8

“Images They Can't Forger”

Sam Peckinpah had chased the holy grail of art and fame for more than twenty years; now he had it in his grasp. He had sacrificed much to get it, perhaps too much, but how it glittered there in the spotlight. The Wild Bunch had been only a marginal success at the box office, but Time, Life, The New Yorker, and dozens of highbrow movie critics had declared him one of the greatest filmmakers of his generation, a brilliant artist in an era when art counted in Hollywood as it never had before.

The next three years would pass like an eight-second ride on the back of a Brahma bull. One whirling frenzy of action—thrilling leaps toward the sky, sudden twists, and pounding falls to earth. He managed to hang on through it all, but the jolts took their toll—at first deep inside, where no one could spot the damage, but in time no one would be able to miss it.

Sam's suite of offices at Warner Bros. became a beehive of frantic workers. At times during the production of The Wild Bunch and The Ballad of Cable Hogue there were four secretaries crammed into the outer offices. Lou Lombardo, Bob Wolfe, and Frank Santillo set up editing rooms on the lot, Jim Silke was in and out on various writing projects, and Gary Weis and Gill Dennis had an office for editing their documentary on the making of Hogue. Robert Culp stopped by frequently to talk about their Summer Soldiers script, which Sam hoped to direct next, and the rest of the Peckinpah Bunch—L. Q. Jones, Strother Martin, Jason Robards, Frank Kowalski, Jerry Fielding—boisterously barged in and out.

Joel Reisner, who was masterminding The Wild Bunch Academy Awards campaign, also had a desk in Peckinpah's suite. About Sam's height with the same slight build, Reisner was high-strung, incredibly well-read, and incredibly enamored of Sam's work. Jean Renoir and Sam Peckinpah, he was fond of saying, were the two greatest filmmakers in the history of the cinema. Determined to win Sam the recognition he deserved, Reisner mounted a PR blitzkrieg.

He put together a retrospective of Peckinpah's work at the Los Angeles County Art Museum. Everything from episodes of “The Westerner” to Ride the High Country, Major Dundee, Noon Wine, and The Wild Bunch was shown, and Sam participated in audience discussions afterward. Reisner also arranged hundreds of personal and telephone interviews with magazines and newspapers across the country, including interviews with Sight and Sound, the British Film Institute's prestigious magazine, Film Quarterly, and other highbrow publications. He set up a European tour in which Sam appeared at the Sorrento Film Festival for a screening of The Ballad of Cable Hogue, stopped in Paris to do interviews with all the auteurist film critics, and lectured at the British Film Institute and the national film schools in Sweden and Denmark. Reisner put together a ninety-minute radio documentary, “Sam Peckinpah's West,” which aired on KPFK in Los Angeles, and got Sam guest slots on the David Frost and Dick Cavett shows. The new hip, intellectual alternatives to the showbiz babble of Johnny Carson's “Tonight Show,” Frost and Cavett attracted strong followings in the early seventies.

Under Reisner's guidance, Peckinpah's image as a public figure crystallized. Major Dundee and The Cincinnati Kid, two major setbacks, were now transformed into inverse triumphs that helped draw the portrait of Peckinpah as the eccentric genius who had seen his best work butchered by Hollywood philistines. Sam was an enthusiastic collaborator in Reisner's revisionism. He began telling journalists that before Jerry Bresler cut it to pieces, Dundee had been “possibly the best picture I've made in my life.” But when Columbia offered to let him restore the picture to his original version, he turned down the proposal, claiming he no longer had the time. Dundee was more useful as a lost masterpiece than a rediscovered failure.

With great enthusiasm, at first, Sam recreated himself for the media. Gone now were all traces of the rich lawyer's son who had always worn fancier clothes than any of his classmates. The uniform was now complete: dirty jeans, a dusty bandanna wrapped around the graying head, and a pair of mirrored sunglasses masking the eyes. To listen to him now one would think he'd spent his entire youth cowboying and hunting at Dunlap's Ranch rather than just his summers, that he'd grown up in some dilapidated log cabin rather than a sprawling ranch house with elaborately landscaped gardens and an exquisite interior decor.

He took up knife-throwing, hurling the steel blades into the doors and walls of his office and home. Jerry Fielding's kitchen cabinets were gashed and splintered by Sam's constant target practice when he visited their house in the Hollywood Hills. If a journalist or studio executive stepped into his office the response was Pavlovian; Sam reached for the knives and fired away.

He spoke freely to reporters of his drinking binges, his whoring and brawling. Far from diminishing his reputation—at least at first—it fueled it, for this was an era that reveled in excess, that celebrated rebels and cheered mavericks. And here, in the heart of the Hollywood machine, a bizarre anomaly had surfaced: a combination of Ernest Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, and Wild Bill Hickok who, through sheer will and gall, had taken on the Combine, the System, with both fists swinging wildly, and damn if he didn't seem to be winning! They dubbed him “Bloody Sam,” “The Picasso of Violence,” and soon he was a bigger star than any of the actors who appeared in his movies.

But fame concealed a deadly double edge. No one seemed to remember anymore that “The Westerner” had been far less violent than its counterparts on television, or recall the naive romantic scenes between Elsa and Heck in Ride the High Country or the subtle characterizations of Noon Wine. Now all they wanted to write about were his “ballets of blood” all they wanted Sam to talk about was violence.

“It was all bullshit,” says Jim Silke. “I told Joel Reisner one night, ‘Do Sam a favor and leave him alone. It's what he does that counts, not what you say about him,’ which was a direct quote from Sam. That really got Reisner upset. Jerry Fielding gave me a big hug. He said, ‘Somebody had to tell him that.’ But you couldn't stop Reisner and Sam would go along with it. Sam never was the kind of guy that was in shape to deal with all of the publicity. That's when he was weak, in my opinion. When things were tough he was great. But when he got all that adulation it was not good for him. He lost his perspective. It's an incredible thing to try and deal with that kind of attention, I don't see how Sam stayed sane . . . I don't think he was very happy, much, after that.”

He was drinking heavily again, the restraint observed during the shooting of Bunch now abandoned. He'd start with vodka in the afternoon and switch to whiskey or tequila or any other imaginable combination of liquors in the evening, not showing the effects until the small hours of the night. He could still put the work in and his intellect and creative instincts were still razor-sharp, but his mood swings were becoming more radical.

His romantic entanglements had accelerated along with everything else. Never had his sexual liaisons been so plentiful and so unstable. While shooting Bunch he had been comforted by the charms of the two most beautiful Mexican actresses on the picture, Yolanda Ponce and Aurora Clavel. Now that he'd returned to L.A., both wrote passionate love letters that inevitably concluded with pleas for money. He never sent them as much as they asked for, but he usually sent something.

Most of his secretaries did double duty as lovers; he had his own harem set up in the suite at Warners with anywhere from two to four women in attendance at any given time.

A great number of beautiful young women were eager for a piece of the man who'd been hailed as a cinematic genius. As Sam traveled across the country and through Europe in 1969, 1970, and 1971, he marked his trail with more than a dozen brief but intense affairs. It took very little persuasion to get most women into the sack, and there were very few—including the wives and girlfriends of his associates—whom he couldn't seduce if he really set his mind to it.

Peckinpah's correspondence files from 1969 to 1972 are jammed with hormone-saturated letters from starry-eyed conquests professing their desperate and unquenchable passion for the maestro. If a secretary, groupie, or other naive prey were not available, there was always the file of hookers’ phone numbers that he kept within easy reach at the office. It hadn't been difficult to assemble the list; Hollywood's studio executives, agents, directors, producers, and stars supported a thriving prostitution industry.

But even an enthusiastic whoring partner like Frank Kowalski had begun to notice how Peckinpah's sex drive had become a compulsion fueled by a disturbing undercurrent of hysteria. “We were down in Mexico one time right after we finished Cable, and this Mexican nurse came into the hotel room to give Sam a shot for the flu or something. She was a big two-hundred-pound woman, not even remotely attractive, not by any stretch of the imagination. So Sam drops his pants and bends over, and as she's giving him the needle in the ass, he's reaching back trying to fondle her breasts. It was weird! I thought to myself: this is the strangest display of human emotion I've ever seen!”

Occasionally the hysteria broke to the surface. Jason Robards, who was renting a house in Malibu, stopped by Sam's place at Broad Beach frequently, and by the office at Warner Bros. during pre- and post-production of The Ballad of Cable Hogue. By this time Robards had fallen in love with Lois O'Connor, the associate producer on Noon Wine, and decided to marry her. Sam and Lois had been lovers briefly when both were working for Martin Ransohoff during pre-production for The Cincinnati Kid. But Sam's volatility had caused the affair to crash and burn shortly after it took off.

Now Robards wanted Peckinpah to be best man at his wedding. It would be a small civil ceremony officiated by a Superior Court judge at Jason's house, with only a few friends in attendance. Sam showed up the morning of the wedding wearing a white tuxedo with an apple blossom in its lapel, and a gold tie that Robards had given him. He hung around the house all day while the bride and groom prepared for the ceremony. The radio was playing and the theme to The Wild Bunch came on. Robards noticed a strange tug-of-war of emotions on Peckinpah's face. Then Lois came down the stairs in her wedding dress. Sam wrote in a letter years later, that he would always remember Lois “coming down the stairs wearing on her head—blossoms cut in the fog and worn in the sun.”

They rose before the judge. Sam handed Jason the ring on cue. Bride and groom recited their vows, looked lovingly into each other's eyes, kissed tenderly, and were pronounced man and wife. People came forward to congratulate them. Sam, who'd been standing stiffly, suddenly broke down, crying uncontrollably. Before any of the shocked onlookers could react, he turned and fled the house and didn't return that day.

Peckinpah had bought the rights to The Ballad of Cable Hogue back in 1967 while he was still scrambling for TV assignments to make ends meet. John Crawford and Edmund Penney had written the haunting, allegorical screenplay about a stubborn desert rat who discovers a water hole along a stagecoach route at the dawn of the twentieth century. Cable Hogue lays claim to the water and opens a stage stop that services the needs of weary travelers. For a time he prospers, but then the automobile arrives on the Western landscape. In the blink of an eye the stagecoach line and Cable Hogue are obsolete, and both pass into history.

When Ken Hyman gave the project the green light in August 1968, Gordon Dawson and Sam did a minor rewrite, adding comical scenes, tightening up some sequences, and polishing the dialogue of others. The film would be a tribute to Sam's great-uncle, Moses Church, his grandfather, Charlie Peckinpah, and all the other wild and woolly entrepreneurs who carved their own empires out of the great untamed land in the nineteenth century, then faded into obscurity when “progress” eventually passed them by. Peckinpah's team—Dawson, who would function (without credit) as associate producer, cinematographer Lucien Ballard, art director Leroy Coleman, and prop man Bobby Visciglia—cranked pre-production into high gear in December 1968.

Jason Robards would star as Cable Hogue, Stella Stevens as a prostitute, Hildy, whom he falls in love with, and Englishman David Warner would play the Reverend Joshua Duncan Sloane, a lascivious, self-ordained minister to “the church of the wayfaring stranger, a church of my own revelation,” who befriends Cable. Strother Martin and L. Q. Jones would revive their demonic Laurel and Hardy act as two former partners of Hogue's who betray him, and whom he then plots vengeance against, and the Peckinpah stock company would fill out the rest of the cast. The picture was to be shot in thirty-six days in the Valley of Fire, just east of Las Vegas, and in Arizona on a slender budget of $880,000.

But when shooting began in January 1969, the simple low-budget picture turned into a financial quagmire. The Valley of Fire became the Valley of Thunderstorms. Heavy rains and technical and logistical problems caused the production to fall ten days behind schedule in its first month of shooting. Peckinpah took his frustrations out on the crew. He fired thirty-six people from the production, an average of one a day. The dismissals grew so frequent that a car was kept on location for the express purpose of carting the fallen from the set, and a shuttle service transported casualties to the Las Vegas airport and fresh fodder out to the valley. Sam terminated camera mechanics, assistant directors, caterers, drivers, an animal handler, a set dresser, a projectionist, a gaffer, grips, a makeup man, and production manager Dink Templeton.

Sam had hired Sharon and her boyfriend, Gary Weis—a talented still photographer—to shoot a 16mm documentary on the making of the film. But far from being fascinated by the assignment, Sharon was disgusted by the way her father treated the crew and outraged by the use of small animals in many of the scenes.

The screenplay for Cable Hogue dictated that as Hogue scratched out an existence from the barren desert he would kill lizards and rattlesnakes, rabbits and birds for stew meat. Sam insisted that live animals be used, and that some of them be killed on camera.

When Gary Weis learned that Sam intended to squib a live lizard for one shot and blow it up in slow motion to simulate the reptile's being shot by a rifle, he mounted a “Save the Lizard!” campaign. “I started leaving these phantom notes around, on Sam's car, on the bulletin board at the hotel where all the production notices were posted,” says Weis. “They'd say things like, ‘To kill a lizard on Thursday is bad luck for a hundred years—Akira Kurosawa.’ I always signed the names of Sam's idols on them.”

Weis’ efforts were in vain. Sam blew the lizard up anyway.

Sharon was horrified. Looking at all those rabbits trapped in their tiny wire cages, knowing they would be slaughtered for a scene in a movie, was unbearable. It was Simbo's puppies all over again; it was the way she, her sisters and brother, everybody and everything came second to his films that infuriated Sharon, and she told him so. Sam shot back at her, “Who do you think is paying for your education?” and ridiculed her as naive. But it was bluster—Sharon's verbal darts were drawing blood.

“She and Gary really got to him,” says Gill Dennis, an AFI intern on the production who ended up codirecting the documentary. “They were making him feel so guilty. Every time Bobby Visciglia took a rabbit off to kill it for a shot, Gary would film it and zoom in with the camera, you know?”

The final confrontation came when Sam summoned Sharon and Gary to his hotel room one night. He launched into a tirade against his eldest daughter, accusing her of disloyalty. Did she have any idea how stressful it was to direct a movie? Under such high pressure he needed all the emotional support he could get, but instead she had betrayed him.

Sharon's anger matched his own. She told him she didn't believe in what he was doing. “Do you think making a dumb movie is going to be worth hurting so many people? All the people you've fired, all the people you've humiliated and degraded, do you ever think about that?”

Suddenly, Sam burst into tears. “You've got to get out of here,” he cried.

“I'm out of here!” Sharon said, rushing to the door.

“That was a weird moment, it made me choke up a little,” says Gary Weis. “It was weird, he broke down, he cried, tears, sobbed. It was off-putting. It made me feel sad.”

Cable Hogue finished principal photography on April 1, 1969, nineteen days behind schedule; when finished with post-production it would rack up a final negative cost of $3,716,946, almost $3 million over its original budget—much to Phil Feldman's displeasure. Feldman thought it was a nice little picture, but at a price tag of nearly $4 million, he saw little chance of it ever turning a profit.

After wrapping the picture, Peckinpah returned to L.A. and finished post-production on The Wild Bunch. Then, as that picture went into release, he left for Hawaii in July, where he would do the bulk of the editing on Cable Hogue with Frank Santillo, that master of montage who had cut Ride the High Country. When Lou Lombardo had put the finishing touches on Bunch, he also joined the team.

