Twentieth Century Fox wasn’t the only studio going through the dry heaves of near-bankruptcy. Warners’ financial straits led it to acquire a new, better-heeled partner. The executives of Kinney National Services, expert in the matters of paper towels and parking lots, were immediately intrigued by the name Mick Jagger, and wanted to see Performance, which was buried in a vault and forgotten somewhere in the concrete and asphalt of Burbank. They found the film. They screened it. They liked what they saw. “Doors started opening and money to flow again,” said the film’s producer, Sandy Lieberson.
Suddenly, Performance looked almost mainstream. Almost. Redolent with sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, and violence, the film now possessed a prescient glow when viewed in the aftermath of the Rolling Stones/Hells Angels/Altamont murder and Charles Manson’s mangling of the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” lyrics to reference a racial-war apocalypse. Rock music and violence were a marriage made in tabloid heaven.
A preview screening of Performance in New York City signaled a big hit. Young music journalists and film aesthetes, psyched by Hollywood’s embrace of edgier fare like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider in the previous decade, proved the ideal audience. Too ideal, perhaps, to be an accurate gauge of the film’s future success at the box office.
A much older, less rock-savvy crowd three thousand miles away in Santa Monica, California, presaged the film’s eventual commercial defeat. “Most of the audience ran screaming out of the theater,” said director Donald Cammell. “I don’t think you could have a much better reaction than that. I was enjoying it in the back of the theater with my employers, the authorities—the Warner Bros. fuzz.”
The film’s director didn’t mean to be ironic. He reveled in being the trailblazer, the provocateur, the hornet in the studio ointment. Buoyed by the New York response, Cammell dreamed of cult status for his long-gestating baby.
The Warner Bros. fuzz, on the other hand, simply saw a box-office disaster, and it didn’t help when the MPAA slapped an X on Performance, as much for its violence as its sex. The Rolling Stone reviewer pretty much concurred with that ruling, writing: “This is a weird movie, friends. . . . Use Only As Directed. One of the attributes of evil is ugliness and on one level Performance is a very ugly film. Hallucinating though it may be, I would not recommend viewing it while tripping.”
In 1969, the X didn’t hurt Midnight Cowboy.
In 1970, the X meant pornography. Even so, Americans saw more than the Brits did when the film opened across the Atlantic, where the censors excised a few minutes. Most of the lost footage had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the scene in which James Fox and his cohorts torture a gangster’s limousine driver. The BBFC’s Sir John Trevelyan wrote that the scene was “brilliantly shot by Nicolas Roeg,” but violence-wise it was “worse than any that I had seen before. We had to cut it, and, although our cuts were strongly resisted, we insisted on them; even in its modified form the scene was shocking.”
If Cammell would remember the disastrous Santa Monica preview with perverse delight, Roeg had his own guilty pleasure when it came to seeing his work trashed. For several months after the film’s release, he carried Richard Schickel’s pan review from Life magazine in his coat pocket.
Performance turned into an obsession for Schickel and his middlebrow, status-quo-pandering publication. When he reviewed Gimme Shelter, the Maysles brothers’ documentary on the 1969 Stones tour and the Altamont murder, the clairvoyant Schickel saw Mick Jagger’s future, and it didn’t include the rocker’s footprints in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. “Finally, one imagines he will withdraw physically, as he already has psychologically, from his public—just as the character he played in Performance did,” Schickel wrote of Jagger.
First, James Fox, who continued his Christian missionary work in South America. Now it would be Mick Jagger’s turn to retreat from a film career, as evidenced by the one-two blowout of Performance and Altamont. The most notable casualty of the rock star’s turnabout was Lieberson and Cammell’s film adaptation of Michael McClure’s The Beard, a snippet of which had achieved minor movie immortality in Agnès Varda’s Lions Love. The play, about a sexual encounter in hell between Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow, had already been busted fifteen times in Los Angeles alone due to its graphic depiction of oral sex. In London, the Royal Court Theatre converted into a private club to be able to stage the show, just as it had done with John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me.
Cammell savored the challenge of bringing The Beard to the screen. “I discovered that I shared one or two fetishes with Michael McClure,” revealed the director, who claimed a personal identification with Jean Harlow, as well as Billy the Kid. “It’s not necessarily a war,” he said of the characters’ love-hate relationship. “You can see the consummation of it as being an orgasm. If you look at the whole play as being a fuck, then the seduction at the end of the play corresponds with the orgasm at the end of a sexual encounter.”
Cammell couldn’t wait to make The Beard.
Jagger could. After the twin nightmares of Performance and Altamont, he retreated from another brush with filmmaking for the remainder of the decade.
With little fanfare, Paramount Pictures unveiled its utterly incompetent screen adaptation of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer that February, and despite its being the first major American release to feature the word “cunt” (uttered several times by narrator Rip Torn, and taken verbatim from Henry Miller’s much-banned novel) and the pubic hair of Ellen Burstyn (best known heretofore as a showgirl on The Jackie Gleason Show) the film played only one week in one theater, according to its godfather, Paramount Pictures’ head of production. Robert Evans had made a bet with his old friend Henry Miller, wagered over two games of Ping-Pong, that Tropic of Cancer could not be made into a movie. Evans, as well as Paramount, lost that bet.
LIKE SO MANY ONCE-TABOO subjects, blowjobs continued to present sizable problems for filmmakers in 1970.
