Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne: A Life in Several Acts Page 8

  It was also a time, Hale believed, when the two brothers walked very different paths despite working on the same film. “Nick got more into the 1960s social scene,” he said. “John was an Eastern suit. He was pretty straight.”

  Real panic struck when Avco-Embassy abruptly dumped the Needle Park project, and Dominick had to work overtime to negotiate a deal with Twentieth Century Fox and also try to hire a young director, one of those “terrific . . . kid directors” whom his sister-in-law ridiculed. He much admired Jerry Schatzberg’s edgy film Puzzle of a Downfall Child, starring newcomer Faye Dunaway. At the time, Schatzberg was better known for his fashion photography in Vogue.

  “I read it with one eye and not much heart,” Schatzberg said of the Didions’ Needle Park script. What did excite him was a young actor whom Dominick wanted to cast after Jim Morrison proved too debauched (and soon died from a drug overdose). The director had seen Al Pacino in the play The Indian Wants the Bronx and told his agent, “Boy, if ever I did a film, that’s the guy I’d like to work with.” Dominick also saw Pacino, but in another play, Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?, and promptly thought of him to play Bobby in Needle Park.

  “‘Al Pacino’ were the major words,” said Schatzberg. They were not major words, however, for the executives at Fox. Richard Zanuck and David Brown wanted another actor, one who was taller, less ethnic, and better looking. They wanted a star.

  “Nick was terrific; he agreed with me about Pacino,” said Schatzberg, and best of all, Dominick put together a strategy for getting the studio to agree with their offbeat casting choice. “We’ll set up casting,” he told Schatzberg, “and if we come up with someone who’s fantastic, fine. And if we don’t, we’ll go back and say Pacino is the only one.” For a few weeks, Robert De Niro looked like a contender—although not a star, he had made one movie to Pacino’s none—but Dominick’s patience and political skills with the studio prevailed. Pacino got the role.

  Dominick also found his female lead on the stage, in San Francisco at the American Conservatory Theater. She was playing, of all roles, George Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan. “I never did ask Nick how he saw Helen in my St. Joan,” said Kitty Winn.

  Again, the studio was not happy. “We’d like Mia Farrow,” a studio boss opined.

  “Oh my God!” said Schatzberg. “Isn’t that the girl who just divorced Frank Sinatra?”

  After Mia Farrow turned out not to be available or too expensive or simply uninterested, Kitty Winn met with the studio chiefs, who voiced disappointment over her being all of twenty-five years old; Farrow, at the time, was twenty-six. They thought Helen should be twenty. “Nick went in and fought for me,” said Winn, who, at the time, looked eighteen.

  Dominick played the studio casting game a second time; again, he assuaged the executive fears, and they cast the very reserved Kitty Winn as Helen. Schatzberg recalled, “Nick and I both liked these unknowns who could have come from any place in America” to play the film’s drug-addict lovers, their modern-day star-crossed and strung-out young lovers.

  Schatzberg called Dominick “a terrific producer.” He was also super-protective of his relatives’ screenplay. “Nick got a little upset when he watched the dailies,” said the director. “His brother and sister-in-law wrote the script and maybe he was anxious about their seeing [the film]. I like the actors to improvise. I actually did not see John Gregory and Joan once we started [shooting].”

  Kitty Winn made one suggestion for changing the script. One long monologue did not read well. “It came from this literary place,” she recalled. Winn told Schatzberg that “maybe there shouldn’t be any words.” Dominick overheard the conversation and asked them to keep the monologue. In the end, the actress and her director dropped it.

  A couple of weeks into production, Dominick called his leading lady to his New York pied-à-terre at the Volney, the same hotel where he had recently sniffed so much amyl nitrate that he “knocked over a lit candle onto the curtains, which went up in flame,” and had to quickly banish “the trashy late-night strangers of the love-for-sale variety who were my guests” before the cops and fire fighters arrived. Putting on a more professional face for his leading lady, Dominick wanted to talk to Winn about her performance. He liked her subtlety as an actress, but she was being too subtle, in his opinion.

  “Al’s going to steal the film from you if you don’t up your game,” he began.