In the fall Peckinpah returned to Warner Bros. for the final phases of post-production: looping, scoring, and dubbing the picture. By this time the Ted Ashley-John Calley regime had taken hold of the reins at Warner Bros. Because the picture had been green-lighted by Ken Hyman, they had no vested interest in it. If it laid an egg at the box office they could simply chalk it up as another of Hyman's failures and claim a hefty tax write-off.

And when a two-and-a-half-hour rough cut of the film was shown, without Sam's knowledge, to Warner Bros. distributors in August, they were convinced that an egg was exactly what they had. The movie was funny in parts, but disjointed, too long, and the ending a real downer. Sam was horrified that it had been screened in such a rough form. “This was not a fine cut,” he explained to Garner Simmons, “it was a rough cut without the final soundtrack or music track.”

Sam and Phil Feldman were barely on speaking terms, but they put up a united front in an attempt to save Cable Hogue. Feldman explained to the Warners brass that another half-hour would be cut from the picture. He urged them to hold their judgment until they saw the final product. But the executives were not moved by this appeal. A few suggested reshooting the ending. Instead of having Cable Hogue die in the end, why not have him run off to New Orleans with Hildy, the whore with a heart of gold, and live happily ever after? Even Feldman was appalled by this suggestion, which subverted the entire concept of the movie. When he backed up Sam's refusal to compromise, the executives shrugged it off. They gave Peckinpah a free hand to finish the film his own way, not out of respect for his artistic talent, but out of apathy. The picture was simply not worth the hassle of another battle with Peckinpah.

Feldman was hoping the previews would save them. If audiences liked the picture, certainly the Warners brass would have to change its attitude. With its running time now hovering at about two hours, Cable Hogue previewed at theaters in Long Beach and New York at the end of January and beginning of February. Seventy percent of the reaction cards rated it from good to excellent. But this was not enough to change Warners’ attitude about the picture. The Ballad of Cable Hogue was dumped into second-rate theaters across the country with barely a ripple of publicity—one billboard on Sunset Boulevard, an ad in the trades, only quarter-page ads in newspapers, and no radio or TV advertising at all. “Warner Bros. didn't release it,” says Stella Stevens, “they flushed it.”

Though some critics found its allegorical style heavy-handed and pretentious, the film won many raves that were every bit as good as those for The Wild Bunch.

But the reviews were not enough to save Cable Hogue. After a couple of weeks in second-run theaters it sank to the bottom half of double bills on the drive-in and grind-house circuit, then disappeared altogether. By 1973 it had grossed a grand total of $2,445,863.

Devastated and enraged, Peckinpah denounced Warner Bros. at press conferences and in interviews and sued the studio for damaging his professional reputation. The suit had no legal grounds to stand on and Warner Bros. eventually had it thrown out of court.

In later years, when he appeared on college campuses and at film festivals, the movie Sam Peckinpah most urgently wanted audiences to see was The Ballad of Cable Hogue. He frequently referred to it as his favorite film, and it's easy to see why, for it exposes the tender inner core of this turbulent, often misunderstood artist.

Today, over twenty years after its release, it plays as a startlingly unique and stylized film, but flawed in one of its most central elements: the love story between Cable and Hildy. The relationship between the two is strangely (by Peckinpah standards) underdeveloped. The “Butterfly Mornings” montage in which Robards and Stevens sing to each other, bathe each other, pick flowers together, and serve each other breakfast in bed, are disturbingly absent of genuine feeling—as empty as the “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” sequence in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. If The Wild Bunch displays the incredible range and depth of Peckinpah's artistic vision, Cable Hogue reveals its limitations.

Those limitations are not of craftsmanship or creativity—Hogue is brilliantly crafted; its audacious staging and luminescent imagery confirm Peckinpah as one of the great originals of the American cinema. The limits are defined by the psychological scar tissue of the artist himself. Peckinpah had been many times more powerful, convincing, and insightful when depicting the failure of love in Noon Wine, and would be again in his next film. It's no accident that the most genuinely moving moment between Robards and Stevens occurs in the dinner scene, where Cable's vindictive jealously drives Hildy away. Sam knew that moment very well.

But the love scenes themselves, which Sam intended as an “affirmation of life,” remain as flat and facile as a Hallmark valentine card. The calendar-girl image of Hildy reveals an innate flaw in his vision of women. They are adored as beautiful objects, longed for from afar, they are to be fought for and possessed, but they are never really understood as human beings in their own right. (The exception to this is older women, such as Olivia De Havilland in Noon Wine or Ida Lupino in Junior Bonner. When they are no longer ripe for sexual conquest, Peckinpah has an easier time discovering their humanity.)

But when Cable Hague shifts its focus to the allegorical tale of a Wild West entrepreneur who found water where it wasn't, it works superbly. At its core, the film is yet one more act of mourning for the death of the Old West. Nowhere before or after did Peckinpah dramatize its demise with such self-conscious stylization. The film's dream imagery—passionate, bizarre, and warmly sentimental—matches the best of Fellini.

Sam was still taking off for the the mountains of eastern Nevada every fall on his annual hunting expeditions with the Walker River Boys. But now even the crisp snowy air of the High Country bore the unmistakable whiff of Hollywood hysteria.

He wasn't quite finished editing Cable Hogue when he left for a week in the Shell Creek Mountains in November 1969. The next day Lou Lombardo received a call in his editing room at Warner Bros. It was Sam, phoning from his hotel room in Ely. He'd had a sudden inspiration about the film and needed to talk to Lou immediately. “Get your ass up here, Lombardo, right now!” One couldn't fly into Ely, so Lombardo and Frank Kowalski got a plane to Las Vegas, rented a brand-new 1969 Thunderbird, loaded it up with cases of beer and Jack Daniels, and headed northward into the night.

“We're drinkin’ whiskey, flyin’ down the fuckin’ road, nobody on it,” says Lombardo. “We get to Ely the next day, to this hotel, and we just missed Sam. He'd left for the campsite up in the mountains. What is Ely but a hunting town with a lot of brothels? We don't go to bed. We missed him, we'll go in the morning, so we sat down at the blackjack tables and played all night and I won eighteen hundred dollars, and in those days, on a thirty-dollar-limit table, that's hard to do. Frank Kowalski will try to tell you he won all the money, but he's lying. Frank was too drunk to even read the cards. I was the one who won it.”

“Did Lou tell you he won all the money?” Kowalski demands with an angry gleam in his eye when the subject of the trip is brought up. “He's a liar. He wouldn't know how to win eighteen hundred dollars at blackjack if his life depended on it. I won the money. I played all night; they kept switching dealers on me, but it was one of those lucky streaks. I just couldn't lose and I knew it, so I just kept playing and winning.”

Finally, at 6:30 in the morning, they checked into a room and got a couple of hours of sleep. When they awoke, refreshed and ready to hit the road again, Kowalski counted up the money bulging in his jeans and had a sudden inspiration: “Let's buy out the brothels in town and take the girls up to the camp!”

They went to three different brothels, rented six girls, stuffed them in the Thunderbird, and roared up into the mountains. Following the directions Sam had left for them, they got up to the general area of the hunting camp but couldn't find the dirt road they were to turn off on. They sped back and forth along the same stretch of highway, twice passing a group of cowboys loading cattle into a trailer truck. The cowboys’ leathery heads swiveled as the T-bird and its glittery cargo rocketed by. On the third pass one of them signaled for Lombardo to stop. “You must be lookin’ for Peckinpah.”

“Yeah, where's he at?”

“Go up that dirt road there about five miles through the trees; when you come out the other side they're camped up there. But be careful, you can't go up that road with a Jeep more than five miles an hour.”

“Well,” says Lombardo, “now I'm flyin’ up this fuckin’ road and there are rocks comin’ up through the floorboard of this new Thunderbird. Boom! Bam! Bong! It's dusk and we burst into camp. They're all sitting there around the campfire and here we come screaming into this campsite, girls are falling out of the car and they're screaming at me, and I walk over to Sam, and he says, ‘What kept you?'”

The next morning Sam asked to borrow his older brother's camper so that he and Kowalski could return the girls to their various establishments in Ely. “Okay,” Denny said, “but have it back here by four o'clock this afternoon.”

“No problem,” Sam said, and took the keys. And off they went down the mountain and into town. One thing led to another, and Sam and Frank didn't start back for camp until nine o'clock the next morning. All the way up the mountain Sam gripped the wheel white-knuckle tight and muttered anxiously about how angry Denny would be and what he might do.

When they pulled into camp it was deserted. Everybody had gone hunting—except Denny. He was sitting by the fire, leathery face focused on the pale flames, as if he hadn't noticed the prodigal's return.

Sam and Frank hopped out and called to him with false cheer. “Hi, Denny!” Denny gave no response. The air was stinging cold and they stepped up to the fire opposite him to warm themselves. There was a long, incredibly uncomfortable silence, then Denny got up and walked around the fire toward his younger brother with all the righteous bearing of Steve Judd himself. He stopped beside Sam, eyes burning, and said softly, “You lied to me.”

“Sam was white, absolutely white,” Kowalski recalls. “I'd never seen him like that before. He didn't say a word to Denny, he couldn't even look at him.”

Denny pivoted slowly away from Sam and shifted his gaze to Kowalski, saying just as softly, “And you lied to me too.” Then he turned from the fire and walked away.

With the release (or flushing) of The Ballad of Cable Hogue, the wild and heady days at Warner Bros. came to a close. Had the film been a hit, Sam Peckinpah might have had a much different career. But Hogue’s failure solidified the Hollywood power brokers’ perception that Peckinpah was an “action” director, a high-toned version of Andrew McLaglen or Michael Winner. With only one splendid exception, the projects Sam managed to find financing for after this were riddled with gunfire, high-speed car chases, and spurting blood. He would have to snatch fragments of poetry and meaning between the falling bodies before the characters slapped another clip in their weapons and opened fire again.

Peckinpah's lawsuit and public attacks on the new regime at Warner Bros. ended his relationship with the studio. Warners had announced plans to produce another Peckinpah film, Summer Soldiers, but it abruptly canceled the picture. And Sam lost out on two other juicy projects, John Milius’ Crow Killer, which eventually became Jeremiah Johnson, and an adaptation of James Dickey's harrowing novel, Deliverance. In both cases the writers lobbied hard for Peckinpah to be signed as the director, but Warners refused.

Dickey met personally with Sam to discuss how he would go about adapting Deliverance to the big screen and to see if there was any way to get Warners to reconsider. “I wanted Peckinpah because I thought he was the best action director there's ever been in movies, and I liked his work very much,” says Dickey. “We talked for the better part of a whole day. When we shook hands to say good-bye, he said, ‘Well, you know, if they don't let me do this movie, we'll do something later on. But always remember this, you and I are doing the same thing, me with my images up on the screen and you with your words on the page. We're trying to give them images that they can't forget.’ I said, ‘I go with that, you bet.’” But Dickey's efforts were in vain; Warners wanted nothing more to do with Peckinpah.

Now a free agent, Sam made the rounds of various studios and independent producers, trying to find financing for Castaway, The Hi Lo Country, and adaptations of two other Max Evans books, One-Eyed Sky and My Pardner. But producers considered these properties either too weird or too “soft.” Where were all those famous Peckinpah ballets of blood?

There were two other novels that Sam was eager to turn into movies: Joan Didion's scathing behind-the-scenes vision of Hollywood, Play It As It Lays, and Ken Kesey's awesome masterpiece, Sometimes a Great Notion, which told the story of an Oregon logging family that bore striking similarities to the Peckinpahs. But producers wouldn't even consider Sam because they assumed that the psychological subtleties of both books were beyond his grasp.

Daniel Melnick was eager to break into features, so Peckinpah took Castaway to him, but like Feldman, Hyman, and almost every other producer Sam ever showed it to, Melnick didn't know what to make of the weird nightmare piece. He was certain, though, that he didn't want to make a movie out of it.

But Melnick owned the rights to a novel, The Siege at Trencher's Farm, by a Scottish writer, Gordon M. Williams. He had shown it to Martin Baum, the head of the newly formed ABC Pictures, a division of the television network. (The fees that networks were having to pay to air theatrical features had begun to skyrocket, so ABC decided to cut out the middleman by producing its own movies.) Baum agreed with Melnick: Siege had the makings of a strong “action” picture. It told the story of an American college professor who moves with his wife and daughter to a cottage in the English countryside, where he hopes to find peace and quiet and time to finish writing a book. But the family is terrorized by a group of local hooligans who, by the climax of the novel, lay siege to the American's farmhouse. The college professor is forced to defend his family, and with his back against the wall does so savagely and successfully.

It was pure exploitation melodrama with a plot as old as movies: the meek bookworm is finally pushed to the brink, his passive façade is cracked, and he turns on his tormentors with the wrath of a wild cat and emerges victorious. The story had been used in hundreds of western, gangster, and boxing pictures, even by comedians like Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Harry Langdon. Moviegoers had seen it over and over again, but, like salted peanuts, they could never get enough of it.

Melnick thought the tissue-thin narrative and characters could be turned into something of substance. He saw possibilities in a story about an East Coast liberal-pacifist who is thrust into a violent inferno, forced to fight for his life, and thus to confront his own repressed barbarity. If anyone could make an important film out of it, Peckinpah could.

Martin Baum, who'd seen and loved The Wild Bunch, agreed. Melnick had already commissioned a screenplay from David Zelag Goodman, who had written Lovers and Other Strangers and the adaptation for Jack Schaefer's classic western novel, Monte Walsh. But Baum didn't like Goodman's script, so ABC offered Sam $200,000 to rewrite it with Goodman and to direct the picture.

Once again Sam was being asked to spin flax into gold, and Baum and Melnick had promised to give him a free hand. He respected and trusted Melnick, but it was not without a twinge of bitterness that he accepted this assignment; he had told the press on several occasions that he would never make another bloodbath like The Wild Bunch. Trapped in the Hollywood high-stakes game by his own financial and psychological needs, he felt he had no choice. One night in late May 1970, shortly before he left for London, Sam sat up drinking in the Malibu Colony house that he had been renting since wrapping Cable Hogue. With him was Joe Bernhard—his pal from Fresno grade school who had abandoned the Hollywood rat race and now lived, like Hogue, in a ramshackle cabin in the grassy hills of Madera County. Sam affectionately called Joe “Orr,” after the one flier who escaped the insanity of World War II in Catch-22. "All right,” Sam said to Bernhard when the bottle between them was nearly empty. “They want to see brains flying out? I'll give them brains flying out!”

He rented a tastefully furnished two-story flat at Eaton Mews, smack in the heart of London; his $500-a-week tax-free per diem made it easily affordable. Ken Hyman had set up a production company in London and was operating out of Universal's headquarters at Piccadilly and Hyde Park. He got Sam a suite in the same building and introduced him to the city's movie-making elite. Everyone was eager to shake hands with the big-time Hollywood director who'd come to London to make his first European film—Peckinpah was even more revered in England than at home.

