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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Passion for life and death … and Mick Jagger too
IAIN LUNDY
Scotsman.com
April 20,2006
IT WAS the era of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. The Swinging Sixties were just that, a time when the Captain Mainwarings of regimented post-war Britain were swept away in an orgy of student demonstrations and Ban the Bomb marches. The country's rebellious youth got high on marijuana or LSD, women took the contraceptive pill and all indulged in "free love" - to the horror of their elders.
The Rolling Stones were the bad-boy rockers whose image came to typify the 1960s. They swore, they took drugs, they boasted of their sexual exploits. Their lyrics and the stage appearance of lead singer Mick Jagger oozed sexuality, non-conformity and delivered two fingers to the stuffy British establishment.
But if the Stones were bad, there was a character in the swinging London scene who made their exploits appear tame. Donald Cammell, a Scot born into a privileged Edinburgh family, enjoyed an outrageous sex-and-drugs-laced lifestyle and was the one man at the height of Sixties Britain who could "out-Stone the Stones".
Jagger was a close friend and partied at Cammell's London house with the rocker's future wife Bianca. The story may be apocryphal but Cammell is reputed to have approached the pair one night and suggested that they join in a bedroom foursome. The Wild Man of Rock said "no" - this time.
Cammell was said to have an irresistible lure to women, certainly his "conquests" can be counted in triple digits. He even bedded his second wife when she was a 14-year old schoolgirl. But like many of his generation he faded along with the culture he espoused. In 1996, at age 62, the man who had once epitomised Bohemian Britain, shot himself in his Hollywood home.
[Model Bronwen Pugh posing for Donald Cammell.
Picture: Getty Images]
Cammell's father Charles was a scion of the once-mighty Cammell-Laird shipbuilding family. An artist and poet, he owned a chateau in France and wrote a biography of his close friend Aleister Crowley - dubbed "the wickedest man in the world". The younger Cammell would later boast that Crowley was his godfather and that he used to bounce him on his knee although it is unlikely the two ever met.
Charles Cammell and his wife Iona rented the Outlook Tower adjacent to Edinburgh Castle and it was here that Donald was born. Described as a "precocious" boy his artistic upbringing showed itself at an early age. Donald studied at the former Fort Augustus Abbey School in Inverness-shire, then at Westminster, was a gifted painter and won a scholarship to the Royal Academy in London at 16. After studying in Florence he set himself up as a portrait painter at a studio in Chelsea. The work bored him and he moved to New York and then France. In the late 1960s he decided his future lay in directing films.
[Anita Pallenberg and Mick Jagger in Performance.
Picture: British Film Institute]
Between 1968 and his death in 1996 Cammell directed four films, one of which, Performance, had such a stunning impact on audiences in the UK and US that it became a cult. Performance was Cammell's zenith; the film contained scenes the public had never seen before - explicit sex, violence and the effects of hallucinogenic drugs. At a test screening in California the wife of a Warner Brothers executive was so shocked she vomited. It put Cammell briefly on an artistic pedestal, as he had produced a genuinely pioneering piece of British cinema.
Even today, Performance is screened regularly on British movie screens. Starring James Fox as a gangster and Jagger as a rock star, it deals with how London's East End and West End clashed in the 1960s. The overtones are distinctly homoerotic, including a classic scene of Jagger in a three-in-a-bath scene with actresses Anita Pallenberg and Michelle Breton. Not surprisingly both women were lovers of Cammell.
That success, however, was never to be repeated. The shock element of the decade vanished to be replaced by the horror genre of the 1970s and 1980s. Cammell by this time had moved to a house in the hills above Hollywood with his second wife, China Kong, and struggled with production companies, bankruptcy hearings, box-office oblivion and depression.
Fast fact
To mark the 10th anniversary of Donald Cammell's death, The Filmhouse Cinema in Edinburgh is showing a short season of the director's films beginning on Monday.
When film company Nu Image cut what he regarded as crucial scenes from his movie Wild Side, the privileged Scot, seeing this as the last straw in a long list of disappointments, took a 9mm Glock pistol and shot himself through the forehead. He survived for 45 minutes with his wife by his side, even asking her to turn a mirror towards him so he could watch himself dying.