  Winn came from ACT, an extremely non-star-oriented ensemble. She did not know the first thing about upstaging. “Tell me a scene where you feel Al is stealing the scene,” she asked.

  Dominick did not hesitate. “You’re in Blimpie and Al is eating a sandwich and it is falling out of his mouth and all you see is his being stoned with food falling out of his mouth while you’re talking to him.”

  Winn took a deep breath. She had never made a film before but stood by her understated interpretation of Helen. “Nick, I have to be true to my character and Al has to be true to his character and I can’t sit there doing what Al’s doing to steal the scene back,” she said. “It really is the director and the cameraman if they want to focus on me or they focus on Al. It’s not up to me. It’s only up to me to play my part.” Winn called that afternoon at the Volney Hotel “our only contretemps.”

  Once shooting started in autumn 1970, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner sent a reporter to do a story on the film. Bridget Byrne arrived around midnight for a shoot near the Museum of Natural History on Central Park West. Pacino told the reporter about the Method, his approach to acting. “When I have a scene in which I have to push Helen around, I push Kitty around all day,” he said, then added, “Jerry doesn’t pretend to know anything about acting. But he has a sure instinct for what will work and what won’t, what looks right, what doesn’t.”

  Dominick did not think such talk helped the film. Nor did John’s comment about New York City being a dying city, which was why he and his wife lived in California. Most upsetting personally to Dominick, however, was Byrne’s description of him. She wrote, “Dominick Dunne hovers at the end of the alley during a set-up. Despite the absence of a rattle he looks like a cheerer at a football game.”

  Shortly after shooting ended, Dominick and Schatzberg took their unfinished film to Paris to show it to officials from the Cannes Film Festival. They also spoke to journalists there, hoping to create some buzz. Dominick joked with the French reporters, telling them, “They put us up at the George V. I think I’m going to steal a couple of ashtrays from the hotel.”

  Dominick’s off-hand crack caused a minor stir. The publicist for the Cannes Film Festival said something in French to the maître d’. “And five minutes later they brought a package of hotel ash trays,” Schatzberg recalled.

  Dominick was not happy. “No, you don’t understand,” he told the maître d’. “I wanted to steal them!”

  Later, he got his chance to lift something from the five-star hotel, but even that theft was thwarted. Back in the United States, customs agents searched the two filmmakers’ luggage “because we were bringing a film back,” explained Schatzberg. The search did not go well for Dominick.

  “Those sons of bitches!” he said as soon as he and Schatzberg cleared customs. “They took the bathrobe out of my suitcase!”

  “Nick had stolen a George V bathrobe! That was Nick,” said Schatzberg.

  Needle Park played the Cannes Film Festival, where Kitty Winn won the award for best actress on May 27, 1971. Al Pacino did not make the trip, having already started production on The Godfather. (It always irked Dominick that Pacino never remembered him, even though he had given the actor his first big break in the movies.) Schatzberg found the experience of having a film shown at Cannes to be part excitement, part humiliation. “We were put up at the Carlton a block away from the Palace—Nick, Kitty, Joan and John, and I came down. There was a big limo waiting for us. We drove one block and got out, and as we got out we saw the press running toward us.” Even before the screening, the Needle Park company entertained fanta
sies their film would be a big hit. “Then the press ran right past us. Michele Morgan, the president of the Cannes jury—her limo was right behind ours!” Dominick did not care. He had gotten this close to Morgan, the French film actress whose photograph had once adorned his bedroom wall back in West Hartford.

  The Panic in Needle Park received an excellent reception from the assembled filmgoers, and their applause bathed the American team in adulation as they walked down the grand staircase at the Palais des Festivals. “Then when we got outside, there was no limo and we had to walk back to the Carlton. Nick loved it!” said Schatzberg.

  After Needle Park won a couple of awards at Cannes, Dominick traveled to Paris to take meetings for his next film, Play It as It Lays, based on Joan Didion’s second novel. It would be a difficult project to bring to the screen for no other reason than the executive in charge of the movie at Universal Pictures hated it. In fact, Ned Tanen only agreed to greenlight the film because he personally liked Frank Perry and Universal had done well with the director’s previous movie, Diary of a Mad Housewife. “I always had this fear of studio heads,” Dominick said. “Any male in charge brought back the father thing to me.” Tanen quickly became one of those men.