The nights were filled with exciting new adventures; no city swung like London in the late sixties and early seventies. But Sam's days were consumed by an all-too-familiar horror: writing.

Martin Baum was right; David Goodman's script needed a lot of work. But Goodman was a solid craftsman and he had given Sam what was so essential: a solid structure and the basic components of the characters and their dramatic conflicts.

What was it about this story, Sam asked himself as he thumbed through Goodman's script a second and third time—why did American audiences hunger to see it again and again?

A decent, peace-loving man is besieged by evil forces rushing at him from all directions. Finally the mild-mannered hero is pushed to the brink and transformed—like Jesus at Armageddon—from pacifist to righteous warrior. It was a fantasy of potency for middle-class men—men besieged by bill collectors, domineering bosses, marriages gone cold for reasons too convoluted to comprehend, and inner demons that gnawed at their self-esteem. Gathered together in the cloaked darkness of the theater, audiences could revel in the spectacle of a heroic alter-ego laying waste to surrogate enemies, conquering life instead of being conquered by it.

That hidden rage seemed to be racing up through the fissures of the American landscape and spewing out everywhere: the Manson Family, Charles Whitman—the former altar boy and Eagle Scout, an architecture honor student who climbed to the top of a twenty-seven-story tower on the University of Texas campus and proceeded to methodically shoot forty-five of his fellow students, killing twelve. ("Boy there was an honor student, the good guy, the Boy Scout leader who was kind to his mother and small animals,” Sam later said. “Whether he enjoyed shooting all those people isn't the issue. The issue is that he did it. He had all that violence in him and he went up into the tower and let it out.”)

And then came My Lai, the massacre of 567 innocent Vietnamese villagers by a platoon of American soldiers led by Lieutenant William Calley. The American soldier was no longer a broad-shouldered, straight-talking, benevolent warrior dispensing goodwill, cigarettes, bubble gum, and justice from the barrel of his Thompson submachine gun; he was a mad-dog killer, Charlie Manson in uniform.

Meanwhile, from New York to California students were taking over college administration buildings and shutting down classes to protest the war. On May 18, 1970, National Guardsmen at Kent State fired into a group of students who had been hurling rocks at them: four were killed and eight wounded. The civil rights movement had also turned bloody. Twenty-eight Black Panthers had been killed in the last two years in shootouts with police, and in 1969 alone there had been over 2,000 bomb scares in New York City and eight actual bombings of such stalwart capitalist institutions as the RCA Building, Rockefeller Center, the General Motors Building, and Chase Manhattan Bank.

“Everybody was fighting against the violence,” Peckinpah later observed, “fighting against this, fighting against that. Everybody had it in them.”

Peckinpah had recently read two books by a playwright and self-taught anthropologist, Robert Ardrey: African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative. Marshaling an impressive armada of evidence gathered by paleontologists, biologists, and anthropologists, Ardrey argued that man's voracious appetite for violence is not the product of a negative socioeconomic environment, as Karl Marx and other sociologists believed, nor the product of traumatic childhood experiences, as Freud contended, but was caused instead by powerful instinctual drives.

Man was a carnivore, argued Ardrey, a murderous ape who had learned over the centuries to fashion ever more sophisticated weaponry with which he bludgeoned and hacked his way to the top of the food chain—a killer with a natural love of slaughter and an instinctive impulse to fight for the control of a sphere of territory, for himself, his family, his tribe, his nation. This, explained Ardrey, was why the history of man was written in blood, why it was marked by the bleached headstones of war after war after war. It was a good fight, the exquisite pleasure of murder that man lusted after more than sex, Ardrey explained—it was the control of territory, not women, that most men battled for.

The eroticism and horror of violence and man's fascination with it had been just one theme among many in the epic tragedy of The Wild Bunch, but in Siege it would become the focal point. To engage his audience on an emotional level, to force it to confront its own conflicted feelings about violence, Peckinpah would have to reach down into his own guts and yank up a fistful of entrails. When it came to his own demons, in life Sam Peckinpah was secretive, evasive, desperately self-deceptive; but in his art, with the mask of characters and a story to hide behind, he plunged into his soul's darkest regions with ruthless courage. In the many interviews that followed the release of this film he cited Ardrey's theories and talked about man's innate violence and the need to come to terms with it. But never once did he talk about how deeply personal the movie was, how he had infused the material with his own torment, except to admit ambiguously that “every one of my films is autobiographical.”

But anyone familiar with the details of his parents’ marriage, and his own to Marie and Begonia, could see what he drew up out his own past and siphoned into the finished film. The tortuous process began with the script. Once again he rewrote it scene by scene. The copies of the drafts survive in his files, the pages stained by coffee and cigarette ashes spilled as he scribbled new dialogue and scenes in margins and on the reverse sides. Some of the sequences sprang forth fully formed and would survive, barely altered, in the finished film; others would go through numerous rewrites by Sam, and later Goodman, Dustin Hoffman, and the other actors.

Peckinpah shifted his protagonist's inner conflict from that of a worn-out liberal struggling to overcome a sense of moral impotency to that of an apolitical intellectual who struggles to repress his passions, most particularly his incredible rage, which he tries desperately to hide from others and himself. Sam grounded that rage not only in hidden primitive instincts, but also in the accumulated resentments of a bad marriage.

Peckinpah eliminated the couple's daughter and made them both younger. The wife would now be barely twenty and beautiful—a native of the village who had gone to college in America. The script implied that she had been the professor's student there and married him in the heat of mad crush. Now she's brought him back with her to England and the bloom is wilting quickly from the rose. When the couple make love or express affection in Sam's rewritten scenes, it is with the flirtatiousness of high school kids. This interaction is charming at first, but as it keeps recurring the lack of depth builds a disquieting tension. The young professor, David Sumner, tries to contain the relationship emotionally, to keep it within a safe, compartmentalized box that will fit neatly into his labeled and filed life. Yet subconsciously he senses the shallowness of his marriage and resents it, even though he is the one who set it up. Again and again he sticks blades of sarcasm into his wife, Amy, subtly ridiculing her for her lack of intellect.

For her part, Amy is stung by David's patronizing attitude and craves attention, her only source of self-esteem. When she doesn't get it she, like Fern Peckinpah, finds manipulative ways of striking back at her husband. She sneaks into his study when he is absent and alters the convoluted equation on his blackboard (he's an astrophysicist), changing a plus sign to a minus. Several misspent hours later he will discover her little “joke.” She walks outside to where the burly workmen from the local village are erecting a garage for them and begins flirting, knowing that David is watching from inside the house. She interrupts his work constantly with requests that he perform minor chores, or by barging into his study to flirt, then acting hurt when he kicks her out.

The dynamics match precisely those between Sam and Begonia at Broad Beach, when he would lock himself up in his office to write for hours on end, leaving her adrift in the alien Malibu landscape.

Amy's flirtations with the village workmen open a Pandora's box. Already envious of the American professor because of his money and his beautiful wife, the workmen begin to subtly, then not so subtly taunt and humiliate him. Then, one night, David finds their pet cat strangled by the light chain in his bedroom closet. Amy claims the villagers did it to prove they could get into his bedroom and presses David to confront them, but he refuses. “Listen, I'm not going to accuse them . . .” he protests. Instead he tries to win their friendship. They appear to warm to him and invite him to go hunting in the woods the next day.

When the finished film was released many critics would attack it under the assumption that David Sumner reflected Sam's contempt for introverted intellectuals, but if David Sumner represented anyone it was Sam Peckinpah. Not the knife-throwing wildman of the countless magazine profiles, but the inner Sam, the one who hid behind the mirrored sunglasses, the bandannas and barbed one-liners, the tag along runt of the litter at Dunlap's Ranch, dwarfed by the Peckinpah men who towered all around him, who craved their approval but was often ridiculed instead for being a shy, self-conscious bookworm.

Following Charlie Venner, Norman Scutt, and the other men of the village into the woods, David Sumner is handed a shotgun almost longer and heavier than he is and shown how to load it. He handles the gun awkwardly and the other men snicker, but as Sam notes on one script, “he grins with them, just happy to be a part of it.” They take him out to a remote forest meadow and leave him there, literally holding the bag, telling him they will drive the birds to him. “We'll be spread about—iffen need us, call,” says one villager, Cawsey. David nods resolutely, determined to earn his place among men, and answers, “I'll be here.”

Then, of course, they ditch him. David waits there for hours before realizing he's been had.

Meanwhile, back at the farmhouse, Amy's former lover Charlie Venner arrives at her front door. He invites himself in; there is some bittersweet banter about the old days, then he forces himself on her. She resists, he slaps her around, she gives in, reluctantly at first, then passionately—all the pent-up frustrations, anger, and unmet passions of her soured marriage released in a frenzied coupling. It starts out as a rape scene, turns into a sad and tender love scene, then veers hideously back into rape when a second villager, Norman Scutt, shows up on the scene with a shotgun in hand. Venner's loyalties shift in an instant from his old girlfriend to his tribal comrade. He helps hold Amy down while Scutt brutally rapes her. Amy doesn't enjoy it this time, not at all.

And through it all David Sumner stands in a lonely field, holding an empty bag. It was a clip right out of Sam's worst anxiety-attack dreams, the nightmare of the cuckold; Sam knew how David Sumner felt at that moment. But he knew also that the cuckold is rarely an innocent victim, but often as guilty as his betrayer. Peckinpah later explained: “[David] set it up . . . There are eighteen different places in that film, if you look, at it, where he could have stopped the whole thing. He didn't. He let it go on . . . As so often in life, we let things happen to us because we want it to . . . I've had to lecture twice now, really, about the film to psychiatrists . . . They say, ‘How did you find out about this?’ Well, I got married a few times.”

The trauma and all the sordid imagery it conjured haunted and fascinated him. He couldn't stop playing and replaying it in his mind. And each time it took on greater malevolence, pathos, and erotic power. It was no longer a real event, but a recurring nightmare that he'd never be free of.

Having no knowledge of its roots in Sam's personal life, many critics attacked the scene as the ugliest of male-chauvinist fantasies. It would earn Sam Peckinpah a foremost place in the feminist hall of infamy, and become a prime illustration in women's studies courses in universities across the country of Hollywood's debasing of women as wanton sex objects who enjoy nothing better than a good rape.

The story came to a climax when David Sumner accidentally hits the village idiot, Henry Niles, while driving home one foggy evening. The simpleton is cut up and bruised, but not seriously hurt. David takes him home and calls the town pub. Unbeknownst to him, earlier that evening Niles accidentally strangled a young girl from the village, and now the villagers are looking for the missing girl and Niles, who was spotted walking away from a church social with her.

Sumner's phone call alerts them to the retarded man's whereabouts, and soon a group of drunken vigilantes are pounding on the door of the American's isolated farmhouse, demanding he hand Niles over to them. Included in their number are Venner and Scutt. Sumner refuses to hand Niles over to a mob: “They'll beat him to death,” he explains to Amy. His last stand begins on solid principles, but soon more primitive instincts take over: “This is my house! This is where I live! . . . This is mine! Me! I will not allow violence against my house!” And as the battle escalates to orgiastic heights, David Sumner descends into a murderous rage more frightening and effective than that of all of his attackers combined.

“Violence usually begins with a reason, with some principle to be defended,” Sam told one interviewer. “The real motivation, however, is a primitive thirst for blood, and as the fighting continues reasons or principles are forgotten and men fight for the sake of fighting.” But clearly David's pump has been primed from a wellspring of disillusionment and despair. Whatever fantasies he still harbors about saving his marriage are shattered when, in the middle of the siege, Amy attempts to abandon him for Charlie Venner.

It's the moment where David Sumner gets the blindfold pulled off, where he finally sees Amy and his marriage for what it really is. “In marriage so often,” Sam later said, “especially if the man is lonely, he will clothe her [his wife] in the vestments of his own needs—and if she's very young she'll do the same thing to him. They don't really look at what the other person is, but at what they want that person to be. All of a sudden the illusion wears off and they really see each other.”

It's this intolerable realization that causes David Sumner to explode. Afterward, when his living room is littered with bodies, he exclaims, elated, “Jesus Christ . . . I got them all!” By perfecting his skills as a killer and smothering his more vulnerable emotions—as D. Sammy had by becoming an expert hunter and an equal at last in the eyes of the Peckinpah men—David Sumner has passed a bloody rite into manhood. But at what cost? For Sam Peckinpah personally the price had been a stiff one, and he was still making payments on it.

When the finished film hit the theaters more than a year later, many critics would attack it as a fascist celebration of the joys of combat; just as many would defend it as an antiviolent statement that cautioned us against our own innate savagery. Peckinpah himself switched from the first interpretation to the second from one interview to the next. Sometimes he seemed to embrace both interpretations in the same interview, even in the same breath.

He told William Murray of Playboy: "He [David Sumner] didn't know who he was and what he was all about. We all intellectualize about why we should do things, but it's our purely animal instincts that are driving us to do them, all the time. David found out he had all those instincts and it made him sick, sick unto death, and at the same time he had guts enough to stand up and do what he had to do . . . True pacifism is manly. In fact, it's the finest form of manliness. But if a man comes up to you and cuts your hand off, you don't offer him the other one. Not if you want to go on playing the piano, you don't. I'm not saying that violence is what makes a man a man. I'm saying when violence comes you can't run from it. You have to recognize its true nature in yourself as well as in others and stand up to it. If you run, you're dead, or you ought to be.”

David Sumner, Peckinpah seems to be saying, is horrifying yet admirable, both hero and a villain. This dichotomy lies at the heart of the film. The movie is not a simplistic statement about violence being “good” or “bad.” Instead Sam uses the story as a vehicle for probing his own profound ambivalences about violence. “Why do we hunger to see such bloody tales over and over again,” he is asking his audience, and himself. “Why are our heroes all killers? What does this say about us?”

This would not be an antiseptic thesis film, but a profoundly personal exploration by a man who told one person that his boyhood years spent learning to hunt in the Sierra Nevada had been the best in his life, then told another friend they had been his worst; who had spent a lifetime passionately pursuing a mythical Wild West fantasy life but now was just beginning to perceive its corrosive effects on him.

It would remain an open-ended film, without answers, for he himself had none. “I always thought that what he was doing was putting things on film that he did not understand,” says Gill Dennis. “You know? I thought he was saying, ‘Here, look at this. How does this fit into your scheme of things?’ “ Sam later told an interviewer: “I'm defining my own problems. Obviously, I'm up on the screen.”

Peckinpah turned in his first rewrite of the screenplay in late August 1970. Martin Baum and Dan Melnick loved it, though it would continue to go through rewrites for the next four months with Sam, Goodman, and Melnick all making contributions.

Baum also insisted that the title had to be changed. A demographic study (which was just emerging as a powerful marketing tool in Hollywood) told ABC that most people thought The Siege at Trencher's Farm sounded like a western. Sam came up with Straw Dogs. He'd gotten it from a passage in The Book of 5,000 Characters, by the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, that read, “Heaven and Earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad of creatures as straw dogs: the sage is ruthless and treats the people as straw dogs . . . Is not the space between Heaven and Earth like a bellows?”

