Greg Goldin:

You've been in Hollywood more than forty years –

Dean Stockwell:

Forty-five years.

GG:

That's almost your entire life.

DS:

It's funny.  About a week ago I was reading an article on Lillian Gish, and it mentioned that the motion-picture industry is ninety years old.  My career has spanned half – a full 50 percent – of the industry's history.

GG:

Does that appall you?

DS:

Yeah!  It blows me away.  It's amazing.

GG:

You started out at the end of the glory years, the days of the MGM studio-contract players.  When I think of that time, it seems a lot looser.  It seems as if the players were much larger than life, much freer individually, than they are now.  Or maybe they were just icons. 

DS:

Hollywood wasn't looser.  It was confined by the major studios.  These figures you are talking about gave those studio heads a lot of trouble.  But they were rugged individualists, and individualists always seem to make for stars.  In later years, after that studio system dissolved – and I'm thankful that it did; part of that is personal, but I think it was healthy for the industry as a whole – independent filmmakers emerged, and you got a much more varied spectrum of filmmaking.  More voices, more social themes.

GG:

You think there is more freedom in Hollywood today?

DS:

Vastly more.  The films were formulized then.  The studio moguls thought they divined and decided what the public wanted to see, and they manufactured films that, for the most part, were fantasies.  Now there are still some fantasies made, and I'm glad they are – the great ones like E.T. or Star Wars or Back To The Future.  But they weren't making the relevant films.

GG:

They weren't making The Hustler, The Graduate –

DS:

They weren't making Paris, Texas or Blue Velvet.

GG:

Why did you become a child actor?  Was it because you showed natural talent?

DS:

I didn't show a thing, as far as I know.  It was just circumstances.  I was in a screen test.  MGM was looking for a cute little boy, and I was a cute little boy.  They didn't know if I could act.  I never said a goddamn thing; I watched a guy blow up balloons in the screen test.  Watched him, that's all.

GG:

You said nothing?

DS:

Said nothing.  Read no lines.

GG:

It was just your physical impression.

DS:

That's right.  It was the way I looked.  It was very much accidental.

GG:

It doesn't seem that you had the most happy childhood as an actor.

DS:

It was a childhood with a truly vast experience missing, which is the experience of play, and discovering through play, and innocence.  Supplanted in its place was work, which is the antithesis of play – work that entailed extreme psychological and emotional pressure.  So, yes, it was a very difficult childhood.  Without the rock support of love from my mother, I simply would not have survived it.  I'm too sensitive.  And I know of others who didn't survive it – friends of mine.  Some others are still healthy and with us, but they haven't continued their careers.  The exceptions are, of course, Jackie Cooper, Elizabeth Taylor, Roddy McDowall, and myself.  And that's not very many, is it? 

GG:

What was it like to be a child actor?  What were you put through?

DS:

Well, speaking for myself, they expected from me the same thing they expected from adult actors.  Then, in the next breath, I was obligated to realize that I was still a child; if I did anything that was too adult, I would be reminded that I was still a child.  So it was a schizophrenic thing that was imposed on me.  Essentially, there is no difference between an actor portraying a child and one portraying an adult.  It's just that you can't get an adult to convince an audience that he's 10 years old, so you use a real child.  You can't get a monkey to do it, because he isn't good enough.  [laughs].  If you could, you wouldn't have to pay him as much.  You wouldn't have to deal with his mother and send him to school.

GG:

Would they have preferred that?

DS:

Yes, I'm sure.  Say you've got Van Johnson, Janet Leigh, and young Dean Stockwell in your movie.  You're not paying Dean Stockwell as much, but you can use Van Johnson or Janet Leigh from the minute they come on, all day.  But the child has labor laws and has to have three hours of school a day.  The studio heads resent that.  And I felt it.  Of course!  And directors, who have their schedule, resent it.  And the assistants, who get the pressure from the directors, resent it, and everyone was trying to rush me because I cost them time, because I was supposed to go to fucking school.   

GG:

Did you feel guilty about that?

DS:

I resented the whole thing.  I wanted to go and play.

GG:

You didn't even find pleasure in the work itself, or the people you worked with?

DS:

No.  For one thing, I was very withdrawn.  I wasn't liked because I wouldn't say good morning to people.  Well, they didn't realize that I was terrified to go there in the morning.  When it came time to block a scene and rehearse it, I couldn't do it, and the other actors resented that.  But I formed a forced alliance with the camera – which initially represented an escape for me – at a very early age.  What was going on in rehearsal, in blocking scenes, or any of that was horrendous to me.  I could never reconcile myself to this process of rehearsing, which seemed superfluous and counterproductive.  I had a nickname among my adult peers – I was called "One-Take Stockwell."  

