7In the late 1920s the film actress Gloria Swanson, boasting that her annual expenses included $25,000 for fur coats, $50,000 for gowns, $9,000 for stockings, $10,000 for lingerie, $5,000 for handbags and $6,000 for perfumes, explained to a Hollywood magazine that the public expected film stars to live like kings and queens. "So we did - and why not?" she shrugged. "We were making more money than we ever dreamed existed and there was no reason to believe it would ever stop."
It didn't stop: it just got crazier. Over the past 75 years Hollywood has lost whatever fleeting connection to reality it may once have possessed, and become more outlandish than one of its own storylines. During the boom years of the 1980s, in particular - fuelled by a relentless publicity machine and underwritten by vast quantities of dollars - the film industry hurtled to unprecedented heights, creating, along the way, a cast of real-life monsters far scarier than fictional fiends such as Godzilla or Dracula could ever hope to be.
One such was the producer Don Simpson, the man who is generally credited with inventing the kind of film now known as the high-concept blockbuster; and in a biography which is less a study of Simpson's life and work than a deliciously whole-hearted dive into decadence, the Los Angeles-based reporter Charles Fleming has opened up some gloriously repellent cans of Hollywood worms, shining his torch not just on sleazy sex and rampant drugtaking, but also on the chaotic, panicky and often totally inept way in which films get made.
So what is a "high-concept blockbuster"? Well, think Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, Con Air. Exciting event followed by crisis followed by triumph, redemption and a happy-ever-after freezeframe ending. A hero who comes out on top despite incredible odds. Non-stop action, gallons of testosterone and a pounding soundtrack - or, as Fleming puts it, "a movie that any producer could pitch in 30 seconds and any audience could understand without even thinking . . . the bigscreen equivalent of the popcorn served in the lobby: tasty, devoid of nourishment, free of any resonance."
And who was Don Simpson? Well, he was the guy who, with his partner Jerry Bruckheimer, made those high-concept blockbusters, and more besides: Flashdance, Days Of Thunder, Bad Boys and The Rock, among others. On the walls of his Stone Canyon home he kept framed photocopies of the million-dollar cheques which represented part of his earnings - part of his earnings, mark you, for Fleming calculates that between 1983 and 1990, Simpson made six movies and $40 million. His fame in the movie world, and notoriety outside it, stemmed partly from this phenomenal success, though the fact that he was the first Hollywood producer to employ a personal publicist - who he expected to arrange the nitty-gritty details of his life, like being "mobbed" by French film fans as he arrived at the Deauville festival - undoubtedly helped.
Simpson's personal appetites were legendary - and we're not talking here about his well-documented penchant for eating a jar of peanut butter at a sitting. When he was making Top Gun, according to a former assistant, "He was split between the cocaine and the alcohol. At 4 p.m., he'd start on the 25-year-old Macallan. He'd be so loaded he could hardly walk. Then at five or so, he'd start on the cocaine. He'd spend the whole afternoon in and out of the bathroom." That was in 1985. A decade later Simpson decided to clean up his act. In the summer of 1995 he hired a doctor, Stephen Ammerman, to come to live with him in an attempt to beat his addiction to illegal drugs - but the detox plan went slightly awry when Ammerman was found dead in Simpson's bathroom, having injected himself with four times the lethal amount of prescription-strength morphine.
The L.A.P.D. detective David Miller discovered that for the three-week period prior to Ammerman's death, Simpson's bill for prescription drugs at one pharmacy alone amounted to $12,902. That was at one pharmacy, using only his own name: when he added the multiple aliases, nine doctors and the eight or so pharmacies Simpson was known to use regularly, Miller came up with a total of $75,000 a month for painkillers, antidepressants, anxiety medications - and dozens of other drugs used to treat the side-effects caused by the mix-and-match cocktail.
Self-discipline was never Simpson's strong point though he was, if Fleming is to be believed, partial to inflicting quite a lot of discipline on the women in his life. These were almost always hired for the occasion, but Simpson was unabashed about his dependence on prostitutes. "I don't pay them to come," Fleming quotes him as saying of the call girls, duly noting the double entendre. "I pay them to leave."
A handsome man whose physical equipment was, as one female associate assured Fleming, "more than adequate", Simpson nevertheless spent a small fortune on plastic surgery. In one six-year period he had collagen implants in his cheeks and chin, a forehead lift and a restructuring of the eyebrows, liposuction to flatten his belly, a buttock lift, collagen injections in his lips and injections of fat into his penis. The latter operation is known as a girth enhancement, takes 15 minutes and costs $2,500. And when, as in Simpson's case, it goes wrong, boy, does it go wrong. As Simpson's former driver explained to the author: "It had turned all black-and-blue, and it was very painful. There was a lot of swelling and fever. In the end they had to take out whatever it was they put in there . . . "
Not quite the desired result, to put it mildly. In the end Don Simpson - who had wanted all his life not just to hire the stars but to be a star - turned into an uncanny Elvis look-alike, refusing to go out because he didn't want anyone to see how much weight he had gained, living on a mixture of drugs and junk food, dying on the loo while reading a biography of Oliver Stone. Hollywood wept and held memorial services; but reading this biography, it's hard not to agree with the man who met him while he was in detox on a health farm. "He was," he said, "the epitome - as a successful man, as a representative of Hollywood, as a male animal - of the kind of person who made your skin crawl."
High Concept: Don Simpson And The Hollywood culture Of excess, by Charles Fleming, is published by Bloomsbury at £16.99 in UK