  No sooner did Dominick arrive in Paris to begin the preproduction process than Tanen called the novel and the script it was based on “a piece of shit.”

  As producer, Dominick had to take what he got—no other major studio wanted the project—and he began casting the leads. He knew Tony Perkins through their mutual friend Stephen Sondheim, and it was on his post-Cannes trip to Paris that Dominick met with the tall, lanky actor to discuss Play It as It Lays. In the 1950s, Perkins enjoyed great success with the bobby-soxer set but underwent a major image overhaul when he played the serial killer Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. In subsequent screen performances, he never quite lost that creepy edge, and his career suffered, especially with the young female moviegoers who had moved on to the more virile Warren Beatty and Steve McQueen.

  Dominick’s meeting with Perkins oozed subtext. He was in Paris to offer the currently out-of-work actor the role of the closeted, substance-abusing film producer BZ (short for Benzedrine), who commits suicide in the arms of the dissolute leading lady after she hands him a lethal dose of pills. Not only was Perkins a closeted homosexual, but he was being offered a role that Joan Didion had based on her closeted, substance-abusing brother-in-law producer.

  The two men could not have chosen a more apropos spot in Paris to meet and talk. Perkins stayed at L’Hotel, the final home of Oscar Wilde, and it was there on the Left Bank that Dominick made his pitch, saying, “I thought you’d be terrific for this film I’m going to do.” Dominick had not yet admitted to himself that he was asking Perkins to play a role he had inspired his sister-in-law to write.

  Perkins mentioned reading the book. “I don’t think he’s like me,” he said in defense to Dominick’s suggestion that he would be “terrific” in such a flamboyantly gay role. Not that the actor could be choosey.

  On his Paris trip, Dominick also met with Perkins’s agent, Sue Mengers, who saw Play It as It Lays as a treasure trove of roles for her growing stable of actors. In addition to Perkins, the superaggressive, often outrageously caustic agent wanted Dominick to cast a second client in the film. She thought Ann-Margret would be perfect to play the female lead, Maria. Dominick wanted Perkins; he did not want Ann-Margret, whose brassy Las Vegas persona at that moment in her career clashed with Maria’s nearly debilitating existential angst. That casting disagreement aside, Dominick later groused how his meeting with Mengers “interlocked us for a number of years.” They met at Café de Flore, and it was there that the powerful agent introduced him to a Belgian man who spoke with a thick French accent. Where Mengers was overweight and blowsy, her boyfriend was tall, tan, fit, and very attractive, and also unlike her, he was not well connected in Hollywood—except for his girlfriend. One thing disturbed Dominick about the unlikely couple. She called him Jean-Claude Tramont. Dominick blanched at the name. He knew Mengers’s boyfriend from his days at NBC in the 1950s when Tramont went by the name Jack Schwartz, was a Jewish guy who lived with his mother in the Bronx, and worked as a page boy at the door of the network’s Studio 3. Seated across from the Hollywood couple at the historic Café de Flore, where Georges Bataille and Robert Desnos practically invented surrealism, Dominick knew what Tramont knew, and he dared not mention their common Rockefeller Center past. Finally, the agent’s boyfriend acknowledged, “It has been a long time.” Dominick glanced at Mengers, and he saw trouble. “It was not that she did not know that his name had been Jack Schwartz. She did. What she hated about the encounter was that I knew,” he later remarked.

  When Dominick expressed interest in Tuesday Weld to play the role of Maria, Mengers took note and quickly wooed the actress away from the William Morris Agency. So much for Ann-Margret.

  Dominick and the Didions always agreed that Weld should play Maria, the novel’s B-list actress who is trying to recover from a nervous breakdown by starring in a C-list biker movie and riding the L.A. freeways in a convertible on a road to nowhere.

