Conversations in the Raw

by Rex Reed

  He stops in front of a blood bank where the 42nd Street flotsam sells its blood for enough money to exist for another few days of clockless eternity. “One night we shot a scene where I sell blood. In the movie, they show somebody else’s arm with a needle in it, but it shows me going inside. This woman started coming down the street right toward the camera. She was overly made-up and singing and dancing—a bizarre creature you could only find in a place like this. She had really freaked out. All the things than can happen to you in New York had hit her very bad and she had left the scene goodbye. When the crowd saw her, they started laughing. But it’s like they laughed with her, not at her. And when she saw the camera, she just stopped singing and said ‘Nope!’ and walked away like a completely different person. Even in her madness she had dignity. I was really proud of her. She was goddam right not to let us photograph her. None of these people should have been used unless they wanted to be used. It felt undignified somehow to exploit them. They all stick together here. The hostility we encountered from these people was directed at the cameras and actors, not at each other. We were the phony world. We were spoiling their street, invading their privacy.

  “The thing I learned rubbing elbows with these people is compassion. The person Dusty plays in the movie is ugly. You see people like him every day and you don’t need a translation. You look at them and see them for what they are. But if you were taught to look at them a bit differently maybe you could learn to understand why they became that way. Then when we understand what happens to people maybe we could rid ourselves of the callousness that seems to be everywhere. I’m no psychologist, but I feel if we could break down some of our prejudices we’d learn we’re not too different inside from these people on 42nd Street. We all hurt in the same places.”

  A matronly woman eyes Jon curiously, walks quickly ahead of him, then turns around and stops him. Will she scream rape? Will she beat him about the face and eyes? No. She’s just a moviegoer who saw his picture in the ads. Jon grins sheepishly. Then the woman does ten minutes on how she’s writing this doctor’s thesis on “Victorian Literary Responses to Renaissance Art.” She moves on. It’s something he’s got to get used to but isn’t yet. He’s still worrying about it when he accidentally trips over a drunk moaning in a garbage-strewn doorway. He doesn’t run, repulsed. He kneels down and screws the top back on the bum’s wine bottle. “You OK, buddy?” The bum groans and rolls back his eyeballs. Red mucous runs down his cheeks, making a river in the dirt. Jon moves on, obviously touched. It’s a quality he has which saves Midnight Cowboy from being the most depressing movie ever made, and now it seems obvious—the quality does not stem from a screenplay based on James Leo Herlihy’s novel, but from the pure deep-down apple pie niceness of Jon Voight. “A few years ago, when I was in a revue called O, Oysters in the Village, I got to know some of these bums. They used to hang around on the Bowery and take care of each other like a gypsy band. There’s an unwritten law in the Bowery—every bum has a buddy and they split everything 50-50. It’s very beautiful. Like the relationship between Dusty and me in the movie. It’s really a love affair, although it never becomes sexual. But it’s still love. Loneliness can drive people to feel a lot of things. Everyone wants to be Mr. Terrific and I’m no exception, but there will be people who don’t like me because of this character. I can’t worry about them. I want people to go away from it realizing that people like these have a kind of stature, you know? I don’t want people to merely be glad they are better off. I want them to have compassion for the ones who aren’t.”

  Jon Voight has always been lucky. He has never been a midnight cowboy. He’s never even been a 12:00 noon cowboy. He was born in Yonkers 30 years ago and his father, who is the golf pro at Westchester’s Sunningdale Golf Club, started him off as a caddy, hoping he’d follow in the old footsteps. “For a while I played in the low 70s, but I was a rebel. Then I played an 80-year-old man in a school play and acting was all I wanted to do after that. Then my family wanted me to be a lawyer—anything as long as I had some kind of status. But I came to New York in 1960, after I graduated from Catholic University, and studied with Sandy Meisner and, although they disapproved, they put up with my first sophomoric on-my-own arrogance. I guess they realized I would never be a lawyer, so they adjusted. People always do. They have to. But I never had to be a bartender or wash dishes to pay for acting classes. I always knew I could get money from home if I needed it. I always had security. And I worked in projects I was interested in. I was lucky. I never had to do a TV series or anything like that.”