Baum couldn't make heads or tails out of this Chinese mumbo-jumbo, but Straw Dogs had an intriguing ring to it—enigmatic, allegorical, it suggested hidden depths of meaning without spelling anything out. Instead of ordering another demographic study to test its marketability, Baum went with his instinct—Straw Dogs it would be.

Now they were ready to go after a star. After batting several names around—Beau Bridges, Stacy Keach, Sidney Poitier, Jack Nicholson, Donald Sutherland—they finally decided on Dustin Hoffman. Hoffman read the script, screened some of Sam's films, and signed on for $600,000. Before he was brought on board, ABC had envisioned Straw Dogs as a leanly budgeted “little” picture. Now it had suddenly become the company's most important production. The budget was doubled from $1,070,221 to $2,117,263, and the film was given a sixty-one-day shooting schedule, quite generous considering it required only one location and a few interiors. The adrenaline began to pump both in ABC's Hollywood offices and in London, where Melnick and Peckinpah cranked into pre-production.

It took a very special breed of secretary to cope with Sam's around-the-clock madness. He burned through a half-dozen in London before Katy Haber walked into his life. A voluptuous twenty-six-year-old with a rich mane of coffee-colored hair and sharp, intelligent eyes, Haber was a lightning-fast typist with brilliant management skills and a computer-like mind for detail. She would become the primary organizational force in Sam Peckinpah's life for the next seven years, and one of his most complex dark and twisted romantic entanglements.

Haber had seen plenty of darkness before meeting Peckinpah. Her parents were Jewish refugees from Czechoslovakia; they had escaped just three days after the Nazis marched into Prague. “They were the only members of my family to get out,” says Haber. “They lost everybody.” A poster-sized picture of one of her aunts, who was burned in a death-camp oven, now hangs in a Czech museum that documents the horrors of the Holocaust.

Katy was born in London in 1944 and sent away to boarding school when she was twelve because her parents feared they would spoil their only child and the last blood relative they had left in the world. When Katy was eighteen, her mother fell ill. Her father was convinced she had cancer. Unable to face the loss of another loved one, he committed suicide. It turned out Katy's mother did not have cancer. She recovered, but Katy didn't. The shadow of her father's death—all the guilt, the intense fear of abandonment—hangs over her to this very day.

She scuttled plans to enter a university, went to secretarial college instead, and then went to work as a production secretary on a series of undistinguished comedies and horror pictures.

Just a few months before meeting Peckinpah, Haber was offered a job by an English producer who was doing a picture in Hollywood, but she turned it down because it would have meant leaving her mother alone in London.

Then James Swann, the associate producer for Straw Dogs, called Katy up and asked if she'd be interested in working for this big American director who'd come to London to make his first movie in Europe. It sounded interesting, so Katy agreed to go in and meet him. When she walked into the office she found a graying but handsome man with a neat mustache sitting behind a cluttered desk in a pair of beige jeans and an Italian leather jacket. “Katy, this is Sam Peckinpah,” Swann said.

Two huge hot hazel eyes swiveled up at her. “Well, are you ready?” he said abruptly.

“What are you talking about?” Katy's face felt warm.

“I've been through about six women. None of them can read my writing.”

“He'd hired these girls and they wanted lunch breaks and wanted to be out by six,” says Haber. “With Sam that doesn't exist—lunch, tea breaks, having your hair done and having dates, being with other people—it just doesn't exist. If you're with him you don't have another life and that's it.”

“Sit down and start typing,” Swann said, gesturing toward a desk with a typewriter and a disheveled pile of stained pages covered with Sam's chicken scratch.

Katy complied. They were Sam's script revisions and the very first thing she typed up was the rape scene. Jesus, who am I working for, Jack the Ripper? she wondered. It was tough following the circuitous path of his scribbling up and down margins and around onto the backs of pages. But she liked it. The script was bleak as a moonless moor, but riveting. She worked till midnight, much to Sam's amazement. “He was overwhelmed,” says Haber. “You know, here was someone who could finally do it all.”

She worked straight through till Sunday for him, typing away while Sam was on the phone to Jason Robards, Dan Melnick, and Marty Baum. He began taking her out to dinner with him after work; she met Jerry and Camille Fielding and Frank Kowalski, who were in London at the time. (Kowalski was on Peckinpah's payroll, writing the treatment for Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.) "It was very exciting for a nice little Jewish girl who was supposed to marry a doctor, move to the suburbs, and have babies,” says Haber. “Then one night while we were working late, Sam said, ‘When I'm working with somebody it always becomes a very close relationship.’ I knew what he was intimating and I said, ‘I never mix work with pleasure, Mr. Peckinpah.’ He laughed. He had these eyes, they were so loaded with emotion; they were so powerful, they drew you in, but at the same time they made you want to turn away.”

It didn't take them long to draw her in. “I fell in love with Sam very quickly,” says Haber. “I'd never experienced anyone like him before. He seemed so sophisticated compared to the boys my own age whom I'd been going out with. I'd been in love before, but never like this. At first it had been something that I didn't want to get into, but it was stronger than I was. I had intended to keep it on an even keel. Then one thing led to another. He was a very charismatic man. He didn't force himself on me, he was just very entertaining, larger-than-life, and I fell for it. He knew how to pour it on thick with the roses, the notes, the phone calls. He told me, ‘I can't live without you, you're everything I've ever dreamed of in a woman. You've got everything I ever would want. You make me feel fulfilled.’ It's awful hard not to be seduced by that.”

But Katy quickly discovered that Sam had two sides. One night they went out to dinner with Dan Melnick. It was a pleasant evening filled with exciting talk about the picture. Sam was drinking heavily, beginning to slur his words, and almost knocking glasses over when he swung his hands to emphasize remarks. Katy had a lot of work waiting for her back at their apartment and decided to leave early. She got up, said good night to Melnick, then Sam, and left. Sam was still not back when she went to bed around midnight. A couple of hours later she awoke to the sound of screaming. It was Sam, standing over her, spewing a stream of curses. He yanked her out of bed, struck her across the face, and began picking things up—the alarm clock, a water glass, a table lamp—and smashing them against the walls. Finally, he wheeled on her, bellowing his first coherent sentence, “What the hell is going on between you and Dan Melnick?”

“It was all because I had said good night to Melnick first before leaving the restaurant,” says Haber. “He was convinced we were having an affair. I told him that was ridiculous, that I wasn't the least bit interested in Melnick, that I was just being courteous.”

The next morning Sam was apologetic, obviously mortified, but avoided full responsibility for his actions by claiming he'd been drunk and couldn't really remember what he had done—which may have been true; more and more frequently he was experiencing alcoholic blackouts. “He never fully admitted his guilt for things like that,” says Haber. “He would offer a roundabout apology. But I know he felt terrible, you could see it in his eyes. After every one of those incidents he took on a little more guilt, and because he could never really talk about it it just accumulated.”

She quickly learned to handle Sam's jealousy by devoting her attention exclusively to him when other men were present. If another man in the room started to pay too much attention to her, she would immediately go and sit or stand beside Sam, direct her attention to him, and distance herself from the others so there could be no doubt where her loyalty lay.

Katy quickly assumed control of all the day-to-day details of Sam's life. He definitely needed a steady hand on the tiller, and Katy provided it. She kept track of all his phone calls, his appointments—both business and personal—paid his bills, bought gifts for his kids, relatives, and friends, made all his travel arrangements, kept copious notes during all his meetings, and during filming kept track of all the shots he needed to get on a given day and the myriad production details that he needed to attend to.

Sam would often praise Katy to others, both in her presence and when she was absent, admitting that he couldn't have gotten past this or that obstacle without her. But just as often he would turn on her, snarling invectives with an entire movie crew looking on until Katy finally fled in tears. Many felt sorry for Katy and disgusted by Sam's sadistic treatment of her.

But others in the inner circle noticed that Katy often seemed to provoke the attacks with manipulative behavior. Says one former member of the Peckinpah Bunch: “Nobody deserves to get hit, there's absolutely no excuse for it. But Katy would egg Sam on. She was with him for seven years, she must have known what would trigger him. On one movie we worked on she brought up a conversation she'd had with the producer, who Sam hated and was at war with. The producer had complained to Katy and now she was going over their conversation word-for-word in front of Sam. Finally, Sam said, ‘Okay, I don't want to hear any more.’ He kept trying to change the subject and she kept coming back to it until finally he exploded and shoved her. It was as if she had gotten what she wanted. She could then play off his guilt for having done it and play the martyr.”

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Haber, Sam was also having an affair with Ken Hyman's secretary, Joie Gould, a slender but shapely blonde in her mid-twenties, with big eyes, a sharp wit, and a vivacious personality. Sam started seeing her shortly after his arrival in England. “It was amazing, physically, when you first met him, after you'd heard so much about him,” says Gould. “You imagined he would be this great big tall John Wayne-type guy, but he wasn't big at all, he was very slender, and in his eyes, he was so vulnerable. Our courtship went on for months. For the first few weeks we met for lunch; I only saw him during the day.”

Then they started going out to dinner together. Sam would dress very elegantly, but always with a pair of cowboy boots beneath his slacks. He reminded her of James Garner in “Maverick”: the gentleman cowboy, handsome, smooth tongued, utterly charming. During the eight months they dated before Straw Dogs started filming she never once saw him drunk, never once saw him have more than a couple of martinis with a meal. “He hid that side of himself from me.”

People kept warning her: “He's not for you. Don't get involved with him.” She'd heard the stories about his drinking and brawling. “But I never saw any of that behavior. He was the most courtly, gentle man you could imagine. I never saw him angry. We never so much as had a disagreement.”

He was so thoughtful, so attentive. He was always buying her funny little gifts, sending her breathtaking flower arrangements and little cards with touching endearments on them. He was obviously brilliant, incredibly well read, and loved to spontaneously make up poems and haikus. She could easily picture him teaching a literature course in a quiet little college somewhere.

The warnings only increased his allure. She knew there had to be some truth in them, but believed their blooming love had had a calming effect on him. She'd brought him the peace and contentment he'd always yearned for; she, at last, had made his life whole—he told her all this, and she believed him. She was going to be the one to change him.

By this time Katy was aware of their relationship but did not know that they had become lovers. “He told me that he was having dinner with her and stuff,” says Haber, “and that it was rather serious, but I thought they were just friends.”

It was when Straw Dogs went into pre-production that Joie noticed the first disquieting changes in Sam. He told her, “I've really got to do my homework on this thing because I'm working with Hoffman.” He grew tense, restless.

“When he got ready to shoot a film it was as if he was going away to war,” says Gould. “He expected the producers to betray him at every turn, that the film would be taken away from him. The creative concentration took every ounce of his strength. Dealing with all the elements—the actors, the producers, the crew—and all the conflicts, it took a tremendous toll on him. That's when the heavy drinking began.”

He gave her the script to read and the characterization of Amy left her aghast. “What a horrible woman!” she told him. “She has no redeeming qualities, not a single one! Why is David married to her?”

Sam shrugged. “Well, maybe you should rewrite some of her scenes. See if you can make her more sympathetic.” She did just that, but when he read her pages he rejected them as “too sentimental.”

By now Joie had begun to see the deep insecurities behind Sam's self-assured façade, and how Straw Dogs was his Rorschach inkblot. “He'd tell me how young and beautiful and smart I was. He said I could have any man I wanted, and he couldn't understand why I'd picked him.”

He began interrogating her, his voice softly encouraging intimate disclosure, but ominously persistent; his eyes probed hers for the slightest flicker of insincerity. If the timing had been different, he insisted, she could easily have fallen in love with someone else. “How about Dustin Hoffman, do you think you could have fallen in love with him if you'd met him before you met me?”

“No, Sam, look, I love you!”

“Come on, you can at least admit to the possibility, can't you?”

“He was always playing that game,” says Gould, “always testing your loyalty.”

Take away all the artifice—the cowboy boots, mirrored glasses, and throwing knives—and, Joie realized, Sam didn't really believe he was that interesting. Beneath it all he saw himself as David Sumner: small, inadequate, dull. “If a woman fell in love with him, he couldn't understand it. He never really believed me when I told him that I loved him. It was very sad.”

But he wanted to believe her, very badly. On the back of one of his scripts Sam one day penciled: “Joie says, ‘Who you are, what you feel, and who you love are totally different in each person. If you can't see the love in my eyes you'll never see it anywhere.’” He tried to see it there; in his own warped way he was looking for it, but all he found in her gaze was his own doubt.

Joie's attempt to rewrite Amy gave Sam a sudden inspiration: “You could play the part! I'll cast you! You'll bring all of your natural sweetness to Amy, you'll make her sympathetic simply by being yourself!” An alarm went off inside Joie's head, and not because she'd never acted before. But she couldn't pinpoint the exact cause of her anxiety. Sam's enthusiasm overcame her doubts. She did a screen test with other actors and met with the costume designer to discuss possible wardrobe. When they ran her test in the projection room the response was very positive from all but Sam, who brooded. She had definite star potential, the others were saying. Dan Melnick suggested she get a nose job.

“The positive reaction from everybody made Sam very anxious,” says Gould. “I don't think he ever seriously thought I'd play the part, and when it became a real possibility he was very alarmed. I said, ‘Well, you started it all.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but I didn't expect anyone to like you.’ I said, ‘Well, thanks a lot!’ Finally he said, ‘You've got to choose between me or a career as an actress!’ That was fine with me, I never wanted to be an actress to begin with.”

What was going on here? The costumes used for Amy in the final film bore a striking resemblance to Joie's own wardrobe, and Dustin Hoffman wore many items that could have been pulled out of Sam's closet. (Peckinpah was dressing—coincidentally or purposely—more preppily than he had in the States.)

Peckinpah was not only using his own past as raw material for the film, but manipulating his present, himself and the people around him, to help feed the psychodrama. A dangerous game, as Joie would learn the hard way.

Meanwhile the search for the real Amy continued. Among the actresses considered were Judy Geeson, Jacqueline Bisset, Diana Rigg, Helen Mirren, Carol White, and Charlotte Rampling. One of the most intriguing candidates was Hayley Mills, the impish blond child star of such squeaky-clean Disney flicks as Pollyanna and The Parent Trap. Then twenty-four, Mills was trying to make the tricky transition into adult roles. And what a transition it would have been, but Sam realized that despite the possibilities the choice would have been too camp.

Finally, a twenty-year-old actress named Susan George walked through his office door. George had been acting in television since age four and had recently appeared in sex-kitten roles in such British features as Lola, The Strange Affair, and The Sorcerers. Her performances demonstrated no shining talent; like so many movie starlets, she skated by on her stunning looks (which were strikingly similar to Joie's): blonde, olive-skinned, with bright hazel eyes, full round lips, and a body that could have been sculpted by a Greek master. Certainly all that got Sam Peckinpah's immediate attention, but it wouldn't have been enough to win George the part. As soon as she walked into the room he felt it: a palpable sensuality and, just beneath it, the claws of a wildcat.

