Hollywood Hellraisers (22 page)

Drive, He Said
went further than any previous movie in its depiction of full frontal nudity and the sex act. After a screening at the Cannes Film Festival there were boos as well as cheers and some audience members got to their feet to wave indignant fists toward Nicholson. Then a fight broke out that had patrons running for the exit. Back home a scene where a couple fuck in a two-seater sports car was the subject of much discussion, with some critics finding it all a little degrading and unpleasant, having to watch a girl bent over the front seat taking it like a good ’un from behind. Jack hit back: thanks to personal knowledge, he could confirm that was the only position in which one can fuck in a sports car.

He came to terms with his directorial debut misfire, but relations with Mimi were near breaking point. An ambitious actress herself, Mimi was fed up being known only as Jack Nicholson’s girlfriend, so had begun sleeping around within Jack’s extended entourage. Not best pleased, Jack was in no position to complain as he was doing the same himself. But, hell, sex was an important part of Jack’s life. He argued that if you’re not releasing sexual energy, you’re in deep shit. Away from home and, ‘not relating to a chick’, in Dr Jack’s words, ‘pretty soon that’s all you’re thinking about. Within three days in a new town you’re thinking, Why can’t I find a beaver in a bar?’

Eventually it was Mimi who walked out. ‘We were two maniacs who couldn’t live together or apart,’ she bemoaned. As for Jack, he felt, ‘dumped on’ and for a time broke into a cold sweat at the very mention of Mimi’s name. He sought solace with pal Harry Dean Stanton, who recalled Jack was, ‘almost incoherent. I’ve never seen such despair.’

Jack always found it amusing that because of his reputation men would ask him for advice about women. Close friends never did. ‘They think I’m too goofy about women. In love with love. Too easily injured. Idealistic.’ In relationships Jack commits like a freight train, which means when it hits the buffers, the pain is that little bit stronger. When it comes to the opposite sex Jack has three guidelines: ‘They’re stronger, they’re smarter, and most important they don’t play fair.’

After years in the wilderness it must have felt strange for Jack to have directors like Mike Nichols, who refused to even let him audition for
The Graduate
, now falling over themselves to have him in their movies. Nichols described Jack as ‘the most important actor since Brando’ and personally cast him in
Carnal Knowledge
(1971) as Jonathan, an unrepentant philanderer, a role Jack was all too familiar with and gleefully took on, unaware of the backlash it would create. This was a character who didn’t know how to communicate with women beyond fucking them, a situation Jack freely admitted he’d been in himself. ‘When I began sexual activity in earnest, my point of view was simply to try to seduce everyone I could.’

The impact of
Carnal Knowledge
and Jack’s performance caused the growing feminist movement
,
dubbed ‘political lesbians’ in Washington, to have a collective seizure. No matter how hard Jack tried to explain that he was merely replicating what the script required of him, which was, in his view, a legitimate portrait of male attitudes at the time, the women’s libbers had their bras in their ears and weren’t listening, ranking him public enemy number one along with other reprobates such as
Playboy
owner Hugh Hefner. Jack probably didn’t do himself any favours with quotes such as: ‘I’ve balled all the women, I’ve done all the drugs, and I’ve drunk every drink.’ Such statements seemed deliberately antagonistic.

So, despite protesting that ‘I am not trying to get into the pants of every woman I’m interested in,’ Jack’s role in
Carnal Knowledge
pretty much cemented in the minds of the public an image of Jack as an out-of-control shagging machine, male chauvinist and rabblerousing establishment-baiter. He was never to live it down, if indeed he ever wanted to.

Still down in the dumps over Mimi, Jack hooked up with Michelle Phillips, taking care to first phone Dennis in Taos to say he was dating his ex. ‘Best of luck, man,’ said Dennis. ‘It’s over between her and me anyhow.’

Michelle was a stabilising influence, despite her being just as much of a free sprit as Jack and highly ambitious. Right from the start she’d been happy to accede to Jack’s ground rules of not wishing to be tied down and refused to share a house. ‘The idea of living with him was just horrible because he’s set in his ways.’ No problem, Michelle and her daughter rented a house nearby and Jack happily carried out stepfatherly duties such as taking the kid to school.

