Batman was filmed at Pinewood Studios under a cloak of secrecy with a cast that included Michael Keaton as the dark knight and Kim Basinger, who famously referred to Nicholson as ‘the most highly sexed individual I have ever met’. He had amazing stamina, too. According to his driver, during the making of Batman Jack was out gallivanting most nights until four in the morning. Then he’d be up at seven to be picked up for work.
As for Burton and Jack, it was a real melding of minds. When they first met, Jack offered some advice: ‘Don’t do this thing too bright. I’m a fan of Batman – it takes place at night.’ Burton agreed completely. ‘I liked the darkness as a kid,’ said Jack. ‘The wild, deranged complexity of The Joker.’ Burton called Jack one of the most intuitive actors he’d ever worked with, someone who got to know his character inside out and then had fun with it. ‘He’s absolutely brilliant at going as far as you can go, always pushing to the edge, but still making it seem real.’ Jack himself was particularly proud of his performance as The Joker. ‘I considered it a piece of pop art.’
After Batman Jack’s marquee value had never been higher, but his personal life was about to take a tumble. His relationship with Karen Mayo-Chandler was becoming increasingly high profile. For years Anjelica had put up with his wanderings just so long as they didn’t make her look foolish in the eyes of the public. Maybe he’d gone too far this time. She walked away, saying that she’d had a wonderful time with Jack but now she needed to find a relationship that gave her what she most wanted in life: to be a wife and, hopefully, a mother, too. Friends said Jack was dreadfully hurt, having lost not only a woman he loved and cared for deeply but also a close friend. He made numerous calls in an effort to patch things up but Anjelica wasn’t budging. More bad news arrived a couple of days later when Karen revealed to the press that she’d broken off her relationship with Jack, too.
The old rascal wasn’t alone for long. During a visit to a nightclub he met Rebecca Broussard, an aspiring actress with just the right qualifications: blonde hair, blue eyes and about half Jack’s years. The only downside was the fact she was married, although in the throes of separating from her record-producer husband. It wasn’t long before a gossip columnist spotted Rebecca driving Jack’s black Range Rover in Aspen. She also jumped at the chance to play a small role in The Two Jakes.
The rumour mill began to grind again when Anjelica showed up on the Two Jakes set, Rebecca sensibly making herself scarce for the day. Was this a reconciliation? Were all the years of being together, however distant ‘together’ had sometimes been, worth throwing away over the silly romp with Karen Mayo-Chandler? And how much did she know about Rebecca?
But all that became irrelevant after Karen did a kiss-and-tell for the December 1989 issue of Playboy. A salacious exposé of his sex life was the last thing Jack needed. ‘He would hold me down,’ Karen gushed, ‘rip off my clothes and make incredible, mad, wild, wonderful love to me.’ At times Karen came over like a lovestuck teenager. ‘We did not sleep a wink that first night. He’s a guaranteed non-stop sex machine,’ who, she said ate peanut butter in bed, ‘to keep his strength up’. She added, ‘He really ought to write a book and call it How to Make Love to Women. It would be a best seller.’
Most middle-aged men might feel well chuffed about a very sexy young woman making such complimentary if terribly personal revelations, and, had Karen stopped there, so might Jack. Instead she went on to reveal a kinkier side to their bedroom antics, fun and games including spankings and bondage, whips and Polaroids. She alleged that he also enjoyed ‘chasing me round the room with a ping-pong paddle’. ‘Spanking Jack’ became Karen’s favourite nickname for him. (Jack has confessed that he doesn’t see much wrong with a woman wanting a good spanking, and, gathering up Warren and a bunch of friends one time, Jack announced, with a mischievous grin on his face, ‘How about a night out with Spanking Jack?’)
Angry enough to live up to the nickname, Jack phoned Hugh Hefner to complain. The Playboy boss said Jack ought to get over it, that the piece was only a bit of fun. Jack wasn’t laughing and called Hefner a shit. Trying to dismiss the article as a ‘non-event’, Jack did admit that ‘it caused me some problems with Miss Huston’. Indeed, as Anjelica said to friends, ‘An article on Jack’s sexual prowess at Christmas is hardly my idea of a nice present.’
