Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Page 3

  “Sorry about nothing,” Marvin admonishes. “You are an actor. Actors have to be able to access their emotions. We need our actors to cry. Sometimes that facility comes at a cost. Now tell me, what’s the matter?”

  Rick composes himself and then says after a gulp of oxygen, “It’s just I’ve been doing this over ten years, Mr. Schwarz. And it’s a little hard to sit here after all that time and come face-to-face with what a failure I’ve become. Coming face-to-face with how I ran my career in the ground.”

  Marvin doesn’t understand. “What do you mean, failure?”

  Rick looks across the coffee table and tells the agent sincerely, “You know, Mr. Schwarz, once upon a time, I had potential. I did. You can see it in some of my work. You can see it on Bounty Law. Especially when I had solid guest stars. When it’s me and Bronson, and me and Coburn, and me and Meeker, or me and Vic Morrow. I had something! But the studio kept puttin’ me in flicks with faded old fucks. But me and Chuck Heston? That’d been different. Me and Richard Widmark, me and Mitchum, me and Hank Fonda, that’d been different! And in some of the movies, it’s there. Me and Meeker in Tanner. Me and Rod Taylor in McCluskey. Shit, even me and Glenn Ford in Hellfire, Texas. By that time Ford didn’t give a fuck no more, but he still looked strong as hell, and we looked good together. So yeah, I had potential. But whatever potential I had, that prick Jennings Lang at Universal pissed it away.”

  Then the actor exhales a defeated, dramatic breath and says to the floor, “Hell, even I pissed it away.”

  He looks up and meets the eyes of the agent. “I totally pissed away a fourth season of Bounty Law. ’Cause I was done with TV. I wanted to be a movie star. I wanted to catch Steve McQueen. If he could do it, I could do it. If during the entire third season I hadn’t been an uncooperative pain in the ass, we would’ve sailed into a fourth season. And we coulda all done well and all parted friends. Now Screen Gems hates me. Those goddamn Bounty Law producers are gonna hold a grudge against me for the rest of their lives. And I deserve it! I was a prick on that last season. I let everybody goddamn know I had better places to be than this fuckin’ pipsqueak TV show.” Rick’s starting to get teary-eyed again. “Doin’ that show Bingo Martin, I hated that prick Scott Brown. Now, I was never as bad as him. You can ask the actors I worked with, you can ask the directors I worked with, I was never as bad as him. And I’ve worked with pricks before. But the reason this prick got to me? I saw how ungrateful he was. And when I saw that, I saw myself.”

  He looks at the floor again and says with sincere self-pity, “Maybe gittin’ the snot wiped outta me by this season’s new swingin’ dick is what I got comin’.”

  Marvin listens to the whole explosion that bursts forth from Rick Dalton with his mouth closed and his ears open. After a moment, the agent says, “Mr. Dalton, you’re not the first young actor to land a series and fall under the spell of hubris. In fact, it’s a common ailment out here. And—look at me—”

  Rick raises his eyes to the agent’s eyes.

  Marvin finishes, “It’s forgivable.”

  Then Marvin smiles at the actor. The actor smiles back.

  “But,” the agent adds, “it does require a bit of reinvention.”

  “What do I hafta reinvent myself as?” Rick asks.

  Marvin answers, “Somebody humble.”

  Chapter Two

  “I Am Curious (Cliff)”

  Rick Dalton’s stunt double, forty-six-year-old Cliff Booth, sits in the waiting room of Marvin Schwarz’s office on the third floor of the William Morris Agency building, leafing through an oversized copy of Life magazine that the agent provides those who wait.

  Cliff wears tight Levi’s blue jeans and a matching Levi’s blue jeans jacket over a black T-shirt. This outfit is a leftover costume from a low-budget biker flick that Cliff worked on three years earlier. Actor-director Tom Laughlin, an old buddy of Rick’s and a friend of Cliff’s (they all did The Fourteen Fists of McCluskey together), had hired Cliff to stunt-double a couple of biker characters in a motorcycle movie he was starring in and directing, The Born Losers, for American International Pictures (it would end up being AIP’s biggest hit of the year). In the film, Laughlin would play, for the first time, the character that would make him one of the most popular pop-culture movie characters of the seventies, Billy Jack. Billy Jack was a half-breed American Indian–Vietnam veteran–hapkido expert who didn’t mind demonstrating it on the violent biker gang known in the movie as the Born Losers (a stand-in for the Hells Angels).

