by Lee Hill
Charles Feldman, the legendary superagent of Hollywood’s golden years, owned the rights to Casino Royale, the only Ian Fleming property not owned by Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. Feldman had a smash hit the previous year with What’s New, Pussycat? and planned to use one of its stars, Woody Allen, in the role of Bond’s younger brother, Jimmy, a meek pretender to 007’s mantle. Feldman was a producer who could never leave a good idea alone. What’s New, Pussycat? became a hit in spite of cast changes and heavy rewrites of Allen’s original screenplay, but this approach would backfire on Casino Royale. It was to have been McGrath’s feature film debut, but Feldman hired, fired, and then rehired him along with four other directors—Robert Parrish, Val Guest, John Huston, and Ken Hughes. The results were edited together to form a quasi-psychedelic burlesque. Other writers, credited and uncredited, included Allen, Huston, Wolf Mankowitz, Michael Sayers, Frank Buxton, Joseph Heller, Ben Hecht, Mickey Rose, and Billy Wilder.
Casino Royale production took up almost all of 1966. Feldman had crews and sets working off and on soundstages all over London. Terry didn’t seem to mind the delays. It was another scene and there was lots of raw material he could work into Blue Movie.
“I received a call from Gareth Wigan, a famous British agent, who was representing me at the time,” Southern recalled. “He had this call from Peter Sellers saying he wanted me to write some dialogue for him on this movie. Wigan said, ‘I think you can ask whatever you want because the producer, Charles Feldman, wants to make it a blockbuster.’ There was a lot of heavy weight on that movie because of Orson Welles and Woody Allen. However, Woody Allen and Peter were such enemies on that film that I didn’t really associate with anyone but Peter. An extraordinary thing happened. Because Woody Allen was having such a bad time on the picture, his agent came over to the Dorchester Hotel to speak to him. When he came into the lobby, he was dead sure he spotted his client Woody Allen at the newsstand reading a paper. The agent came over and said, ‘Hey, Woody, we’re gonna fix that fucking Sellers and he’ll be off this picture.’ But it was actually Peter Sellers he was talking to. Sellers immediately realized that it was a case of mistaken identity and of course went right along with it and apparently gave a masterful impersonation of Woody Allen. He used to repeat this imitation with the grimace and glasses. The agent kept ranting for three or four minutes how Sellers should be fired and some specific things like ‘I’ve seen his contract and I know how much he’s getting, blah, blah, blah,’ and then he split. Peter was so irate (later he was amused) that he walked straight out the door and flew home to Geneva and announced he was taking a few days’ holiday. So this multimillion-dollar movie came to an abrupt halt. It was an incredible situation costing thousands a day. They tried to shoot around Peter in his big confrontation scene with Orson Welles in the casino. Welles was furious. They didn’t even have all the actors in the master shot, just some stand-ins, and each day they would shoot around whichever star didn’t show up.”
Southern concentrated on polishing Peter Sellers’s dialogue. He claimed to have earned about $25,000 for the work: “I was staying at the Dorchester during Casino Royale. I stayed at a number of hotels. Writing on a contract for a major studio you get the very best. I would go back and forth on these over-the-Pole flights, where you would go from L.A. to London. I wrote a lot during those flights.”
Southern accepted the revolving door of cast changes, new directors, production delays, and other writers with amusement. Like many key players on the film, he was kept on full pay much of the time with very little to do. But in London in the mid-sixties, having too much free time and a pocketful of per diem money was a guaranteed ticket to a grand time.
During his frequent visits to London, Southern had gotten to see a lot of Robert Fraser, whose Duke Street art gallery was the showcase for breaking the work of American pop artists such as Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Larry Rivers into the European market. Work by cutting-edge British artists such as Bridget Riley, Colin Self, Richard Hamilton, and Peter Blake was also on view. Terry loved the new developments in painting, sculpture, and multimedia. “I think pop artists are doing for art what I’m doing in literature,” he told Life magazine only a few years before.
