Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Read online

  Rick interrupts, “Whaddaya mean? You’re my stunt double.”

  Cliff tells it like it is: “Rick, I’m your driver. Since Green Hornet and since your driver’s license got taken away, that’s what I am. I’m your gofer. I’m not complaining. I like driving you around. To the set and back. To auditions. To meetings and shit. I like house-sitting in the Hollywood Hills when you’re gone. But I ain’t been a full-time stuntman for a while now. So from where I’m standing, goin’ to Rome to star in movies doesn’t sound like the fate worse than death that you seem to think it is.”

  Rick counters quickly, “Have you ever seen an Italian western?” Then, answering his own question, “They’re awful! It’s a fuckin’ farce.”

  “Oh yeah?” Cliff counters back. “How many you seen? One? Two?”

  Rick says with authority, “I’ve seen enough! Nobody likes spaghetti westerns.”

  Under his breath, Cliff says, “I bet some Italians kinda like ’em.”

  “Look,” Rick says, “I grew up watchin’ Hopalong Cassidy and Hoot Gibson. Watchin’ a wop western, directed by Guido DeFatso, starring Mario Bananano, ain’t gonna ring my fuckin’ bell.” Finishing his Italian tirade as he flicks his cigarette out of the car-door window, “Understand, I’m still pissed that spaghetti bender Dean Martin’s in Rio Bravo. Forget about fuckin’ Frankie Avalon dying at the fuckin’ Alamo.”

  “Again,” Cliff ventures, “I ain’t you. But it seems to me like a pretty nifty life experience.”

  “What do you mean?” a genuinely curious Rick inquires.

  “Photographers takin’ pictures of you all the time. Sippin’ cocktails at little tables lookin’ at the Colosseum. Eating the best pasta and pizza in the world. Fuckin’ Italian chicks.” Cliff deduces, “If you ask me, that beats hangin’ ’round Burbank, losin’ fights to Bingo Martin.”

  Rick guffaws, “Well, ya got a point there.”

  Then the two men start snickering, and pretty soon a smile creeps up on Rick’s face. Cliff putting out fires for Rick has been an essential part of their dynamic since the two became a team. Sometimes those fires are figurative, like right now. But the first fire that forged their partnership was a literal fire.

  It was during the third season of Bounty Law (the ’61–’62 season). Cliff Booth was brought in to double the series lead. Rick didn’t take to Cliff right off. For one really good reason: Cliff was way too handsome to be a stuntman. Bounty Law was Rick’s pussy party. He didn’t need a swingin’ dick, who looked better in Rick’s costume than Rick did, horning in on all that ample tail. But he started hearing about Cliff’s exploits in World War Two. He learned Cliff wasn’t just a hero. He was one of the biggest heroes of World War Two. He won the Medal of Valor, twice. The first time for killing Italians in Sicily. There were a lot of reasons why he was given that distinguished honor the second time. But the main reason was, except for the fellas that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, no other American soldier had more confirmed kills of Japanese enemy soldiers than Sergeant Clifford Booth.

  Rick, on the other hand, would have spent months jumping off of kitchen chairs to get flat feet if he thought it would keep him out of the Army (especially during wartime). Nevertheless, he admired men who served and served with distinction.

  But the fire that forged the bond between the two men happened about a month into Cliff’s time on Bounty Law. One of the episodic directors on the show, Virgil Vogel, had an idea that the series’ main character, Jake Cahill, would wear a big winter jacket and the jacket would be dyed nurse-shoe-polish white. Now, in real life it would look ridiculous. But on black-and-white film it would look kind of neat. However, wardrobe took so long preparing the jacket, it wasn’t ready for Vogel’s episode. So the producers just earmarked it for the following episode. And on the following episode, at the end, Jake Cahill gets set on fire. Everybody thought that would be a good way to utilize this big winter coat they spent so much time prepping.

  Cliff was ready, willing, and able to do the fire gag. But after it was explained to Rick what was entailed and what to expect, the actor decided he’d give it a whirl. So fire accelerant was placed on the back of Jake’s big white winter coat, far away from his face and hair.

  However, what nobody on the crew knew—not even the wardrobe department, because they had sent the jacket out to get dyed—was the white dye they used was 65 percent alcohol-based. They didn’t know and nobody told them because there wasn’t a fire gag in the episode that the white garment was originally planned for. So with Rick inside, when they touched a flame to the back of Jake’s jacket, it burst into a blazing Roman candle.

