Robert Sellers Read online

  Zanuck wouldn’t be the only one. During rehearsals for The Fugitive Kind (1960), the actors all sat round a table to read the script, speaking their lines in a low mumble, taking the lead from Marlon. Finally, cast member Maureen Stapleton couldn’t take it any longer. ‘What the fuck are you doing, Marlon? I can’t hear a word anyone is saying. Have I gone deaf or what? For all that money you’re getting you ought at least to let everyone hear what you’re saying.’ Marlon burst into laughter and everyone felt a huge release. Sitting at the back was the author Tennessee Williams, ‘Thank God, darling,’ he said. ‘I haven’t heard a bloody thing all week.’

  While filming Viva Zapata Marlon got up to his usual tricks, setting off firecrackers in a hotel lobby, dropping tarantulas into the dressing room of the actresses and serenading leading lady Jean Peters from a treetop at three in the morning. Kazan also recalled the amazing number of women who hung around the set, making themselves very available to him, though he rarely responded. His warmest relations seemed to be with the men. Well, not all of them, certainly not Anthony Quinn, cast as his brother. The two hardly spoke at all. Quinn was pissed off that Kazan asslicked Brando constantly, attending always to his needs to the detriment of everyone else’s. One day the two actors took a walk, during which Marlon got his dick out and started pissing. He suggested Quinn do the same. ‘At least we can relieve ourselves together.’ After that the pair had contests to see who could piss the furthest.

  Then all hell broke loose. In the climactic fight between the two brothers Kazan wanted authenticity, he wanted his actors at each other’s throats for real, so spread malicious lies to Quinn that Marlon had badmouthed him and vice versa. When the cameras rolled both men went wild. Marlon especially lost it, yanking out tufts of hair. ‘I wanted to stick my sword in him,’ Quinn said later. Kazan kept his deception secret and as a result the two actors didn’t speak to one another for fifteen years until the misunderstanding was resolved. ‘He inspired a lot of actors,’ Brando said of Kazan. ‘But you paid a price.’

  Over the past few years Kazan had become a mentor for Brando, an integral part of his creative life, which made what the director was about to do all the more shocking. This was the age of the McCarthy witchhunts, of Reds-under-the-bed paranoia, and after going through private torture for months Kazan agreed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), naming former colleagues who, like himself, had once been communist sympathisers. Many in Hollywood would never forgive Kazan such treachery. Could Brando? He was working on a new film, Julius Caesar (1953), when someone told him what Kazan had done and he was poleaxed by the revelation. The director, Joe Mankiewicz, later recalled Brando coming to him on the set virtually in tears, saying, ‘What’ll I do when I see him, bust him in the nose?’

  For now Marlon had to put Kazan’s betrayal to one side and concentrate on his biggest challenge yet, Shakespeare’s Mark Antony, quite a stretch after playing a Mexican and the masturbatory fantasies of Tennessee Williams. Critics, naturally, scoffed but the British Film Academy voted him best foreign actor of the year. ‘Dad always liked to point out,’ says Tom Mankiewicz, ‘that the Brits, especially in those days, would rather have committed mass suicide than give an American actor an award for Shakespeare. But he was wonderful in it.’

  Riding a huge wave of popularity, Brando had still to come to terms with fame, still detested the intrusion into his personal space by both fans and those darker elements like stalkers and general nutters. There were three girls who camped on his doorstep and refused to leave, and a woman who festooned her bedroom walls with pictures of her idol as she plotted his kidnap and cannibalisation. One time a gaggle of girls, including a young Mary Tyler Moore, waited outside his house for him to appear. An old man with a limp exited and got in a car. It was Brando in disguise. They tailed him for about a quarter of a mile until he stopped, got out and walked over. The limp was gone, so too the grey wig. ‘He walked to us in the slowest, sexiest walk I’d ever seen,’ Moore later recalled. He bent down and briefly scanned the passengers before saying, ‘Don’t you girls have anything better to do on a Saturday night?’

  Brando solidified his place as the archetypal bad boy when he was cast as Johnny, the swaggering leather-clad leader of a motorcycle gang that terrorises a small town. The Wild One (1954) was amongst the first films to address a new and pressing problem in fifties America, juvenile delinquency. Terribly tame by today’s standards, even blissfully nostalgic, the film provoked huge controversy at the time with moralists claiming it glamorised anti-social behaviour. In one scene a girl asks Johnny what he’s rebelling against. His defiant response. ‘Whaddya got?’