What evolved out of that forced relationship with the camera was a certain intimacy and knowledge of the camera that is quite detailed and extensive.

GG:

What was the toughest thing about being a child actor?

DS:

Having to work six days a week.

GG:

What were they paying you?

DS:

For most of it, I was getting $300 a week, forty weeks a year, and there was a twelve-week layoff, and the studios had the option.  I think I finished at $500 a week.

GG:

Were you supporting your family at the time?

DS:

Well, I don't know what my mother's salary was.  As my guardian she got something. 

GG:

This must have put a lot of pressure on your mother as well. 

DS:

Immense pressure.  From her end, the pressure was mostly balancing the lives of her two children.  It was impossible.  All the attention, whether it was honest, clean attention or not, was coming to me.  She also had to look after my older brother, Guy, and yet she had to spend an inordinate amount of time with me when I was working.  I don't know how she did it.

GG:

Why did you continue to act?

DS:

Because I was under contract.

GG:

It was as simple as that?  You couldn't have become an irascible, unmanageable –

DS:

It's not in my nature.  I was withdrawn, if anything.  Nonconfrontational. 

GG:

You could have easily put up a fight, or at least you could have used your mother as a proxy.

DS:

No.  My mother was a first-generation Italian-American; her family was from Abruzzi, Italy.  Her father was a carpenter, and her mother was a housewife.  It was a large family, with no education, from the lower classes.  They had no idea that the system could be fought, that one could be self-assertive in the New World.  And that's the way she was raised.  She married, she had these children, her husband didn't work out and left, and she was left with two children.  One had a contract for seven years at MGM studios.  It never occurred to her that she could break that contract.  I don't even know if it could have been broken; those days were different.

The situation grew more difficult, and my mother became more and more aware that I really would have preferred to get out of it, but still, the only thing that came up was that once I graduated high school, then I could have a say in what I did  And that's what I aimed for.  I graduated high school and I left.

GG:

What about the notoriety that came with being a child actor? 

DS:

There are a group of "worsts" that come to mind under the blanket term of work.  The notoriety was certainly one of the more nefarious aspects of it.  I learned at an early age what it is like to be a minority – in this instance, a minority of one.  Somewhere in my mind I was aware that there were a couple of others.  Margaret O'Brien, who was at MGM, was one I knew who was going through the same sort of thing.  Bobby Driscoll over at Disney Studios must have been going through it, too.  But still, for the most part, I felt it was just me.  My peer group, at any age, didn't like me.

GG:

You mean your acting peers?

DS:

No, my peer group in the world.  They would come and ask for autographs, but there was a fierce measure of hostility lying right underneath their requests.  And a lot of times it would come to the foreground.  It would happen at the studio gates at the end of the day; it would happen anywhere else I went.  I was ridiculed for being a movie star, when I didn't want to be a movie star at all.  

GG:

Were you embarrassed to be an actor?

DS:

Embarrassment is something that you feel when you perceive yourself as having committed some sort of error, or let your pants drop, or let spittle run down your lip.  I hadn't done anything.  I wasn't embarrassed.  I was under siege, under attack.  At the end of the day, when I left work at MGM, there were hundreds of people waiting for me.  Most of them were kids.  It was a dreadful experience.  To be surrounded by people pushing at you and knocking your mother on the floor, and tearing at your clothes and all that stuff, is bizarre and abnormal to a child.  My perception of it was that the fans were not responsible for themselves; they were not in touch with themselves.  Why should they be coming to me in such an aggressive way?  

GG:

Isn't that normal adoration?

DS:

No, not when they can't see the difference between the ideal that person represents to them in his performance and the real person. 

GG:

Were you able to distinguish them?

DS:

Yes, and that didn't make it any easier for me.

GG:

Did you have any friends besides your older brother, Guy?

DS:

Intermittent shallow friendships.  I was very much alone.

GG:

I know that at the studio you did like Errol Flynn.  You worked with him on Kim, the adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling novel.

DS:

He treated me as an equal.

GG:

How was that expressed?  I know that when your were working on Kim, he walked up to you and said, in front of your mother and your schoolteacher, "Had your first fuck yet, kid?"

DS:

He didn't say "kid."  He said, "Have you had your first fuck yet?"  And from that moment I loved him.  He was not in awe of a teacher or a mother, or of any stricture whatsoever.  So it was as perfect a relationship as possible between an adult and a child.  He was leading me into the world, or opening up the doors to the world for me.  And no one had done that.

