Jack loved to refer to himself jokingly as Huston’s son-in-law. Maybe the director was a surrogate father in a way, for, as Jack admitted, ‘He’s one of those people in life whose approval I seek.’ Anjelica, though, had to separate her private from her professional relationship with these two powerful males who had shaped her life. During filming in New York she took a separate hotel room from Jack, who again brought his role back home with him. ‘There were elements of the hit man in Jack at the time and I didn’t want to be around him too much.’ Jack had soaked up the gangster milieu by frequenting Brooklyn bars and gambling joints where these sorts of characters hung out, mastering their dialect and gestures. He also ate a lot of pasta to gain a more squat physique than usual. For his squinty-eyed expression he borrowed the look from his dog, ‘When he had just killed another dog.’
Prizzi’s Honor was only a mild hit when it opened in the summer of 1985 but critics loved the film and it was duly recognised with a host of Oscar nominations, Jack got his eighth best actor nod. But it was Anjelica who walked off with best supporting actress. A delighted Jack was at the ceremony, of course, although his left elbow was in a cast following a skiing accident, and he thanked God Anjelica’s prize came early in the evening. ‘I was legitimately stoned on pain pills.’
Marlon Brando – In Tahiti, probably.
Baby wants to fuck! Baby wants to fuck Blue Velvet!
It had become the biggest story around Hollywood. ‘Hey, did you hear about Dennis Hopper? They say he’s gone straight, no booze, no drugs.’ People couldn’t quite believe it, but there was a new Dennis in town, lean, mean and fit, not the bedraggled devil creature of a few years before.
He’d beaten his obsession, the hardest part of his rehabilitation. ‘I don’t give a fuck if you put a pound of cocaine on the table, I don’t want it.’ Sitting in the company of other drinkers no longer sent him off the deep end. He’d no desire any more to join them and get hammered. ‘I have a great time not disorientating my mind.’ His only vice now was a good cigar.
And he was eager to work, ready to prove to the world that he could be relied upon. No longer would he finish off a bottle of tequila or snort cocaine to help him play a scene. He discovered it was a lot easier now without the mood swings, the anxieties; he fell back instead on his drama training. Bizarrely, it was the sober and clean Dennis that would provide cinema with some of its most perverse and psychotic screen madmen.
Kit Carson, who so memorably caught Dennis’s mad era in his documentary The American Dreamer, had written the sequel to Tobe Hooper’s seminal horror movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and wanted Dennis to play an avenging sheriff in pursuit of the cannibal killers. It was shot in Austin, Texas, and the cast and crew all stayed in the same hotel. ‘Every morning,’ recalls Carson, ‘Dennis would be in the commissary, going, “OK, I’ve got to do something today and it’s not going to be drugs. So it’s gonna be golf.”’ Dennis had befriended singer Willie Nelson, so every day when he wasn’t shooting he’d go off and play golf with Willie. The sport became a passion; he’d play with Neil Young and Bob Dylan, sometimes Jack. It seemed to Dennis that most of America’s golf courses were full of former wild men. ‘Most of the guys who were heavy on drugs and stuff, we’re all out playing golf and we’re all sober. It is weird.’
Still, the madman was never too far from the surface. On the set of Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) Dennis celebrated his fiftieth birthday. ‘And he insisted on cutting his cake with a chainsaw,’ says Carson. So there wasn’t a huge change in him then. ‘It was clear, however, that he had got more focused on having a relationship with parts of his family that he had neglected in his own egotistical trip,’ says Carson. ‘I saw a gentleness in him.’
One man who still hadn’t heard about the new and improved Dennis, who still thought he got flaked out on drugs and slept with his gun, was director David Lynch. Hopper’s name was one of several that came up in meetings about playing a sadomasochistic gangster called Frank Booth in Lynch’s new movie Blue Velvet (1986), but it was always shot down. Then word reached Lynch that the guy was on the wagon for real. One afternoon Lynch took a phone call he’s never forgotten. ‘I have to play Frank.’ It was Dennis, breathing heavily down the phone. ‘I have to play this part because I am Frank.’ This hardly inspired confidence, in fact it scared the living shit out of Lynch. ‘Yeah, David was apparently pretty shaken up by my call,’ laughed Dennis. Immediately he put the phone down Lynch called Dean Stockwell, whom he’d already cast in the movie and knew to be a long-time buddy of Hopper. ‘My God, Dean, I’ve just spoken to Dennis Hopper and he said he had to play the part because he was Frank. And the scariest thing is, I believe him!’
