, each clash with authority, and realised that not once had he been sober, that every bad situation, every mad Dennis moment, had been fuelled by his addictions. In the end it was a simple rationalisation: all he had to do was stop drinking and the paranoia, the schizophrenia, would melt away.
There was no turning back now; his addictive personality meant that he could never do drinks or drugs again. One glass of wine with a meal and he’d want to know where the case was, or the vineyard, and then why the liquor store was closed. As for cocaine, he couldn’t sit down and do a line. Bullshit. He’d want to do an ounce.
Dennis’s rehabilitation led to welcome reconciliations with his children and his mother. At last he saw the damage he’d done, not just to himself but to those closest to him. There was also a willingness to help other people who, like him, had reached the absolute nadir and were grasping for a new start, a new life free of drugs. ‘I don’t think people can stop taking drugs until they’ve bottomed out, spiritually and morally, or they die. That’s how they get off drugs.’ Customarily with Dennis, his rock bottom was more rock bottom than anyone else’s.
Dennis was never to touch booze or hard narcotics again. ‘I’d only go back on drugs if sixty per cent of Americans voted that I should,’ he once joked. Did he miss them? No, not really. Sure he puffed on the odd joint now and then, but that was purely for relaxation. Question was, had he subconsciously been trying to kill himself with all that stu
ff? ‘No,’ he once said, ‘I was having a good time.’
Look at the upside: we’re not livin’ lives of quiet desperation.
In 1984 Warren Beatty returned to heavyweight politics when he supported the presidential aspirations of Colorado senator Gary Hart, marking a new era in the relationship between Hollywood and politics. The pair had met while collaborating on the 1972 presidential campaign for George McGovern and bonded quickly after realising they shared a passion for, well, women. Jennifer Lee remembers Warren introducing her to Hart at the Beverly Wilshire. ‘Warren says he’s a political hopeful,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘But he seems more like a poor man’s version of Warren.’ That would be his downfall.
Hart was intoxicated by Warren and listened to his opinion on key policy matters, but there really was only ever going to be one winner in that year’s presidential race, ex-actor Ronald Reagan. Years later Hart would launch another bid for the White House and once again Warren came on board as kingmaker. The political ramifications this time, however, were to be of an altogether more momentous kind.
With no film in the pipeline Warren happily pottered around Hollywood. Nearing the big five-o, he still looked in pretty sound nick. This was due not to hanging out at fancy LA gyms but healthy living habits. For one, he didn’t smoke, take drugs or drink excessively. ‘It doesn’t take much to get me loaded.’ Ex-girlfriend Janice Dickinson claimed that because both Warren’s parents had been drinkers he’d decided early in life that he’d never go mad with booze or drugs.
Warren was also fastidious about what he put in his mouth. He chewed vitamin pills and steered clear of rich fatty foods. His idea of sin was eating ice cream. Michelle Phillips said he once went on a courgette and string-bean diet for months. He refused to eat anything else. ‘He’s a complete freak about his health and his food,’ she said.
Mike Nichols called him ‘a postgraduate hypochondriac’. One time Warren crossed wires making a call and overheard two strangers discussing the symptoms of a friend about to have her gall bladder removed. He listened and then broke in. ‘Hey, she doesn’t have gall bladder problems, she should be tested for hypoglycaemia.’ Sure enough, he was proved right.
Asked once why he never married any of his many girlfriends, Warren replied, ‘Just because you need a quart of milk doesn’t mean you have to go out and buy a whole cow.’ Well, Warren was certainly making more than the average number of visits to the dairy.
Model and socialite Carole Mallory remembers calling him up to suggest a rendezvous: ‘He said he’d be right over. We continued our date on the kitchen table.’ It was a one-night stand that didn’t stretch to two; she refused to see him again after he passed her name on to Jack.
Warren continued to have his fair share of rebuffs. One of the classics was perpetrated by Sandra Grant, former wife of crooner Tony Bennett. She recalled Warren asking her to invite a girlfriend to her home to make up a threesome. She did just that and when Warren arrived both girls told the by now probably drooling Lothario to undress and get into bed. Teasingly, the girls told Warren to wait while they went into the bathroom to disrobe. Warren waited and waited . . . and waited. But the women never came back. Deciding it was time to puncture his ego, they’d crept out of the front door and gone to the cinema. ‘He was adorable,’ said Sandra. ‘But he had to be taught a lesson.’
Do I ice her? Do I marry her?
In 1984 Hollywood was alive with rumours that Jack Nicholson had agreed to make a sequel to one of his most famous films, Chinatown. Once again he would play embittered detective Jake Gittes, Robert Towne would both write and direct, while ex Paramount supremo Robert Evans, who’d started his career as an actor, would appear in front of the camera for the first time in over twenty-five years. Contracts were signed, a production company was formed and the trio went out seeking financial backers.