Soon he was coming out with stuff like, ‘Expanding sexuality is not most satisfied through promiscuity but through continuously communicating with someone specifically.’ Could Michelle be the one to stop his philandering ways? Jack admitted that in the past there had been weeks ‘when I’ve been with more than four women’. He dismissed that now as being nothing more than an ego trip and also regretted having once told a reporter that he’d already bedded all the women he wanted to. ‘Well, man, every chick I ever related to really resented that statement.’

I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.

The film that threw a lifeline to Marlon Brando’s floundering career was never seen as anything particularly special. ‘Everyone forgets Paramount had no faith in
The Godfather
,’ says its producer Albert Ruddy. The studio had bought an option on Mario Puzo’s book prior to publication but done absolutely nothing with it. ‘Because they’d made a gangster movie called
The Brotherhood
three years earlier that was a disaster,’ Ruddy continues. ‘And they said, who wants to do another fucking mob movie, we don’t care how good Puzo’s book is. But when it came out, the damn thing never dropped off the bestseller list, so they finally said, fuck it, let’s do this, but do it as a cheapie.’

Every director Paramount approached turned them down. Finally, studio head Robert Evans insisted an authentic Italian get the job, if audiences were to ‘smell the spaghetti’. Francis Ford Coppola’s name cropped up. Evans wasn’t sure: he’d only made three pictures and none of them had done any business, but at least he was an Italian. ‘And he was born to do
The Godfather
,’ says Ruddy.

So, I guess, was Brando born to play Don Vito Corleone, the mobster boss, arguably his most famous and certainly most lampooned characterisation. Coppola’s determination to cast Brando put him on a collision course with Paramount. ‘Marlon had a bad reputation and was death at the box office,’ says associate producer Gray Frederickson. ‘He was kind of washed up.’ At a meeting with executives Paramount president Stanley Jaffe slammed his fist hard on the table and decreed that Brando would be cast in
The Godfather
over his dead body. It was a statement that saw Coppola succumbing to what seemed like an epileptic fit.

While Coppola put his career on the line for Brando, the actor repeatedly spurned his advances; he wanted no truck with a film that celebrated the Mafia. It was Marlon’s assistant Alice Marchak that pestered him to read Puzo’s bestseller. At one point he threw the book back at her howling, ‘For the last time, I won’t glorify the Mafia!’ Marchak realised he’d warmed to the notion when she arrived at Mulholland Drive one afternoon to see Marlon sporting a drawn-on pencil moustache and asking, ‘How do I look?’ Every time she turned up at the house for weeks after he was wearing a different gangster-style moustache.

So keen was Brando now to play Don Corleone that he personally visited Bob Evans at his Paramount office. ‘I know a lot of people in Hollywood say I’m washed up,’ Evans would recall him saying. ‘And I know you’ve heard a lot of stories about me, and some of them are true. But I can play that part, and I can do a good job.’

The studio power brokers were still to be convinced, so Coppola asked Brando if he might come over to Mulholland where they could do a little improv and put it on video to show his doubters. While Coppola set up his equipment Brando put shoe polish on his hair, stuffed a pillow up his jumper and pushed tissue paper in his cheeks. His idea was that Corleone had been shot in the throat years before, so muffling his voice. He also wanted the Don to speak quietly. Powerful people don’t need to shout. As he looked at himself in the mirror, there was Don Corleone staring back at him. ‘That’s it,’ Marlon muttered to himself. ‘The face of a bulldog, mean-looking but warm underneath.’

Coppola took this footage over to New York to personally show Charles Bluhdorn, the Austrian CEO of Gulf+Western, who owned Paramount. Setting up the video monitor in a conference room, Bluhdorn poked his head round the door. ‘Francis, vat are you dooink?’ Suddenly Brando’s face appeared on the screen. ‘No! No! Absolutely not, I don’t vant a crazy guy.’ Bluhdorn changed his mind when he saw the transformation into Don Corleone. Coppola had got his man.

Francis faced another stiff battle over his casting choice for the key role of Michael Corleone, inheritor of the family business. Evans wanted Beatty, Jack, Redford . . . anyone except Coppola’s favourite, Al Pacino, whom he felt didn’t radiate star quality. ‘We tested Al three times,’ says Ruddy. ‘The second time they said, forget it, why are you testing him, he’s a fucking midget. Francis is pulling his hair out, we’re gonna start shooting soon. I said, “Francis, let’s do one more test, put the camera on the ground and shoot up so he looks like Clint Eastwood.” I get a call from Bob Evans. “Ruddy, I run the fucking studio, right? I go to the dailies, what do I see? Fucking Al Pacino, the fucking midget again. Get him the fuck out.”’