Agents and industry people warned Dennis to stay clear of Frank Booth. ‘This part has no redeemable character. It’s beyond redemption. ’ Bring it on, said Dennis. ‘The part is a fucking dream, man.’ He knew exactly the kind of guy Frank was. He’d lived in a very dark area of alcoholism, addiction, drug running, outlaw glory. He’d seen Franks. He’d known them, they’d been friends. ‘It was something I really understood.’
Lynch had to concede that Dennis was the only person who could play Frank – ‘He’s one suave fucker’ – and that as an actor he had the same quality as Jack, ‘You can’t stop watching the guy. He’s got a presence. ’ His savage rape of Isabella Rossellini, inhaling amyl nitrate through an oxygen mask to heighten the sexually violent act, was amongst the most obscene ever shown in a mainstream movie. In the original script Frank inhales helium, which merely has the effect of altering his voice; it was Dennis who suggested amyl nitrate, so altering Frank’s mind. It leaves one wondering how the scene would have played with Frank on helium sounding like Donald Duck. ‘Now that would have been really creepy,’ said Dennis.
It remains an astonishing performance, one that Lynch remembers coming to life with unbelievable power. There was an odd feeling on the set, a disturbing quiet when they finished a take. ‘It just astounded me,’ said Hopper’s brother David. ‘Definitely Dennis, in Frank Booth, worked out the worst aspects of his alter ego.’
On release Blue Velvet turned Dennis once again into a cult figure, this time for a new generation of moviegoers. Even though he called Frank the most perverse, decadent and degenerate man he’d ever played, Dennis also, rather bizarrely, saw him as one of cinema’s great romantic leads! He was deadly serious. Yes Frank was a bit of a sicko, but his desire for Isabella’s character was real and he went to any lengths. ‘He kidnaps her, cuts her fucking husband’s ear off with a pair of scissors, which isn’t an easy thing to do, even shoots the cop he’s in cahoots with. Now if that isn’t true love, what the fuck is?’
Next for Dennis was a role opposite Gene Hackman in the basketball drama Hoosiers (1986), playing a drunk who ends up in rehab, a case of art imitating life. The film proved somewhat of a crowd pleaser and earned Dennis a well-deserved Oscar nomination for best supporting actor. It was an acknowledgement of a kind, an acceptance back into the mainstream, and it didn’t faze him at all when he lost out.
Dennis was now on a roll, jumping from film to film. River’s Edge (1986), featuring an early lead role for Keanu Reeves, was a dark fable about America’s current crop of disturbed youth. Dennis played a burned-out hippie who sells dope to kids and lives on his own with an inflatable doll. Then Warren asked him to play yet another alcoholic father in a film he was producing, The Pick Up Artist (1987), starring the then very hot brat-pack actress Molly Ringwald. There was even a short stint in Spain on cult director Alex Cox’s wacky hommage to the spaghetti westerns, Straight to Hell (1987). Dennis numbered amongst a truly eclectic cast including Clash front man Joe Strummer and singers Courtney Love and Elvis Costello. Cox had wanted to use Dennis years before on his debut movie Repo Man. ‘We met for lunch and he was very nice and reasonable and not at all intimidating. In the end I didn’t cast Dennis because of money. His agent wanted more than we had, so we went instead with Harry Dean Stanton.’
On Straight to Hell Dennis was on set just for one day. He worked fast, luckily, and came well prepared. ‘Dennis was just wonderful to work with,’ says Cox. ‘He didn’t act like a big star in any way. Dennis is a real person. Very relaxed and easy to get along with, and a magnet for the other actors. Five were called that day; twenty-five showed up to watch him work.’
I think that something went wrong and now I own a blind camel.
Warren Beatty was having a lot of fun, but he wasn’t making movies. With no strong family ties, plenty of money and no compulsion to work, he’d take off for months on end to hop around the world, read, dabble in politics and bed beautiful women, of course. This is the strange contradiction within him: Warren is a workaholic given to gaping periods of hedonistic idleness.