  When Rick heard the rush of his jacket going up in flames, his panic accelerated as much as the flammable costume. Immediately, he felt the flames going past his shoulders and licking and popping around his head. At that moment he was ready to do the very worst thing he could have done in that situation: take off running in a blind panic. But just before Rick could go apeshit, he heard Cliff Booth calmly say, “Rick, you’re standing in a puddle of water. Just fall down.”

  Rick did just that, and shortly the flames were put out, before they had a chance to do any real damage. And that was when Rick and Cliff became the team of Rick and Cliff.

  The other real cool cachet that Cliff Booth brought to the party: As well as being a good friend, a good stuntman, and a war hero, in this world of make-believe, Cliff was a real killer. Just on his television show alone, Rick killed something like two hundred and forty-two people. That’s not counting how many Indians and owl hoots he killed in his western movies or those hundred and fifty Nazis he killed in The Fourteen Fists of McCluskey. And, when he played the twisted black-leather-gloved psycho killer in Jigsaw Jane, he dispatched most of his victims with a shiny silver stiletto.

  Rick remembers drinking booze and discussing his Jigsaw Jane character with his stunt double at the bar located inside the Smoke House, off of Riverside Drive. As they talked and drank, Rick asked Cliff, had he ever killed an enemy soldier with a knife?

  “Plenty,” answered Cliff.

  “Plenty?” Rick repeated, surprised. “How many is plenty?”

  “What?” Cliff asked. “You want me to sit here and count?”

  “Well, yeah,” Rick said.

  “Well, let’s see . . .” Cliff thought. He started counting silently to himself on his fingers, until he ran out of fingers and had to take another lap around the track, then he stopped and said, “Sixteen.”

  If Rick’s whiskey sour had been in his mouth at the time, he’d have come close to doing a comedic spit take. “You’ve killed sixteen fuckin’ guys with a knife?” he asked incredulously.

  “Japs in the war,” Cliff clarified. “Yeah.”

  Rick got quiet, leaning forward and asking his buddy, “How’d you do it?”

  “Do you mean how could I do it, mentally and emotionally?” Cliff asked. “Or how did I do it, physically and practically?”

  Wow, good question, Rick thought.

  “Well, I guess first, how did ya do it?”

  “Well, not every time, but most of those times was me coming up behind some joker and taking them by surprise. A rock gets in some guy’s shoe. He straggles behind his company to take off the shoe, git rid of the rock. I come up behind him, stick a knife in his ribs, hold my hand over his mouth, and twist the knife till I feel him give up the ghost.”

  FUCK, Rick thought.

  “But,” Cliff said, holding up his index finger, “now I fer sure killed him. But did he die because of me, or did he die because he got a rock in his shoe?” Cliff philosophized.

  “So let me get this straight,” Rick clarified. “You stick a blade in some Jap’s ribs, then you cup a hand over his mouth, squashing the scream, then hold him through the whole damn death rattle till he dies in your arms?”

  Cliff took a swig from his highball glass filled with room-temperature Wild Turkey and said, “Yep.”

  “Wow!” Rick exclaimed, as he knocked back some o
f his cold whiskey sour.

  Cliff Booth smiled to himself as he watched his boss wrestle with this idea, then asked provocatively, “Wanna know what it feels like?”

  Rick’s eyes moved up to Cliff’s face. “Whaddaya mean?”

  Cliff repeated low, slow, and deliberate, “I said, would you like to know what it feels like?” Then added with a shoulder shrug, “You know, for your character.”

  Rick didn’t say anything for a while. The bar seemed to get real quiet, then Rick Dalton let escape a very soft “Yeah.”

  Cliff smiled at his friend and employer, took a big gulp of booze, laid the heavy glass down hard on the bar, and said with another shoulder shrug, “Kill a pig.”

  What? Rick thought.

  “What?” Rick said.

  “Kill. A. Pig,” Cliff repeated sinisterly. After a beat of silence, where the words “kill a pig” hung in the air, Cliff continued to explain.

  “Buy yourself some big fat hog. Take her home to your backyard. Then get on your knees next to her. Hold her, feel her, feel her life, smell her, hear her grunt and snort. Then, with the other arm, stick a butcher knife right into her side and hold on, brother.”

