Gene Hackman, 95, the Greatest Movie Actor of His Generation, His Second Wife, Classical Pianist Betsy Arakawa, 64, and Their Dog, All Found Dead in Their New Mexico Home, under Highly Suspicious Circumstances
“Hackman, it’s always Hackman,” said my chief of research, when I asked him who “the secret star” was.
He was the most brilliant of a grand generation of American movie actors; he was a veteran who had lied in order to enter the U.S. Marine Corps at 16, where he served his country for four years; and he was written off by his fellow classmates and teachers at the Pasadena Playhouse, as the worst student in the history of the famous acting school. He ultimately won two Oscars, was nominated five times, and should have been nominated several more times.
“No foul play is suspected and no cause of death has been announced.
“Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza confirmed the news on Thursday.
“Hackman was one of the most accomplished actors of all time, thanks to star turns in The French Connection, Bonnie and Clyde and The Royal Tenenbaums….
“Hackman is survived by his wife, retired classical pianist Betsy Arakawa, whom he married in 1991; and three children, Christopher, Elizabeth Jean and Leslie Anne, with his late ex-wife, Faye Maltese.”
Hackman made no “star turn” in Bonnie and Clyde; the movie’s stars were Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. Hackman played a supporting role, and was nominated for an Oscar for the first time, for Best Supporting Actor.
And he wasn’t survived by his wife.
(Media outlets typically have obituaries prepared for famous figures many years before their deaths, which they update when they get the word, with cause and place of death. But it is the copyeditor’s job to ensure that a howler like saying that the decedent was survived by his equally dead wife, is corrected.)
If you wanted to speak of “star turns” which contributed to his legendary career, you wouldn’t speak of Bonnie and Clyde or The Royal Tenenbaums (though he did star in the latter movie). You’d speak of Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), a re-make of Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966).
You’d speak of Scarecrow (1973).
You’d speak of Mississippi Burning (1988).
You’d speak of Unforgiven (1992).
You’d speak of Enemy of the State (1998).
In my undergrad acting textbook, Respect for Acting, by the legendary German actress, Uta Hagen, Hagen spoke of the two extreme types of theatrical performers, Italian Eleonora Duse (1858-1924) and French Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923). La Duse was the ultimate internal actress, while Bernhardt was the ultimate external actress. Hackman was both.
You didn’t see much of the internal Hackman, but one picture was all Duse. In The Conversation, as private intelligence operative Harry Caul, the best in the business, he played a man who is terrified of the world eavesdropping on him. And with good reason.
Once, Harry pulled off the impossible. The crooked, top two officials of a labor union would go fishing in a rowboat, so they could have private conversations without being eavesdropped on. Without being anywhere near them, Harry managed to somehow record their conversation.
It was bloody murder, and Harry has been paranoid and guilty ever since. Except he’s not paranoid.
In contemporary San Francisco, where Harry lives, a corporate CEO (Robert Duvall) hires Harry to surveil his pretty, young wife (Cindy Williams) and the young executive in the husband’s firm (Frederic Forrest, with whom Coppola became obsessed), with whom the wife was having a scorching hot love affair.
One day, while Harry follows the couple around alternately with his operatives, an obnoxious mime in grease paint working the area stalks Harry for a bit, while a girl sings Harry M. Woods’ huge 1926 hit, “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along,” accompanied by a live band.
That night, Harry visits his pretty, young, blonde lover (Terri Garr) in her apartment. He has refused to tell her his name, give her his address, or even his phone number. And yet walking around the apartment, she sings to herself, “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along.” It’s impossible for that to be a coincidence!
The Conversation bombed (I watched it in the virtually empty Lido Theater in my hometown of Long Beach), but such was the esteem in which the Motion Picture Academy held Coppola, then the King of Hollywood, that it nominated him for Oscars for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, and Walter Murch and Art Rochester for Best Sound.
But the academy slighted Hackman, who had given the performance of the year, not even nominating him for Best Actor.
Coppola lied, in asserting that he was inspired to make The Conversation by Watergate burglar and former FBI/CIA agent, James McCord, when McCord came out in 1973 and blew up the Watergate case. And indeed, Hackman resembled McCord! There was the same General Issue London Fog raincoat, the same dark mustache, the same bald head with hair slicked back on the sides, the same cheaters, about the same height. But Hackman gave an interview on a talk show in 1974, in which he said that Coppola had made the picture before The Godfather (1972).
Ah, Coppola. He’s one of Hollywood’s great “raconteurs”!
