Chapter 9
In September of 1977, I was out with some friends one night at Ports, doing cocaine, drinking, and playing Backgammon, and saw a good-looking guy there performing magic tricks. I watched as he cracked an egg into a glass and made it disappear. And then it reappeared in someone else’s glass. Pretty slick.
Jordan Hahn was a professional magician, a good one too, and we started hanging out and having a lot of fun. He was a member of the Academy of Magical Arts, which meant he could take me as his guest to The Magic Castle, a private L.A. club for members of the Academy of Magical Arts.
We had a lot in common. We loved to drink, do cocaine, and hang out at my house and watch Battlestar Galactica (which starred Lorne Greene from my old Bonanza days).
The first time I’d ever done cocaine was in the early 1970s at Elliot Robert’s house. I remember doing a couple of lines and announcing that it didn’t affect me in the least — and then I cleaned his entire kitchen.
Mainly, I liked coke because I could afford it and it allowed me to drink more. It was my wingman drug. Eventually, I’d worked out a pretty neat barter system. My dentist had access to pharmaceutical-grade cocaine but he preferred cocaine that was cut. My therapist had cocaine that was cut but preferred pharmaceutical grade. Enter Charlotte, the coke fairy. I was able to help them facilitate a swap on a regular basis and got some coke out of the bargain.
And no, it never occurred to me at the time that having a therapist who relied on me to secure his drug of choice might indicate I was working with the wrong therapist.
Within a few months of first meeting, and having a great time together — there’s nothing like doing nothing to bring a couple together — Jordan and I took a trip to Mexico where we did more nothing together and had a good time and got engaged.
In retrospect it happened pretty fast and without a lot of thought, but at the time it seemed like the most perfectly natural thing to do. We should not have gotten married; we should have just thrown a party.
I was, though, thinking clearly enough to realize that we needed a place to get married that would be easy and fun — neither of us wanted a church nor did we want a place that would be too expensive. We needed to save our money for more important things like drugs and alcohol. We had priorities.
I put a lot of thought into trying to figure out where to have the ceremony until I had a flashbulb moment. My mind went back to the poker nights at my house in Topanga and to my buddy Kit Carson, who was both an actor and was turning out to be a very gifted writer. At the time he was working on a screenplay that eventually became the 1982 film Paris, Texas among other things. Kit was married to the actress Karen Black and I knew they had a beautiful backyard. Karen, you may remember, had appeared in a string of great films including Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Nashville and The Great Gatsby.
I called up Kit and told him what I was calling about and he said, “Well, ask Karen.” So he put Karen on the phone and she was just fine with it.
This phone call must have triggered something in Karen’s mind because she called me back a few days later.
Here was her question: “Kit was telling me about these little houses he used to eat at your place. I was wondering if you could tell me how to make them?”
Um. Houses? That you eat?
Back in the Topanga Canyon days Kit had spent the night any number of times and my mind went back to what I may’ve cooked up for breakfast. Drawing a blank.
“Houses?” I asked.
“Yeah, you know. He said you made these houses. With cheese. I think he called them houses.”
“Do you mean quesadillas?” I asked, taking a wild stab in the dark.
“Yeah, maybe that was it.”
And so I explained the approximately three steps it takes to make a quesadilla.
I liked her a lot but sometimes she was a bit on Planet Karen if you know what I mean.
Our wedding in their backyard was on a perfect, warm, sunny L.A. day. There were lots of guests, many of whom I barely knew or not at all. Including Harrison Ford although for the life of me I cannot think why. He must have gotten dragged along as someone’s date.
In front of all these people we promised to be true to each other for the rest of our lives.
It was a terrible idea.
I don’t know what it is with me getting involved in film projects that take years to complete. Right around this time I was cast in one of my favorite films, which almost no one has ever seen, called Human Highway. This time instead of David Lynch throwing five years of his life at a movie, it was Neil Young.
Neil loves movies and had already shot a couple: Journey Through the Past and Rust Never Sleeps. This time he really wanted to make something creative, anarchic, something he was excited about, and that had some meaning.
He’d come up with an idea in rough form and had gotten together with actor friends Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn, and Dennis Hopper. From the start Neil knew he didn’t want anything scripted. He wanted to catch moments as they unfolded naturally in front of the camera. In the late 1970s they’d spent a few months in and around San Francisco and Taos, New Mexico, shooting scenes for a kind of road movie, which Neil eventually hated and finally walked away from.