  Like Dustin Hoffman, he was no overnight sensation. He’s done a lot of things nobody remembers. Like singing “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” to Lauri Peters in The Sound of Music for six months on Broadway. “My instincts were good but my singing was lousy,” he grins. He married the girl. It lasted five years. Roles followed in the off-Broadway revival of View from the Bridge and with Irene Papas in Frank Gilroy’s ill-fated That Summer—That Fall. He has two other unreleased movies, a low-budget job called Out of It, and Mike Nichols’ Catch-22, in which he plays a young Nazi type. All of it leaves him confused, intense, critical, too intelligent to hitch his wagon to any particular star. Even Catch-22 fails to set him on fire, although everything about it impresses him except his own contribution to it. “I was down in Mexico with all those guys sitting around all day with nothing to do, and I felt intimidated. All that cleverness and wit. It rained a lot and Mike Nichols and Dick Benjamin and Buck Henry and Art Garfunkel and Martin Balsam would sit around all day and tell jokes and I couldn’t think of anything to say. I don’t have that much to do in it. It’s Mike’s picture and I only have a small part of the puzzle. So I’d just listen and finally it got to the point where everyone was talking about each other because there was nothing else to do. The night Orson Welles arrived I remember they all wondered what it would be like if he sat up talking all night and somebody said about five in the morning, he’d probably say, ‘And then I was four …’”

  But Catch-22 is a long way off. Right now, he’s got Midnight Cowboy to think about and the kind of stardom Dustin Hoffman had handed to him in The Graduate staring him in the face. “My friends tell me I’m avoiding stardom, that I’m self-destructive,” he says, staring at a pair of lace panties in a window with the derriere missing. “They say I don’t give in to vanity enough, or enjoy compliments. That’s true, I guess. I’m neurotic about all that. I distrust it. I want to avoid childish game-playing and make all my statements through my work. Dick Benjamin has been able to do that, and Dusty. I really like Dusty. I was around watching it happen to him, all the fans pulling his clothes and all. He has really developed a wonderful way of coping with stardom. Of course, he goes to a psychiatrist at least five days a week.”

  Somebody grabs him around the waist suddenly and lifts his six-foot-plus frame off the sidewalk. It’s Raymond St. Jacques, on a day off from shooting Cotton Comes to Harlem. “Hey, baby, I hear you’re too much in Midnight Cowboy!”

  Jon blushes and changes the subject. The old put-down again. “He taught me fencing at the San Diego Shakespeare Festival one year.”

  “You were a great Ariel,” says St. Jacques.

  “That shows what a crummy actor I must’ve been,” says Jon, as St. Jacques vanishes in the crowd. “I played Romeo that year too, but he doesn’t even remember. It was nice of him to come up to me, though, don’t you think? When you make it, people’s attitudes change. His didn’t. He seemed genuinely glad to see me, don’t you think? Maybe I won’t create much excitement with this movie after all. That would be a blessing. Then I could go on with my life the way it has been and never give anybody a chance to get an overblown opinion of me.”

  He’s still putting himself down as he wolfs down two hot dogs at Nathan’s. Two mippy-dippys at a nearby table get so zonked out over his movie-star looks they spill mustard all over their vinyl raincoats. He tries to ignore them. “My looks inhibit me. I can’t play real people. I’d like to pl
ay a Greek or a Jew but I’ll never be able to do much with age or ethnic characters. I hate type-casting. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern should be played by Simon and Garfunkel, like Borscht-circuit comics. I think everybody should play everything, but it doesn’t work that way. I wanted to play the Al Pacino role in Does the Tiger Wear a Necktie? They want people today who look like Dusty. I want to be a character actor. I will never let them turn me into a Tab Hunter and I will never go to Hollywood unless they offer me the right properties. I want to go back to class. I may direct a rock musical version of The Tempest with wild lighting and a new kind of theatre both constructed by Jerry Brandt, who built the Electric Circus. After Midnight Cowboy I felt drained. I didn’t know if I ever wanted to work again. I had so many doubts about everything I did. I felt I made a lot of mistakes. I still feel that way. I know there are so many things I have still got to learn.”