How did those who worked with Donald Cammell remember him? A survey of the people who knew him best offers some insight:
"Donald looked upon violence as an artist might look on paint."
- James Fox, who played the gangster Chas in Performance
"He was too clever for Hollywood. No-one likes to work with people who are too smart."
- Chris Rodley, film director and friend
"He was one of those people who once met, are never forgotten. Women, in particular, found him irresistible. He had a magnetic personality and he exploited it."
- David Cammell, brother
"You can only listen to someone say they want to kill themselves so many times. You say, 'come on, let's move on'. But it was 'no, I have to kill myself'. He used to rant about it."
- Myriam Gibril, long-term lover
http://heritage.scotsman.com/people.cfm?id=597662006
(link for article and two pics)
[Edited by Ten Thousand Motels] |
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| rasputin56 |
China Kong. Great name! |
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| Bitch |
[quote]Ten Thousand Motels wrote:
Passion for life and death … and Mick Jagger too
IAIN LUNDY
Scotsman.com
April 20,2006
IT WAS the era of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. The Swinging Sixties were just that, a time when the Captain Mainwarings of regimented post-war Britain were swept away in an orgy of student demonstrations and Ban the Bomb marches. The country's rebellious youth got high on marijuana or LSD, women took the contraceptive pill and all indulged in "free love" - to the horror of their elders.
The Rolling Stones were the bad-boy rockers whose image came to typify the 1960s. They swore, they took drugs, they boasted of their sexual exploits. Their lyrics and the stage appearance of lead singer Mick Jagger oozed sexuality, non-conformity and delivered two fingers to the stuffy British establishment.
[Model Bronwen Pugh posing for Donald Cammell.
Picture: Getty Images]
THOSE WERE THE DAYS!!! |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Sun 23 Apr 2006
Scotland's Satanic Majesty
BRIAN PENDREIGH
living.scotsman.com
Donald Cammell: A Life on the Wild Side
Rebecca and Sam Umland
FAB Press, £16.95
DONALD Cammell's life reads like a blockbuster novel with lots of sex and drugs, exotic locations, pop stars and society beauties and a hero who scales dizzy heights of fame and fortune and plumbs depressing depths as his dreams collapse around him.
He belonged to one of Scotland's great shipbuilding families and was born in the Outlook Tower next to Edinburgh Castle. He studied art in Florence with Annigoni, the Queen's official portrait-painter, opened a successful studio in Chelsea and counted Princess Margaret among his subjects and friends.
At first glance he might have seemed a pillar of the establishment. But Cammell got bored with painting, tapped into the Sixties zeitgeist and became mentor to Mick Jagger, proffering expert advice on everything from sex to country dancing. The unlikely lads decided it would be a good idea to get into movies, and Cammell wrote and co-directed Performance, with Jagger as a reclusive pop star and James Fox as the gangster who turns up looking for somewhere to lie low.
Marlon Brando was one of Cammell's closest friends and they spent years developing projects together. None ever made it in front of the cameras and the two fell out when Cammell started dating the schoolgirl daughter of one of Brando's lovers. After many other disappointments, Cammell put a gun to his head and shot himself.
In the ensuing decade, Performance has regularly figured in lists of the best British films. Last year, Demon Seed, Cammell's second film, came out on DVD, and Fan-Tan, a pirate epic on which Cammell and Brando collaborated, appeared in novel form.
Even in his native Scotland, Cammell remains a little-known figure. But that is changing and the process will be accelerated by the appearance of this biography and a retrospective at Edinburgh's Filmhouse.
Often, an actor or director may have turned out great work, yet the details of their private lives are decidedly dull. For every Errol Flynn, there are a depressing number of actors who went straight to drama school, were dedicated to their craft and faithful to their wives. Cammell was not one of those.
He is a biographer's dream, or nightmare. Rebecca and Sam Umland spent six years on this book, four more than they intended. A husband and wife team, they are academics at the University of Nebraska, but despite the generally scholarly tone, they admit they could not ignore Cammell's "infamous sexual life".