The Fraser gallery became the center of a free-floating “salon” that Terry and Gail took an active part in. Surrounding Fraser was an eclectic group that included photographer Michael Cooper, the Rolling Stones and Beatles (and various camp followers), the collector and decorator Christopher Gibbs, model/actress Anita Pallenberg, and singer Marianne Faithfull. Donald Cammell, the charismatic painter-turned-filmmaker, was often around the Fraser circle with his companion, Deborah Dixon, a beautiful model from Texas. Donald’s brother, David, was a successful producer of commercials in a company he ran with Hugh Hudson (who later directed Chariots of Fire). Another partner in the company, Robert Brownjohn, was a New Jersey native best known for his art direction (he had shot the title sequence for Goldfinger). Sandy Lieberson was an up and coming American agent with the London office of Creative Management Associates (CMA) working closely with Peter Sellers, Richard Harris, and Lindsay Anderson. Others on the periphery of the Robert Fraser crowd included the cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, the painter Francis Bacon, and William Burroughs, now living in London. Harvey Orkin, Lieberson’s boss at CMA, was another American expatriate. Orkin was renowned for his no-nonsense wit and became a regular on a talk show hosted by David Frost called Not Just a Programme More a Way of Life.
It was a pretty fast crowd for the time. The Stones were seen as a kind of antichrist version of the Beatles, and the British media played up the contrast. In reality, the two groups were close friends and shared the same nascent interests in mind-expanding drugs, pop art, movies, and experience for its own sake. The older members of the crowd liked the energy and unpredictability of the gatherings in Mayfair and Chelsea.
Gail Gerber recalls the frenzied pace of the Fraser social scene at that time: “I’d never seen people party like that; it was just party, party, party…it was exhausting and I wasn’t used to staying up that late. It was very intriguing. The Stones were the come-uppers and angry young men.”
“I knew about Robert Fraser’s gallery because friends of mine like Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Larry Rivers, and others would show there,” Southern recalled. “[Fraser] was an extraordinary guy. Kenneth Tynan lived on Mount Street near the gallery. He used to take me to a lot of places like that. Fraser’s gallery became very common knowledge in the industry. One day, Tynan said I had to see this friend of his, Colin Self, who had done this extraordinary piece of sculpture which was like the Strangelove plane. They wanted me to pose with it at Fraser’s gallery. That was my first actual trip there. While I was there, Michael Cooper, the photographer who took some pictures, said, ‘You must come over for drinks. Mick and Keith are going to be there.’ Robert used to have this very active salon at his flat. So I went over and got to know them in a very short time. Christopher Gibbs, the antique dealer and production designer for Performance, was part of the crowd at Robert Fraser’s. Then there was Tara Browne, who was killed in the car crash John Lennon wrote about in ‘A Day in the Life.’ It was through him that I knew Christopher. Sandy Lieberson, who was an agent who optioned Flash and Filigree and produced Performance, was there a fair bit. He was involved with the American film industry in London.”
Southern bought Self’s missile sculpture, but it became lost in transit to New York.
In addition to the openings, Fraser and company threw parties and dinners throughout the West End. There were film nights at Fraser’s Mount Street apartment, where Marianne Faithfull vividly recalls seeing The Blood of a Poet, the Jean Cocteau classic. There was dancing at the new discos like the Ad-Lib or Bag O’Bones. There was friendly chatter and limitless book browsing at Barry Miles and John Dunbar’s Indica bookshop, where, if one were lucky, one’s purchases might be gift-wrapped in paper designed by Paul McCartney. The wine flowed freely. Marijuana
smoke filled the air and tabs of Owsley acid were dropped like proverbial pennies from heaven. In addition to head turners like Faithfull and Pallenberg, there were the likes of Donya Luna, a model who was the Naomi Campbell of her time. On more subdued nights, Southern might take in a game of poker with Ted Kotcheff and Mordecai Richler.
Through Fraser, Southern and Gerber became especially close to Michael Cooper. The photographer had a studio at 4 Chelsea Manor, Flood Street, where he shot various assignments for New York and London fashion magazines. Cooper carried his Nikon with him constantly. His real subject was the “family” of friends he shared with Southern and Fraser. Even the camera-weary Stones and Beatles allowed Cooper to take informal snapshots of them. Cooper was also interested in film and was constantly “talking” story with Lieberson and Southern.
