She captured some of the most famous faces. Then she put them in a drawer

The actress Candy Clark documented her unlikely journey through 1970s Hollywood in a series of Polaroids, now published in a memoir.

Jeff Bridges taught her how to drive in his Volkswagen bus. Steven Spielberg refused to flirt with her. She successfully talked actor Rip Torn out of assaulting director Nicolas Roeg on a movie set. While lying on a beach in Mexico with painter Ed Ruscha, she was grazed by a stray bullet on the thigh. Once, she pinched David Bowie’s nipples.

In Los Angeles, a city built on oversize lore and swaggering legend, where does one file away stories like these? Revealing but not gossipy. Candid but not lurid. Occasionally surreal but consistently sweet.

“It’s a confessional era, right?” said Candy Clark, a former actress who wears a neat blonde bob and Warby Parker glasses, sitting in a booth at the Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood, California. It was a Sunday afternoon, and Clark – the one behind the wheel of Bridges’ van, the starlet who tried to flirt with Spielberg, the peacemaker, the bullet-wound victim and the nipple-twisting culprit – was nibbling on pita and hummus.

Dodging a life of mundane midcentury expectations, she started a modelling career in New York and went on to become a darling of the “New Hollywood” era in the 1970s. During her five decades onscreen, she collected over 80 film and television credits, establishing herself as a ubiquitous face who played mostly free-spirited lovers and burnouts like Debbie Dunham in American Graffiti, the part that earned Clark an Oscar nomination. It was her second-ever acting role.

“It was my arrival,” she said, recalling the nomination. “You’re just the centre of the universe, and it’s really wonderful.”

If she ever begins to doubt that all of these things happened to her, she can flip through the stack of photos she took on a small SX-70 Polaroid camera, which she used to capture life on sets with the likes of John Huston and George Lucas.

Clark’s glossy Polaroids, and her laconic anecdotes about the famous faces in her world, have been gathered for the first time in the book “Tight Heads,” published last month. It’s both a visual memoir of the actor’s charmed life and a document of a halcyon cultural moment, when directors had free rein, an independent spirit flourished and a girl from a small town with no acting experience could be discovered at a casting call.

The book is “not quite a tell-all,” she admitted. “It’s a tell-some.”

Born in Oklahoma and raised “poor” in Fort Worth, Texas, with four younger brothers, Clark likes to say that her childhood dreams were about attainable things. She wanted to be a secretary receptionist when she grew up. But after a chance encounter with a visitor from New York in 1968, Clark impulsively bought a $45 one-way plane ticket to the big city. She was 19 years old.

“I remember looking out the window at Manhattan and thinking, ‘I’m never going back,’” Clark, 77, said.

She started out working as a model in department stores, living on 50c a day. Eventually, she began modelling for magazines like Seventeen and Ingenue. Now and then she took work as an extra in films (for the free lunch).

Content with her newfound career, Clark initially resisted when casting director Fred Roos, whom she met while he was casting The Godfather, insisted she fly to Los Angeles to audition for Huston’s adaptation of the novel Fat City.

“I didn’t want to be an actor at all,” Clark said. “So I drove a hard bargain. I said, ‘I’ll fly out only if I can go to the Academy Awards and visit Disneyland.’”

Soon after, she was watching the Oscars through rented binoculars on the upper decks of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Days later, wearing a wide-brimmed hat with Disneyland printed across the front, she auditioned for Huston, Roos and the producer Ray Stark. The scene called for tears. Clark recalls trying to make sobbing noises while hiding behind the brim of her hat. Then she fled, assuming the audition had been a flop.

But Roos chased her down, asking her to try a screen test. As she tells it in the book, the good news made her burst into real tears. “I just want to be an extra!” she cried.

Clark spent the summer of 1971 filming Fat City in Stockton, California. When the cameras weren’t rolling, she and a troupe of young actors swigged tequila with Huston and tried the local Mexican food. During the shoot, Clark, who played Faye, the pregnant girlfriend of a struggling young boxer, became romantically involved with Bridges, who at 22 was just becoming a household name.

The pair moved into a stuccoed beach shack in Malibu, and spent the next four years cooking for friends and family, playing guitar and raising dogs and turtles. Elements of their relationship, Clark wrote, inspired Bridges’ performance as “the Dude” in The Big Lebowski, specifically their shared love for Kahlua and smoking grass. Bridges was less sure.

“I don’t remember the Kahlua so much,” he said. “But the pot, I do.”

Headshots

Bridges’ is the first face in Tight Heads. In the photo, he wears a boyish grin.

