Hollywood Hellraisers (17 page)

It wasn’t just women who were occupying Warren’s time; politics was beginning to take a firm hold on him, growing eventually into a consuming passion that preoccupied him for months and sometimes years at a time, severely curtailing his film output. When in 1968 Robert Kennedy denounced America’s involvement in Vietnam and declared his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination Warren was amongst the first of Hollywood’s liberals to offer his support. After his brutal slaying an outraged Warren became a vocal gun-control advocate. He spoke to a large crowd before a football game, but they didn’t take kindly to an actor who’d just made a film about gangsters lecturing them on the perils of owning a rifle. As someone rather succinctly put it: ‘Here was Clyde Barrow himself, blathering on about gun control, when only recently we’d watched Faye Dunaway caressing his rod.’

For a time, Julie Christie accompanied Warren on some of his gun-control lectures. They’d met again in San Francisco, where Julie was filming
Petulia
. Being fully aware that she was still in a serious relationship with the artist Don Bessant didn’t stop Warren begging her to go out with him, describing how he wanted to do something less selfish with his life besides the soulless and single-minded pursuit of women and fame. Don’t knock it, it worked. Eventually she caved in and, you never know, Warren might even have meant it! After
Petulia
was in the can they ran off to Mexico and Bessant was history. Back in LA Warren rented a house that he and Julie could share, but refused to give up his suite at the Beverly Wilshire, in whose corridors Julie was sometimes spotted wearing a see-through white cotton sari.

Warren’s suite at the Beverly Wilshire has passed into Hollywood folklore. It comprised three penthouse rooms and was aptly named El Escondido (‘The Hideaway’). For such a meticulous person in habits and outlook, the place was a tip: half-eaten room-service sandwiches adorned most surfaces, books, scripts and unopened mail lay in heaps. British playwright Trevor Griffiths, when he worked with Warren on
Reds
, dubbed the suite ‘The Pit’. People scratched their heads in bewilderment as to why Warren, a millionaire many times over, preferred to live in these slovenly kept rooms, slipping in and out of the hotel garage to avoid the paparazzi. It was freedom and independence, I guess; the fact he could at a moment’s notice just pack up and leave. ‘Any need for possessions or roots is unnecessary.’

Maybe Julie was the one to change all that. She was a blast of fresh air for Warren, just the woman he needed, and he loved her inability to bullshit. ‘She saves me from my vanity.’ As for Julie, Warren’s unconventional, rebellious spirit and proud rootless nature had been hard to resist. Less so his womanising. Even while in relationships Warren sought out the company of other women. Playing around on his current girlfriends became almost a way of life for him, and a thrill. Twenty-one-year-old Jaid Mako, Drew Barrymore’s future mum, remembers arriving in Hollywood in the late sixties and finding a job as a waitress at the famous Troubadour, the town’s ‘in’ music venue. The first guy to hit on her was Warren. (Actually, when you think about it, the odds of that happening to young, buxom new arrivals in Hollywood aren’t really all that long.) Accompanied that night by Julie Christie, when Warren saw Jaid’s dark smouldering Hungarian looks he walked over to her and immediately began flirting. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ she later recalled. ‘Here he was, so handsome and with this beautiful girl, and he’s coming on to me.’

Jaid went on to enjoy numerous whirlwind Hollywood romances but Warren never lost interest in her, nor, once she was old enough, in her star teenage daughter Drew. Both were at a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard when Warren invited them over to his table. ‘He got very flirtatious, ’ said Jaid. ‘He started kissing and caressing me and eyeing Drew. Finally, he said he was very much into sleeping with one of us, or even both of us.’ His offer received a polite but firm refusal.

Jennifer Lee was another new arrival in Hollywood and soon began a tempestuous affair with Warren, claiming that during sex he took calls from Julie Christie. She was also disturbed by his habit of constantly monitoring his partner’s responses in bed, analysing what turned them on and giving directions, not only about positions, but about how to feel and react. ‘The pressure to have the biggest, most earth-shattering orgasms can get a little relentless,’ said Jennifer

It was precisely this kind of reputation that inspired the British director John Schlesinger, who’d launched Julie Christie’s film career with
Billy Liar
and
Darling
, to write to his protégée and warn her off the Hollywood Lothario, whom he described as a serial womaniser who ‘gets through women like a businessman through a dozen oysters’. Good advice, though she ignored it.