  Brando was now moving with alacrity from one classic to another, but turned down On the Waterfront (1954) when it was first offered, not because he didn’t want to do it, but because Elia Kazan was attached as director. The true story of mob rule on the New York docks and one young worker’s determination to testify against the crime bosses had obvious resonance for Kazan, but Brando was still in turmoil over what he’d done by selling out his friends to McCarthy paranoia. So Frank Sinatra was installed as star. All the time, though, Marlon, by far the greater box-office draw, was being secretly wooed by producer Sam Spiegel. After much persuasion Brando gave in; the role of Terry Malloy was just too good to turn down. More than most, Marlon could relate to a character ‘driven crazy by his inner conflicts’. As for Sinatra, he was incensed at being dumped and no doubt planned to put a horse’s head in both Spiegel’s and Brando’s beds.

  Although he still respected Kazan professionally, calling him ‘the best director I ever worked with’, all intimacy had gone and there was an uneasy atmosphere on set. They never worked together again. In order to achieve greater realism, Kazan spurned studio sets to shoot amidst the slum dwellings of the dock area where weeks earlier Marlon had hung out with workers loading crates. It was dangerous, though, with the local Mob keeping tabs on the production. One afternoon Kazan and Brando lunched with gangsters to get permission to shoot in a particular area they controlled.

  Cast as Terry’s girl was Eva Marie Saint, who marvelled at how Brando never once stepped out of character. ‘He was Terry.’ Their relationship on screen is beautifully tender. He may also have saved her life. In a scene where both are chased down an alleyway by a truck, they had to run through a door to escape. On ‘action’, when they got to the door the thing was locked, a crew hand had goofed. With seconds to spare Marlon broke a window pane, slashing his hand, flung open the door and threw himself and Eva inside just as the truck hurtled past.

  As filming continued Kazan could only stop and admire what Brando was giving him. ‘If there is a better performance by a man in the history of film in America, I don’t know what it is.’ Every word Brando spoke seemed not something memorised but the spontaneous expression of an inner experience. And there’s no better example than the archetypal scene, staged with Rod Steiger in the back of a taxi, where Marlon famously emotes, ‘I could have been a contender.’ Having trouble with the dialogue, so pissing off further a screenwriter already maddened by his endless ad-libbing, Marlon got Kazan to allow him to virtually take over. ‘I never could have told him how to do that scene as well as he did it,’ Kazan later admitted.

  When a rough cut of the movie was screened for the first time the mood was ebullient as the lights came back on, but of Brando there was no sign; he’d gone, walked out without even speaking to Kazan. ‘I thought it was terrible,’ he later said, criticising his own performance. Such misgivings were utterly unfounded. On the Waterfront was a major commercial and critical success, winning eight Oscars, including best picture and best actor for Brando. Everyone expected him to cause chaos at the event, swing on the chandeliers, try to mate with Bette Davis, but he was civil and gracious in his acceptance speech, though for years he contemptuously used the statuette as a doorstop before someone stole it.

  Never greater in demand, Brando found himself turning down scripts left
, right and centre, spurning the chance to play in East of Eden (1955), so leaving the door open for a certain James Dean to make his film debut. When it opened, reviewers remarked on the plagiaristic resemblance between Dean’s acting mannerisms and Brando’s. Both Midwestern farm boys recast as rebels, Brando saw this attempt to copy him, including his lifestyle, as Dean’s way of dealing with his own insecurities. Dean took to wearing the same brand of jeans as Brando, started riding motorcycles and for a while dated the same women, including future Bond girl Ursula Andress. When Marlon sat down to write his autobiography in the nineties he called Ursula at her house in Rome, first complimenting the actress upon her eternal beauty and then making the ultimate faux pas by asking her if they’d ever had an affair. When her former husband John Derek got to hear about this he fumed, ‘Who wouldn’t remember fucking Ursula Andress? Marlon must be coming down with Alzheimer’s disease.’

