.MJSchulman chronicles how an unlikely alliance between Gregory Peck and Candice Bergen brought the Academy Awards up to date.
Rumors circulated that the unidentified killers had a movie-star hit list. Los Angeles was upended with fear and speculation. Was it the Black Panthers? A celebrity stalker? Who was next? Throughout Hollywood, people armored their mansions with automatic gates and guard dogs. Gregory Peck hired a night guard in Brentwood.
Bergen had bought her own place, called the Aviary, on the old John Barrymore estate. Having once housed exotic birds and, later, Katharine Hepburn, it was an impractical but romantic dwelling: a Mediterranean tower amid cypress trees, with stained-glass windows and moldy murals that reminded Bergen of the “Arabian Nights” tales. She had a horse named Herschel and spent her days practicing photography and contemplating ecological causes. But, after the Manson murders, everything seemed darker.
Dennis Hopper forgot all about the Academy Awards ceremony, until someone reminded him to show up. “Easy Rider” had been nominated for its screenplay and for its supporting actor Jack Nicholson’s performance. On April 7, 1970, Hopper arrived in a velvet tux, cowboy boots, and a Stetson. Jane Fonda, wearing her “Klute” shag, held up a fist to the roaring fans and yelled, “Right on!” Her political opposite, John Wayne, also received a swell of cheers, although one person held up a sign reading, “.
Presenting Best Cinematography to “Butch Cassidy,” Wayne marked his turf in the culture war, grumbling, “I’m John Wayne, an American movie actor. I work with my clothes on.” Like Hope, Wayne was pro-Vietnam and was despised by the hipper members of the audience. Never again will Hollywood be accused of showing a lollipop world. Perhaps by showing the nitty-gritty, by giving the world a glimpse of the element of violence and its destructive effect, it will help cool it. Whatever violence the screen has shown is not an example to follow but to see in its full destructive power. The troubled, kooky characters that people the screens are not examples to emulate but to learn from and try to understand and hopefully, perhaps, contrive help for.
Peck set up a committee to review grievances, which poured in. There was the “distressed” former M-G-M producer who did “not understand what is to be gained by tossing others to the crocodiles.” There was the producer of “Bud Abbott and Lou Costello in Hollywood,” who blasted the Academy’s “prejudice or favoritism.”
Schneider was becoming less interested in making movies and more interested in revolutionary politics. In one heady weekend, he introduced Bergen to Joan Baez, the guru Baba Ram Dass, and Huey Newton, the Black Panthers’ “minister of defense.” Her parents were even more appalled by her new boyfriend than they had been by Terry Melcher. When Schneider implored Mrs. Bergen to “go with the flow,” she snapped, “No.
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