It couldn’t get any worse, could it? Well, yes, when a gossip column printed rumours that Rebecca was pregnant with Jack’s child. On hearing the news Anjelica was incandescent with rage and drove over to Paramount Studios, where she knew Jack was working. As he confessed to Parade magazine in 2007, ‘Her first response was, “You have to support this woman.” Her second response was to beat the hell out of me. She really beat me up. I tell you, Anjelica can punch!’
An unwanted child himself, Jack had always been against abortion, and besides, he wanted another kid, middle age and all. Jack and Rebecca’s daughter was born in April 1990, six days before his fifty-third birthday, and christened Lorraine. He was present at the birth and took to the job of being a father again with enthusiasm. Speculation began that maybe Jack’s wild times were over, a debatable point as he was quick to dismiss talk of marriage, his intentions all too obvious when he installed Rebecca and the baby in a separate house not far from Mulholland Drive. It was an unusual arrangement, even by Hollywood standards, one Jack said gave them both their independence. Several times in the past he’d been through periods when he needed to spend time alone, ‘So I can think devilish thoughts.’ And because he has a loner streak in him. And that takes some understanding on the part of any woman. Certainly the last twenty-five years or so had shown Jack that he was no good at cohabitation.
And what of poor Anjelica? She walked out of Jack’s life, this time for good, her dream of him fathering her children obliterated, leaving only painful thoughts of what might have been. The double blow of Karen’s kiss-and-tell revelations and the media scrum surrounding Rebecca’s pregnancy was the kind of public humiliation undeserved by a woman who had loyally spent the last seventeen years of her life devoted to the Jack project. Her fury must have been incalculable, as must her feelings of loss and abandonment.
6
The Redemptive Nineties
I’m getting too old for this nonsense.
It was one of cinema’s greatest gags, Marlon Brando sending up his Godfather image as an ageing mobster in The Freshman (1990). It also marked the first time he’d shot on location in New York for something like fifteen years. On that first day of shooting in Manhattan, around Little Italy, word soon got out and the streets quickly filled with paparazzi and fans. Director Andrew Bergman was at a loss as to how he was going to get Marlon out without him being photographed or mobbed. A solution was found: Marlon was put into the trunk of his car, which was no easy task, and driven out.
For everyone concerned the film was a memorable experience. Producer Mike Lobell remembers receiving an alarming call from Marlon midway through filming, saying he was in a friend’s Lear Jet, flying out to Tahiti for the weekend. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be back by Monday.’ It turned out that Marlon was phoning from his hotel and had rigged his room with sound effects to make it appear he was aboard a plane.
William Fraker was the cameraman on The Freshman, his first film with Marlon since Morituri back in 1965, and recalls the big man’s final day on the shoot. ‘We finished in the afternoon and Marlon brought a whole stack of photographs of himself and he sat on the tailgate of the grip truck for two hours and signed those pictures for every member of the crew.’
Still despising Hollywood, Marlon was adamant that none of his children would become actors. One of them, Miko, did gravitate toward the glamour of showbiz, for a time becoming Michael Jackson’s bodyguard, famously saving the singer’s scalp when his hair caught on fire during the filming of a TV commercial.
Quite naturally, Marlon felt closest to his first-born, Christian. Ironically it was Christian who was the most troubled Brando sibling, at various points i
n his life addicted to alcohol and drugs. After an abortive attempt to become an actor he’d worked at a host of menial jobs, including tree surgeon and welder. Christian didn’t get on that well with his brothers and sisters. His closest relationship was with his half-sister Cheyenne, a beautiful but troubled young girl who also dabbled in drugs. On the night of 16 May 1990, Christian, Cheyenne and her boyfriend Dag Drollet were over at Mulholland Drive. By the end of the evening Drollet was dead, a bullet in his brain.
There were stories and claims that Drollet beat Cheyenne, even though she was pregnant with his baby, and Christian wanted to teach him a lesson that night, scare the shit out of him. He got a gun and pointed it at Drollet; the two struggled and it went off. ‘And I saw the life go out of him,’ said Christian. Brando was at home that night, so too was Cheyenne’s mother Tarita. Both ran to the scene when they heard the shot. Brando took the gun from Christian’s hand, then he phoned the police.