  Rick on his barstool listened to Cliff, mesmerized.

  “Now, she’s gonna scream like a son of a bitch and bleed like a bastard. And she’s gonna fight you. But you keep holding with one hand, while you keep sticking that blade inside of her with the other. And even though it’ll seem like an eternity, somewhere in the first minute you’ll feel her die in your arms. And that will be the moment you truly feel death. Life is a bleeding, screaming, violently jerking pig in your arms. And death is you holding a bunch of heavy unmoving meat.”

  As Cliff described the entire step-by-step murder of the imaginary pig, Rick grew paler and paler, imagining himself acting out that scenario in his backyard.

  Cliff realized he had his audience by the throat, so he swooped in for the kill. “So if you wanna experience what it’s like to kill a man, killing a pig is as legally close as you can get.”

  Rick swallowed hard, as he grappled with whether he could do that.

  Cliff added, “Then take that pig to a butcher and have him cut ’er up for ya. Bacon . . . pork chops . . . sausages . . . pork shoulder . . . pig’s feet. You consume that entire animal. And that will be you showing respect for the death of that beast.”

  Rick swallowed down some more whiskey sour. “I don’t know if I can do that.”

  “Oh, you can do it,” Cliff assured him. “You might not want to do it, but you can do it. In fact, a case could be made, if you can’t do it, you don’t deserve to eat pork.”

  After a moment Rick slapped his hand on the bar and said, “Okay, goddammit, I’ll do it. Let’s get a pig.”

  Now, of course, Rick never did it. There were enough moving parts to this experiment that it was easy for Rick to lose momentum. Where do I buy a pig? How do I clean up all that blood on my pool patio? How do I get that dead pig outta my backyard—she probably weighs a ton? What if the fucking thing bites me? But even though Rick never actually did it, he absolutely contemplated doing it. Which was its own form of calculated cold-blooded murder, similar to Jigsaw Jane’s black-gloved killer.

  Cliff drives Rick’s Cadillac up into its spot in Rick’s driveway in front of his house on Cielo Drive. Directly outside of the windshield, looming huge, is a giant oil painting of Rick wearing a cavalry uniform, grimacing, with a foot on his face. This is one section of a six-section outdoor billboard that advertised Comanche Uprising, the first feature film he headlined once Bounty Law made him a television star. The full billboard consisted of Rick Dalton as his character, Lieutenant Taylor Sullivan of the U.S. Cavalry, on the ground surrounded by (apparently) Comanches, with the chief placing a moccasined boot on the side of Sullivan’s face in a victory pose, pinning the angry, helpless Cavalry officer to the ground. An old friend of Rick’s found the section of billboard in an antiques store in Dallas, Texas. The friend bought it and sent it to Rick. Rick, however, never really cared for that poster, except for the fact it featured him and not top-billed Robert Taylor. Nor did he harbor any illusions that Comanche Uprising was anything other than what it was—a routine fifties’ Cavalry vs. Indians potboiler. Its virtues included working with salty-dog western-helmer R. G. Springsteen and how damn fancy Rick looked in his blue Cavalry officer’s uniform. But, other than that, the motion picture was unmemorable.

  So when Rick received the billboard section featuring him, he initially thought, What the fuck am I gonna do with this? His answer was to just leave it outside in the driveway.

  That was five years ago.

  As Cliff switches off the ignition, Rick goes into one of his passive-aggressive tantrums. He’s upset about something, so he makes himself upset about something else. In this case, the billboard in the driveway.

  “Can we finally”—gesturing broadly toward the oil painting—“get this fucking thing outta the driveway?”

  “Where do you want me to put it?”

  “Throw it away for all I care!”

  Cliff makes the disappointed face of a child. “Awww, Felix found that for you.” He prods, “Don’t be jaded, that’s a cool gift.”

  “Just because I don’t want to spend every morning and evening staring face-to-face with an oil painting of my mouth, like I’ve done for the last five years, shouldn’t insinuate I’m jaded.” Rick clarifies, “I’m just tired of fuckin’ lookin’ at it, alright? Can’t ya just put it in the garage?”

  Cliff chuckles, “Your garage? It’s a mess.”

  Rick instructs, “Well, can you clean it out enough to stick the billboard in?”

  Cliff removes his sunglasses and says, “Yes, I can.” Then clarifies, “But that’s not a this-afternoon thing; that’s a weekend kind of thing.”