It is impossible to keep his private and professional lives apart and the multiple couplings in Performance merely reflect Cammell's own taste and experience, though the Umlands contend that threesomes were Cammell's own peculiar way of avoiding intimacy.
Although Performance is now regarded as a classic, Cammell's work remains uneven and there is a feeling that he never realised his full potential. Early in the book the Umlands write: "When success was in his grasp, he repeatedly, one might even say systematically, set about to guarantee his own failure, either by abandoning a project or by setting himself at odds with his patrons. It is our view that the reasons for this deliberate artistic undercutting are not rooted in culture, but are highly idiosyncratic and personal."
The Umlands spend considerable time on his schooldays and an unhappy period at Fort Augustus. He ran away more than once, prompting the authors to speculate on the possibility of abuse (without any evidence, other than the unauthorised absence) when homesickness seems an obvious enough motivation. A possible genesis of his strange behaviour might be found closer to home. Despite being one of the Cammells of Cammell Laird shipbuilding fame, his father Charles was no industrialist. A playboy poet, he inherited and lost much of the family fortune.
Charles Cammell wrote the biography of occultist Aleister Crowley, once described as "the wickedest man in the world". A family friend, he was probably responsible for Cammell's obsession with death and the occult, interests which Cammell would pass on to Jagger, and which in turn surfaced in such Rolling Stones records as 'Sympathy for the Devil' and Their Satanic Majesties Request.
Cammell had shown prodigious talent as an artist and his success had him rubbing shoulders with Princess Margaret, Brando and Jagger and bedding singer Eartha Kitt and actresses Barbara Steele and Jill Ireland. Cammell was romantically involved - for want of a better phrase - with Anita Pallenberg and the future Bianca Jagger before any Stone was.
He was nine years older than Jagger and exerted a Svengali-like influence on the young rock star. One of Cammell's long-term lovers claims Jagger's distinctive stage movements "with head defiantly erect, back arched and arms akimbo" were inspired by watching Cammell dancing Scottish jigs.
United Artists had just had a big hit with the Beatles film A Hard Day's Night and their rivals at Warner Brothers were desperate to tap into the youth market with a Rolling Stones film. Performance was the closest they got. It did not come entirely out of nowhere. Cammell wrote the scripts for two other 1968 films The Touchables and Duffy, a crime caper starring three Jameses - Coburn, Mason and Fox.
In Performance, Fox's character arrives in a house occupied by Jagger and two live-in lovers, played by Pallenberg, at that time the girlfriend of a very jealous Keith Richards, and Michele Breton, a complete unknown Cammell had met on the beach at St Tropez. Fox finds himself drawn into some strange mind games.
Warner executives were horrified by the incendiary mix of sex and violence, and the film did not come out until 1970. A change of management and Easy Rider had underlined the full extent and profitability of the youth market.
All sorts of far-fetched stories have attached themselves to the film. Many are true. "Home movie" footage shot by Pallenberg turned up at a Dutch porn festival and full-frontal photos of Jagger were taken from it and printed in the infamous underground magazine OZ. They are reprinted in the Umland book, which is illustrated excellently, including examples of Cammell's art.
Several of those involved in Performance had problems coming to terms with the experience. Pallenberg and Breton struggled with heroin addiction, while Fox gave up acting for a decade and sought solace in religion. It was years before Cammell was trusted with another film.
But Peformance is the halfway mark in this fascinating tale. The Umlands present a detailed picture of Cammell's tortuous relationship with Brando - including the bust-up over girlfriend China Kong, the reconciliation and an extended sojourn in the South Seas. There are Cammell's later years in America and many unrealised projects, including one that would have seen him working in his native Scotland with Sean Connery.
Many would say Cammell left behind him only one great movie. But he also left at least one incredible, mesmerising story - the story of his life.
Donald Cammell Season, Filmhouse, Edinburgh, from tomorrow
This article: http://living.scotsman.com/books.cfm?id=608582006
Last updated: 22-Apr-06 00:16 BST
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| lotsajizz |
when's it coming to DVD?
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