Why did Coppola lie about the inspiration for The Conversation? Because Antonioni would have sued him for plagiarizing Blow-Up!
In Scarecrow, Hackman and Al Pacino put on one of the greatest acting duets I’ve ever seen. Hackman was Max, a tall, powerful man with no sense of humor but a violent temper that keeps getting him thrown into jail. But Max has a dream of opening his own car wash, and has just about saved enough to do it.
Pacino plays Lion, a little boy-man who is completely irresponsible, and unable to cope with the brutality of life—and boy does life dish him up some brutality. And yet, Lion is able to make Max laugh. Max is so grateful to him for that gift that he will sacrifice anything for him, for the rest of their lives.
In Mississippi Burning (1988), Hackman played a completely unbelievable FBI agent, a Southern good ‘ol boy, paired off with an equally unbelievable colleague, a politically correct Northerner, played by Willem Dafoe. (The idea was surely to give two opposing viewpoints on the murders.) The agents were investigating the very real 1964 murders of young, civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner (the first black, the last two Jews) in Philadelphia, Mississippi by the Klan, in an agitprop exercise by scriptwiter Chris Gerolmo and Englishman Alan Parker.
Hackman rose above the tawdry material, and was nominated for the second time for the Oscar for Best Actor.
In 1992, he stole the show in Unforgiven, which starred the founder of the catatonic school of acting, who had proved himself a gifted producer-director. However, not only did Catatonic get script girls he was shtupping to smuggle the best scripts (like David Webb Peoples’ script that became Unforgiven) out of Warner Brothers’ vaults for him, but I suspect they were also giving him secret acting lessons.
Nihilistic, leftwing, Village Voice movie critic, Jim Hoberman, described Hackman’s heroic character, sheriff Little Bill Daggett, as “the bad guy,” and Catatonic’s character, the mass-murdering, bank-robbing William Munny, as the good guy!
In Unforgiven, Hackman played it right down the middle, between Duse and Bernhart, and won his second Oscar, for Best Supporting Actor.
In Enemy of the State (1998), Hackman got to play Harry Caul again, albeit under a different name.
Jon Voight plays an evil intelligence chief who is leaving dead bodies all over Washington, and who seeks to murder powerful labor lawyer Will Smith. Smith was in way over his head. He was much too young for his role, and in any event, lacked the necessary gravitas. Hackman’s Harry Caul—no longer crippled by guilt—saves Smith’s character’s life, and Hackman saves the movie.
Uncredited cameos
Young Frankenstein (1974): Hackman played a wandering village blind man. The other day I saw someone claim that he “starred” in this Mel Brooks masterpiece.
Postcards from the Edge (1990): Carrie Fisher’s (Meryl Streep) female drug dealer is hanging around the set of her newest movie. The director (Hackman) throws the dealer off the set, and announces, “Does anyone else need to be arrested or murdered?”
I read that Hackman based the director on Dick Donner, with whom he’d made the first two Superman movies, in which Hackman played heavy Lex Luthor. And Hackman sat down with a dialect coach, in order to get one line right as Lex: “Ja wohl.”
Along the way, Hackman picked a lot of bad scripts.
But to return to the crime scene.
“No foul play is suspected and no cause of death has been announced.
“Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza confirmed the news on Thursday.”
Of course, foul play is suspected! When you find a couple dead the way Hackman and his wife were found (not to mention their dog), there are only four possible explanations.
1. Murder-suicide: One of the spouses murdered the other, killed the dog, and then committed suicide.
2. Murder-murder: They killed the dog, and then each other (this is the least likely scenario).
3. Accidental deaths of both spouses and the dog, due to a malfunctioning heater.
4. The murders of both spouses and the killing of the dog, by a home invader (also extremely unlikely).
Now, we wait to see if the authorities will fess up. In any event, the continued news will be very bad.
Award-winning, New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix founded A Different Drummer magazine (1989-93). Stix has written for Die Suedwest Presse, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Middle American News, Toogood Reports, Insight, Chronicles, the American Enterprise, Campus Reports, VDARE, the Weekly Standard, Front Page Magazine, Ideas on Liberty, National Review Online and the Illinois Leader. His column also appears at Men's News Daily, MichNews, Intellectual Conservative, Enter Stage Right and OpinioNet. Stix has studied at colleges and universities on two continents, and earned a couple of sheepskins, but he asks that the reader not hold that against him. His day jobs have included washing pots, building Daimler-Benzes on the assembly-line, tackling shoplifters and teaching college, but his favorite job was changing his son's diapers.
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