Any child who loses his father at age 6 is thereafter involuntarily embarked upon a quest for a father figure.  This, for me, proved very difficult to find.  The adults around me all seemed to be subject to the same emotional deficiencies or vulnerabilities, because the industry that I was working in seemed to present to people the possibility of striking the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow at any moment.  That was one of the core elements of it.  It still is.  And that in itself lent to all those people who were after that a color of anxiety, of emotional unease and nervousness, of an overdesire to achieve and create, as well as a great susceptibility to self-doubt and self-criticism.  With Errol Flynn – for the first time – I found a guy that wasn't subject to any of that.  The guy was solid, whole, impervious to everything.  He was a romantic, intellectual stud.    

GG:

Still, I'm not so sure Errol Flynn is the role model every parent wants for his child.

DS:

Errol Flynn was great.  Did you ever read his book, My Wicked, Wicked Ways?  It's amazing on a philosophical level.

GG:

What in his philosophy affected you as a child? 

DS:

It's all summed up in a three-letter word, N-O-W.  Now. That's what he lived for.  When I was living in a now that was being dictated by everybody else, for someone to give me a now that was mine was very important.  And beyond that, he had a very expansive, human quality that even opened up enough to involve children.

GG:

How did that express itself?  I know that, for example, he initiated you into his . . . what was it called?

DS:

The Flying Fuckers.  He gave me a pin.    

GG:

Not exactly every mother's wholesome wish.

DS:

No.  She found that, years later, and threw it away.

GG:

That's too bad.  It would have been a piece of memorabilia.

DS:

I would have it in my lapel now.

GG:

What did it look like?

DS:

It was a beautiful handmade set of wings, with a little shield in the center with three interlocking Fs.  But when you turned the lapel the other way, it was a big fucking erection and balls that were held up.  You know, Flynn's Flying Fuckers – it was a very exclusive club.

GG:

And how did belonging make you feel?

DS:

Great.  Like any child who at some point in his life feels real acceptance from his father that the adult world is coming up, and that he's going to be part of it, and all his instincts are real, and there's nothing wrong with them.  He represented all of that to me.

He used to invite me into his dressing room, which meant more to me than I could ever express.  And I'm sure he didn't know how much that acceptance by him meant to me.  And he would talk and talk and talk, and I don't even remember what he said.  He would sit there with a big glass full of vodka and sip it like a baron until they called us to work, and then he would down it.  He'd do a scene and go back to the dressing room and fill it up again.  There were a few other figures I felt a similar thing from.  Joel McCrea and Richard Widmark, for example – they had an understanding that they extended to me that was even and solid and accepting and fair and loving and good.  I never felt that they were aware of it; it was just in their nature, and I loved them very much for it.  I still do.  Errol, on the other hand, was aware of it as well, and that made it even more charming and more beautiful.

GG:

At age 16, when you graduated high school, you went on to the University of California at Berkeley, where your brother was enrolled.

DS:

But I didn't really have something I wanted to study.  I was just going there to get away from my work.  And then whatever little avenue opened up, I would take.  Until 1957, I worked odd jobs, bumming around the country alone.

GG:

You returned to Hollywood in 1957.  What brought you back? 

DS:

I had nothing else I could do.  I thought I would try to go into acting again as an adult, since that was the only way I had to earn a living, other than continuing to do odd jobs.

GG:

I have a question about money.

DS:

I can't lend you anything right now.

GG:

Well, I wanted to know about $25,500 that you went to pick up in 1957.  It really strikes me that you got ripped off.  

DS:

Why?  How many children that were actors got big payoffs?   

GG:

Well, very few, actually.

DS:

I did well compared to other people.  But some of my relatives hired bad accountants, so I ended up paying all this tax money out of my bonds when I shouldn't have.  All in all I ended up with a little over $20,000 due to me when I was 21. 

GG:

But at the same time, the adults you were acting with may have been getting . . . who knows, ten, fifteen, twenty grand a week. 

DS:

Now, the interesting thing is, that continued, in a sense, in my early adulthood.  When I did starring roles in Compulsion, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and Sons and Lovers, I got between $10,000 and $15,000 for each.  But with Sons and Lovers, I was attracted to the depth of the project, to D. H. Lawrence and that whole thing.  That area has always had a lot of meaning for me, so I said yes and overlooked that I was being underpaid.

GG:

You received two Best Actor awards at Cannes and a Golden Globe for Sons and Lovers, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and Compulsion.

DS:

I was doing serious acting, but I still didn't enjoy it and I didn't appreciate it.