Still coming to terms with Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, Warren threw his weight behind the campaign to elect Vice-President Hubert Humphrey to high office. The current incumbent, Lyndon Johnson, was a dead duck because of his Vietnam War policies and Warren, along with many others, saw Humphrey’s liberal allegiance as the nation’s only hope in the face of Richard Nixon’s rabid republicanism. The war was stoking up unrest on the streets of America. At the Democratic convention in Chicago anti-war protestors lined the streets outside the Hilton Hotel, where Humphrey and his team were staying. Warren was tear gassed during one demonstration as he attempted to enter the building.

Humphrey asked Warren to appear in a campaign documentary. Warren’s price was simple, and something many of Humphrey’s friends were urging him to do anyway: that he should publicly criticise and break with his own administration’s stance on Vietnam. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Humphrey, ‘that’ll be happening within the next week or so.’ Warren was satisfied, but Humphrey failed to honour his promise and his defence of the war cost him the support of the large anti-war lobby. That November Nixon claimed the White House.

Upon Warren’s return from Chicago,
Los Angeles
magazine gleefully reported a phalanx of girls ‘larger than a Broadway chorus call’ outside El Escondido. A very nice welcome home present, but the guest directly below his suite had some difficulty getting to sleep, what with the bumping and grinding noises emanating from above his head. ‘What goes on up in that penthouse apartment?’ he asked the manager. ‘I hear the strangest noises at all hours of the night.’ Had the guest known who the occupant above was, he might not have asked such a stupid question.

To say that a conveyor belt of crumpet perpetually wound its way through Beatty’s hotel suite is not much of an exaggeration. ‘When he was in town he’d have various people over there,’ says Tom Mankiewicz. ‘And a couple of times he said to me, you wanna come up, I’ve got this and that going on. I don’t think Warren wanted me to go up as much as he wanted me to know what he was up to. He had a real reputation, and I think he loved every minute of that reputation. I think he’s very clear that he did it and I think he didn’t mind that people knew that he did it. I’ve always thought Warren, in the best sense of the word, was one of the most shameless people I’ve ever seen.’

Hey hey we are the Monkees, you know we aim to please. A manufactured image with no philosophies.

After the positive reaction to his script for
The Trip
, Jack Nicholson was giving serious consideration to dumping acting altogether and concentrating on writing, and maybe directing. His next screenplay,
Psych-Out
(1968) was a paean to flower children and all that hippy-dippy shit; the problem was, by the time the cast and crew arrived at Haight Ashbury in San Francisco, home of the hippie movement, the summer of love had turned to winter, hard drugs were being taken, the counterculture was for sale. ‘The kids on the street,’ says Richard Rush, brought in by Jack to direct, ‘took one look at us in our studio trucks and decided that we were the enemy, we were the establishment come to exploit them.’ Knives were pulled on some of the actors, and the film-makers couldn’t call the cops lest they alienate the very group they wanted to film. ‘So I called the Hells Angels,’ says Rush. ‘I called Sonny Barger and said, “Listen, can you send a couple of guys to police this for us?” and he did, and it worked beautifully because both the Angels and the kids on the street had dope in common and the tide turned to friendliness at once. So it worked out fine except that I felt like I had just called the Nazis to police the French underground.’

Jack had taken a role in the film and once again Rush found him easy going, ‘although very demanding in terms of what he was doing. Inevitably he’d bring you a performance with a lot of invention in it.’ It was the last time they’d work together. When they met up again years later Rush was surprised how unchanged he was by superstardom. ‘He was very much the same old Jack, but he’d become an international icon. I wasn’t surprised he became a star, he was such a naturally magnetic leading man, with terrific range and the ability to handle anything on screen. There’s a common-man appeal in him that’s reached everybody, they all root for Jack whether it’s on the screen or at a Lakers game.’