  Often Marlon would listen to Dean’s sensitive voice talking to the answering service, asking for him, but never spoke up and never called back. They finally met at a party, where Dean was ‘throwing himself around, acting the madman’. Brando took him aside and, recognising the personal demons eating into his skull, gave him the number of his analyst, suggesting he pay a swift visit. ‘You need help.’ Whether Dean ever sought it is unrecorded.

  You’re tearing me apart!

  Dennis Hopper arrived in LA at the close of 1954 with virtually the clothes he stood up in and hardly any cash, but most importantly with the name of a casting agent scribbled on a piece of paper by his acting sponsor Dorothy McGuire that was worth its weight in gold.

  Thanks to her he won an audition for a substantial guest role in the TV hospital-drama series Medic. It was to play an epileptic patient and Dennis was up against a dozen other actors with much more experience than he had. The director looked at this young buck, heard him read and didn’t think very much. ‘Can you portray an epileptic fit?’ he asked. Dennis remained silent, but his eyes began to roll in their sockets and his body started to jerk from side to side. The director was starting to wonder if he’d been sent a real epileptic by mistake. Dennis stopped as abruptly as he’d begun and stared back at his inquisitor. ‘We’ll let you know.’ He got the part.

  While he waited for his episode to air, and with money desperately tight, Dennis took any menial job he could find, even stealing milk and orange juice from his neighbour’s front porch to sustain himself. Eventually lack of funds and near starvation drove him back to his folks and he took a soul-destroying job delivering phone books around the local area, where he’d be met on doorsteps with taunting looks from friends who’d seen him head off to Hollywood with high ideas of stardom. ‘I thought you were an actor now!’

  Dennis rammed those words down their throats when his Medic episode was broadcast a few weeks later. The family all sat in silence watching it, mesmerised by his performance, especially his convincing epileptic fit. ‘It’s similar to what Grandma described when you were sniffing gasoline back on the farm,’ said his mother. Joking aside, everyone was duly impressed, including Hollywood. Seven studios wanted to put the eighteen-year-old under contract. Coolly he chose Columbia and went along to check the place over. Head of the studio was the fearsome Harry Cohn, a man who ruled the place with an iron will, ranting and raving at his stable of stars. Hedda Hopper said, ‘You had to stand in line to hate him.’ Dennis knew of his reputation, that his workers visibly cowered in his presence, but didn’t give a shit as he walked into his office flanked by his agent, looking around at shelves groaning under the weight of awards.

  ‘I seen your TV show, kid; you got it, you’re a natural, like Monty Clift. What else you done?’ Dennis was elated: Clift was a hero. ‘I’ve done Shakespeare at the —’ Cohn butted in, Shakespeare, or culture in general, was anathema to the mogul. ‘Oh my God,’ he said, as if Dennis had taken a dump on his prize mohair carpet. He turned to face a minion. ‘Give this kid some cash and put him under contract. Then get him started with a coach to wipe out that Shakespeare crap.’

  Dennis stood up. He wasn’t taking this from Harry Cohn or anyone. ‘Go fuck yourself!’ he hollered and stormed out. Cohn went purple with rage. ‘Don’t ever let that bastard set foot in my studio again, or his fucking agent.’ Then, screaming at the rapidly disappearing Dennis: ‘You’ll never work at Columbia, not even a crowd scene.’ The mogul was true to his word, Dennis never worked for them until 1969, by which time Cohn was long gone and Dennis had a little film called Easy Rider to sell.

  A much better impression was made over at Warner Brothers and Dennis was given their standard seven-year contract. Director Nicholas Ray was the first to seize on Hopper’s talent and cast him as a gang member in the studio’s latest teenage angst movie, Rebel Without a Cause (1955), starring James Dean. Ray also asked Dennis to stand in for Dean at a series of screen tests with prospective leading ladies, one of them former child star Natalie Wood. The next day Dennis got a call from Natalie confessing she fancied him like mad and wanted to have sex with him. ‘A helluva line,’ Hopper recalled. ‘In the fifties, to be aggressive like that as a woman was really amazing. It was an amazing turn on to me.’

  Dennis jumped into his car and raced over to pick Natalie up outside her hotel. As they drove up into the Hollywood Hills she confessed to having just come from the bed of Nicolas Ray. Aged sixteen, Natalie was still a minor, illegal goods for either man to tamper with, but at least Dennis was only a couple of years her senior — Ray was in his midforties. Dennis eased the car down an uninhabited stretch of Mulholland Drive and the two youngsters made out together for the first time.