GG:

You burned the awards you received in Cannes, didn't you? 

DS:

Yeah, later, in the early '70s, I burned them in a fire.

GG:

What did they look like?

DS:

They're not very attractive.  That's one of the reasons I burned them.  Also, I was drunk and very emotional and stupid, you know.  Besides, I didn't have any children at the time, so there was no reason to keep these parchment scrolls.

GG:

In the early '60s you lost interest in acting again.

DS:

After I had finished Compulsion, I called my agent and said, "Forget it.  I'm not going to work."  And I didn't work for three years. 

GG:

What was it that drove you out again?  

DS:

It was the revolution – the psychedelic revolution.  I decided to stop working and be part of it. 

GG:

What were you doing with yourself?  Were you dropping acid and getting stoned?

DS:

I may have taken some acid.  I was stoned.  Dennis Hopper and I hung out a lot, later on, in the '70s.  We were bad news together.  [laughs]

GG:

When did you hook up with Dennis Hopper?

DS:

I met him in 1958 in New York, when I was doing Compulsion onstage.  He came to see it, and he and Roddy and I went out for coffee afterward.  I met him again in the '60s when we did a television show together – Jack Palance's The Greatest Show On Earth.  It was sort of an insipid piece, and we survived by forming a friendship.  And we used to see each other around what emerged as the scene in the '60s, in all sorts of different places.  I ran into him just after he had finished Easy Rider, and he was trying to decide between buying a ranch in Nevada, in the Sierras, or buying the Mabel Dodge Luhans house in Taos, New Mexico – he had made some money on Easy Rider.  Now, I had been to Taos in '60, with Sons and Lovers, and had become fascinated with what Lawrence had to say about this place.  When Dennis was shooting Easy Rider on location, he shot in Taos.  I think both of us have a very strong link with that particular spot on the globe.  And after he had indeed moved there, we would hang out and terrorize Taos together. 

GG:

How did you guys terrorize Taos?

DS:

Well, I don't really feel disposed to go into particulars, but someone who had been in Taos at the time would tell you that Dennis and I were wild men.  You know, we were really just crazy . . . something far beyond free spirits.  I remember Dennis telling me that this guy – he'll remain nameless – once came up and said to Dennis, "I always thought you were the biggest asshole in Taos, but now I know it's this other guy" – meaning me.

GG:

Did you want to make movies then?

DS:

Oh, yeah, desperately.  But nothing came, hardly anything.  I remember us both crying on each other's shoulders about it.  We're quite different now.  I mean, we're the same people, but our modus operandi is radically different.  You could use clichés and say our feet are on the ground and we're centered, but really we've just found another level of maturity, especially in our perspective on our work.

As I went into my forties, there was still something very, very profound missing from my life experience.  Something that I had thought about through most of my life and had, at times, come to the conclusion that I would forgo.  And that was the experience of raising a family.  At a certain point, I changed my mind.  I met the right woman, my dear wife, Joy, and decided to raise a family.  That event has had a considerable effect on my life.  I had never really had any goals.  I've never had the goal to win an Academy Award or any of that.  But once I had made the decision to raise a family, all of a sudden I became goal oriented, for the first time.  That has fueled my life completely ever since.  Fulfilled me.  Now I save everything for my children.  Now I have something to work for.  Frankly, I want to do nothing but work.  I've accepted virtually every offer that's come up.  And the best of them have been that out-on-the-cutting-edge, avant-garde, if you will, type of film.

GG:

How did you find working with Miguel Littin, the Chilean exile director, on Alcino and the Condor?

DS:

He's a brilliant director and a wonderful man.

GG:

How did you get involved in that project?  You went to film in Nicaragua when the revolution was one year old. 

DS:

Originally, they wanted Dennis, and Dennis was unavailable.  Somehow we are linked as representative of the same type of element.  The day that I arrived in Nicaragua, the headlines in the paper were the first open statement from the U. S. Administration that it was considering invading Nicaragua.  And I was there to play an ugly American in this film.  

GG:

When you first met David Lynch down in Mexico City, he apparently gave you the once-over because, he later said, he had thought you were dead. 

DS:

Well, I didn't notice that he was giving me the once-over.  I didn't even notice his reaction.  The next time I spoke to him, he said, "I'm sorry if I appeared a little flustered.  The reason for it is that I thought you were dead."

GG:

So at that point in your career, it was possible for someone to think you had –

DS:

Yeah.  Oh, yeah.  I remember someone telling me that they'd been at a production meeting where the people were saying, "We need a Dean Stockwell type for this role."  When I couldn't get a fucking job, I would hear this.  [laughs].