There was also a new woman in Jack’s life, Mimi Machu, a former model he’d met on a movie set. The pair were immediately attracted to each other and began a passionate and occasionally stormy affair. Occasionally they’d hang out at the home of director Bob Rafelson. Dennis and Brooke would also be there, the atmosphere was warm and friendly, and the dope was good. Rafelson was riding high as one of the creators of the hit TV show
The Monkees
and planned to use the group for a surreal assault on the big screen, turning to Jack to help with the script — the result was
Head
(1968). Both worked on the screenplay, ‘stoned out of our minds’ on acid, says Rafelson. But audiences didn’t get the joke and the proposed sequel never happened. Shame. The ads would have read: ‘From the people who gave you
Head
.’

Rafelson would become a key Nicholson collaborator; he was starting to collect them thick and fast. Another powerful new friendship was with Robert Evans, a former movie actor who had been appointed head of Paramount. Evans was backing a Roman Polanski film called
Rosemary’s Baby
and suggested Jack play the father of the devil child. Polanski wasn’t convinced; Jack was a too unknown and off-the-wall choice. ‘For all his talent, his faintly sinister appearance ruled him out,’ said the director, who preferred Warren, though he said he’d rather play the part of Rosemary. As with
The Graduate
, Jack had missed out on another breakthrough role. It only added credence to his own argument that he should quit acting altogether.

Cutting off her nipples with garden shears! You call that normal?

Marlon Brando’s career was in free fall and his personal life wasn’t faring any better. It was around this time that his
Bedtime Story
co-star Shirley Jones met up with him again — sort of. Shirley was the star of a new TV series called
The Partridge Family
, playing the mother of a teen pop group. She also often appeared as a guest on the TV game show
Hollywood Squares
and became friends with Marlon’s best pal Wally Cox, who also appeared on it from time to time. One evening Wally invited Shirley and her husband to dinner at his home. When they arrived Wally opened the door and rushed out. ‘Now Shirley, don’t say anything, Marlon’s here and he doesn’t want to see anybody or talk to anybody, so just make like he’s not here.’ A little taken aback, Shirley replied, ‘Oh, really.’ Wally said, ‘Yeah, he’s in a very bad mood, he’s having problems with his kids.’ So Shirley went inside. ‘They had a whole table set out with food,’ she recalls. ‘It was a buffet, we could go and get our dinner whenever we wanted. As I approached the table to get some food, underneath was Marlon Brando, sitting in a crouched position. And he stayed there all evening until the people started to leave and then gradually he got up and just left.’

Marlon’s friendship with his old roommate was really rather odd indeed. Marlon often stayed at his house or sometimes broke in when Wally and his wife were away, and they’d return to see him slouched on a coach eating peanut butter out of a jar. The two men shared the same mischievous sense of humour and intellectual pursuit of life. Rumours that they were lovers have always been dismissed by family and friends, although Marlon could be incredibly possessive of Wally and never wanted him to marry. He did, though, three times. His third wife, Patricia, never saw any evidence of bisexuality or any other shenanigans. ‘I knew Wally pretty well. Even though Marlon had orgies, Wally never participated in them.’ But eyebrows were raised when Marlon told one journalist, ‘If Wally had been a woman, I would have married him and we would have lived happily ever after.’

Marlon was in Tahiti in February 1973 when he learned of Wally’s death from a heart attack, aged just forty-eight. He was devastated, and just like the wrestling from his life of his mother, he’d never get over it. He flew in for the funeral but refused to join his fellow mourners, staying the entire time in Wally’s room, sleeping that night in his old pal’s pyjamas. Later he wrenched Wally’s ashes away from his widow, promising to scatter them himself in the place where they used to go hiking together. Instead, for years Marlon kept them at home or under the front seat of his car. When he revealed to the press that he talked to them nightly, Wally’s widow was furious at being lied to and threatened to sue in order to have them returned, but in the end decided, ‘Marlon needed the ashes more than I did.’

Hey, man. All we represent to them, man, is somebody who needs a haircut.

One night during a publicity junket for
The Trip
Peter Fonda lay whacked out on vodka and weed in his hotel room when an idea suddenly hit his brain that was so enlightening he had to tell someone about it there and then. He called Dennis Hopper. ‘Listen to this, man.’ Fonda outlined his idea of a modern western, two buddies on motorbikes instead of horses travelling across America on one final dope deal. ‘Whaddaya think?’ We’ll take the two leading roles.’