  Night is falling and out on The Street the creep show is in full swing. Jon Voight wanders past the windows where the “Last Four Days Before Close-Out” signs have sucked in the tourists for the past five years, watching what his movie is all about in action. Past the 15-cent piña colada stands and the 25-cent all-girl nudie peep shows. From nowhere, a butcher steps into the crowd from a doorway, fresh blood running down his white apron. The Street fills with hawkers and drunks and pimps and prostitutes and girls with wild, vacant panics in their eyes and needle bruises on their arms, all looking like vampires in search of a transfusion. It’s as though the doors of Charenton are suddenly flung wide open and all the inmates are running free.

  “See that drag queen?” says Jon, pointing to something in purple stretch pants with an orange wig and a face full of acne scars. “You wonder what a person like that does at night, what he picks up on a street like this, where he goes. But there’s something to be said for being ready to admit to anything being possible. If you cared enough to stop him and really talk to him, I’ll bet you could learn to understand him. That’s what Midnight Cowboy is about. I wanted to try not to intellectualize the study of loneliness and insecurity, because it wasn’t that personal a thing for me. In a way, I feel I have no right to be in the picture at all. I don’t know anything about homosexuality or transferring the feelings I’ve had for girls in certain sexual situations to what I might feel for a boy. I think it’s a love story, but I’m not enough of a psychologist to explain how I felt about it. It’s not whether I am that person or not that matters; it’s whether I have the compassion for that kind of person or not. I don’t want to say to an audience who doesn’t know anything about hustlers ‘I’m right and you’re wrong.’ I just want to say ‘Let’s share something.’”

  He heads for a taxi, which will take him uptown to the garden apartment he shares with Jennifer Salt, the actress who plays Crazy Annie, his old girl friend back in Texas, in Midnight Cowboy. He turns and takes one last look at The Street. Three imitation midnight cowboys with their flies unzipped dance by, running pocket combs through the streaks in their hair. Jon Voight, who has just played either one or all of them in a role which may make him a celebrity for life, does not laugh. “I have this apartment, you know? It’s nice and clean. Very comfortable. I’m very aware of how comfortable it is. But then I think of all these people who don’t live that way, and I know having a nice apartment or being a great success has nothing to do with me as a person. These people have their own kind of dignity.” He closes the taxi door. “Dignity has nothing to do with where you live.” Soon the midnight cowboys are just dots in the rear-view mirror.

  Offering the Moon to a Guy in Jeans

  On a recent muggy, breezeless morning, a bearded 27-year-old Italian boy from Great Neck named Francis Coppola ambled into a crummy warehouse on West 26th Street, wearing sandals and a red T-shirt with the word “Underplay” across the front. He looked like an organ grinder. Or a hot-dog vendor. But never the sort of fellow Seven Arts would entrust with a $1.5-million wide screen, Technicolor movie called You’re a Big Boy Now!

  Still, there he was, the Orson Welles of the hand-held camera, making like a director, smiling through his furry foliage: “I can’t get used to coming to work every day and watching all these people making more money than my father made in his lifetime and they’re all waiting for me to tell them what to do.”

  They were, too. Geraldine Page sat on an apple crate reading Edgar Allan Poe. Julie Harris tiptoed about looking young enough to play Frankie Addams again tomorrow, ready to go into a scene in which she has her arm broken by a demented rooster. Elizabeth Hartman, as a sadistic discotheque dancer whose prize possession is the wooden leg of an albino hypnotherapist who raped her in her youth, sat in a corner chuckling fiendishly. A rehearsal began: “Am I embarrassed to be here?” asked Tony Bill, who is discovered by the camera in a Chinese bathrobe in Miss Hartman’s Greenwich Village apartment.

  “No, enjoy it,” said Coppola.

  Peter Kastner, the young Canadian actor whose only previous film exposure was in Nobody Waved Goodbye, swallowed a hunk of hot pastrami. “I don’t have to kiss anybody today, do I?”

  They were joined by a floppy sheepdog with a Beatle hairdo. “Sit, Emily! Sit!” cried Peter. Emily plunged into the wall. “If you hit an E-flat, she sits.”

  “Maybe it’d look better if your hair was wet—like you were taking a shower when Peter comes in,” said Coppola to Tony Bill.

  “Then I could have my hair wet, too,” giggled Miss Hartman.

  “Yeah,” said Coppola, his eyes lighting up with visions of directorial sugar plums. “Then everyone would think you were taking a shower together!”