There are two ways of looking at this first attempt at shooting the film. The first is this — these guys had all lived next to each other in Topanga Canyon and that first on-and-off film shoot was just a typical Topanga thing — a bunch of hippies getting stoned and grabbing a camera, going out on the road and seeing what happened.
The other way of looking at it is that these guys really knew the movie business. Remember that Russ Tamblyn had been acting in film since the late 1940s, as an eighth grader, and had later been a song and dance guy in musicals such as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and then in West Side Story (with my old friend Richard Beymer) as well as in straight dramas such as Peyton Place and How the West was Won. Likewise Dean Stockwell got his start as a little kid in the mid-1940s shooting the big-budget musical Anchors Aweigh with Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly. At age 12 he’d starred in The Boy with Green Hair and appeared in one of the Thin Man movies with William Powell and Myrna Loy — he’d grown up in the Golden Age of Hollywood — and had gone on to build a huge resume in TV and film.
Dennis Hopper had gotten his start rather famously in the 1955 blockbuster Rebel Without a Cause and had gone on to roles in a string of now-classics such as Gunfight at the OK Corral, Cool Hand Luke, and True Grit.
These guys were hardly naïve flower children when it came to the film industry. What they saw I’m guessing, with the success of Dennis’s film Easy Rider, was that something was “blowing in the wind.” There was an audience hungry for movies with a completely different feel — something grittier, less perfect, and more like their real lives.
The remnants of that first attempt at Human Highway appear in a 20-minute dream sequence in the middle of the final film and, in my opinion, it’s great stuff. Weird but great. There’s a whole extended performance of “Hey, Hey, My, My (Into the Black)” with Neil and the band Devo, which is trippy and pretty cool.
I was only involved a little bit in that first round of filmmaking. It was a scene shot somewhere near Neil’s ranch in Woodside in which Neil and I are apparently married and live in this odd little white clapboard house. He’s leaving in the morning and something like a dozen of our kids are streaming out past me as I stand in the doorway waving goodbye.
As Neil is taking off, the actor David Blue shows up dressed to the hilt as a milkman in a snappy white suit. Once Neil and the kids are gone, the milkman and I dash inside and shut the door. (Wink.)
It was fun but I had no idea what it was about and as I would later learn, neither did anyone else.
In spite of something like $1-million down the drain, Neil decided to start over but he didn’t quite know what to do. He bemoaned the fact that in the first version of the film he’d made the mistake of casting himself as a musician and he just didn’t think anyone would find that very interesting.
Jeanne Field meanwhile, who never seems short on ideas, had a concept that she thought might work and wrote a treatment for a new version of Human Highway that she described as a rock-n-roll Wizard of Oz.
Neil liked this new direction a lot and used it as a loose — very loose — roadmap for what became the final film, a dark, spoofy, cartoony anti-nuclear-power film.
We shot the new version at Raleigh Studios, which sits across the street on Melrose from Paramount. The good-looking studio manager from Raleigh named Kevin kept an eye on our production, rented Neil lights and equipment, kept things cleaned up, and would sometimes hang around to watch us work. At some point we all eventually learned Kevin’s last name, which was Costner.
Every morning we’d show up to the sound stage and Neil would outline what the upcoming scene was about, what he was looking for in terms of what would happen, how it would advance the story, and then we’d wing it. Once we’d filmed the scene in a way that worked, someone would write down the dialogue so that the screenplay was actually written after we shot it.
Neil played two characters in the new version, a grease monkey mechanic named Lionel Switch, a completely clueless dork, and Frankie Fontaine, a rock star, who is too cool to even emerge from his limousine. He saw the idea of playing Lionel, something totally the opposite of his onstage persona, as being a much more interesting proposition for an audience. For those of us who know Neil, playing a nerd wasn’t a huge stretch. If anything it was simply revealing a side of himself that audiences hadn’t seen. This is a guy, remember, who when he got money did what? Built a barn and filled it with model trains. He loves them so much he bought an interest in the Lionel train company. And note the name of the character — Lionel Switch.
I loved how Russ Tamblyn put it once in an interview saying that in Human Highway Neil got to play two characters, “Himself and himself.”
Besides starring and producing the film, Neil directed along with Dean Stockwell, who played Otto Quartz, the new owner of the Rail Café in Linear Valley who appeared to be up to no good. Dennis Hopper remained in the cast, along with Russ Tamblyn, who, since he was the resident song and dance guy, was now tasked with choreographing a big dance number that takes place just before the world blows up.