Cooper, Southern recalls, persuaded Fraser “to install a 45 rpm record player under the dashboard of his car—a removable Italian device that would absorb the bumps and cobbles of Old Smoke without skipping a note.”
Cooper, Southern, Fraser, and company would drive through the streets of London listening to the Beatles, the Who, or the Kinks at full blast while racing toward a chic bistro or to catch jazz at Ronnie Scott’s in Soho. Or sometimes they would pop by to say hello to Paul McCartney, who was then living with Jane Asher and her parents.
Through Robert Fraser’s gallery and the Swinging London scene that surrounded him, Southern found himself at another red-hot center.
“It was really a meeting place for everybody from every background and walk of life,” says Sandy Lieberson. “Who turned up that was unexpected? To be honest with you, you expected everybody from Muhammad Ali to you name it. It was that sort of feeling in London at the time. I don’t know why. Everybody converged on London at that time. I had it before in Rome in the early sixties. So I was lucky enough to get it in two places.”
Everybody was drawn to Southern by his Grand Guy persona, but Lieberson recognized there was a downside.
“He was not interested in business at all. He never had enough money. He was always short of money no matter how much he was getting paid. Probably part of the problem came down to his lack of interest in the business side of it. Terry loved to have a good time. He loved to be around people. He was quite lonely and didn’t like to be alone. He seemed to really love being the center of attention, being the center of the group, the crowd. He loved talking and storytelling…. He would talk about the quality of the drugs. Who was fucking who. Oh yeah. He loved it. He was a great gossip.”
“In England, a veritable renaissance occurred—The Beatles, Stones and the dress—people were beginning to recognize London as a creative mecca, such as post-war Paris had been. London was the center of the universe for a two-to-three year period. In every era, there is a place for artists to go—London was that place in the 60s,” Southern later wrote in Blinds and Shutters, a 1989 book of the photography of Cooper, who died in 1973.
Anita Pallenberg saw the social circle that surrounded Fraser as a natural extension of his personality. The German-Italian model was then dating the Stones’ guitarist, Brian Jones.
“He was just very open to new influences and very avant-garde,” Pallenberg recalls. “[Robert] liked us to put this effect together. There was another friend of ours, Christopher Gibbs, and he had a house down on 100 Cheyne Walk and we used to have get-togethers there as well. We always went out for dinner together and we were all very jaded and arrogant and put up these big scenes. After that we used to go to the Ad-Lib or the Speakeasy, these clubs that no longer exist. So it’s all very hazy to remember, but it was all very exciting.”
“Terry was definitely everywhere and everybody worshiped him at the time,” Pallenberg adds. She was somewhat intimidated by the writer, who was naturally fascinated by her femme-fatale aura. Terry nicknamed Pallenberg “Neat” and would send her little notes teasing her about her broken English.
Drug use played an important role in cementing the unity of the group says Pallenberg. She admits they had tremendous naïveté about the long-term ramifications of using harder drugs like cocaine and heroin so freely. “I think we had one thing in common and that was drugs, and in the early days it was experimenting. It wasn’t like being a drug user and losing control and being a junkie. William Burroughs was our hero and he sometimes came to Robert Fraser’s as well. We kind of thought that the rest of England and London wasn’t into it. We thought we were pioneers [laughs]…we were using it together and we smoked hash. I don’t want you to think there was this high intellectual thing about it.”
Pallenberg believes Southern was always just a little detached from the group. “Well, Terry was fascinated by them and they were fascinated by him and Michael Cooper was there a lot. He was very close to Terry and I was. I think it was more like mutual admiration and then obviously when we were high it was more gossipy and there were stories and that kind of thing. That’s really quite social. I never felt that the scene really had an impact on Terry, or what kind of impact it had on him. He seemed to be above it [the rock world].”
Even reclusive filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick and Michelangelo Antonioni broke with habits and checked out the scene. Antonioni dug the atmosphere so much he shot the epic morning-after party scene from Blow-Up at one of the group’s apartment’s on Chelsea’s Cheyne Walk.