  After that Dennis saw Natalie a lot, reassuring her that she was bound to get the role opposite Dean: she was fucking the director, after all. Returning home from a drive one day their car was involved in an accident with another vehicle and the couple were thrown into the road. Dennis escaped with minor bruising but Natalie suffered concussion and was taken to hospital. Later the police arrived to question them both, and afterwards Natalie called Ray. ‘The cops called me a goddamn juvenile delinquent; now do I get the part?’

  As filming commenced on Rebel, Dean cut a posturing figure on the set, treating Hopper and other cast members with unconcealed disdain. Dennis didn’t give a shit, he was the best actor around, he was gonna take Hollywood by storm, wasn’t he? All that changed when he saw Dean act. It blew him away. When cameras finished rolling on the scene Dennis grabbed Dean, or so the story goes, and threw him inside a car. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he yelled in his face. ‘I thought I was the best young actor in the world until I saw you. I gotta know how you do it!’ It was the beginning of Dennis’s idolisation of Dean, as the star sometimes took time out during filming to watch his takes and offer advice, for example, ‘Smoke the cigarette, don’t act smoking the cigarette.’ In other words, just do it, don’t show it. Both also learned they had a mutual hatred for their parents and used that anger as an outlet in their acting. ‘I’m gonna show you, I’m going to be somebody,’ that was the drive, as it was for Brando, too.

  Dennis hung out with a lot of the Rebel cast, smoking dope at a time when regular offenders were thrown in jail. Worse, he also tried peyote, dried cactus top, shit the Indians smoked; this when it wasn’t cool to mention the fact even to your closest buddies. Dennis ended up hooked on the stuff for years, until he quit after a bad trip. According to friends, when they popped over to see him at home there was always a pot of the stuff simmering on the hob ready for use. Dennis later claimed peyote ‘helps you communicate with God or the universe. Once when I took peyote I saw the world as a cancerous growth.’ It’s official, Dennis was the first hippie.

  Actor, writer and friend of James Dean, John Gilmore also befriended Dennis on the Rebel set and hung out with him. One particularly memorable night was spent at the Hollywood home of Maila Nurmi, aka Vampira, the original glamour ghoul girl who hosted late-night horror movies on TV. A few of the Rebel cast, including Dennis, were relax
ing on the living-room floor, chatting with Maila. Suddenly she jolted up and cried, ‘Kiss my ass, stupid.’ This Dennis viewed not as an insult but as an invitation to pull down Maila’s jeans and proceed as instructed. She fought him off, but Dennis’s gander was up and he’d yanked her pants partway down before noticing she wasn’t wearing knickers. Embarrassed and vexed, Vampira, according to Gilmore, punched Dennis hard in the face. He tried to laugh it off but the next day arrived on set with a glorious shiner.

  It didn’t take Gilmore long to realise that Dennis was into sex in a big way. He accompanied him one afternoon to a burlesque show downtown, ‘and Dennis started jacking off in the middle of it. Someone called the manager and he asked us to leave and Dennis shouted, “I’m Dennis Hopper, man. I’m with Warner Brothers and I’ll have your fucking job!” The guy said if we didn’t leave he’d call the cops. “We don’t allow no jacking off in here!”’

  Dennis and Natalie remained an item all through the shooting of Rebel, creating such a bad atmosphere on set between himself and the director that Dennis challenged him to a fist fight. ‘Kid,’ Ray said, ‘someday you’re going to learn to put your fists away.’ Dennis consoled himself with the fact that, even though Natalie was shagging the old guy, ‘she was with me.’

  One day Dennis and Natalie decided to have a good old-fashioned Hollywood orgy and invited another couple round to Dennis’s apartment. No one really knew what the rules were, so Natalie got things rolling by crying out, ‘Let’s have a champagne bath.’ Good idea, thought Dennis, who popped out quickly and returned with a couple of cases of cheap bubbly and proceeded to fill the bath with it. Natalie stripped and slowly lowered herself in. Within seconds she was in absolute agony, her vagina inflamed by the alcohol. A half-dressed Dennis had to rush her to the ER.