One such was Texan tycoon Charles Langston, who was invited to Evans’s palatial mansion in LA to talk about the movie. ‘Bob was very gracious,’ Langston recalls. ‘But he was what I would consider a little bit odd. He sat there for four hours out by his swimming pool totally naked as he told me the story of the movie. He’d just gotten out of the swimming pool. Occasionally the phone would ring and he’d pick it up, chat, and then he’d hang up and say, “That was Jack.” And then it would ring again, he’d pick it up, “That’s Warren, we’re all gonna meet tonight at a restaurant on Sunset Strip.”’ Sure enough, Langston found himself at a table with Jack, Warren and Evans. ‘And it was wall-to-wall women. The conversation was nothing about movie making, it was about all the women they had bedded. That evening was wild; you could tell that the bad-boy fraternity had arrived. And you can imagine there were tons of women at that bar, it was about four-deep all the time trying to get in to talk with Warren and Jack.’
Over the course of the evening Langston witnessed and came to appreciate the camaraderie that existed particularly between Jack and Warren. ‘They had real respect for each other. And they were helping their buddy out, Robert Evans, because Evans had a money guy in town and they were gonna show the money guy a good time. They had a charisma about them that was magnetic. Back then, this was one of the deals where I wouldn’t want to take my girlfriend, not around these guys because, who knows she’d wanna stay. But in their own way, if she did stay they’d make you feel good about it, heh, we’re gonna take care of her, don’t worry about it, you come back tomorrow and pick her up.’
In the end, though, Langston never got his cheque book out and the Chinatown sequel, provisionally entitled The Two Jakes, collapsed before it even started. A great supporting cast had been assembled that included Dennis, Harvey Keitel and Joe Pesci, but as the schedule loomed Towne voiced reservations about Evans, that he simply wasn’t up to the task of playing the second lead role and should be replaced. Jack remained faithful to Evans and fought his corner. ‘Bob used to run Paramount and you can’t treat him like a piece of shit,’ barked Jack. ‘Friendship is more important than money. And if my friend Bobby Evans doesn’t do this part, then I don’t do this movie.’
It’s all about loyalty with Jack; loyalty to his friends is the glue that binds his life together. It’s something he grew up with on the streets of New Jersey, a certain belief in honour. ‘Jack is tremendously loyal,’ says Witches of Eastwick director George Miller. ‘He had this personal driver who’d been with him for years, drove his Winnebago around while Jack often slept in the back. One day he turned up late on the location and the whole roof of this trailer had been ripped off. He’d been driving along and there was this low bridge and despite all the warning signs he’d ploughed on and shaved off the top. Jack was lying in bed when he saw the roof literally disappear. Of course most people would have sacked the guy. Not Jack, he kept him on.’
Jack certainly stayed loyal to Evans throughout the producer’s many turbulent episodes, not least the time he was financially wiped out and lost his beloved mansion. When he heard, Jack got on a plane and flew to Monte Carlo to meet the new owner, went into the guy’s bathroom while he was shaving and got down on his knees and begged him to return Evans’s house. The guy thought he was crazy and went all over the south of France that summer telling friends, ‘Can you believe Jack Nicholson flew over and bent in the bathtub asking for this guy Evans his house back?’ In the end he sold the property back to Evans. ‘And when I got back into it, I found a drawing Jack did and it said, “Back Home”. Beautiful.’
There wasn’t a happy ending for The Two Jakes, though. Hearing of the acrimony between the partners, Paramount pulled out and the project folded before a foot of celluloid was exposed. A million dollars’ worth of sets already built had to be destroyed. Worse, the partners were sued by creditors to the tune of $3m. It left a nasty taste in the mouth and some very bad publicity. Jack was left reeling, while Towne retreated and licked his wounds, not making another movie for three years. The Two Jakes finally appeared in 1990 under Jack’s direction and was met with a muted public response.
> Jack had great affinity for Anjelica’s movie-director father John, then in his eighties, the days of directing cinema classics like Moby Dick and The Maltese Falcon long behind him. Producer John Foreman had come across a property called Prizzi’s Honor, a nice little black comedy about gangsters. He arranged lunch with Anjelica and told her about it. She loved the idea, there was even a nice little part in it for her, but then came the catch. ‘What about your father to direct and Jack to star?’ Anjelica was thinking: Don’t do that to me. Please!
Jack plays Charley Partanna, a dour mafioso hit man who marries fellow assassin Kathleen Turner only to discover they each have a contract out on the other. He’s a bit of a dumb-bell, and so put Jack through the wringer, forcing him to give up everything the public loved about his screen persona – his smile, his charm, his wit. During filming, Huston’s continual advice to Jack before takes was, ‘Remember, he’s stupid.’
Invariably happy to concede near total control to the director, Jack likes to think of himself as the solution rather than the problem. ‘I pride myself on being low maintenance.’ George Miller recalls a conversation he had with Jack about his relationship with directors. ‘Jack said to me, “If Stanley Kubrick wanted me to walk through a door for the hundredth take for some reason only known to him, that was my job, to walk through that door a hundred times.” And then when he made Prizzi’s Honor, John Huston was very ill and directing out of a wheelchair with an oxygen bottle, and Jack said, “I knew that I needed to give John my performance in take one or take two.” And that’s Jack’s brilliance, it’s whatever gets the movie made. If that’s what Stanley wanted, that’s what Stanley got, if that’s what John Huston needed, that’s what he got.’
Robert Sellers Page 29