There were always projects on the go, fingers in numerous pies, which made a nice change. Michelle Phillips recalled how Warren could spend five hours a day on the telephone. Practically all his business was conducted on the damn thing. Playwright Trevor Griffiths was amazed to see Warren deftly managing between four and ten projects simultaneously. ‘I’ve been at his suite where he’s had six or eight different phone calls all on at the same time, and moving between them. In fact I was going to write a play for the Royal Court in the eighties called Warren, which was just about that. And he said, “I hope you don’t, it’ll cost you a lot of money.”’
The problem with Warren was he’s always been a bugger to commit to anything, and that goes for women as well as movies. ‘I’ve made a whole career out of not working,’ he liked to joke. For him, making a movie was like vomiting. He really didn’t look forward to it, but after he did it he felt a lot better. But the gaps between his films were getting longer, to the extent that each time he made a movie it felt like a comeback. After six years away from screens the project Warren chose to make his return in couldn’t have been more of a pilchard, a movie that has become synonymous with box-office disasters – Ishtar (1987). Hard to believe, but at the time it looked like a pretty good idea to team Warren and Dustin Hoffman as a couple of luckless cabaret singers lost in Arabia, then throw in Euro totty Isabelle Adjani and a funny camel. But it fell foul of almost everyone who saw it. Roger Ebert in the New York Post said, ‘It’s not funny, it’s not smart, it’s interesting only in the way a traffic accident is interesting.’
Warren was annoyed that most reviewers dealt with how much the film cost (something in the region of $40m) rather than its merits. Personally he thought it was funny, but the rest of the planet didn’t. When asked about the disaster Isabelle Adjani replied, ‘Oh, I took it the way Dustin Hoffman did, as a nice holiday in Morocco.’
Promoting Ishtar in New York, Warren stayed at the Ritz Carlton. At lunch one day he spied the familiar face of Julia Phillips. He knew the producer was staying in the suite across the hall to his and motioned for her to join him. ‘So tell me, Julia,’ he said. ‘Don’t you ever have an inclination to knock on my door late at night?’ Phillips, you might recall, had been keen to jump into Warren’s pants a few years before but had been rejected. ‘Not in the least,’ she replied. Far from dissuaded, Warren asked. ‘What would you do if I knocked on your door?’ She answered, ‘I’d tell you to go away.’
Warren was romancing Isabelle at this point, but his roving eye was ever alert. One evening he went out to dinner with a friend and his date, an attractive model. At the end of the meal the waitress took their order for dessert, chocolate or vanilla ice cream were the choices. The model decided on both. For the rest of the evening she could sense Warren staring at her from behind his sunglasses. Next day, sure enough, he called, discussing of all things the fact she’d wanted both ice-cream flavours. ‘You like to try everything,’ Warren concluded. ‘Have you ever made love to a woman? Do you want to? It will be my present to you.’ All the time the poor girl was thinking, Just because I ordered both kinds of ice cream!
Anyway, they eventually had a little fling and the model came away duly impressed by his lovemaking and stamina, he could literally go at it all night. Returning home she wrote in her diary, ‘I’ve been Warren-ized.’
There was another affair, with tomboy beauty Joyce Hyser, formerly Bruce Springsteen’s squeeze. Reports emerged that Warren was going to settle down with her after Hoffman had convinced him of the joys of married life during the shooting of Ishtar. ‘Do you want to go on like you have until you’re ninety and wind up with the girls laughing at you?’ Hoffman had remonstrated. But Warren was still drawn to women almost half his age, and had established not a single emotional root during his roving years, so the fate of Joyce was to be no different. Despite telling friends that she was both a friend and a lover, ‘not just a wiggle and a jiggle’, Warren was soon alone again. Over the years he’d found stability and a sense of belonging with the temporary family of successive movie crews, or he might attach himself to the families of friends like Hoffman, who genuinely felt for his buddy, seeing in him an essential loneliness. ‘I can see him dying alone,’ Hoffman told a journalist. ‘With nobody there to love him and hold his hand. It hurts to think about that.’
I always like a little pussy after lunch.