  Slowly, the scene began to take shape. Kastner fell down a flight of stairs carrying roller skates, tennis shoes, two suitcases, a typewriter, a briefcase and an abstract painting. “Come, dog!” he instructed Emily, who was all over the set, licking everyone. “Gee, Francis, that sounds funny. How would Audie Murphy say it?”

  The rehearsal stopped dead while everybody sat around gloomily, trying to think how Audie Murphy would say it. It looked, to an outsider, like group therapy. But then nothing about You’re a Big Boy Now! has ever been conventional.

  According to Coppola, the whole thing started a year ago in Paris, where he was helping Gore Vidal write the screenplay for Is Paris Burning? He had already attended UCLA, won the Samuel Goldwyn award for screenwriting, and nurtured a love for movies since he was old enough to toddle to the box office. His grandfather came to America as Caruso’s pianist and his mother had acted in Vittorio De Sica films in Rome. “As a child,” she says, “Francis would hold out his little hands like he was lining up a shot every time I came into the room.”

  Armed with a lot of technical knowledge but no experience, Coppola set out to make a low-budget nudie film called Dementia. “It was filmed in a motel room and when I finished shooting at the end of the day, I would sleep there because I was so poor.” The film played 42nd Street, but nobody noticed. So he turned to writing full-time, and sold some high-priced film scripts like This Property Is Condemned and Reflections in a Golden Eye. Then, while in Paris, he completed the script of You’re a Big Boy Now! at night while working on Is Paris Burning? during the day. “I wanted to film it in Europe, but Seven Arts wasn’t interested in a $20,000 movie shot there in black and white with a hand-held camera and unknown actors, so they made me come home.”

  Back in New York, the moguls decided to take a chance on Coppola’s offbeat script with a beginning budget of $250,000. As one press agent observed: “You should have seen it. Typical conference-table session, with all these stuffy executives sitting around offering the moon to this funny-looking guy with a beard in blue jeans.”

  Without the moon, Coppola might have ended up another faceless member of the popflick set, the ones who still think Hallelujah the Hills is really a movie. Breaking away from accepted slickness with their shaky tape recorders, blurred sound, sloppy editing, and boring repetition. But Coppola gobbled up the moon like Popeye’s spinach. Without introduction, he
called up Geraldine Page and Rip Torn and Michael Dunn and Julie Harris, talked them into accepting small roles, and suddenly the budget was up to a million and a half. Never hesitant to rush in foolishly where most show business angels had feared to tread, Coppola talked Mayor Lindsay into expediting license and permit procedures and cut through miles of red tape. He got the N.Y. Public Library (bong!) to open its stacks for Peter Kastner to roller skate through, persuaded May’s 14th Street store to let him shoot a chase scene through its midday rush hour with cameras hidden in paper bags and delivery carts, even managed the coup of the year by arranging for the Accutron signs over Times Square to interrupt their news headlines and flash the name “Barbara Darling” through the air for a night shot.

  On the first day of rehearsal, he presented the cast with not one but two scripts—the first for actual shooting and a second with extra dialogue which he produced onstage like a play, taped on a video recorder with a zoom lens, took home to a dark room and studied. “It taught me a lot—how to make shortcuts, how to turn fat characters into thin ones, how to shoot three and four scenes at a time, how to handle the actors. That’s why writers often make bad directors—they have to film it the way they saw it on paper. Not me. I have no ego. Back at UCLA, while the others were always sitting around talking about Eisenstein, I was stealing the keys to the cutting room.”

  Outrageous? David Benedictus, the young British novelist on whose book the film is based, says “I never thought it would get off the ground. I’m so shocked I’m hysterical. It wasn’t a very good novel. The ending was very downbeat and the tone was black comedy. Now instead of being scarred for life by this sadistic Barbara Darling, the young hero will get a nice girl in the end. Still, I think there have been fewer concessions to public taste than in most American films. Francis is wild. He used to call me up in London from Hollywood in the middle of the night and say, ‘We’ve been offered Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood and an $8-million budget, but I knew you wouldn’t be interested, so I turned it down.’ I’d groan and turn over and go back to sleep. I never believed it would see the light of day, but with Francis anything is possible. He is so determined you’d be afraid to say no to him.”