Elliot Roberts, who makes an appearance in the film as the manager of Neil’s superstar rocker character, produced along with Jeanne.
Elliot and Neil hired Sally Kirkland, Geraldine Barone, and me to round out the cast, as waitresses in the Rail Café and my friend Mickey Fox as one of the café’s more memorable customers.
One of the producers very nicely asked if I wanted my new husband Jordan to work on the film and I said absolutely not. Which I realized later was not a good sign.
I played Charlotte Goodheart, a waitress in the greasy spoon café, who dreams of becoming a chanteuse and is the object of Lionel’s goggle-eyed, slack-jawed desire. I wore heart earrings, a heart necklace, and a heart apron. I was blonde and breathy and had a ball.
Early in the film Lionel Switch drops by the café to see Charlotte and for a full minute of screen time (time it if you don’t believe me) we are treated to the sight of his eyes bugging, his face twitching, his mouth open and moving, trying to form words at the sight of his heavenly Charlotte.
Well, what actress doesn’t want a bit of that?
Human Highway was the first and only time I got to sing on film. Before shooting the scene where I sing “Moonglow” to Neil as Lionel (he joins in whistling) I sang that song everywhere I went — in the car, cleaning my house, walking down the street. When we finally filmed the scene everyone was stunned that I could actually carry a tune. Nailed it on the first take.
The film also includes a subplot with guys from the New Wave band Devo as jump-suit wearing workers from the local nuclear power plant — the one that’s about to blow. They glow red as they move red glowing barrels of nuclear waste in a truck that also glows red, all the while performing their version of the Kingston Trio hit “A Worried Man.”
Devo were big at the time, thanks to popularity of “Whip It.” Elliot had been Neil’s manager for a long time and now also managed Devo, so he was bringing a lot of his clients together on this. Plus, Neil really like the Devo guys and loved performing with them.
Dennis Hopper, who played Cracker, the twitchy, talkative short order cook, was always high, drunk or both during filming and was usually a pain in the ass. This was, I believe, the last movie he did before going into drug and alcohol recovery. On set he was not that different from his character in Apocalypse Now, always in his little kitchen banging stuff, pots, pans and implements and always jabbering away maniacally and nonsensically and driving us all crazy.
One day Sally Kirkland had had it with him. Dennis was banging the metal counter in his kitchen with a large knife. She grabbed it by the blade, thinking perhaps that it was a dull prop, but no, it was good and sharp and it sliced right through her, severing a tendon in her right index finger. It was pretty bloody and awful.
They got her off to the hospital and bandaged up. A day later several of us from the film went to see her in a play and there she was on-stage with a cast on her hand and arm, gamely ensuring that the show would go on, seeming to do pretty well.
Something like five years later, in December 1985, she filed a $2-million lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court against Dennis claiming that he’d intentionally knifed her. She also named Neil and Elliot in the suit, claiming they had been negligent in not keeping Dennis under control. My friend Mickey Fox, who played Mrs. Robinson in the film, and I had to go testify.
In court Dennis’s lawyer didn’t dispute that the knife incident had happened or that his client had been high at the time but maintained that it had been an accident.
In February 1986, Superior Court by Judge Stanley Malone found Dennis not at fault along with Neil and Elliot and the whole thing was dropped.
The final film, meanwhile, was released in September 1982, shown first at the Mill Valley Film Festival and later in Los Angeles. The reviews weren’t great and it wasn’t embraced by the film industry at all.
The tone, the look, the feel of it, the politics, it just wasn’t cool in the way things were supposed to be cool at that moment. Perhaps if it had been released 10 years earlier or 10 years later it would’ve received a different reception. In 1982 Ronald Reagan was president. Margaret Thatcher was the prime minister in the UK. Punk music was on the rise. The world had shifted since Human Highway had first started filming back in 1978. The average moviegoer was seeing E.T., Poltergeist, Blade Runner and Porky’s. Film connoisseurs were seeing Diner, Gandhi, and Sophie’s Choice. No one that year was in the mood to see a group of Topanga friends sing and dance their way through a comedic, experimental, anti-nuclear-power film.*
* I am thrilled that as I’m sending this book off to the publisher, I’ve just learned from Elliot that Human Highway is slated to show in 400 theaters in March, 2016 — finally getting the spotlight it deserves.