  Dominick knew Weld from Roddy McDowall’s parties at his Malibu beach house in the summer of 1965 when the blonde sex-kittenish actress was still married to the actor’s secretary, Claude Harz. He considered Weld a friend, having invited her to his Black and White Ball. But there were other reasons he wanted the actress and they could be summed up in one word, “typecasting.” Time magazine described Weld as “Shirley Temple with a leer.” By her own admission, Weld was an alcoholic by age twelve and had attempted suicide several times, imbibing a not-quite-lethal cocktail of aspirin, gin, and sleeping pills. She would not be the easiest actress to work with. “Miss Weld is not a very good representative for the motion picture industry,” complained gossip crone Louella Parsons.

  But Dominick adored her, even though his wicked sense of humor sometimes got the better of him on the subject of Tuesday Weld. As Joyce Haber described the situation in her Los Angeles Times column, guests at Dominick’s parties in Beverly Hills used to engage in a macabre betting pool: “Each of them listed precisely the month and the day that Tuesday Weld would end her life,” Haber wrote. Playing outrageous games or stealing George V bathrobes, Dominick always knew how to keep people entertained. “He collected people and people liked him,” said Mart Crowley.

  Weld forgave Dominick’s suicide watch. In addition to sharing a skewed sense of humor, they were fellow potheads, and he could always be counted on to score the best weed. “I get high on anything,” Weld said.

  Whatever she was feeling the actress did not make it easy for Dominick. She made him woo her for the role. As she told the press, “Well, they’re after me to play the lead . . . and, I mean, I told them I could just phone it in because that’s my life, I mean, it wouldn’t be any real challenge.”

  Meanwhile, Frank Perry wooed Dominick and the Didions. Although Mike Nichols and Sam Peckinpah also expressed interest in directing, Perry made the better case. Or was willing to work within a very limited budget. He told his three collaborators that theirs was “absolutely a marriage, a marriage with no provision or divorce until the film is made. . . . You two write the screenplay, Nick and I will produce and I will direct.”

  Together, the four of them visited all the locations in the book—the desert, the beach, the L.A. freeways—and they screened movies like The Pumpkin Eater and Petulia that “experimented with time,” said Perry. They then holed up in Dominick’s Spalding Drive apartment for four days, using a bulletin board and multicolored cards to chart the sequence of scenes.

  In a curious twist of fate, Play It as It Lays launched one career in Hollywood that eventually outshone most of the principal talent on the film.

  “I stalked Dominick Dunne,” said Joel Schumacher. In the early 1970s, Schumacher had “burned many bridges” in the fashion business and looked to reinvent himself as a costume designer. Dominick’s friend Howard Rose
nman invited Schumacher to an early screening of The Panic in Needle Park, in part “because I had a serious relationship with drugs” and in part “to meet Dominick.” John and Joan were also present. Later, Dominick introduced Schumacher to Frank Perry, who told him, “We need a $200-a-week costume designer.”

  “They gave me a two-week trial,” said Schumacher, who passed the test.

  Even though John and Joan rarely visited the Play It as It Lays company during production, Schumacher made a point to know the couple. “Nick introduced me to his brother and sister-in-law. They were fantastic to me,” he recalled. “They had this house on the beach in Trancas, and they had what would be called a salon. It was very international.” John knew people from Life and Time; Joan had written extensively for Vogue and the Saturday Evening Post. “It wasn’t just movie people. Which was unusual at that time. Back then it was such a tiny one-industry town. You didn’t meet people from outside the film business,” said Schumacher. “But at John and Joan’s, there were a lot of great reporters, people who were covering wars. It was an incredible mix of people.”

  But mostly, it was movie people with whom Joan and John wanted to network to secure script work. Those movie people included Julia and Michael Phillips, Martin Scorsese, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Steven Spielberg, and a smattering of fellow screenwriters. Paul Schrader described the soirees in Trancas as being “very heady.” In addition to barbecuing, swimming, sunbathing, and talking about movies, “a lot of these writers and directors helped each other,” said Schrader. “Even though we were relatively unknown, there was a real feeling that the world was our oyster.”

  That heady mix at the Didions’ weekend salons, however, did not include Dominick.

  “They invited me to their house at least once every other week. They went out of their way to invite me,” said Schumacher. “Nick was never invited. Something was going on.”