  Cliff’s job was to double one of the gang members known as Gangrene, played by David Carradine’s old buddy Jeff Cooper, who Cliff kind of looked like. However, during the last week of the shoot, Tom’s stunt double dislocated his elbow (not performing a gag but skateboarding on his day off). So Cliff filled in doubling for Tom that whole last week of the shoot.

  At the end of the shoestring production, when given a choice between seventy-five dollars or keeping the Billy Jack wardrobe—leather boots included—Cliff opted for the outfit.

  Four years later Tom Laughlin would star in and direct the movie Billy Jack for Warner Bros. Laughlin would be disappointed by how the studio marketed the picture. He would buy back the rights himself, then sell it state by state, market by market, like an old carny promoter. Laughlin four-walled movie theaters and flooded the local TV stations with enticingly cut TV spots aimed at kids watching television in the afternoon after school. Laughlin’s maverick distribution innovations, along with his having made a pretty terrific movie, made Billy Jack one of the biggest sleeper success stories in the history of Hollywood. And once that happened, Cliff’s blue-jeans wardrobe became so identified with the high-kicking hero that he had to stop wearing it.

  While Miss Himmelsteen sits behind her desk in the outer office answering the telephone (“Mr. Schwarz’s office,” pause, “I’m sorry, he’s with a client right now, can I ask who’s calling?”), Cliff sits on the colorful uncomfortable couch by her desk, huge Life magazine laid out on his lap, leafing through the pages. He’s just finished reading Richard Schickel’s review of the new Swedish film that has all of America’s puritans and many of their newspaper-based opinion makers in a tizzy. This new movie has both Johnny Carson and Joey Bishop, as well as every comedian from Jerry Lewis to Moms Mabley, making puns out of its catchy title.

  From the couch, Cliff calls to Miss Himmelsteen behind her desk, “Have you heard of this flick from Sweden, I Am Curious (Yellow)?”

  “Yeah, I think I have,” Miss Himmelsteen says. “It’s supposed to be dirty, isn’t it?”

  “Not according to the U.S. Court of Appeals it ain’t,” Cliff informs her.

  Reading directly from the magazine, Cliff recites, “‘Pornography is a work lacking in redeeming social value.’ And according to Judge Paul R. Hays, ‘Whether or not we ourselves consider the ideas of the picture particularly interesting or the production artistically successful, it is quite certain that I Am Curious does present ideas and does strive to present these ideas artistically.’”

  He lowers the huge magazine and meets eyes with the pigtailed young thing sitting behind her desk.

  Miss Himmelsteen asks, “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “Exactly,” Cliff repeats, “it means the Swedish guy who made it wasn’t just making a fuck film. He was trying to make art. And it doesn’t matter if you think he was a total failure. And it doesn’t matter if you think it’s the biggest piece of shit you’ve ever seen in your life. What matters is he tried to make art. He didn’t try and make smut.” Then, smiling and shrugging his shoulders: “At least that’s what I get out of this review.”

  “Sounds provocative,” the young pigtailed lass remarks.

  “I agree,” Cliff agrees. “Wanna go see it with me?”

  A sarcastic smirk spreads across Miss Himmelsteen’s face, as she asks with just the right touch of Jewish comic timing, “You wanna take me to a dirty movie?”

  “No,” Cliff corrects. “According t
o Judge Paul-something-Hays, I just want to take you to a Swedish film. Where do you live?”

  Before she can stop herself, she instinctively answers, “Brentwood.”

  “Well, I’m pretty familiar with the cinemas around the Los Angeles area,” Cliff informs her. “Will you allow me to choose the theater?”

  Janet Himmelsteen is well aware she hasn’t even agreed to go on a date with Cliff yet. But both she and Cliff know she’s going to say yes. Now, William Morris has a rule against miniskirt-wearing secretaries dating their clients. But this guy ain’t a client. Rick Dalton’s the client. This guy is just one of Rick’s buddies.

  “You choose,” says the young lady.

  “Wise choice,” says the older man.

  They both share a laugh as Marvin’s office door swings open and Rick Dalton in his tan leather jacket emerges from the agent’s office.

  Cliff quickly stands up from Marvin’s uncomfortable couch and throws his eyes toward his boss, to read the demeanor of the meeting he just completed. And since Rick looks a little sweaty and a little distraught, Cliff figures the meeting didn’t go so hot.

  “You okay?” Cliff softly asks.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” Rick says briskly. “Let’s just get out of here.”

