Jeff Bridges taught her how to drive on his Volkswagen bus. Steven Spielberg refused to cheat with her. She succeeded in assaulting director Nicholas Log on the film set and tore the actor's lips apart. While lying on a Mexican beach with painter Ed Lasca, she was grazed by a floating bullet on her thigh. Once, she pinched David Bowie's nipples.
Where do you file stories like this in Los Angeles in a city built on oversized lore and incredible legends? It's not gossip, but I'll reveal it. Not frank, but not crazy. Sometimes surreal, but consistently sweet.
“That's the time of confession, right?” Candy Clark, a former actress who sat in a booth at the Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood, California and wore a neat blonde bob and a warby parka glasses, was recently at Clark on Sunday afternoon. About pita and hummus.
Stoshing the life of the anticipated centuries of medieval times, she began her modeling career in New York, becoming a beloved man of the “New Hollywood” era in the 1970s. For 50 years on screen, she has earned over 80 film and television credits and established herself as a burnt-out ubiquitous face with a free lover like Debbie Danham in “American Graffiti,” which won the Oscar nomination. It was her second acting role.
“It was my arrival,” she said, recalling the nomination. “You're just the center of the universe and that's really amazing.”
If she begins to doubt that all this happened to her, she can flip the stack of photos taken with her little SX-70 Polaroid camera.
Her low anecdotes about Clark's shiny Polaroid and her world-famous face were first collected in a book called Tight Heads, released last month. It is a visual memoir of the actress's fascinating life, a document of Halcyon culture moments, where the director has free reins, an independent spirit flourishes, and a small town girl who has no experience in acting in casting calls is discovered.
She admitted that the book “doesn't speak at all.” “That's what I'm telling.”
One-way ticket
Born in Oklahoma, raised “poor” in Fort Worth, Texas, and along with her four younger brothers, Clark says her childhood dreams are achievable. When she grew up, she wanted to be the secretary's receptionist. However, after a random encounter with a visitor from New York in 1968, Clark impulsively purchased a $45 one-way plane ticket to the metropolitan city. She was 19 years old.
“I remember looking out the Manhattan window and thinking, 'I'll never go back,'” said Clark, 77.
She began working as a department store model and lived for 50 cents a day. Eventually, she began modeling magazines like Seventeen and Ingenue. Sometimes she worked as an extra for films (for free lunch).
Satisfied with her new career, Clark met while casting “The Godfather,” casting director Fred Ruth, whom she met while casting “The Godfather,” resisted when she flew to Los Angeles and auditioned for an adaptation of Hoston's novel “Fat City.”
“I didn't want to be an actor at all,” Clark said. “So I drove hard bargains and said, “Only pop out if I can go to the Academy Awards and visit Disneyland.” ”
Soon afterwards, she was looking at Oscar through rental binoculars on the upper deck of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. A few days later, she auditioned for Mr. Houston, Ruth and producer Ray Stark, wearing a wide hat with Disneyland printed on the front. Sheen wanted tears. Clark recalls attempting to make sobs while hiding behind the rim of his hat. She then ran away, assuming the audition was a flop.
However, Ruth chases after her and asks her to try the screen test. As she tells it in the book, the good news exploded her into real tears. “I just want to be an extra!” she cried.
Clark filmed “Fat City” in Stockton, California in the summer of 1971. When the camera wasn't rolling, she and a group of young actors cried out tequila with Mr. Houston and tried local Mexican food. During filming, Clark, who played Faye, the pregnant girlfriend of a struggling young boxer, was romantically involved with 22-year-old Jeff Bridges.
“She was a natural actress,” Bridges said in an interview. “But she didn't want to expect that all of her happiness would come from an acting career, and she had something amazing.”
The pair moved to Beach Shack, Stucco in Malibu, where they spent the next four years cooking for friends and family, playing guitar, and raising dogs and turtles. Elements of their relationship influenced Bridges' performance, written by Clark, as “The Big Lebowski,” and their performance as “man” as their shared love for Kahlua and Smoking Grass in particular. Bridges wasn't that sure.
“I don't remember Kahlua that much,” he said. “But Pot, I will.”
head shot
Bridges is the first face of “Tight Head.” In the photo, he wears a boyish smirk.