Beyond the A-listers and “big boy” directors, the 87 Polaroids in the book are a testament to Clark’s expansive social appetites. She cultivated a circle, mostly men, that included bestselling authors, dancers, agents, artists, screenwriters, rock stars and hotshot producers. To Clark, though, they were a small, tight-knit community of striving actors and artists who had not yet achieved mega-fame.

“The camera brought people together, and it was magical,” she said. “Everybody would gather around the film watching it develop. It wasn’t a cheap medium, so you couldn’t just fire off with your cellphone.”

For the last 50 years, the photos have sat largely untouched, tucked away in the drawer of an antique credenza in Clark’s Van Nuys ranch house.

“To me, they were just souvenirs,” Clark said.

But they piqued the curiosity of Sam Sweet, a Los Angeles archivist who, in the fall of 2022, asked Clark for an interview. During their conversation, Clark casually mentioned the trove of photos and offered to show him some.

Sweet was instantly struck by the stature of her subjects: an introverted Harrison Ford glaring at the camera, Robin Williams holding his newborn son in Griffith Park, a 20-something Anjelica Huston clutching a lover.

Clark seemed genuinely amused by each shot: “As if she was delighted that the life they depicted was actually her life,” Sweet, 42, said. “Like, ‘Can you believe this?’”

Sweet, who since 2014 had been running All Night Menu, an imprint focused on Los Angeles history, suggested she publish them with his press. He considers Tight Heads the whimsical antithesis to a book like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, the blistering expose of 1970s Hollywood by Peter Biskind.

“Rather than giving the illusion of impossibility, Candy’s photos place mythical figures on a tangible landscape,” Sweet writes in the book’s introduction. “Her scenes suggest that the real dreamworks of Hollywood are not locked behind the gates of Paramount.”

Warhol by way of Babitz

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As with all of the best chroniclers of Hollywood, Clark had a knack for dissolving the psychic barriers of celebrity, even as she was drawn to it.

“Candy always had a magnetic attraction to art and artists,” artist Ed Ruscha wrote by email. “She is very worldly without ever losing her roots.”

Clark had her share of famous flings, like ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov and actor William Hurt. Ruscha, whom Clark describes as having “Modigliani eyes,” was among her long-term boyfriends. Her social calendar included lunches with novelist Ray Bradbury and screenwriter Ivan Moffat, and Dodgers games with agent Irving Lazar.

Three years after her arrival in Hollywood, Clark made it to the Academy Awards again – this time not as a tourist, but as a nominee for her supporting role in American Graffiti, with Bridges on her arm. Clark had started a one-woman PR blitz for the nomination, spending US$1700 of her own money on quarter-page ads in trade publications. In the end, she lost to Tatum O’Neal, who, at age 10, became the youngest actor ever to win an Oscar.

Not long after, Clark came down with infectious hepatitis, spending a month in the hospital and almost a year recovering. After being out of the spotlight, her career struggled to get going again.

“You go back to zero, basically,” Clark said.

British director Nicholas Roeg gave Clark another shot after he met her at a beach party. Without an audition, Roeg – who would become another paramour of Clark’s – cast her in his twisted sci-fi social drama The Man Who Fell to Earth, opposite Bowie.

The film resulted in one of Clark’s most memorable roles as Mary-Lou, the lonely Oklahoma woman who introduces Bowie’s character, an extraterrestrial, to alcohol, sex and other earthly pleasures.

But as the “New Hollywood” years waned, free-spirited producers and directors no longer had carte blanche to realise their visions, narrowing opportunities for character actors like Clark. She found steady work on TV shows like Magnum PI, Matlock and Baywatch. (“Always playing the floozy,” Clark noted.) She also had a few side hustles in the 1980s and ’90s, briefly running a limousine service and producing a line of custom pillows for ABC Home and Carpet.

Occasionally, she found her way back on to the sets of her generation’s big directors, including for parts in David Fincher’s Zodiac, Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant and David Lynch’s reboot of Twin Peaks. Cheques for American Graffiti still come in. (When he made the film, Lucas agreed to split 1% of its profits with 10 of his actors, including Clark.)

She’d rather not cling to her past fame, though. Clark prefers to live in a present of her own design, hitting the estate sale circuit, collecting art, doting on her pet rat, Herman, and spending weekends with her boyfriend of 25 years.

But looking back occasionally isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

“I found out who I was putting this book together,” she said, “It’s a life full of a lot of yes.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Nathan Taylor Pemberton

Photographs by: Adali Schell

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