At Twentieth Century Fox, Michael Sarne was having his own tussle with a scene in which Raquel Welch’s Myra had been assigned the improbable task of performing oral sex on Rex Reed’s Myron. His solution involved getting the studio to give him the run of its film archives, and it was Sarne’s idea to insert a number of classic black-and-white vignettes from old movies into the most colorful action of Myra Breckinridge. The inserts, working as comic comment, would lighten the graphicness of certain scenes. At least, that’s what he told them at Fox. Of special concern was not only the scene in which Myra penetrates a young man named Rusty with a strap-on dildo, but the moment when Myra miraculously goes down on herself as a man. Sarne found an old Fox movie in which the young Shirley Temple milks a goat and squirts herself in the face by mistake. He plugged that old gem into the Myra/Myron blowjob scene and nearly laughed himself into a coma.
The scene was also a favorite for the preview audience of three thousand gay men in San Francisco, where Fox chose to test Myra Breckinridge. In homage to Mae West and other legendary ladies of the silver screen, a number of moviegoers in attendance that night dressed up as their favorite star of the opposite sex. According to Sarne, the screening was everything he, David Brown, and Richard Zanuck could have hoped for. Then little Shirley milked her goat.
“At that point the fucking theater exploded. It went ‘Boom!’ like an atom bomb,” said Sarne. “Zanuck is holding his sides—he can hardly sit in his seat . . . the gays were loving it—everybody was loving it.”
Testing Myra Breckinridge with a bunch of gay guys in Frisco was a little like testing Performance with a bunch of stoned rock journalists in Manhattan.
Neither demographic is a general moviegoing audience.
A few days later, back in Los Angeles, Zanuck was no longer laughing at Myra, Shirley, and the goat. He called Sarne into his office to tell him that the entire blowjob scene had to go.
Sarne wouldn’t hear of it. “Sorry, bubby,” he told his boss. “It’s staying, it’s the best scene in the film, the biggest laugh in the film.” He reminded Zanuck, “In San Francisco, you were pissing yourself laughing. I remember, you had to go to the toilet.”
According to Sarne, Zanuck revealed that no less a person than the president of the United States, Richard Nixon, had called Zanuck’s father, Darryl Zanuck, to complain about the scene. It seemed that little Shirley Temple had grown up to be a delegate to the United Nations. “And that it’s got to go,” Zanuck demanded.
THE OTHER BLOWJOB BALLYHOO that February involved, of all revered organizations, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. The people who gave out the Oscars were petitioning John Schlesinger to cut the Jon Voight/Bob Balaban encounter from Midnight Cowboy. Schlesinger’s “dirty” picture had been blessed with seven Oscar nominations that winter, including one for best picture, and the Academy did not think it becoming to have one of its nominated films carrying the suddenly sullied X rating. The MPAA announced that it would give Midnight Cowboy the less restrictive R rating—if the blowjob scene disappeared.
Schlesinger kept it simple. “No way,” he said.
MIDNIGHT COWBOY’S JON VOIGHT and The Damned’s Helmut Berger found themselves in competition with each other at the 1970 Golden Globes, for the Most Promising Newcomer Award. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which gives out the honors, is an organization of journalists who write about films and otherwise spend their weekends at press junkets held in posh hotels around the world, where they interview movie actors and eat free food and drink free wine provided by the motion picture companies. Although Berger didn’t exactly talk about his ongoing relationship with Luchino Visconti, he also didn’t exactly hide his sexual orientation when it came to promoting his performance as a Nazi degenerate in The Damned.
“I am somewhat of a devil. I can’t help it. It’s the way I live,” he told one journalist. “I must experience everything at least once. It’s my curiosity and also my needs. I’m not different from a lot of men, but I admit what and who I am and what and who I need. I now have a very lovely girlfriend, Marisa Berenson. Maybe you saw us on the cover of Vogue? She understands me and what love is all about. She is not shocked because I need a man I love and I also need a woman I love! Does that shock you?”
Berger’s admission might have shocked—or perhaps, disgusted—Dr. David Reuben. His how-to manual Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) had recently risen to the top of the bestseller lists. In addition to advising readers on such topics as oral sex and the joys of consecutive rather than simultaneous orgasms, the doctor got very graphic on the subject of homosexual males and the various objects they engorged in their respective anuses; these were acts of self-abuse, wrote the doctor, that often required the aid of emergency-room medics when it came to removing these makeshift dildoes. Unfortunately for Dr. Reuben, no less a personage than Truman Capote took note of the book’s strange fixation on homosexuality, and when the bestselling doctor unceremoniously canceled an engagement on The Dick Cavett Show to appear instead on the rival Tonight Show (“Dr. David Reuben came down with a better engagement,” said Dick Cavett), the Cavett producers quickly booked Capote, a frequent guest, to fill the empty spot. It didn’t take long for Cavett to get his revenge. One of the first questions he asked the author of In Cold Blood was if he had learned anything from reading Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex. Capote said no, then he attacked, saying the book had “one whole chapter on homosexuality of which not one word is true.” The censors at the ABC network went into overdrive and bleeped out most everything else Capote had to say that night, which sent the studio audience into paroxysms of shocked laughter. “Oh, you’re ornery tonight!” Cavett said with a smile.
Shocked or just plain ornery, the Golden Globes voters gave their coveted award to Jon Voight, not Helmut Berger.