  “Sure thing,” Cliff says. Then the stuntman Cliff spins on his back heel, till he’s facing Janet Himmelsteen, his movement so quick it startles her. She doesn’t make a noise, but she does instinctively flinch. Now that Cliff is standing directly in front of her (over her, actually), smiling like a blond Levi-clad Huck Finn, Miss Himmelsteen sees how truly handsome this guy really is. “Opens this Wednesday,” Cliff informs the young lady. “When do you want to go?”

  Now that he’s fully engaging her, goose pimples break out all over the fatty part of her arms. Under the desk, her sandaled right foot rises off the ground and runs down the back of her bare left calf.

  “How about Saturday night?” she asks.

  “How about Sunday afternoon?” Cliff negotiates. “I’ll take you to Baskin-Robbins afterward.”

  That reaches beyond the Himmelsteen giggle to her actual laugh. The woman has a lovely actual laugh. He tells her so and discovers she has a lovely actual blush.

  He reaches down and plucks out one of her business cards, sitting in what looks like a clear-plastic bus stop for business cards, and brings it up to his eyes to read.

  “‘Janet Himmelsteen,’” he reads out loud.

  “That’s me,” she giggles self-consciously.

  The stuntman removes his brown leather wallet from the back pocket of his blue jeans, opens it up, and makes a show of sliding the white William Morris business card inside. Then the blond fella starts walking down the hall backward to catch up with his boss. But he still continues his comedic patter with the young secretary: “Now, remember, if your mother asks, I’m not taking you to see a dirty movie. I’m taking you to see a foreign film. With subtitles.”

  He gives her a wave just before he disappears around the corner and says, “I’ll call you next Friday.”

  When Cliff and Miss Himmelsteen saw I Am Curious (Yellow) at the Royal Cinema in West L.A. that Sunday afternoon, they both liked it. When it comes to cinema, Cliff is far more adventurous than his boss. To Rick, movies are what Hollywood made, and with the exception of England, all other countries’ film industries are simply the best they can do, since they’re not Hollywood. But after all the blood and violence Cliff experienced during World War Two, once Cliff returned home, he was surprised at how juvenile he found most Hollywood movies. There were some exceptions—The Ox-Bow Incident, Body and Soul, White Heat, The Third Man, The Brothers Rico, Riot in Cell Block 11—but they were irregularities in a fake normalcy.

  After the devastation that the countries of Europe and Asia experienced during the Second World War, once those countries slowly started making movies again, oftentimes surrounded by the bombed-out rubble remnants of the war (Rome, Open City; Big Deal on Madonna Street), they discovered they were making them for a far more adult audience.

  While in America—and when I say “America” I mean “Hollywood”—a country where its home-front civilians were shielded from the gruesome details of the conflict, their movies remained stubbornly immature and frustratingly committed to the concept of entertainment for the whole family.

  To Cliff, who had borne witness to the stark extremities of humanity (like the heads of his Filipino guerrilla brothers stuck on spikes by the occupying Japanese), even the most entertaining actors of his era—Brando, Paul Newman, Ralph Meeker, John Garfield, Robert Mitchum, George C. Scott—always sounded like actors and reacted to events the way only characters in movies did. There was always a level of artifice to the character that stopped it from being convincing. After he got back to the States, Cliff’s favorite Hollywood actor was Alan Ladd. He liked the way the diminutive Ladd would practically swim in the modern forties’ and fifties’ fashions he wore. He didn’t care for him in westerns or war films. He disappeared in cowboy attire and military uniforms. Ladd needed to be in a suit and tie and preferably a snap-brim fedora. Cliff liked his look. He was handsome without being movie-star handsome. Since Cliff was so damn handsome, he appreciated other men who weren’t but didn’t need to be. Alan Ladd looked like a few guys he served with. He also liked that Ladd looked like an American. But he loved the way the little guy fought fistfights in his movies. He loved how he socked the shit outta the character actors who specialized in playing gangsters. He loved that droopy lock of hair that hung in his face during the fight. And he loved how Ladd used to roll around on the floor with the heavies. But his absolute favorite thing about Ladd? His voice. He had a no-nonsense way of delivering his lines. When Ladd acted opposite William Bendix, Robert Preston, Brian Donlevy, or Ernest Borgnine, they all seemed like hambone actors when compared to him. When Ladd got mad in a movie, he didn’t act mad. He just got sore, like a real fella. As far as Cliff was concerned, Alan Ladd was the only guy in movies who knew how to comb his hair, wear a hat, or smoke a cigarette (okay, Mitchum knew how to smoke a cigarette too).