Yet for all the superficial decadence (the hangover wouldn’t start to kick in until after the infamous Stones drug busts of June 1967), there was an air of tremendous excitement and energy. The cultural artifacts of the era speak for themselves: the Beatles produced a trilogy of classic albums, Rubber Soul, Revolver, and Sgt. Pepper; the Stones countered with Aftermath, Between the Buttons, and Their Satanic Majesties Request. Newer groups like the Kinks, the Who, the Small Faces, the Yardbirds, Pretty Things, and Pink Floyd would move away from R&B covers to writing strikingly original songs. Fraser’s gallery openings (and those of his rival Paul Kasmin) introduced Peter Blake, David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, Allen Jones, Richard Hamilton, and other new artists to the British public. Even the furniture was interesting, as anyone who visited any of the homes Gibbs designed could attest. The success of the James Bond series and the “kitchen sink” films like Room at the Top and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning led to an enormous investment by the American studios in England’s modest film industry. All the major studios in Los Angeles opened large operations in London. Kubrick was shooting 2001 at Shepperton and François Truffaut was making Fahrenheit 451 at Pinewood. Blacklist refugee Joseph Losey revitalized his career with The Servant and Accident. Roman Polanski was attracting attention for psychological thrillers like Cul-de-Sac and Repulsion. Michael Caine became a star as Alfie and Harry Palmer.
Although he was almost a generation older (and had seen real suffering in World War II), Southern did not recoil at the occasionally glib love and peace sloganeering of younger people he met in London. In turn, his association with Dr. Strangelove, arguably the hippest, most political film up to that time, Candy, and The Magic Christian made Southern everyone’s favorite uncle. The London scene was more about fun in the form of recreational drugs and music than politics. Lieberson recalls few if any political conversations. Instead there was a boundless optimism about the future. “We now know there are no limits,” Terry would roar…he was half joking, but he was also dead serious.
As the spring of 1966 rolled around, Terry and Gail attended the Cannes Film Festival. Andy Warhol and Gerard Malanga were also there, to show Chelsea Girls. Malanga and Southern would stay in touch and become neighbors in New England in later years. One of the films Terry caught was Ride in the Whirlwind, which was being toted around by a barely employed actor/writer named Jack Nicholson, whom Terry and Gail knew from the Malibu get-togethers of Fonda and Vadim. Kathleen Tynan remembers bumping into Southern there a great deal. Kenneth wanted to get Terry to help him with a revue he was planning that would deal with the sexual revolution. It would be a collection of sketches featuring the con
tributions of Sam Shepard, Beckett, Pinter, and others. Southern was keen to oblige and said as soon as he had time he would write something.
Southern never did get around to sending Tynan a skit for what became Oh! Calcutta! Nor did anything come of an intriguing approach by Jean-Luc Godard to assist him with a treatment called A Certain French Girl. Southern was a big fan of the French nouvelle vague. He would later cite the ménage à trois scene in Godard’s 1980 Every Man for Himself as one of his favorite examples of on-screen eroticism.
Back in London, Southern continued to put in time on Casino Royale as well as work on The Magic Christian adaptation for Sellers. Sandy Lieberson was trying to move from being an agent to producing. He optioned Flash and Filigree, which became an on-again/off-again property. Lieberson had hoped to land Robert Mitchum as Dr. Eichner, but the project never took off.
Last, but not least in terms of cinematic potential, was Candy. Frank and Eleanor Perry, the husband-and-wife team behind David and Lisa, convinced David Picker at United Artists to give them development money to option Candy. This process was complicated by the increasingly bitter estrangement between Terry and his old Paris buddy and collaborator, Mason Hoffenberg. Mason’s talents as a writer had proven to be conceptual at best and heroin became the dominating force in his life. Drifting from one friend’s home to another, Hoffenberg was not only an unrepentant junkie, but a professional freeloader. Many of Terry’s friends, such as Jean Stein, disliked him. Terry, no doubt sensing this, kept Hoffenberg at a distance. Hoffenberg also felt Terry had sold him out for Hollywood success, a claim that barely held water given the fact that half of the Candy movie money automatically went to Hoffenberg or to his most recent address. Hoffenberg’s perversity also made it difficult to mount a united front in the battles over lost monies and pirated editions as the copyright war over Candy the book grew as mazelike as a Borges story.