  An exasperated Rick vents his frustration in a less bossy way: “It’s just I don’t need a big picture of myself in front of my house. It looks like I’m advertising the Rick Dalton Museum.”

  Then, all of a sudden, the whoosh of a motor and the sound of Beatles harmony invades their driver’s side ear. Both men turn to their left and spy, for the very first time, Rick’s new next-door neighbors, Roman and Sharon Polanski, in their vintage 1920s English Roadster. The Beatles song A Day in the Life emanates from the car radio, tuned to 93 KHJ. The car containing the handsome Hollywood couple sits at the bottom of a hill that constitutes their driveway, waiting for their electronic gate to open. Roman is behind the wheel, his wife in the passenger seat, clunky plastic clicker in Sharon’s hand. The two lovebirds are carrying on a lively conversation neither Rick nor Cliff can hear above the rumbling of the Roadster’s engine and the Beatles’ pretentious sound design. Cliff sees only the stunning blonde in the passenger seat, while Rick looks right through her to the diminutive Polish auteur in the driver’s seat.

  Apart from Mike Nichols, no other young director at the time was more successful or more famous than Roman Polanski. But the Polish megaphone-wielder had a level of popularity that eluded his stage and screen colleague Nichols. In 1969, Roman Polanski was a rock star!

  He had made a name for himself when he directed his first feature, the Polish language Knife in the Water. The film was a hit on the foreign-film circuit and was even nominated for best foreign film at the Academy Awards. After the success of his first film, Polanski moved to London and started making movies in the English language.

  Two of the films, Cul-de-sac and The Fearless Vampire Killers (where he met his wife, Sharon), were admired but didn’t make much of a mark financially. But his psychological thriller Repulsion was a sleeper hit that broke out of the art-house ghetto into mainstream success. After a slew of bad Psycho copies from Hammer Studios and the thrill-less thrillers coming out of France, like the pulse-devoid romans de gare of Claude Chabrol or the amateur-night-in-Paris fumblings of the so-called Truffaut–Hitchcock films, along came Polanski’s London-set Psycho-ish thriller Repulsion. When it came to how to d
o a modern-day Hitchcockian thriller for a with-it audience, that pulsed to a swinging London beat, with Repulsion Roman cracked the code.

  Polanski’s character study of twisted paranoia, starring the beautiful but damned Catherine Deneuve, worked. But where a Hitchcock thriller worked to entertain, Polanski’s movie worked to disturb. Hitchcock could and did disturb too—Suspicion, Strangers on a Train, Shadow of a Doubt, and of course Psycho. But only up to a point. With Polanski, audience disturbance was the point.

  Polanski’s Hitchcockian thriller by way of Buñuel struck a chord with audiences.

  After Polanski showed he had a penchant for getting under an audience’s skin with Repulsion, head honcho of Paramount Studios Robert Evans invited him to come out to Hollywood and make a movie. He lured Roman, an expert skier, into his office by sending him a script for an upcoming movie on their slate about competitive skiing called Downhill Racer.

  And then, in a decision that would later make Paramount’s stock price go up three points, Evans handed him the novel of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby and said, “Read this.” The rest, as Marvin Schwarz would say, is horror-movie history.

  Levin’s slim novel, essentially a novella, tells the story of Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow), a young newlywed who’s married to an ambitious actor named Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes). They move into a classic New York loft and start a relationship with an eccentric elderly couple that live in the building, Minnie and Roman Castevet (Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer). Little does poor Rosemary know, the couple are a pair of Satanists looking for a vessel to birth the long-prophesied Antichrist. Evans’s prescient vision that Polanski was the one to bring this product to the screen has to go down as one of the all-time inspired decisions ever made by a studio executive.

  After reading the material, Polanski only had one qualm. But it was a big one. Polanski was an atheist. And if you don’t believe in God, you must equally reject the idea of the devil. Now, many directors could and would say, So what? It’s just a movie. You don’t have to believe in giant monkeys to direct King Kong. And they wouldn’t be wrong. But Roman didn’t feel comfortable making a movie that reinforced the belief in religion, a philosophy he thoroughly rejected. Yet the filmmaker could see what a good movie this could be. So how did he reconcile his personal beliefs with the material? He staged the material as written but added an almost imperceptible perspective change.