GG:

Where did your character, Ben, the chanteur lip-syncing Roy Orbison's "In Dreams," figure in?

DS:

Someone said that it was alien humor taken to a high and new order.

GG:

What does that mean?

DS:

I don't know . . . That role was not described in the screenplay.  It said, "Ben says this and this there."  So I just flashed on it and made it up.  I sort of knew what David Lynch wanted, what his vision is.  I feel a sympathy for it, there is a weird correspondence there.  I was always confident that the direction my intuition took me in was in line with what he was after for that sort of role.  

GG:

That character was your invention?

DS:

Yeah, everything.  The makeup, the wardrobe, everything. 

GG:

The funny thing about Blue Velvet is that it's reminiscent of Shadow Of a Doubt – Hitchcock.  Joseph Cotten plays the beloved and revered Uncle Charlie, who comes back to his family house in a small town, and he turns out to be the Merry Widower.  He's the one killing all these women, and that's what's behind the picket fence of Norman Rockwell's America.  Hitchcock was uncovering the devastation that lay beneath the bland surface.

Tell me about Married To the Mob.  I understood that when Jonathan Demme flew you out to New York to audition for Tony Russo, your character, you didn't read, because you thought it would be the kiss of death.  Was that superstition or paranoia or just empiricism?

DS:

It's empiricism.  This goes back to the '60s and '70s, the emergence of a new little power structure:  the casting agencies.  They would have a position of power within the company, and people didn't get jobs unless they read.  And I read for a lot of things because I always wanted to work, and I had no option.  I either read for it or I didn't.  So I went and I read, and I never got the part.  I never got a part in my life that I read for.  And I'm talking about a lot of things.  Readings are an agonizing experience for me.

GG:

So did Demme just cast you on faith?  

DS:

That's right.  I'll always be grateful to Jonathan for taking this step, because before Married To the Mob, no one had ever thought of me for this type of role.  It's a romantic comedy, and I play a charismatic guy who chases after women and who people are afraid of, and it's charming and funny.  Prior to that, everyone always thought of me as this serious actor who plays psychotics and neurotics and sensitive people.  In fact, my real nature is more in the direction of this character in Married To the Mob.  Demme was able to see that – without a reading.  I'll forever be indebted to him.

GG:

Palais Royale is in the same vein . . . . 

DS:

Yes.  Again, I play a don.  The nature of both of these films is light, comedic.  I've always had a feel for that and had very few opportunities to do it.  They're sexy characters; they're humorous characters.  There's a bit of a threat in them; there's power to them.  They're strong; they're full-blooded.  I just found them fuckin' wonderful.  I also felt – in fact I was certain beforehand – that the performances would be responded to in a like manner.

My dear friend and creative cohort Dennis Hopper just returned from New Mexico two days ago, after finishing principal photography on Backtrack, which I'm in, by the way.  Starring Dennis, directed by Dennis, with Jodie Foster, Joe Pesci, Vincent Price, and me.  It also involves the mob.  And again I play a member of the mob.  The Consigliere, the lawyer.

GG:

What is this preoccupation with the Mafia?

DS:

We like the mob and we fear them.  They've become a modern archetype in this country.

GG:

Do you personally relate to that?

DS:

Oh, yeah.  I find that I am susceptible to the fascination for them that everyone else has, though I don't particularly like them.  I don't admire them, and I'd rather they were off the planet. 

GG:

Did you read about the mob?

DS:

No, I don't read up on parts.  In my normal curiosity, I had read a number of books involving those figures, like The Godfather.  You can't avoid having that image intrude into your life.  I rely mostly on my imagination when I do a role.  I did Howard Hughes in Tucker, and I didn't go read about him.  I've seen Howard Hughes enough.  I've seen pictures of him, newsreels of him, and I've read a few things about him.  I just use my imagination about where the guy would be coming from and what he'd be like.

GG:

At least in these roles you get to smoke a cigar and you don't have to pretend. 

DS:

I've never pretended I smoke a cigar; even as a kid I smoked it. 

GG:

You also ate some form of camel shit as a kid, didn't you?

DS:

No, I didn't eat any camel shit.  Where did you hear that? 

GG:

On Kim, Errol Flynn had a bet –

DS:

It had nothing to do with eating camel shit.  It was supposed to be food for the holy man that was dying, and I was supposed to look and make sure the food was all right.  And Errol handed me a bowl full of camel shit in a take to see if he could break me up, and he didn't.  He lost 500 bucks.  Too bad, Errol.