Driving inland from Palm Beach, you are immediately confronted by the booming chaos of middle America. On the bridge into West Palm (a community founded for the servants and amenity operators of the Beach itself), there are morose old black men fishing for scrod over the rails. Within seconds you are in drive-in, shopping-mall land. Beef n’Booze, Seven Eleven, X-Rated Movies, Totally Nude Encounter Sessions, Jack’s Bike World, Eats — 24 Hrs. Developments are rearing up everywhere, condominiums, conurbations, the bleak toytowns formed by mobile homes. Drive a little further and you are in the redneck swampland of Wellington and Loxahatchee. Anything, you feel, could happen here — crocodiles slithering across the dirt roads, good ole boys staring and snickering at your out-of-county plates …
Drop me down anywhere in America and I’ll tell you where I am: in America. I soon turned round and headed back to the Beach, where you feel old and safe. I longed to be on the patio of my villa, and to hear my maid calling out protectively to ask if I wanted my tea. She deals with everything, with the tradesmen and delivery boys who zoom round to cater to my whims and to fix all the labour-saving appliances. She does all the washing-up and laundry. My shirts never had it so good. Out in the sun I read a little poem by Von Humboldt Fleischer which perfectly answered my mood:
Mice hide when hawks are high; Hawks shy from airplanes; Planes dread the ack-ack-ack; Each one fears somebody. Only the heedless lions Under the Booloo tree Snooze in each other’s arms After their lunch of blood — I call that living good.’
By now my psychic clock was attuned to Palm Beach, I felt completely at home among the old American lions.
Tatler 1979
Brian De Palma: The Movie Brute
Burbank Studios, Sound Stage 16. In silent hommage to Hitchcock, perhaps, Brian De Palma’s belly swells formidably over the waistband of his safari suit — So, at any rate, I had thought of beginning this profile of the light-fingered, flash-trash movie brute, director of Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Scarface — and Body Double. But that was before I had been exposed to De Palma’s obscure though unmistakable charm: three weeks, twenty telephone calls, and a few thousand miles later. ‘I know you’ve come all the way from London, and I know Brian promised to see you while you were in LA,’ his PA told me at the entrance to the lot. ‘Well, he’s rescinded on that,’ she said, and laughed with musical significance. This significant laughter told me three things: one, that she was scandalised by his behaviour; two, that he did it all the time; and three, that I wasn’t to take him seriously, because no one else did. I laughed too. I had never met a real-life moody genius before; and they are very funny.
So let’s start again. Brian De Palma sits slumped on his director’s chair, down at Burbank, in boiling Los Angeles. It is ‘wrap’ day on Body Double, his pornographic new thriller: only two climactic scenes remain to be shot. ‘Put the chest back on,’ De Palma tells the villain, played by Gregg Henry. ‘Okay. New chest! New belly!’ This means another forty-minute delay. De Palma gets to his feet and wanders heavily round the set. He is indeed rather tubby now, the back resting burdensomely on the buttocks, and he walks with an effortful, cross-footed gait. ‘Hitchcock was sixty when he made Psycho,’ De Palma would later tell me. ‘1 don’t know if I’ll be able to walk when I’m sixty.’ A curious remark – but then Brian is not a good walker, even now, at forty-four; he is not a talented walker.
He walks as if he is concentrating very hard on what he has in his pockets.
I approached the sinister Gregg Henry and asked him about the scene they were shooting. It sounded like standard De Palma: ‘I throttle Craig Wasson to the ground or whatever. I jump out of the grave. I rip off my false belly.’ The false belly is part of Gregg’s disguise, along with the rug, the redskin facial pancake, and the Meccano dentures. As in Dressed to Kill, a goody turns out to be a baddy, in disguise. It takes a headlining make-up veteran three-and-a-half hours to get Gregg looking as sinister as this. Presumably it takes the baddy in the film even longer — but this is a De Palma picture, where gross insults to plausibility are routine. The second shot involves an elaborate false-perspective prop (to dramatise the hero’s claustrophobia as he is buried alive), like the staircase scene in Vertigo. The camera will wobble. ‘With luck, you’ll feel sick,’ says the amiable first assistant. Body Double has gone pretty smoothly, within schedule and under budget. The only real hitch was a ‘hair problem’ with Melanie Griffith. She spent two weeks under the drier and over the sink. ‘We tried brown, red, platinum — until we got what Brian wanted.’