The press by now had gotten used to Jack and Anjelica’s peculiar relationship in which each seemed to flit in and out of the other’s life. But hearing tales of Jack’s infidelity must have caused her grief nevertheless. In February 1986 Jack held a party at his holiday home in Aspen, where he met British model and aspiring actress Karen Mayo-Chandler. It was a memorable evening. Jack played the perfect host, Karen recalled, drinking champagne but not excessively. She was, however, surprised by his casual lifestyle, epitomised by his clothes, which she thought looked dishevelled for a rich film star.
Obviously Karen made quite an impression on Jack, for he invited her and a friend round the next evening for more champagne. It was here, Karen claimed, that she refused Jack’s suggestion that the three of them finish off the evening in his bedroom. But they remained in touch, meeting occasionally, going out to restaurants, parties, even catching a private movie at Warren’s house. Their relationship would deepen later, with scandalous results.
It was back to movies and one of Jack’s wildest roles in The Witches of Eastwick (1987), based on John Updike’s novel about three women in a sleepy town seduced by the devil himself. Really there was only one candidate for the role, since he’d been practising for it his whole life. But it was too obvious a casting choice for director George Miller, who looked at other actors until realising he was crazy not to go with Jack. When they finally met, Jack’s first words to Miller were, ‘What kept you?’
Jack approached the role with deadly seriousness, reading numerous heavy tomes on medieval witchcraft. He told Anjelica that he wanted audiences to believe that he was indeed the devil incarnate. The quietly suffering Anjelica couldn’t miss this open goal, assuring him that such a feat wouldn’t be too difficult, research or not.
At first Miller approached Jack with trepidation. ‘I thought he was a crazy man, that public persona, and that I was walking into the most difficult situation, and it was like falling down an elevator shaft into a pool of mermaids, he was completely the opposite of my expectation.’ At an early meeting Jack said to Miller, ‘You’re paying me a lot of money, and what you’re getting is not an actor but a filmmaker.’ Time and time again Jack proved to be absolutely right. ‘And he did everything he possibly could to make the best possible film,’ said Miller.
And Witches needed a solid rock at its centre as too often it threatened to veer completely out of control. ‘We had somewhat dysfunctional producers in Peter Guber and Jon Peters,’ says Miller. ‘And I still don’t know why, but it was all pretty crazy. I remember one weekend Aliens had just come out and was a huge hit and suddenly Peters was saying, “Let’s have a horror movie scene like the alien.” And then the next weekend, whatever was number one at the box office, he’d want some of that. There was no logic to it, it was like a kid in a candy shop not knowing which candy
to take.’
The film had all the pathologies of Hollywood and Miller actually quit twice. ‘The only reason I stayed was because of Jack, and he coached me through the film because I’d never really worked in Hollywood before.’ Miller had come to prominence in his native Australia with the Mad Max movies but Witches was his first American movie, and he admits now to not really knowing the score. In early budget meetings he tried to be helpful, save the producers a little money by saying he didn’t really need a trailer. A nice gesture, you’d think, but in the Hollywood-speak of that time it signalled, ‘This dumbass is negotiable on everything.’ So when Miller wanted three camera crews on a particular day, he only got the one. If he needed 200 extras, half that many would turn up. It was Jack who said, ‘George, your politeness is your weakness, you’ve got to make them think you’re a little crazy.’ Miller suddenly realised that not only were you punished for good behaviour but you got rewarded for bad behaviour. ‘So if I didn’t get my third camera I just walked off the set and suddenly, with Jack’s coaching, I found myself enjoying the bad behaviour. Jack had seen all this stuff before and was endorsing it. He told me, “Just walk off the set when the producers arrive.” And I did, and they never came on the set again. Jack knew all the tricks.’
The friction on the set deeply affected Jack’s co-stars, a trio of remarkable women, Michelle Pfeiffer, Cher and Susan Sarandon. They were brought close to tears sometimes, and there were reports of them trying some amateur witchcraft of their own to inflict a nasty dose of herpes on the producers. Again it was Jack who provided the comfort zone, a shoulder to cry on. And a professional aide, able to adapt his performance to the requirements of each actress. Sarandon, for example, was best on the third or fourth take, Pfeiffer on the first. He’d even turn up on his days off to read lines to the girls behind the camera.
Robert Sellers Page 30