“From our very first meeting I think he gleaned the idea that I was bright,” says George.” ‘You're smart, kid!’ he'd say with loathing, he couldn't bear it! This was the great love-hate relationship that I had with Sam, it really was love-hate from beginning to end. He knew I was smart and a thinker, and he knew I was wicked, and all of it was attractive to him, and yet he would have loved to rip it all away from me so that I would have to go and claim it back. I thought: God, who is this person, he's frightening the life out of me! But I stood up to him, I stood up to him from the beginning, and he absolutely loved that in me. I never let him know what he was doing to me.”

Sam had found his Amy. George was signed for twelve weeks’ work at $10,000 a week.

On January 22, the cast and crew moved down to the rolling countryside of the Cornwall peninsula on the very southwest tip of England. Here all of the exteriors for the picture would be shot in the village of St. Buryan, and at a nearby farmhouse that would serve as the Sumners’ residence. Dustin Hoffman and Susan George spent days wandering around the village doing Actor's Studio-style improvisations to develop a relationship that paralleled the characters in the film. David Goodman followed them, scribbling down their exchanges, some of which were incorporated into the film.

For the actors who would play the villagers who lay siege to the Sumners’ farmhouse—Peter Vaughan, Del Henney, Ken Hutchison, and Jim Norton—Peckinpah orchestrated slightly less gentle “improvisations” to get them into character, namely a series of drunken parties that often ended in brawls. T. P. McKenna broke his arm at one of these improvs and was forced to wear it in a sling throughout the shooting of the movie. Ken Hutchison responded to this approach with great gusto, and one “Indian-wrestling” match between the young actor and his director left both with swollen and bleeding faces. Sam threw an affectionate arm around Hutchison after they'd fought to a draw and dubbed him his “Dog Brother.”

“It was all very calculated on Sam's part,” says Hutchison. “He was setting the tone for the movie and our characters. It was a very dark, violent piece. I mean, we weren't making Mary Poppins.”

“There was a definite self-destruct mechanism in Sam, no question about it,” says Susan George. “But he found his match on that movie with Ken Hutchison. Ken was his soulmate. Ken was as stupid at times and volatile and as frightening as Sam was. Hoffman and I came back to the hotel one night after being out together all day and this fight was going on in the middle of the dining hall. I thought: oh God, no, not another one! Because we were always coming back to these barroom brawls. I said to Sam, ‘Oh, please, don't do it! Please, don't be so stupid!’ And it was going on and on, eventually they smashed into some glasses on a table and Ken cut his arm. I had to take Ken to the hospital. But I was always the one who could talk to Sam when this was going on. When he hurt Ken I was furious with him. I stopped them from fighting. It troubled me greatly. Sam would listen to me; he hated to hurt me. He treated me as if he was my boyfriend and my father.”

Peckinpah kept drinking heavily, day and night, throughout rehearsals and even after shooting started, much to Dan Melnick's alarm. “Whenever I walked by Sam on the set,” Melnick recalls, “he'd say, ‘Would you like some coffee?’ To prove that it was just coffee, not coffee and brandy. And I knew that as soon as I walked away Katy Haber gave him the coffee from the other thermos, which had the brandy in it.”

Two weeks into shooting, Peckinpah's around-the-clock carousing pushed his body to the breaking point. It was 3:30 in the morning. Ken Hutchison had gone to bed early for once; he had several tough scenes to do the next day. Suddenly his hotel-room door blasted open. There stood Peckinpah in a Mexican poncho and Indian headband with a bottle of tequila in his hand. “Dog Brother,” he croaked, “let's go see the sea.”

Hutchison looked out his window. A winter storm was hurling rain down out of a tar-black sky. He said, “Sam, it's raining. It's 3:30 in the morning.”

“Let's go anyway.”

“Anyone else in the world, I'd have gone ape,” says Hutchison. “We went down to the car park and got in my car and drove fifteen minutes through the storm to Land's End. This is the furthermost southern tip of Britain, surrounded on three sides by the English, French, and Irish seas. We got out of the car, walked to the point in the dark. The wind and rain was coming in every direction. We sat down, listened to the sea, drank the tequila, and he taught me the lyrics of a song called ‘Butterfly Mornings.’ I found out later that it was from The Ballad of Cable Hogue. Pissed as two farts, wet, cold, in the middle of winter—never been so happy in all my life.”

The next morning Sam showed up on the set, red-eyed, flushed, and coughing badly. His behavior became erratic, and his direction chaotic. The next day, the fifteenth of principal photography, Sam's cough and coherency were even worse. In those two days of shooting the company had fallen a day behind schedule.

Both Melnick and Dustin Hoffman were deeply concerned. The producer had to make one of the toughest decisions of his career. “I closed the picture down because Sam was getting really out of control. I told him that I would close the picture down for good or replace him if he went on drinking.”

A doctor was called in to examine Peckinpah. He diagnosed walking pneumonia and said Sam had to be hospitalized immediately. After wrapping the seventeenth day of shooting, with the company now four days behind schedule, Sam left by train for the London Clinic.

Melnick placed a call to Martin Baum in Los Angeles. There was no doubt in his mind, he told the studio head, that Sam's boozing had triggered the illness. Sam's contract was suspended “until further notice,” and Baum got on a plane to London.

Upon arriving he looked at the dailies. They were terrible, chaotic. Hoffman had had enough. He wanted Peckinpah replaced and suggested Peter Yates. Melnick said he would go along with whatever decision Baum made. The production head decided to pay a personal visit to Peckinpah at the clinic.

“I spoke to Sam,” says Baum. “He was in a drunken haze. I said, ‘Sam, you're sick. If I fire you, you're never going to work again. If I keep you, I've got to have your absolute promise that you will be sober and steadfast and responsible for the remainder of the picture. Sam, forget me, don't do it for me. If you're fired and replaced on this movie, who's gonna hire you?’ I think the honesty with which that was stated won his respect. There was no bullshitting him, it would be out of my control, I couldn't justify continuing with a man who was going to behave the way he had behaved. He knew what was at stake. He gave me a hug and promised me that he would do the best he could to make it a brilliant film. And he did, he straightened himself out. That built a tie of mutual respect between us.”

Peckinpah was in the London Clinic for five days. The downtime cost ABC over $85,000, but most of the loss would be picked up by the production's insurance coverage. Sam's treatments included injections of vitamin B₁₂, which helped restore the nutrients that all the alcohol had burned out of his system. He was so impressed by the injections’ restorative powers that he took a supply of syringes and needles back to Cornwall with him and had Katy give him a vitamin shot every day. It became a ritual that continued for the next seven years. Many a writer, producer, and editor would be startled by the sight of Peckinpah nonchalantly dropping his pants in mid-conversation so that Haber could jam a needle into his butt. Afterward he'd pull up his trousers and continue the conversation as if nothing unusual had occurred.

When the company resumed shooting again on February 22, Sam had not quit drinking, but he had reduced his intake considerably. There would be no more late-night expeditions to Land's End. One more time he picked himself up off the barroom floor and returned to the fight. All the fears, the self-doubt, the reluctance to paddle out upon the film's cold dark waters dropped away now. In Martin Baum he had a new father figure to prove himself to. “I have bet on people all my life,” Baum cabled Sam after he was back on his feet. “Some, like Sidney Poitier, Cliff Robertson, Red Buttons, and Gig Young have thanked me publicly as they picked up their Oscars. Others have thanked me privately for their hits. Now I bet my last chips on Sam Peckinpah. I believe in your talent and courage and your total dedication. Good luck.”

Once again Sam summoned up that fierce intensity, that all-consuming commitment and total focus. All the company felt it, emanating from him like a force field. Sam arrived on the set at 8:30 A.M. his first day back, completed his first setup by 9:55, and by the end of the day had seven minutes and forty-five seconds of printed film in the can. The tension between him and Hoffman melted away as everyone put their shoulder to the wheel and really went to work.

“It was a tough experience,” Hoffman would later say. “But I liked working with him [Peckinpah]. He had the spontaneity of a child. Suddenly he would come up with things that were very exciting.”

By the time they started shooting the exterior night scenes of the siege at the farmhouse on March 1, they were moving in high gear. Sam was in his element. “It was a very hard shoot, physically,” says Peter Vaughan. “There was a lot of camaraderie between the whole unit and Sam. It was a very happy, but hard shoot. The hours were long, it was cold. The roles were quite demanding, physically: breaking up the house, firing guns, getting my foot shot off. Sam would say, ‘Go through there!’ And you went through the window. The fact that the curtains were on fire didn't make any difference; if Sam said you go, you go. We actually did break that farmhouse apart; it was an extremely violent couple of nights’ work. It moved very fast, Sam shot with great speed. It was an extraordinary thing to do, from the acting point of view. We were really hyped up. You just don't stroll casually through a window which was on fire. There were stuntmen, but the definition of what a stuntman does and what an actor does gets a little blurred when these things get exciting.”

Once the hysteria started to flow, Peckinpah found it difficult to shut off the valve, and now it washed over his personal life like a flash flood.

He wasn't staying at the hotel anymore. Production supervisor Derek Kavanagh had rented a house for him nearby. Shortly after moving into it, he called Joie in London and asked her to come down and stay with him. Joie—already uneasy because of the dark waters she'd seen stirring before he left—said no. “He wasn't used to people defying him,” she says. “He blew up, got very angry, and hung up the phone. But then he called back the next day, very contrite and very gentle. ‘Why don't you come down next weekend? I really need to see you.’ He kept working on me that way until I said yes.”

Katy Haber, incredibly, still didn't know that Sam's relationship with Gould was romantic, nor about his other liaisons. She believed she was the only woman in Sam's life, his one true love. But that illusion was shattered when Joie arrived in Cornwall.

“I went to pick Sam up one morning to take him to the location, and there's Joie in bed with him,” says Haber. “I was devastated, I was in total shock. I had to sit there and wait for Sam to get dressed and all the while she's just lying there in bed completely oblivious to me. Can you imagine how I felt? She had no respect for my feelings, what it did to me. The unspoken message was, ‘I'm here now and you're out.’”

Katy became hysterical. Sam said, “Look, don't you understand, we can't be involved sexually while I'm shooting a picture. We can't have both a working relationship and a sexual relationship and the picture has to come first. Don't you understand that the work is more important? If you can't cope with it emotionally, then you'd better leave.”

And so she did. She didn't quit the picture, but instead went back to Twickenham Studios in London to work in the production office. “I wasn't going to quit altogether,” Haber explains. “I was learning more about making movies than if I'd gone to the British Film Institute for two years.”

But Joie had won no great prize. She was shocked to discover the change in Sam since he'd left London. He was still drinking heavily in the evenings and on weekends. Around the actors and crew she, like Haber, learned to be on her guard. It was dangerous to pay attention to anyone else besides Sam, especially Del Henney or Ken Hutchison—the two who would rape Amy in the film. The slightest smile or exchange of pleasantries with another male would throw Sam into a fit of jealousy.

By the time they returned to the house in the evenings his eyes were two red pulsing sores and his mood swings were rapid and unpredictable. He flew into a rage at the slightest provocation. And the abuse wasn't just verbal anymore.

“Sam had been working all night, and drinking,” says Joie. “We were sitting upstairs talking and suddenly he got up and started wrecking the entire room. He took a lamp and broke all of the windows in this room. And then he started beating on me. It had come out of nowhere. I was scared, I had never been hit by a man before, it was so shocking to me. It was so dramatic. It was very very dark, it was the middle of the night. I had watched him shoot the last of the siege that night and now the exact same thing was taking place, only now it was real! It was really weird. I ran downstairs and out of the house.”

The cast and crew had been having a party that night to celebrate the end of shooting in Cornwall. Driving home from it, Del Henney came upon Joie, bruised and disheveled, wandering along the side of the road. He picked her up, took her into town, and let her sleep in his hotel room. Henney didn't stay, he doubled up with someone else that night so Joie could have the room to herself. “Later Sam found out about it and assumed I'd slept with him,” says Gould. “The poor guy, he got in the middle of this and he was just trying to be so helpful. He was so nice, he never asked any questions. Everyone left the next day to go back to London. I was so embarrassed. People knew that I was there, obviously, because the news must have gone around, but not one person came in to see if I was okay. I remember watching everyone leave the hotel. I left on my own the next day when everyone had left.”

When the rift with Joie opened up, Katy Haber rushed in to fill the gap. But she soon discovered that Joie was only the first in a long line of betrayals: “Sam had this amazing ability to seduce women,” says Haber. “It was unbelievable. A female reporter would show up. ‘Hello, I'm so-and-so with The L.A. Times, I'm here to interview Mr. Peckinpah.’ I'd take her back to see Sam, then go off about my business. I'd go back a half-hour later to see how it was going and there the two of them would be in bed together! Actresses, socialites, women from all walks of life, women you'd never in a million years expect would be susceptible would leap right into bed with him.”

But Katy endured all the women who came and went over the next seven years, for in the end Sam always came back to her, or rather, called her back to him. “He was with me longer than any other woman, outside of Marie,” says Haber. “He relied on me one hundred percent to run his life, yet emotionally, he expected me to take anything he dished out. I know for a fact, without lauding myself, that I was one of the most important people in his life. And yet it was very difficult for him to accept. He didn't want women to have control of his life, he didn't want anyone to have control of his life. The fact that he relied on me on so many different levels was something very difficult for him to cope with. A lot of his lashing out at me was just for that reason. ‘I don't need you!’ But at the same time he realized that he did, which was real tough for him.”

“After the affair with Joie, Dad treated Katy more like a servant than a girlfriend. She was an emotional stand-by,” says Melissa Peckinpah. “If he had done that to me I would have gotten as far away from him as possible. But Katy came back, she always came back. I always thought she was a leech. Dad felt suffocated by Katy's intense attachment to him, so he'd do something really cruel to push her away. Then Katy would develop some independence and start to stand up on her own two feet and Dad would get attracted to that and pull her back. It was one of the most dysfunctional relationships I've ever seen.”

But it wasn't all bad, Katy told herself. There were times, many times, when Sam could be wonderful—warm, funny, incredibly generous. He taught her the film business inside and out—writing, producing, and directing. She sat in on all the conferences where the most important creative decisions were made both on and off the set. Today she is a producer herself, something that never would have happened without Sam Peckinpah. “He expanded my whole life. One of the most generous things he ever did for me, he bought my mother her apartment. That was ten thousand dollars. I was going to buy it. There was an apartment that came up to be purchased and then he said that he wanted to buy it for her.”

But twenty years later, after many hours of therapy, Katy realizes there were deeper reasons why she clung so desperately to Sam's coattails. “I think it had to do with my father's suicide. I had never looked at what it meant to me, how I felt about it. My therapist says I put up with all that abuse from Sam because he was a father figure to me, and I didn't want to lose my father's love again. My father abandoned me, and I was willing to put up with anything not to be abandoned again.”

After completing the exteriors for the picture, the company moved to Twickenham Studios in London to shoot all the interiors of the Sumner farmhouse: the early scenes that established the conflicted dynamics of the couple's marriage, the siege from the Sumners’ point of view, and the rape sequence.

