Raising hell in the hills of Hollywood

Four Hollywood actors known for their excessive and controversial lifestyles, whose movie careers started in the Fifties, are the subject of lurid, gossipy, helter-skelter group biography entitled 'Bad Boy Drive: The Wild Life and Fast Times of Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson'

UNRULY Jack Nicholson s lifestyle is laid bare UNRULY: Jack Nicholson's lifestyle is laid bare

The slightly spurious title is a reference to Mulholland Drive. Brando, Nicholson and Beatty have had homes there but Hopper never has.

“Together they formed a kind of unholy union that led cops to nickname Mulholland Drive Bad Boy Hill,” explains Robert Sellers. “Jack always preferred Bad Boy Drive.”

So what do these four reprobates have in common and what sets them apart from each other? Brando had the most troubled childhood of the four, later admitting to murderous fantasies about his father.

Hopper was a teenage rebel, “already a committed boozer and close to discovering the wonders of weed”.

Nicholson was brought up in a house of women, his unknown father nowhere to be seen; although he didn’t realise it until he was 38, “his sister was in fact his mother and the woman he’d grown up calling Mom was actually his grandmother”.

Beatty had a more conventional upbringing and shone as a sportsman at school before his swift emergence as leading-man actor.

Three of them shared the same girlfriend, though not at the same time. Jack Nicholson was the first to go out with singer Michelle Phillips, of the Mamas And The Papas. Dennis Hopper lived with her as her husband for a week before she concluded that he was crazy. Beatty was the latecomer to the show.

Brando’s vices were sex and food. Having padlocked the food cabinets in his kitchen, he ordered his housekeeper to resist his entreaties to hand over the key, however insistent. Within half an hour he was threatening to fire her and when she remained resolute he was obliged to crowbar the cupboards open.

Later, he got another housekeeper pregnant no fewer than three times because each time he would call her into his bedroom to pick up something he had dropped but was unable to reach, she would bend over and he would feel impelled to pounce.

While Nicholson consumed women and drugs, especially marijuana, in a consistent but controlled manner, Beatty avoided booze and drugs. Instead, he was addicted to sex. He went through women “on an industrial scale”, as Natalie Wood, a former lover, put it.

When he finally married Annette Bening in his late 50s, Beatty was determined to be a success as a husband.

“Warren is terrified of failure,” said screenwriter Robert Towne. “He must succeed because he cannot bear to fail. Warren will do anything short of murder to win.”

Hopper was the craziest of the group and the biggest drug user among them but at heart he was a boozer, later confessing: “I only used to do cocaine so that I could sober up and drink more.”

Later, when he first went into Alcoholics Anonymous, he tried to stay off booze by taking an ounce of coke every couple of days. Eventually, he forswore the lot.

This is a natural sequel to Sellers’s last book, Hellraisers, about the lives of four British actors known for their excessive boozing and womanising (Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole and Oliver Reed), which came out last year.

I described that book as “a rollicking read”, though I objected to Sellers’s clumsy style and fondness for using vulgar colloquialisms outside of reported speech.

Much the same can be said about Bad Boy Drive. I don’t mind reading profanities from the lips of our subjects but they sound awkward and unseemly as part of the author’s text, as if Sellers is desperately trying to prove that he too is something of a bad boy.

By Robert Sellers

Preface Publishing, £17.99

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