  But that just goes to show how unrealistic Cliff found Hollywood films. When he saw Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, he laughed at what the newspapers referred to as the film’s “shockingly adult language.” He joked with Rick, “Only in a Hollywood movie would ‘spermicide’ be considered ‘shockingly adult.’”

  However, when he saw foreign movies, the actors had a level of authenticity that just wasn’t there in Hollywood movies. Hands down, no question about it, Cliff’s favorite actor was Toshiro Mifune. He’d get so into watching Mifune’s face, he’d sometimes forget to read the subtitles. The other foreign actor Cliff dug was Jean-Paul Belmondo. When Cliff saw Belmondo in Breathless, he thought, That guy looks like a fucking monkey. But a monkey I like.

  Like Paul Newman, who Cliff liked, Belmondo had movie-star charm.

  But when Paul Newman played a bastard, like in Hud, he was still an enjoyable bastard. But the guy in Breathless wasn’t just a sexy stud prick. He was a little creep, petty thief, piece of shit. And unlike in a Hollywood movie, they didn’t sentimentalize him. They always sentimentalized these pieces of shit in Hollywood movies, and it was the phoniest thing Hollywood did. In the real world, these mercenary fuck faces didn’t have a sentimental bone in their body.

  That’s why Cliff appreciated Belmondo not doing that with his little shitheel in Breathless. Foreign films, Cliff thought, were more like novels. They didn’t care if you liked the lead characters or not. And Cliff found that intriguing.

  So starting in the fifties Cliff started driving to Beverly Hills and Santa Monica and West Los Angeles and Little Tokyo to see black-and-white foreign films with English subtitles.

  La Strada, Yojimbo, Ikiru, The Bridge, Rififi, Bicycle Thieves, Rocco and His Brothers, Open City, Seven Samurai, Le Doulos, Bitter Rice (which Cliff thought was sexy as hell).

  “I don’t go to movies to read,” Rick would tease Cliff about h
is cinephilia. Cliff would just smile at his boss’s teasing, but he always felt proud of himself for reading subtitles. He felt smarter. He liked expanding his mind. He liked the task of grappling with difficult concepts that didn’t present themselves at first. After the first twenty minutes, there was nothing more to learn about a new Rock Hudson or Kirk Douglas movie. But these foreign movies, sometimes you had to watch the whole movie just to know what it was you saw. But he wasn’t buffaloed by them either. They still (one way or another) had to work as a movie, or what was the point? Cliff didn’t know enough to write critical pieces for Films in Review, but he knew enough to know Hiroshima Mon Amour was a piece of crap. He knew enough to know Antonioni was a fraud.

  He also liked looking at events from different perspectives. Ballad of a Soldier gave him a respect for his Soviet allies that he never had before. Kanal taught him maybe his wartime experience, compared to some, wasn’t so bad. Bernhard Wicki’s The Bridge made him do something he would have thought was impossible: cry for Germans. He usually didn’t share these Sunday afternoons with anybody (Sunday afternoon was his foreign-film day). Nobody else in his circle was interested (it was almost comical how little the stunt community cared about film itself). But Cliff even liked going to these movies by himself. This was his private time with Mifune, Belmondo, Bob the Gambler, and Jean Gabin (both handsome Gabin and shock-white Gabin); this was his time with Akira Kurosawa.

  Yojimbo wasn’t the first time Cliff saw a Mifune or a Kurosawa film, having seen Seven Samurai a few years earlier. Cliff thought Seven Samurai was magnificent. He also figured it was a one-off. But the newspaper critics convinced the stuntman to investigate Mifune and Kurosawa’s newest effort. After walking out of the tiny shoebox-sized cinema in an indoor shopping center in Downtown L.A.’s Little Tokyo, having just seen Yojimbo, Cliff was sold on Mifune but not yet on Kurosawa. It wasn’t in Cliff’s nature to follow the work of a movie director. He didn’t really hold movies in that high regard. Film directors were guys who shot a schedule. And he ought to know—he worked with enough of them. This idea that they were like some tortured painter who agonized over which shade of blue to put on their canvas was a far-fetched fantasy of what moviemaking was. William Witney busted his ass to get his day done and have good footage at the end of it. But he was hardly a sculptor turning a piece of rock into a woman’s buttocks that you wanted to fondle.