“During the early part of the film,” recalls Dan Melnick, “where Susan George was the princess come back to the village with her husband, Sam and Dustin and everyone was loving to her. Then, as the conflicts in the marriage progressed, they started behaving toward her in a mean way. She was being totally manipulated. I was very upset about it and spoke to Sam a couple of times. I said, ‘Listen, you cannot treat this young woman this way.’ But that's what he did.”

“Sam and Dustin fed Susan off-camera lines that had nothing to do with the script,” says Ken Hutchison. “It was to get reactions. I mean, some of the words that were used to get some of the reactions were pretty unbelievable.”

“Wait till your parents get a load of this rape scene we're gonna shoot, baby,” Sam would murmur from beneath hooded eyes. “How do you think they're gonna react, think they'll be proud of their precious girl then? . . . Roll it, please!”

“I dreaded that rape scene,” says George. “Sam kept saying he was going to shoot the greatest rape scene ever put on film. He went on and on about it and he'd be very visual in his descriptions of the things he was expecting, physical things that he was going to film. He kept talking about it and it was getting bigger and bigger in my mind, quite out of proportion. It had started out as a small scene and now it was becoming a trilogy, and I was getting scared.”

Finally she went to Melnick and said, “Look, I need to sit down with someone and talk about this. I want to know, on paper, what we're expecting of me in this scene, I really do! Because I'm not sure what Sam's expecting, it's getting larger by the day. I'm not sure if it's just me thinking it or whether it's him thinking it. So I need to get a few things straight.”

Melnick smiled warmly, patted her on the shoulder, and cooed in his FM-disc-jockey voice, “I think the best thing for you to do is sit down with Sam and talk to him about it.”

So she went to see him one day after shooting, in his office. As usual he was throwing knives. He hurled three of them into the wooden door not two feet from her head. “Are you finished?” she asked, lips drawn tight around her teeth.

“Yeah, sit down, kid.”

She took a seat opposite his. “Look, I want to talk about the rape scene.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

She shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “I really need to talk about it, exactly what we're going to do.”

“What do you mean, what we're going to do? What, do you want it written down?”

“Yes, actually, I would love it written down. I know that sounds funny, Sam, but I would love it written down. Then I could take it home and go over it and make perfectly sure that I can do all the things that you require me to do.”

“I'm not writing it down.”

“But if you don't write it down and I don't know what you're expecting, it's becoming an insurmountable problem for me and it's bothering me. If we could talk about it from A to Z I'd be really thrilled.”

He leaned forward, pointing a forefinger at her. “Listen to me, when you took this picture, did you or did you not agree to do this rape scene?”

“Yes, I did.”

“You said you'd do it.”

“Yes, I did, but I lied.”

“You what?”

“I lied. I lied because I wanted to get the role and the rape scene was in the picture, and now I'm not sure if I can do it.”

Suddenly he was on his feet; a knife flew, quivering into the wood-paneled wall. “What do you mean you don't think you can do it?”

“I just don't think I can do it.”

“Well, you'll have to do it! I'm gonna make you do it!”

She was trembling as she rose to her feet as well. “All right, Sam, find yourself another Amy.” Then she stormed out of his office and ran across the parking lot in floods of tears. Melnick appeared, as if popping up out of the asphalt, and stopped her. “What happened, what happened, what happened? Have you spoken to Sam about the scene?”

“Yes, and I've just walked off the picture!”

“You what?”

“I've walked off the picture.”

“Don't be ridiculous. That's ridiculous, child, you can't do this! Go back and see Sam.”

“I'm not going back into that room, he's positively livid with me. He's ranting and raving and screaming and throwing bowie knives. I'm not going back up there. I've just told him to find himself another Amy.”

“You can't do this. You'll be sued by the production company, your career will go down the tubes!”

She walked anyway. The next day Melnick made several frantic phone calls to the actress and her agent, John Redway, who finally coaxed George into going back for another meeting with Peckinpah. “I was terrified,” she says. “I walked into Sam's office and he was very quiet, very cold.”

“You want to see me?” he demanded.

“Yes, I do. I need to see you because I think this is silly, really, because I've walked off the picture and I don't think you want me to walk off, and it's all because I'm frightened. You won't help me with that fear that I have, and I'm only asking you to tell me what you want me to do. That will help me not to be so frightened.”

Peckinpah's face thawed a few degrees. “All right, I'll tell you what I want to shoot.”

“He wrote down everything on a piece of paper,” says George, “and it was awful, horrendous! I wish he hadn't written it down. It was ghastly, worse on paper than when he'd told me about it.”

“I can't do that,” she said, “I just can't do these things.”

“Well, how else do you propose to show me these emotions?”

“Well, I propose to do it through my eyes. If I'm the kind of actress that you think I am, and the kind of person that you think I am, I think I can tell you everything with my eyes. If you focus on my eyes and my body movements, I promise you I will lead you down the road you wish to be led down. I will make you believe every bloody moment of it.”

She could see the gears whirring behind his eyes. The sequence was important to him, very important, she knew that. “I want to shoot the best rape scene that's ever been shot,” he said again.

“You will! And I will do it for you. If you let me do it my way, I can give you the most provocative, beautiful, and telling rape scene you'll ever see! I can pull it off without showing pubic hair. I know l can.”

He thought for a moment longer, then his face relaxed. “Okay, I'll make a deal with you. I'll do it your way, and if, when we've done it your way, I'm not satisfied . . . then we have to do some things my way.”

“I understand.”

They had a deal.

“So we shot it,” says George. “For a week we shot the rape scene. On the first day I arrived absolutely petrified. Sam came in to work that day, and he sat with his legs crossed, in a little ball on the floor in front of the couch where I was raped, and he never moved and he never said a word to me for five days. He did talk to Del Henney and gave him a terribly hard time. He started saying things like what a dreadful lover he was. He provoked Del terribly, but he never said a word to me. When Del was on top of me he would be saying things like, ‘Christ almighty! Is this it?’ It was really unbelievable. I used to try not to listen to that, but he never said one word to me, just smiled at me from time to time. And he did what I begged him to do, which was focus on my eyes and upper body and let me tell the story. Sam was so volatile and lethal on the one hand, and so quiet and kind and loving on the other, that's what was fascinating about him.”

“It was a difficult scene to shoot,” says Henney. “It was rather harrowing, actually. But you just have to do it. Halfway into it, it turns into a sort of love scene, a tender scene. There were two forces working in the character I was playing, one of them pushing him forward and the other pulling him back. The one was pushing him to transcend his background, to be more humane. He was brighter than the others, but the other force, the peer pressure from his mates, pulled him back. That's why he ends up holding Amy down so Scutt can rape her.”

“After we finished it Sam wouldn't let me go in to see the rushes,” says George. “He had let me see rushes throughout shooting, but now he refused to let me in. He went to rushes alone and I went home and fretted all weekend, wondering what the consequences were going to be, whether I'd managed to pull it off or not, and just how angry he was going to be if I hadn't. I wasn't shooting that Monday, but I went in anyway at about eleven A.M. Sam had just been to see rushes and I caught him coming out of the screening room and I thought: Christ! What do I do, turn and run? Get out of the way, get back in the car, what do I do? I was standing there and he walked all the way across the tarmac toward me, stony-faced, and when he got right up close to me he put his hand out and said, ‘You've got it, kid.’ And he held my hand, and that was the conclusion of the rape scene.”

She had captured Amy in all her conflicted, tortured passion. It was a stunning performance, easily matching Hoffman's finest moments in the picture, and when Peckinpah was through cutting it, it would become one of the most perversely erotic sequences in cinema history.

“My character started out strong and by the end of the movie she's completely stripped, emotionally,” says George. “When I shot that scene with Del Henney, Dustin Hoffman came to the studio that day. He didn't come on the set, he just came to the studio and knew it was going on inside the sound stage. And the next day he treated me as if I'd been unfaithful to him. And after that, this relationship between he and I, which had been fabulous up until then, deteriorated. It was as if I'd hurt him. I was absolutely distraught because by the end of the movie Hoffman had really cut himself off from me and become terribly distant. From a very kind and humorous and loving friendship, he had become extremely aloof. I was really hurt. I didn't see him again for years and years and years. Mind games, incredible mind games, coming from both Dustin and Sam. But that's the way they worked, and I believe to this day and always will that Peckinpah was a genius, likewise Hoffman, so I was willing to take anything and everything they had to give.”

Straw Dogs finished its sixty-sixth and final day of photography on April 29, 1971, five days over schedule. Peckinpah had shot 261,195 feet of film, only a little above average for a feature at that time. But once again the footage was broken up into a staggering number of setups, and Sam printed almost all of it.

To carve the mountain of raw footage into a finished film, Peckinpah hired a stable of editors—Tony Lawson, Paul Davies, Roger Spottiswoode, and Bob Wolfe—and walked from editing room to editing room to supervise their work on the various sequences. Sam had covered each scene from a multitude of angles with little regard for matching action; often actors played scenes completely differently in the close-ups from the way they did in the long shots. The violation of continuity was intentional. Peckinpah used the close-ups as an opportunity to explore the nuances of a scene and pull out details of characterization and interaction that hadn't existed in the long shot. To a conventional editor it looked like madness, but those who grasped the possibilities found whole new vistas opening up before them.

“Sam's films were discovered in his editing rooms,” says Garth Craven, who worked as a sound editor on Dogs, and as an editor on four subsequent Peckinpah features. “Sam didn't want you to cut a sequence the way he'd envisioned it, he wanted you to come up with ideas he hadn't thought of, and he would either reject them or be thankful for them. I remember Bob Wolfe saying to me, ‘This is an editor's dream. You've got all this footage and it's unshaped and you get to shape it.’ “

The most brilliant member of the team, all admitted, was Bob Wolfe, who would work on a total of five Peckinpah features. “There would be these enormously complicated sequences with thousands of feet of film and all these elements,” says Roger Spottiswoode, “like the church-social scene, where Amy is having flashbacks to the rape. Bob could conceive of that scene as a finished piece, and would cut a version of it which would almost be a fine cut. If you looked at the footage he started with it was a remarkable act of imagination. That was his brilliance, he understood the inner dynamics of the scene. He was inside of what Sam was doing, more than any of us, he was able to conceive of it that way.”

In June Peckinpah's editors followed him to Hollywood, where they completed post-production while Sam prepared for his next feature, Junior Bonner. By the fall Straw Dogs was ready for its first public preview at the North Point Theater in San Francisco. “We had no idea how powerful it was because we never showed it to anybody, and we'd become desensitized to it,” says Roger Spottiswoode.

When the opening credits flashed on the screen, they featured not the producer's name above the title, but a new credit reflecting the rise of the auteur theory in Hollywood and the fact that Sam Peckinpah was one of its leading practitioners: SAM PECKINPAH舗S STRAW DOGS. The theater was packed, and the reaction was every bit as volatile as it had been to The Wild Bunch.

A third of the audience walked out before the picture ended, yelling comments like “This is obscene!” as they marched up the aisles. Many of those who remained cheered Dustin Hoffman on to each escalating act of brutality. “There was this blood thirst that was horrifying,” says one member of the production team who was present. “I think we were all shocked to have provoked that, we had no idea that it would have such a visceral effect on an audience.”

Afterward, Peckinpah and Melnick were standing in the lobby when a small man walked up to them and asked, “Who's responsible for this film?”

Melnick straightened up proudly and purred, “Well, I'm the producer. How can I help you?”

The man began to vibrate, his face turning purple and the veins on his forehead popping out like surgical tubing: “You filthy rotten pornographer!” he began screaming. “You fucking horrible dreadful monster, how could you think of doing this to the American public! What do you mean by—”

Without missing a beat, Melnick pivoted smoothly toward Sam. “Well, as the producer I'm not responsible for contents of the picture. I think you should address your comments to the director . . .”

The little man whirled and sighted in on his new target. Sam took off across the lobby. Slaloming through the exiting crowd, he disappeared into the theater, the little bulldog still snapping ferociously at his heels.

Melnick rushed out to the stretch limo waiting in front of the theater and ordered the driver to race around to the back alley, where they screeched to a halt just as the rear exit door smashed open. Out came Peckinpah, running full-tilt. Melnick threw open the door, Sam dove in, and the car screeched off into the night, leaving the outraged pacifist panting and empty-handed.

“That was a different era in filmmaking,” says Spottiswoode. “They made more chancy films then because they did less market research and they weren't scared. That was the only preview we had for the film, and I don't think we changed anything. We might have taken a minute out of it. The general consensus was we had an extraordinary, strange film and there was nothing you could do with it. There was a lot of discussion about changing the title, but they didn't do that; nobody had a better title. Today it's become automatic that you preview and you change your film according to the preview. The idea that films are tailored to the marketplace has become an accepted and dreadful fact.”

ABC was much more savvy than Warner Bros. when it came to promoting a Peckinpah picture. The print ads and billboards designed for Straw Dogs’ release in December 1971 featured a close-up of Dustin Hoffman in the wire-framed glasses he wore in the film, with the right lens shattered and the glass fragments scattered across his face. It was accompanied by captions like THE KNOCK AT THE DOOR MEANT THE BIRTH OF A MAN AND DEATH OF SEVEN OTHERS! The studio also produced some very slick thirtysecond television commercials, two-minute theatrical trailers, and sixty-second radio spots that echoed the same theme.

The publicity campaign had both a good and bad effect. It certainly provoked interest in Straw Dogs, but the ad slogans and the commercials, which reflected the studio's interpretation of the movie's “message” but certainly not Sam's, caused many reviewers to jump to the conclusion that the film was an elated celebration of physical conflict.

Across the nation the movie incited even more polarized reviews than The Wild Bunch had. Time and Newsweek pronounced the film brilliant; The Atlantic, Variety, The New York Times, Life, and The New Yorker denounced it as depraved, misogynistic, and fascist.

William S. Pechter wrote in Commentary: "Surely, whatever his conscious attitudes toward the violence of his films, no one can stage scenes of violence with the kind of controlled frenzy Peckinpah brings to them without being susceptible to the frenzy despite his controlling it; without in some sense enjoying what he does, and it is this investment of himself, an attempted exorcism of his devils in his work, perhaps even more than his film-making genius, that makes Peckinpah at once so hard to take and so impossible to turn away from. [Stanley] Kubrick coldly lectures us that we are living in a hell of our own making; Peckinpah writhes in the flames with us, burning.”

But much more disturbing to Sam than the response of critics was that of an old acquaintance from Fresno—Fern Peckinpah. “Strangely enough, my mother not only saw it, but wanted to go back and see it again,” Sam wrote to a friend.

The final negative cost for Straw Dogs was $3,251,794, more than a million dollars over its original budget. Despite the controversy about its graphic sex and violence, the picture did only modestly at the box office. By the end of 1973 it had grossed $7,980,902 worldwide, $11,148,828 by 1983. After Peckinpah sicced a team of lawyers and accountants on the studio, the production showed a profit of $503,405, and Sam received his first share of the proceeds: $21,505.

The public furor that Straw Dogs provoked made Peckinpah's name the most widely recognized of any director since Alfred Hitchcock. He even became a target for the English comedy troupe Monty Python, then at its zenith of popularity on the BBC. The group did a sketch—"Sam Peckinpah's Version of Salad Days"—in which a genteel English lawn party turns into an absurdly grotesque, slow-motion bloodbath.