Christian was charged with first-degree murder and the subsequent trial was a press sensation. It fitted horribly into the stereotype of the dysfunctional Hollywood family, something Brando had so desperately tried to avoid. ‘I think I perhaps failed as a father,’ he confessed on the witness stand. It was an attempt, genuinely felt or otherwise, to shoulder some responsibility for the crime, recognising that his tumultuous relationship with Christian’s mother Anna Kashfi had caused his son irreparable damage.
The full truth of what happened that night will never be known. Cheyenne fled to her father’s paradise island, safe from any attempt to extradite her back to the States. There she attempted suicide several times, distraught at being denied legal custody of Tuki, her young son by Drollet. Though she was placed in hospital and well cared for, nothing could be done for her state of mind and eventually in 1995 she hanged herself in her bedroom at the Brando estate. She was twenty-five.
Because the absent Cheyenne had been the only witness to the crime, the first-degree murder charge was reduced to voluntary manslaughter, to which Christian entered a guilty plea and served five years in prison. In 2005 Christian was in court yet again, this time pleading guilty to two counts of domestic violence after his ex-wife claimed he frequently beat her and threatened to kill her. This troubled man’s life ended in 2008 when he died in a Los Angeles hospital after suffering from pneumonia.
There’s something going on here that I really don’t understand, but I like it.
Although his entry in the international film encyclopedia described him as ‘the most freaked-out personality in films’, Dennis Hopper had calmed down greatly by the time the nineties began, though he still revelled in his image and was more than happy to let the old Dennis out of the cage for show. During one interview he was perfectly responsive and polite answering questions. Asked to, ‘get into character’ for a photograph, Dennis slowly removed his glasses, looked for a suitable place to put them, then walked over to the camera, stared straight into the lens and screamed ‘FFFUCK YOU!’
The success of Colors had also resurrected Dennis’s career as a filmmaker and he won two directorial assignments back to back, each presenting him with a unique set of problems. First off was Catchfire (1990), which Dennis also starred in as a hit man who first rapes and then falls in love with his target, played by Jodie Foster. Dan Paulson was the producer and still remembers his first meeting with Dennis. ‘This was one of my idols from the sixties, the counterculture, Easy Rider, he walks in with a white shirt, tie and a grey suit. He was driving a Cadillac Seville, not the chopper from Easy Rider, and it was a bit of a shock. He’d really changed his image; he was now more establishment, more of a serious artist.’
Working with a low budget, Dennis pulled in favours from acting buddies to swell the cast. ‘They all loved him,’ says Paulson. ‘And we got them for practically nothing: Dean Stockwell, Vincent Price, what a classy gentleman he was. I remember Joe Pesci on the set of the movie telling me he was going to leave the business, this was before Goodfellas, John Turturro, Charlie Sheen, it’s a great cast.’
Dennis’s relationship with Jodie Foster started badly though. On the first day of filming there was this long dolly shot of her in a hotel room and Jodie, who’d ambitions to direct herself, yelled: ‘Cut.’ Dennis wasn’t amused, as Paulson recalls. ‘He very discreetly took her off to the side to tell her, “Don’t ever do that again.” Ultimately he got on very well with her, but he’s in charge when he’s on the set, no doubt about that.’
Dennis’s next battle, however, he was never going to win. The backers were Vestron Pictures, who, when they saw the movie, didn’t like it at all, took it off Dennis and recut it themselves. He was furious – ‘I went nuts when I saw it’ – and ordered his name be removed from the credits and replaced by Alan Smithee, which is the standard Hollywood pseudonym used by any director who is too unhappy with the finished film to put his real name on it. It was like the good old days again, Dennis railing against the system. ‘He’s a guy that’s not afraid to speak his mind,’ says Paulson. ‘He has an opinion and he stands behind it. He just doesn’t cave in like a lot of filmmakers do who are thinking of their next job and play nice.’
Ironically, Vestron then went bankrupt so Catchfire didn’t receive a proper theatrical release. Years later Dennis returned to the movie and brought out a director’s cut on video, renaming it Backtrack. It’s a version Paulson prefers and he looks back fondly on working with Dennis. ‘As a director he knew exactly what he wanted, very decisive in making decisions. I knew the legend Dennis Hopper, and I saw beneath that and the legend was a very professional, buttoned-down guy.’