In the end Coppola won, as he did on practically everything else. He was a force of nature you couldn’t compete with; battling to shoot on authentic New York locations, battling for more money, his energy and stubbornness turned
The Godfather
from a low-budget picture into a seminal event. But the first week of shooting was disastrous; they got behind schedule and the studio hated the footage they were seeing. Worse, Brando adopted a stray cat he saw wandering round the set and insisted on using the animal in a scene where he addresses a group of gangsters. ‘The problem was, the fucking cat was purring so loud you couldn’t understand Marlon,’ says Ruddy. ‘Evans went, “Is this movie going to have fucking subtitles or what! We can’t understand what the hell he’s talking about.”’ Rumours circulated that Coppola might get the boot, with Elia Kazan ready to step in. ‘If you fire Francis,’ Brando threatened, ‘I’ll walk off the picture.’

Could things get any worse? Well yes, a whole lot worse. Suddenly the real Mafia showed up, unleashing all sorts of threats against a production they didn’t want to see happen. Evans was frantic after a series of bowel-loosening phone calls from hoodlums and told Ruddy to sort it out. Joe Colombo was the local mob boss and Ruddy got in touch to organise a meeting at his office so the mobster could look over the script. ‘At three o’clock the next day Joe Colombo and two other guys arrived in my office. I gave him the script and he put his glasses on. It’s a hundred and fifty-five fucking pages, right? He looks at page one for about five minutes and says, “What does this mean, fade in.” With that he throws the script in the air. “You read it, Frankie,” he says. “Why me, boss? Give it to Louie.” And they start throwing the script around. Finally, it lands on my desk and Joe says, “Wait a sec, do we like this guy?” They say, “Yeah we trust him.” Joe said, “Let’s make the fucking deal.” Just the threat of making them read a script, I made the deal. Fucking amazing. But believe me, I would rather deal with a mob guy than a Hollywood lawyer any day.’

The problems facing the film only brought the cast and crew closer together and Marlon was, for many, a role model, certainly for the younger actors like Pacino, James Caan, Bobby Duvall and Diane Keaton. ‘It was like acting with God,’ said Pacino. Although God was far from perfect, sometimes not reporting for work on Mondays and altering his own dialogue, but Marlon revelled in his newfound role of Svengali.

At first Pacino and the rest felt intimidated when Brando arrived on the set. ‘It was like Christ coming off the cross,’ says Ruddy. ‘And then Marlon started being funny. He’d be mooning everybody, he’d start cracking jokes, got everyone to loosen up, it was a real love fest. He liked all the guys and they just adored Brando, he was very generous to them.’

The actors mooning at each other became a feature of the production. ‘It started out with Jimmy Caan driving home one night and he had his butt hanging out the window, so they started mooning each other,’ says Frederickson. ‘And then Brando, during the big wedding scene, stood up on the stage and mooned the whole crowd.’

There was general ribbing amongst the cast, too. In one scene Lenny Montana, playing a hoodlum, stuck his tongue out at Marlon; the guys had written ‘fuck off’ across it. Brando loved that. According to Robert Duvall Brando talked about nothing else but, ‘fucking Indians’ for an entire week. As he left the studio to go home Duvall said goodnight to the crew and then to Brando. ‘Have a good weekend, Philosopher King.’ Marlon held up his middle finger and said, ‘Sit on this and rotate.’ Every once in a while it was good to stick it to each other. ‘It was all ultimately in a good spirit,’ says Duvall.

Marlon remained playful throughout the shoot. In the scene where he returns from the hospital on a stretcher, the extras playing the orderlies were struggling a little bit so Coppola asked the strongest crew hands to take over. While they left to get into costume Marlon ran over and grabbed weights off the camera crane and loaded the stretcher with them and then laid back down on top. On ‘action’ the crew were in hysterics as these hefty guys failed to lift the thing. ‘That was Marlon,’ says Frederickson. ‘He wanted to have fun on set. But he was a serious professional. And he worked eleven hours, no more, no less. At the end of eleven hours he would finish the take but if you wanted another take, it was automatic, he would just say, “Goodnight, gentlemen,” get up and walk off the set. There was nothing you could do.’