Beyond the directors of A-listers and Big Boy, the book's 87 Polaroids are a testament to Clark's vast social appetite. She grew mostly male circles, including writers, dancers, agents, artists, screenwriters, rock stars and hotshot producers, mostly for sale. But for Clark, they were a small, close community of efforts by actors and artists who had not yet achieved the title of mega.
“The cameras brought people together, and it was magic,” she said. “Everyone gathers around the film and watches it develop. It wasn't a cheap medium, so we couldn't fire on our phones.”
For the past 50 years, the photos have been sitting barely touched, hiding in the drawer of the antique Credenza at Clark's Vannuis Lunch House.
“For me, they were just souvenirs,” Clark said.
But they piqued the curiosity of Los Angeles archivist Sam Sweet, who asked Clark to interview him in the fall of 2022. During their conversation, Clark casually mentioned the chunks of photographs and offered to show him some.
Mr Sweet was immediately attacked by her subject's height. Robin Williams, an introvert Harrison Ford glaring at the camera, holds his newborn son in Griffith Park, holding Angelica Houston, her 20s, as her lover.
Clark seemed really amused with each shot. “It's as if they're happy that the life they drew is actually hers,” Sweet said. “Can you believe this?”
Sweet, who had been running an overnight menu, an imprint focusing on Los Angeles history since 2014, suggested that she publish them in his press. He considers a whimsical antithesis to books like “Easy Rider, Raging Bulls” by Peter Biskind, a ferocious Hollywood revelation of the 1970s, as “tight head.”
“As illusions of impossible, Candy's photographs place mythical figures on concrete landscapes,” Sweet wrote in the book. “Her scene suggests that Hollywood's real Dreamworks is not trapped behind the gates of Paramount.”
Warhol via Babitz
Like all of Hollywood's best recorders, Clark had the trick to breaking up the spiritual barriers of celebrities, even if she was drawn to it.
“Candy has always had a magnetic appeal to art and artists,” wrote artist Ed Lasca in an email. “She is extremely secular without losing her roots.”
Clark had a share of famous fugitives, such as ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov and actor William Hart. Rusca, who Clark describes as having “Modigliani eyes,” was one of her long-term boyfriends. Her social calendar included lunch with novelist Ray Bradbury and screenwriter Ivan Moffatt and a Dodgers game with agent Irving Lazare.
Three years after she arrived in Hollywood, she again took part in the Academy Awards. This time, Bridges is on his arm as a candidate for supporting roles at “American Graffiti.” Clark launched a single woman's PR blitz for the nomination and spent $1,700 on a 1/4-page ad for trade publications. In the end, she was defeated by Tatum O'Neill. He became the youngest actor ever to win an Oscar at the age of 10.
Shortly afterwards, Clark came down with infectious hepatitis, spending a month in the hospital and recovering almost a year. After being in the spotlight, her career struggled to start again.
“It's basically going back to zero,” Clark said.
British director Nicholas Log gave Clark another shot after meeting her at a beach party. Without an audition, Rohm, who would become Clark's other paramar, cast her in the twisted sci-fi social drama “The Man Who Falled on Earth,” across from David Bowie.
The film is one of Clark's most memorable roles, Mary Lou, a lonely Oklahoma woman who presents Bowie's character, extraterrestrial, alcohol, sex and other earthly joys.
But when the “New Hollywood” year faded, the free spirited producers and directors no longer had a cult blanche to make their vision come true. She has found steady productions on television shows such as Magnum PI, Matt Rock, and Baywatch. (“I play flogies all the time,” said Clark.) She also had several side jobs in the 1980s and '90s, running limo services temporarily and producing a series of custom pillows for ABC homes and carpets.
Occasionally she found ways to go back to the sets of major directors of the generation, including David Fincher's “Zodiac,” Stephen Soderbergh's “Information Provider,” and David Lynch's “Twin Peaks.” The “American Graffiti” check is still in place (When he made the film, Lucas agreed to split 10 actors, including Clark, and one percentage point of their profits).
But she has not clinged to past fame. Clark prefers to live in gifts of his designs, attack real estate sales circuits, collect art, dot pet rats, Herman, and spend the weekend with his 25-year-old boyfriend.
But looking back at it from time to time, it's not necessarily a bad thing.
“I found someone putting this book together,” she said.
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