His fame had contributed at least as much if not more than Dustin Hoffman's to the success of Straw Dogs. His services were more in demand than ever before, but the mold they had forced him into was hardening.

He did his best to break through. By the time the film hit the theaters he was hard at work on his next, Junior Bonner. The script, by Jeb Rosebrook, had not a single gunshot in it, and the body count was zero. It told the story of an aging rodeo champion, Junior Bonner, who returns to his hometown of Prescott, Arizona, to find that times are changing. His brother, Curly, is converting the family's ranch into a mobile-home park. He offers Junior a chance to cash in with him by selling off the acreage in little postage-stamp lots, but Junior clings stubbornly to the life of a rodeo cowboy, a life his body will be able to endure for only a few more punishing years.

Marty Baum had sent the screenplay to Peckinpah in London in the spring of 1971 while he was still cutting Straw Dogs. Steve McQueen, eager to take on something more substantial than his usual action fare, had already been signed to star.

Sam sat down to read the script in his flat in Richmond. He knew by page six—when Curly's bulldozers flatten the family's old ranch house—that he wanted to do the picture. It was a page right out of his own life; he couldn't have written it better himself. And the script only improved with each page he turned. Rose-brook's screenplay unfolded with the graceful prose of a novel. The story reverberated with Peckinpah's own experiences: its depiction of a frontier family cut off from its roots, fragmented, its individual members filled with love and rage and wounded wariness for one another—longing to be reunited, yet recognizing the impossibility of that.

He agreed immediately to make the picture.

Throughout the final weeks of shooting and the first month of editing Straw Dogs, Katy Haber functioned as Peckinpah's right arm during the day and his lover at night. But now, as he left for the States, Sam said good-bye. He promised he would return to London and they'd work together again soon. It was not at all what she had been hoping to hear, but she affected a casual acceptance.

Katy didn't know that Sam was seeing Joie Gould again and that he was taking her with him to California. After that terrible night in Cornwall, Joie had vowed she would never see Sam again. “I mean, I had never had a man lay a hand on me before.” But while he was finishing up at Twickenham Studios he had called her. His voice sounded so small and frightened on the other end of the line. He said she had to come see him, he really needed to speak to her today. Joie agreed to meet him in Richmond Park.

“I probably by this time was really very much in love with him,” says Gould, “but I really don't know why I went down to meet him that day, because I really didn't want to. I was really scared of him and I was very confused.”

They walked through the park together and Sam apologized for what had happened, his voice strangled with genuine anguish. It would never happen again, he promised. It was the siege, he explained—it had gotten under his skin and he just exploded. But he was through with making those kinds of movies. It had nothing to do with Joie, she just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he couldn't be more sorry. It would never happen again, she had to believe him.

But she held firm that day. She told him she couldn't see him again, said good-bye, and drove home. He phoned her that night and begged her to have dinner with him. “Sam was very charming when he wanted to be. He would recite poetry, things like that. As a twenty-five-year-old girl listening to him . . . suddenly I found myself sitting in a restaurant with him, this charming, gentle man.”

And so the courtship began all over again, and slowly but surely he swept her off her feet. “He was manipulating you all the time and you didn't know it,” she says. He sent her flowers with haikus written on the attached cards. She began writing notes in return, with little poems in them that expressed her growing feelings for him. Sam loved them and praised her sensitivity and insight.

“He was madly romantic, and very elegant,” says Gould. “I could imagine him in Paris in the twenties with Hemingway and that lot. You look back on it and you say, ‘Why did I do that? Why didn't I walk away?’ But you're so involved in this whole thing by that time, somehow you don't think. I don't remember ever thinking straight during the whole time I was involved with Sam. I justified all this terrible behavior, always justified it: ‘Oh, he's just caught up in the movie. He had too much to drink and he was so tired.’ I mean, you don't rationalize that kind of behavior. It's not suddenly all right because you've come up with these rationalizations. It doesn't make any sense. But I was very young. I was twenty-five, but a very young twenty-five. I saw everything as nice. I also liked intense, interesting people. I thought: ‘Here's this very intense man who just wants to be happy. He needs someone who really loves him, who really makes him feel secure.’ You think that if you do all the right things this person is going to be happy—that great misguided fantasy.”

So when Sam returned to America, Joie came with him. But they were only in L.A. a few weeks when he provoked a terrible argument, then took off for Arizona to begin shooting junior Banner, leaving Joie stranded in a strange, sprawling, smog-smothered city. She couldn't go back to London, not after having told all her friends she'd be gone for six months. She couldn't face the staring faces, the subtle I-told-you-so's. So she stayed in L.A. and picked up secretarial work at the various studios through her friends in the business. “But Sam kept tabs on me that whole summer,” says Gould. “I had a number of temporary jobs in Hollywood and he knew every person that I worked for. I guess he just didn't want to be involved with me while he had a movie to shoot, and I was still very much in love with him.”

After Sam left London, three eternal weeks passed before Katy heard from him again. Living and working with Sam had often been a nightmare, but she missed the thrills of the rollercoaster ride. Everything seemed so mundane, so pointless now that he was gone, and she missed the dire sense of purpose that a Peckinpah production provided. The prospect of working on an ordinary movie again made her spirits sink. Then came the phone call. He barked, without so much as a hello: “Get your ass over here!” He'd already gone through a couple of secretaries; no one could handle him. He needed her.

Before she met Sam Peckinpah she'd turned down a job in the States because she didn't want to leave her mother alone in London. Now one phone call and she was packing her things in a frantic rush, hurrying to join a man her mother thought insane and dangerous. A leaden feeling of guilt came over her when she boarded the plane at Heathrow, an image of her mother all alone in that tiny flat, but it was quickly submerged in the excitement of rejoining Sam on another picture. She was hooked, unable to stop herself and ask why.

Peckinpah began shooting Junior Bonner on June 30, 1971, in Prescott, Arizona. Robert Preston and Ida Lupino had been cast as Junior Bonner's mother and father, with whom he is reunited when he returns to his hometown, and Joe Don Baker played his brother Curly. Much of the action was shot in and around the real Frontier Days Rodeo held in Prescott every year, which writer Jeb Rosebrook had often attended as a teenager. Peckinpah managed to keep tight control over his drinking throughout shooting. Most days he didn't start hitting the booze until after five o'clock. Then he'd drink steadily throughout the evening production meetings and the screening of dailies. By ten P.M. he'd be bombed, but he was back on the set on time the next morning—red-eyed and pale—on all but a few occasions.

The picture wrapped on August 17, one day over schedule but $1 million over its $2.5 million budget. The overrun was caused by a lack of pre-production time (Peckinpah had only five weeks to prepare from the time he landed on American soil till the first day of shooting, which had to start with the rodeo in Prescott) and by the high labor and equipment costs of maintaining up to nine camera crews for shooting the rodeo sequences.

Bonner was in post-production for ten months, but the time and money lavished on it paid off. The final product—which was edited by Bob Wolfe and Frank Santillo, and scored by Jerry Fielding—was a small but glittering jewel. The understated performances were as truthfully rendered, the characters as sharply observed, and the directing as quietly assured as they had been in Noon Wine.

ABC had expertly exploited Straw Dogs as a thinking man's Dirty Harry, but when the studio released Bonner in June 1972 it made the same mistake that Warner Bros. made with The Wild Bunch. A subtle and subdued character study, the film should have been released to a few select theaters in major cities to give it time to find an audience. But the studio treated it as just another Steve McQueen action vehicle, mass-releasing it to hundreds of theaters across the country simultaneously. McQueen himself argued strenuously against this approach, but his pleas fell on deaf ears.

But Junior Bonner may have had a tough time finding a large audience no matter how it was distributed. The response of critics was far from overwhelming. Both Time and Newsweek, which had raved about Straw Dogs, gave it a thumbs-down. Vincent Canby of The New York Times praised the film as a beautifully crafted slice-of-life drama, as did The New York Post and the Daily News. But most of the critics who'd marched forth to condemn Peckinpah's bloodfests in The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs were conspicuously silent on the subject of Junior Bonner. The picture received scant attention from the media.

One of the most positive and insightful reviews came from William S. Pechter of Commentary. "Nothing much happens except that some people, the place they inhabit, and the quality of their lives are brought vividly before us,” Pechter wrote, “which is to say that everything happens. At the end, as in a good novel, one feels one has known and lived with some people through a time in their lives, the moments of which crystallize into a definition of who and what they are. . . . But what is distinctively Peckinpah's own (beyond the look and feel and texture of the film, and its orchestration of first-rate performances which have been drawn even from such an actor as Steve McQueen whom I've rarely liked before) is the way it's been put together. That one can probably see the film without even being conscious of its editing is to some extent a measure of Peckinpah's achievement. For what Peckinpah has done is to create a profusely edited style in which, despite the shimmering mosaic effect, there's no sense of narrative fragmentation. . . . Junior Bonner provokes me to wonder whether anyone making narrative films has ever edited film more beautifully than Peckinpah. Yet I wouldn't want to isolate this accomplishment or artificially draw distinctions about my unified sense of Junior Bonner as being at once beautifully made and beautifully felt: rowdy and sad, a film which lives, breathes and richly fills a space.”

In its first year in distribution, Junior Bonner grossed $2,306,120 worldwide. By 1977 that figure had more than doubled, to $4,647,876. Officially it was still $3,497,909 in the red, but, taking into account the larcenous bookkeeping of movie studios, it probably turned a small profit. (Martin Baum says, in a moment of either memory lapse or candor: “Junior Bonner cost so little to make, it showed a very nice profit. Absolutely, a profitable film.”)

But it didn't make enough to convince the Hollywood power brokers that Peckinpah was capable of directing delicate dramas about the subtleties of human relationships. The fact was that, with seven feature films under his belt, Sam Peckinpah had made not a single commercial hit. His most renowned movies—Ride the High Country, The Wild Bunch, and Straw Dogs—had been only moderately successful at the box office. Only a runaway success would give him the leverage to pick his own material. And suddenly the opportunity for a hit presented itself.

Steve McQueen loved Junior Banner despite its disappointing financial return. He was eager to work with Peckinpah again and had a property he'd been developing for First Artists, the production company he'd formed with Barbra Streisand, Sidney Poitier, and Paul Newman. Following the example of Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D. W. Griffith in the twenties, the biggest box-office stars of the seventies hoped that by forming their own company they could actually see some net profits from the films they appeared in.

The property McQueen had was The Getaway, a crime thriller by novelist Jim Thompson, who had won a cult following every bit as fervent as Peckinpah's. The Getaway told the story of Doc McCoy, a mastermind bank robber, and his lovely but deadly wife Carol, who embark on one last dangerous score. Thompson's book unfolded in a bleak landscape: the scummy back alleys and sleazy hotel rooms of a hopelessly corrupt society inhabited by a wide variety of human sharks who fed off one another without a glimmer of guilt. The vision was as dark as a black hole in space, but a young screenwriter, Walter Hill, had scrubbed away all the shadows and polished the story into a slick action vehicle. It had the potential of becoming another Bullitt, which had grossed $19,000,000. McQueen offered Peckinpah $225,000 plus 10 percent of the profits to direct it. Sam accepted without hesitation.

Since returning to the U.S., Sam had been living in motel rooms, Jerry Fielding's house, and in his office at Goldwyn Studios, where a small cot was set up. Most of his possessions were still packed away in boxes at Fielding's and in a storage garage in L.A. When shooting on Junior Bonner was completed, he sent Katy Haber to move his belongings into an apartment in Studio City that Bob Schiller had rented for him. Sam had to stay in Prescott for a couple more weeks, he told Haber, to oversee the closing down of the production.

Schiller had found Peckinpah a beautiful two-story townhouse on Acama Street, just a stone's throw from the old Four Star Studio. Haber had all Sam's possessions shipped to the new place and began unpacking. The project turned into a nightmare. “None of the boxes were labeled. Whoever had packed the stuff up had just emptied all of Sam's things into boxes in no order whatsoever. It was as if they'd taken the coffee table and just tilted it so that everything slid into a box, and taken drawers and simply upended them. There were ashtrays with the cigarette butts still in them. It took me three solid days to get everything unpacked and the place in some sort of order.”

But her labor was lightened by the fantasy that this would be the home that she and Sam would share; she was building a nest for herself as well as him. At the end of three days she stood back and surveyed the interior with a glow of pride. It wasn't much—Sam's furniture was a mishmash of unmatched pieces, and his idea of decor was some rusty branding irons and a haphazard collection of pre-Columbian art—but it was a start. Sam would be proud of her, and she imagined herself basking in his praise.

Then the phone rang—it was Sam. He said, without even a hello, “Are you finished yet?” She started to answer, but he went on, “Joie and I have been here at the Santa Ynez Inn in Malibu for two days waiting for you to finish. When can we move in?”

Her head reeled—it was worse than from any physical blow he ever dealt her—her stomach heaved, she wanted to be sick. All through the making of Junior Bonner he had assured her that it was all over between him and Joie, that Joie was a part of the past. Now here she was again, suddenly materialized in America like some hideous specter. Her eyes blurry and wet, she started screaming into the phone, unable to follow her own words.

When she'd finally screamed herself out of breath, Sam's voice murmured calmly in the earpiece, “Obviously you can't cope with this.”

“Fuck you and everything you stand for!” She slammed down the receiver, checked into a motel in Studio City, and a couple of days later was on a plane back to London.

On the flight home guilt closed in on her. She had abandoned her mother, the only relative she had in the world, maybe the only person that really loved her in the world, and had left her alone in that tiny flat for what? To be abused, to give everything and get nothing but cruelty in return?

But three weeks later, as The Getaway was gearing up for pre-production, she received a phone call from Sam. “Have you got your head straight?” he said to her. “Whether you like it or not, Joie and I are living together. But we've got a picture to make. Either you want to work or you don't. Do you want to work? Are you on board or not?” The next thing she knew, she was on a flight back to Los Angeles.

Both Katy and Joie would travel with Sam to Texas for the shooting of The Getaway, and both would work as production secretaries there. He slept with Joie, but Katy was always at his side on the set, organizing his life for him—an arrangement that only Sam Peckinpah could slip comfortably into.

Twenty-five thousand dollars of Sam's up-front fee for The Getaway was to pay for whatever rewriting he did. On Ride the High Country, The Wild Bunch, and Straw Dogs Peckinpah had, through a painstaking process of rewriting, transformed simplistic commercial properties into profound and complex works of art. But this time was different. He suffered no illusions about the kind of movie McQueen wanted—in fact, needed, since the star had not had a hit since Bullitt some four years earlier, and his personal production company, Solar Productions, was now in perilous financial straits. For McQueen as well as Peckinpah, The Getaway offered a chance for big bucks. If it went through the roof, both would be able to exert some control over the films they made in the future; if it went into the toilet, they'd both be at the mercy of the studios.

