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It’s not easy being a star who knows he has no right to be a star. Gene Hackman never got near the honey pot till he was past 40. He has about as much sex appeal as your balding brother-in-law. He dreams fondly of retiring. He’s aware that somebody, somewhere made a big mistake.
Never mind The French Connection, and Hackman’s Best Actor Oscar. Forget The Poseidon Adventure, top grosser of 1973. Hackman doesn’t believe it for one minute. He works hard, humbly and honestly on about three pictures a year, which is about three times what the average star does. He can’t believe he’s already got the brass ring, so he keeps on going round and round.
“I’ve made six films in the past two years. I gotta stop that. I need six months rest. You start drying up after a while. It all seems like the same movie.”
Hackman runs a hand through his hair and leans forward in his canvas chair. He can’t really relax even when he allows himself a few minutes off duty. He warns he won’t be talking very candidly. “I’m afraid I’ll waste it. It’s all supposed to be going into the movie.” He adds apologetically, “Whatever it is I have to offer.”
Melancholic, serious, weary, Hackman is taking five at three o’clock in the morning in the courtyard of a deserted factory in Marseille, where he’s on location shooting a sequel to The French Connection. The sequel is unashamedly titled French Connection II.
Since filming the Cannes film festival first prize winner The Conversation, last year, Hackman has made Zandy’s Bride, playing the husband of mail order bride Liv Ullmann; The Dark Tower, a private eye picture directed by Arthur (Bonnie and Clyde) Penn; Bite The Bullet, a western; and now French Connection II.
So here Hackman is being man-handled down a rickety three-fight fire escape in the custody of a couple of Marseille thugs. The villains commit unspeakable acts upon his person and then shove him in a car and drive him away. This sequence is repeated over and over, so the camera can catch it from several angles. It isn’t an easy way for anybody to make a living.
“I would prefer not to be making this picture. I was contracted to do the sequel over two years ago, when I was making Poseidon. As they say, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“I don’t mean to do a poor-mouth job on the sequel. Three years ago, after the original French Connection was completed, I talked to Billy Friedkin, the director, about what kind of film we’d made. Either it was a masterful art film or it was an adventure film. Yet somehow it was both. This one may very well be as good as the first one. Even if it’s better, there will inevitably be comparisons, since the first one was so fresh. Since then there have been many number of police films, and some were good ones.”
Back when Hackman agreed to do the sequel, he didn’t rate script approvals. “That doesn’t mean they haven’t taken my advice when I gave it. Reasonable deals are made by reasonable men. At that point in my career I only had director or cast approval, whichever I desired.”
Hackman desired director approval and he ended up approving John Frankenheimer, formerly well known as an egomaniac, even now has trouble keeping his tongue in check except with Hackman, who is consulted on every camera set-up.
Hackman had a hard time of it after he made The French Connection. For nine months he was out of work. Who knew this supposedly routine cops ‘n’ robbers pic would gross $38m domestically? “I was waiting for something to happen.” Nothing happened, so he did Prime Cut, playing a meat-packing baddy who ground his opponent into frankfurters.
When The French Connection came out and immediately caught fire, Hackman became the man of the hour. Studios waved contracts in his face and he signed a few of them. But he resisted what he calls “the star thing”.
The “Gene who?” problem plagued Hackman most of his life. He ran away from home at age 16 to join the Marines. He served two years in China, “I made corporal several times,” he says wryly of his uneasy youth. He got out of the Corps and immediately was called back during the Korean war. Afterwards he went to Illinois University and then into the television industry as an administrator and technician. Eventually he attended school in Pasadena, California; a relic of 30 in a classful of youngsters. Dustin Hoffman was there at the same time.
Hackman went to New York to get on the stage. “In those days l had only small goals. To go from $48 a week off-Broadway to $90 a week as a supernumerary on Broadway seemed like stealing. Actually I missed one step – I went straight into a supporting part on Broadway. Wow. Life was simpler then and full of wonderments.”
Life got a little more complicated, but not much, when he played a one scene part in Lilith with Warren Beatty in 1964. Three years went by before Beatty cast Hackman in Bonnie and Clyde, a movie that made a star out of everybody connected with it. Hackman got the first of his two Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominations. But he had to wade through nine more “Gene who?” pictures before getting the part of Popeye Doyle in The French Connection in 1971.
Now that he’s one of the half-dozen best-paid actors in Hollywood, Hackman has an enormous temptation to become remote and unapproachable. By all accounts he doesn’t. He behaves like the guy next door who’s always dropping in with a six-pack can of beers on warm summer evenings. Not exactly a barrel of fun, Hackman, but a good citizen.
“At moments it’s kinda fun to be acclaimed, and all that,” says Hackman, picking up a wire coat hanger and twisting it in his hands. Maybe it’s because of the ungodly hour, but he talks as if acclaim is just another chain to drag along behind him. He is a man of few smiles. Unlike most people, he is too objective about himself for comfort. As he says on the subject of playing the part of the quiet, troubled eavesdropper in The Conversation, “Every time I had fun, I knew I was wrong.”
“Most people who really want to be stars had that personality to begin with. That enormous monster was there all the time – it was one of the things that drove them to success. It didn’t with me. For a long, long time I was very naive about what was possible.”
To a compulsive like Hackman, attaining stardom simply meant that more was asked of him. “The responsibility for the film falls on the leading actor. If people don’t like the picture they blame it on him. It’s unfair, but it’s a fact.”
Hackman’s coat hanger is now knotted into a double figure of eight. “I wouldn’t mind retiring. Maybe it’s not entirely fair to say that, if I was completely rested. I only had 10 days between the end of the last picture and the start of this one”.
“I’d like to do just one picture a year. But it’s very difficult to stay hot enough and still do the one picture you want to do at the price you want. I don’t really know if I am what they call ‘hot’ ‘You don’t know where you are. You only know what people tell you.”
Bart Mills