Dennis next took the directorial reins of a rather tired thriller called The Hot Spot (1990), casting Don Johnson despite never having watched a single episode of his TV hit Miami Vice, thinking him just right to play ‘An amoral car salesman/bank robber/fuck-the-women kind of guy.’ Asked if he had much in common with Johnson, Dennis gave a lengthy pause before answering. ‘We had some of the same girlfriends, which he pointed out to me.’
There was an air of tension on the set with Johnson scarcely endearing himself to either the crew or Dennis, who raised an eyebrow at the ancillary personnel that hovered around the star’s orbit: a cook, a helicopter pilot, a personal hairdresser and make-up man, a driver, a secretary. He also had a heavily muscled bodyguard on hand at all times. When the bodyguard sprained his foot and was immobilised, Hopper burst into laughter. ‘We had about ten people thinking, oh, good, now we can kick the shit out of Don Johnson.’
Wearing that dress is a step in the right direction.
In the new decade commentators wondered if a certain amount of lustre hadn’t worn off Warren Beatty, if his boyish looks had surrendered to the ravages of middle age and his box-office prowess faded. Out of all our bad boys the eighties truly belonged to Jack, who churned out eleven movies, critical and box-office smashes amongst them. Marlon was about as visible as Big Foot in a tutu, Dennis’s career resembled an out-of-control rollercoaster while Warren had managed a measly two features, both dubious in terms of bankability – Reds and Ishtar. Warren was now no longer considered a ‘star’ by the current cinema-going public, lapping up the likes of Cruise, Ford and Arnie. Luckily, Warren had maintained good relationships with high flyers within the Hollywood establishment such as Jeffrey Katzenberg at Disney, who’d bankroll his next film, Dick Tracy (1990).
Even Warren’s Casanova image was dented, looking positively prehistoric in this age of women’s lib and a youth-obsessed society. But he was still out there, chasing like a good ’un, maybe in an attempt to latch on to the kind of girlfriend that would make the world sit up and say, wow, he can still do it. If that was indeed his intention he certainly hit the bull’s eye with Madonna.
The affair essentially sprang from a business deal. Warren was setting up Dick Tracy and Madonna was aching to play snazzy seductress Breathless Mahoney, seeing the role as vital in salvaging her dire movie career. After exploding onto screens in 1984 with Desperately Seek
ing Susan, Madonna hadn’t found another vehicle to match it. Her personal life was in turmoil, too, with her marriage to Sean Penn about as stable as Paris Hilton’s knicker elastic.
Warren didn’t want Madonna, he was thinking of more experienced actresses like Michelle Pfeiffer or Kim Basinger. But her persistence was such that Warren caved in and agreed to a lunch meeting. ‘I know you’ve heard a lot of terrible things about me,’ Madonna said as they sat down to eat. ‘And I’m here to tell you that they’re all true. How about you? I’ve heard a lot about you.’ When Warren remained silent, she said, ‘Just as I thought. All true.’ After their meal Warren, as always the perfect gentleman, took the pop star home and they kissed hungrily, we might imagine, outside the door, after which Warren is alleged to have said, ‘We have lift-off.’
Whatever the misgivings about Madonna’s acting ability she was signed on, Warren eager to exploit the singer’s huge popularity with the MTV generation, who now made up the bulk of the movie going public. Let’s face it, most teens hadn’t heard of Dick Tracy, or Warren for that matter. Everyone was happy then. Well, except Sean Penn. He was livid, since Madonna had promised she’d undertake no major work in the next year so they could try and rescue their marriage by having a baby. When he heard she’d signed for Dick Tracy he became so violent that studio security guards had to drag him out of Madonna’s bungalow. Penn was now a very angry man, and at this stage in his life it was not advisable to be in the same continent as he was, let alone shagging his missus in the same town. He started following Madonna and Warren around as they began to date more frequently. He once parked his car outside Warren’s house as the couple arrived and was still sitting there come dawn.
Robert Sellers Page 32