“We're not doing War and Peace, Tolstoy is not writing this thing,” Sam would tell Gordy Dawson the night before shooting started. “We're here to be pros—get it on, get it over with, get the fuck out. It's not War and Peace, it's not Dustin Hoffman, it's not Brian Keith either. It's a flick. We'll make a good one, it's going to be a good flick—people are good in it, but Steve is marvelous—he can mate with it and he knows it.” For the first time, Sam did not fight to add dimension to the characters or substance to the high octane action. He'd given Jim Silke a copy of the script, and when he finished reading it Peckinpah's longtime collaborator shook his head. “The first thing I told Sam was, ‘There's no second act in this script.’ He said, ‘Fuck you! We're not going to have a second act in this show! We're making a genre movie.’ Where's the second act?—we worried about that on every script we ever worked on. But now he couldn't bother, he had to go shoot. That's where he was, he kind of gave up on that stuff. He'd get in with those movie stars. Steve McQueen was a total asshole in my opinion.”

To maximize profit potential, Hill updated the story from the 1950s to contemporary southern Texas, and the picture was laid out on a lean sixty-two-day shooting schedule with a budget of $2,826,954. For the part of Carol McCoy, McQueen and the film's producer, David Foster (a former publicity man for the star), wanted supermodel-turned-actress Ali MacGraw. MacGraw had the acting range of a department-store mannequin, but her last picture, Love Story, had grossed fifty million dollars, so Sam readily accepted their selection. An excellent ensemble of character actors was created to support the two stars, including Ben Johnson, Sally Struthers, Al Lettieri, Slim Pickens, Richard Bright, Jack Dodson, Dub Taylor, and Bo Hopkins.

The crew was almost the same as it had been on Junior Bonner: cinematographer Lucien Ballard, art director Ted Haworth, property master Bobby Visciglia, editors Bob Wolfe and Roger Spottiswoode, and Gordy Dawson returning to the fold as associate producer and second unit director.

They had eight weeks to prepare from the time the production got the green light from First Artists to the first day of shooting, February 23, 1972—that was three more weeks than on Junior Bonner, but in this case the logistics were much more complex. The company would be constantly on the move as they followed the McCoys on their flight across Texas, from Huntsville to San Marcos to San Antonio, then west to El Paso and the Mexican border. Yet Peckinpah and his team of hardened veterans would pull it off. The Getaway was shot in sixty-six days, just four over schedule.

Peckinpah was at the height of his powers despite the fact that the tenuous control he'd maintained over his drinking on Junior Bonner was slipping away. “I'd go to pick him up to take him to the set,” says Chalo Gonzalez, “and his hands had started to shake in the morning. He'd want a drink to stop them. He'd take a vodka and tonic, something light, then he'd hold up his hand and it would be steady. He'd say, ‘See? Okay, now we can go.’ So he'd have one or two drinks in the morning to get going.”

After his first couple of eye-openers he would try to make it through the afternoon without booze. But the rule of no drinking until five o'clock was broken more often than it was kept.

“Chalo, bring me a drink!”

“But, Sam, it's not five o'clock.”

Peckinpah would slouch deep into the canvas sling of his director's chair for a moment, then ask, “What time is it in New York?”

“Five-thirty.”

“Then bring me a goddamned drink!”

And if Chalo wasn't close at hand, there was always Katy Haber or the short, dark-haired prop man, Bobby Visciglia, Sam's gregarious court jester and partner in crime. (The two were forever hatching new schemes for embezzling thousands from the production company. Visciglia ran his prop department as a lucrative entrepreneurial enterprise.) “I had one of those peanut-hawker trays that they use to sell peanuts out of at football stadiums,” says Visciglia. “I wore it to work on the set. I had it loaded with a bucket of ice, bottles of vodka, Campari, scotch, soda, and everything else. Sam would say, ‘Bobby!’ I'd say, ‘Yeah?’ I'd be propping on the set, but I'd have this goddamned tray. He'd say, ‘Well, let's try, let's see, some soda, some Campari, and a splash of vodka.’ I'd say, ‘Okay, Sam.’ I'd fix him his drink, bring it over to his chair, and I'd fix myself a drink, the same thing. Every time he'd have one, I'd have one. All day long.”

“Sam had this fucking tumbler of booze in this holder on his director's chair all through the picture,” says producer David Foster. “And Bobby kept refilling it. He shouldn't have done that. It was dumb. He loved Sam, and yet he helped destroy him. I don't know where his head was at.”

Yet Peckinpah still managed to put in a full day's work, and though it took him longer and longer to rev up to speed in the mornings, once he did his mind was as alert and creatively agile as ever. Getaway was a solidly crafted mixture of comedy, thrills, horror, and subtle subtext, balanced on a hair. Peckinpah delivered the action-picture goods and at the same time subverted them with sly undercurrents of black humor.

Sam returned to Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood in mid-May to supervise the editing of the picture by Bob Wolfe and Roger Spottiswoode. Wolfe cut the eight-minute opening sequence of McQueen cracking under the pressures of prison life, sculpting it out of the mountain of footage Peckinpah and Dawson had shot at Huntsville Penitentiary. It was the most brilliant passage in the film. “Sam wanted the sequence to build to a great climax,” says Mike Klein, Wolfe's assistant on the picture. “It was Sam's concept, Bob carried it out.”

Instead of following a chronological structure built out of a conventional series of scenes, the sequence jumped back and forth in time in a breathless rush of images. The soundtrack too was a montage of elements—the voices of guards urging the prisoners to work harder, the teletype pounding of the textile machines—synched not literally to the images on the screen, but to the inner reality of Doc McCoy as he reached the breaking point. And intercut throughout the sequence were flashes of McQueen and MacGraw in bed together, making love—painful strobes of memory impinging on Doc's intolerable present. The collage of images and sounds accelerated to breakneck pace as Doc's stress peaked and finally snapped, causing him to crumble a matchstick bridge that he had painstakingly constructed to fill the idle hours into a thousand pieces.

A bravura demonstration that Peckinpah was still at the peak of his craft, able to crawl inside a character's head with his camera and let us experience life through his eyes, it was also a quintessential piece of early-seventies filmmaking. The experimentation in Hollywood movies that began in the mid-sixties had now reached its apex. Two other films released around the same time—Catch-22, directed by Mike Nichols, and Slaughterhouse-Five, directed by George Roy Hill—also fragmented and molded “real” time in profound explorations of the psychological stream of consciousness of their characters.

Peckinpah's highly refined use of parallel action made the various subplots and chase sequences in The Getaway move like greased lightning. Though character development had been sacrificed for pace, no other Peckinpah film, before or after it, moved with such velocity.

In and around the action Sam wove a rich subtext of comic nightmare images: banks of television monitors, surveillance cameras, automated prison gates, hammering textile machines, and carnivorous garbage trucks—a labyrinth of malevolent machinery through which the McCoys have to flee.

The media, which had been indifferent to Junior Banner, showed keen interest in The Getaway when word got out that it would be packed with Steve McQueen car chases and Sam Peckinpah “ballets of blood.” Rolling Stone ran a cover story featuring a picture of Sally Struthers and the caption, WHY DID SAM PECKINPAH TELL STEVE MCQUEEN TO BELT THIS ACTRESS IN THE FACE? There was another feature in Life, with a generous spread of photos by John Bryson, as well as articles in Esquire ("Working with Peckinpah"), The Los Angeles Times, and other newspapers across the country. Almost all of these stories focused on Peckinpah—not McQueen, not MacGraw—as the central dramatic figure behind the making of the movie. (This so incensed McQueen that he fired the unit publicist from the picture.)

In August 1972, four months before the film was released, Playboy published William Murray's interview with Peckinpah. Playboy was at the height of its popularity, and its long and thoughtful celebrity interviews—Marlon Brando, Dustin Hoffman, and so on—had become one of the most prestigious plums in the world of slick magazines. Peckinpah had reached his height as a public personality. The interview was widely read and debated, since Peckinpah jousted volatilely throughout it, alternating between honest and insightful responses and answers that baited Murray and seemed calculated to further outrage Sam's detractors. It made for great copy, but comments like, “There are two kinds of women. There are women and then there's pussy,” helped solidify his image as a flamboyant caricature of machismo.

After reading it, Lee Marvin, an expert provoker in his own right, told Grover Lewis of Rolling Stone: "Christ, he [Peckinpah] only used the word cunt maybe two or three times in Playboy, for Christ's sake. There was a chance to really get it on and agitate his audience and he didn't do it.”

Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw had fallen in love during the shoot, and when MacGraw left her husband, Paramount production head Robert Evans, newspapers and magazines headlined the story from coast to coast, which provided the picture with a windfall of free publicity. First Artists promoted the stars as “the hot new love team!” and designed posters and newspaper ads with huge black copy that read simply, “McQueen . . . MacGraw,” and featured wanted posters of the stars on a table-top with a .45 and bullets strewn over them. Inset into this image was a smaller picture of McQueen blowing apart a cop car with a shotgun.

Theater exhibitors crawled over one another to book the film. David Foster wrote in a memo to Peckinpah: “We are getting all the best houses throughout the country and the world, and the most lucrative terms available. Example: one Paris exhibitor has already agreed to give us a $200,000 guarantee, sight unseen. And that pattern is developing all over the place.” First Artists was able to line up $7 million in such guarantees before The Getaway opened.

The picture's final negative cost was $3,352,254, almost $500,000 over its original budget—a substantial overrun, but Peckinpah's smallest since High Country. The overage was reduced by $300,000 when Ali MacGraw agreed to defer her salary in exchange for 7.5 percent of the picture's net profits. Unlike Charlton Heston on Major Dundee, MacGraw made the right move, since with advanced bookings of more than double its negative cost The Getaway made money before it even opened, and this time First Artists would be in charge of the books.

The film was released over the Christmas holidays. Judith Crist and Rex Reed, two critics Sam detested, loved it. Both had deplored the violence in the The Wild Bunch, but voiced no objection this time around because the bloodletting was all in good fun. Kevin Thomas of The Los Angeles Times also gave it a thumbs-up. But other critics who had supported Peckinpah in the past, like Jay Cocks of Time and Pauline Kael of The New Yorker, were disturbed to see him squandering his talent on such light material.

William S. Pechter wrote in Commentary: ”. . . the action sequences are directed with a cold brilliance, though it is somewhat dismaying to see the violence in a Peckinpah film relieved of its power to disturb and used to no other purpose than melodramatic excitement, as in Dirty Harry (with, naturally, the film then lauded by just those reviewers who raised the most sanctimonious outcry against the violence in Peckinpah's previous work). . . . Well, Junior Bonner flopped and The Getaway is a big hit. I only hope Peckinpah is fully conscious in this instance of just how much of a whore he has been.”

Peckinpah shrugged and told interviewers that the critics had taken the movie “too seriously.” He wrote to Ali MacGraw: “Anyway, the film is doing well, and what it is supposed to do, which is make over $20 million.”

For the first time in his career Sam Peckinpah had a film that went to the top of Variety's box-office chart. It grossed $874,000 in thirty-nine theaters across the country in the week of January 10, 1973, beating Irwin Allen's all-star disaster behemoth The Poseidon Adventure, John Boorman's Deliverance, and a Charles Bronson gangster picture, The Valachi Papers. During its first year of release The Getaway grossed $18,943,592.02—almost as much as Bullitt had made, and more than double what either The Wild Bunch or Straw Dogs had grossed in their first year. Because of past experience, Peckinpah was convinced he'd never see a penny from his 10 percent of the net profits, even if First Artists was keeping the books, so his eyes popped out of their sockets when the first check for $70,255.04 arrived just six months after the picture had been released. Over the next ten years The Getaway would gross $26,987,155, and Peckinpah would earn over $500,000 from his percentage of the profits—roughly the same amount Doc and Carol McCoy made off to Mexico with.

McQueen would earn well over $1 million, MacGraw over $400,000. Sam gave away one point of his profits to Lucien Ballard and another to Gordon Dawson.

Peckinpah's combined earnings from Junior Bonner and The Getaway, both released in 1972, would approach $1 million—mere pocket change to the whiz-kid directors who would soon storm the industry (Steven Spielberg's earnings in 1991 totaled $57 million), but in the early seventies it was enough to rank Peckinpah among the highest-paid directors in Hollywood. The Wild Bunch had taken him to the top of his profession artistically; The Getaway took him there commercially. Now he was a bankable name. His signature on a contract, like McQueen's and those of a handful of other Hollywood talents, was enough to guarantee the financing of a picture.

Considering the progression of his alcoholism and the emotional chaos that both fed and was fed by it, Peckinpah's output of five feature films over four years had been nothing short of phenomenal. He had not only been making films back-to-back, but frequently two at a time. True, he had not done anything that approached the stature of The Wild Bunch, but The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Straw Dogs, and Junior Bonner were impeccably crafted pictures, each startlingly original, provocative, and different from the last. And The Getaway demonstrated that he was still operating at the peak of his abilities. No other American director had matched him during these years.

His major rivals—Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, and Mike Nichols—had much smaller outputs during roughly the same period. Kubrick directed two films, 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange; Penn made three, Bonnie and Clyde, Alice's Restaurant, and Little Big Man; and Nichols three, The Graduate, Carnal Knowledge, and Catch-22. Robert Altman had burst into prominence with M*A*S*H, but his brilliance as a satirist would prove erratic, soaring and taking nosedives from one picture to the next.

But suddenly these directors had become the older generation, a part of the Hollywood establishment they had challenged just a decade earlier. Now arriving in force was a new breed of young turks: the film-school directors. They had flocked to university cinema schools—NYU, USC, UCLA—in the sixties, where they learned the dogma of the auteur theory and watched hundreds upon hundreds of movies, burning the scenes, the lighting, the camera moves, and bits of business and dialogue into their memories.

They'd broken in to Hollywood as screenwriters, assistant directors, production assistants, film critics, wearing T-shirts that read: “But What I Really Want to Do Is Direct!” And now they were. Francis Ford Coppola had just completed The Godfather, which, like The Wild Bunch, took a played-out Hollywood genre to new Shakespearean heights. Peter Bogdanovich had established himself as a contender with The Last Picture Show, and Martin Scorsese was warming up in the bull pen for Mean Streets.

The field was getting crowded, the competition heating up, but at forty-seven Sam Peckinpah was still one of the leaders of the pack and from every indication likely to remain so for many years to come.

And now, like Doc McCoy, he had not only the money and professional accomplishment, but also the girl. On April 13, 1972, while he was still shooting The Getaway in Texas, a column item had appeared in the trades. It read: “Sam Peckinpah snuck off to Juarez Sunday to marry English-born Joie Gould, his steady of sixteen months. The newlyweds surprised the cast of The Getaway, which Sam is shooting in El Paso with Ali MacGraw and Steve McQueen.”

At the end of The Getaway, Doc McCoy drives off into the shimmering horizon of happy-ever-after land with Carol and the money securely beside him. Life isn't like the movies; the emotions and actions of real people are much harder to manipulate than actors on a set—nobody was more painfully aware of that than Sam Peckinpah. He was fond of complaining that once he stepped out of his director's chair his life always seemed to run at least “three frames out of synch.” But this time, maybe it would work out.