Sweet Clark got here to Hollywood on the first light of the seventies, a spunky twentysomething who’d fled her conservative Texas house the city and brought up modelling in New York. Despite the fact that she used to be detached to appearing, she nabbed a component, as a boxer’s female friend, within the John Huston movie “Fats Town,” plus a movie-star beau—her co-star, Jeff Bridges. She settled into Bridges’s Malibu house however stored a bungalow off Fountain Street, just about auditions. She used to be solid in “American Graffiti,” George Lucas’s 2d movie, a few team of sixties teenagers at the eve of maturity, motoring round Modesto, California, on a late-summer evening. Clark performed Debbie Dunham, a bombshell in a platinum bouffant who hops in a Chevy with a dweeby admirer, in search of journey. Her castmates incorporated the younger Richard Dreyfuss, Harrison Ford, and Ron Howard (billed as Ronny). With out realizing it—nobody did, actually—she’d landed sq. within the generation that might turn into recognized, and far mythologized, because the New Hollywood. Anywhere she went, she took her Polaroid digicam.
Sweet Clark photographed by way of Ed Ruscha within the wasteland, circa 1976.{Photograph} by way of Ed Ruscha / Courtesy the artist
Ed Ruscha.{Photograph} by way of Sweet Clark
A life-time later, Clark has launched “Tight Heads,” a selection of her Polaroids from the seventies and early eighties. She’d dug them up in a spare bed room at her area in Los Angeles, on the behest of the author Sam Candy, who used to be interviewing Angelenos for his undertaking All Night time Menu and who become the guide’s editor and writer. “Hollywood is a historical past of fellows taking a look at girls via cameras,” Candy writes in his advent. “By no means had the lens been became on them by way of the ingénue. Beneath Sweet’s gaze, the swashbuckling icons of Hollywood legend turn into blameless.” Clark’s closeups of acquainted faces—Steven Spielberg, Carrie Fisher, David Bowie—have the tossed-off intimacy of a extra freewheeling time, when the events (and the medicine) had been abundant, and everybody used to be “simply children.”
Carrie Fisher.{Photograph} by way of Sweet Clark
Richard Dreyfuss.{Photograph} by way of Sweet Clark
“The floating birthday celebration—you met everybody,” Clark stated not too long ago, after I met her for lunch at Smoke Space, a Burbank eating place that’s been round because the forties. We sat in a red-leather banquette, and Clark pulled out an outdated Polaroid SX-70 photograph album. She opened it to a shot of younger Sweet, mendacity on a ground with a backgammon board and a bottle of Kahlúa. “Jeff Bridges introduced that Kahlúa and milk into ‘The Giant Lebowski,’ when he used to be the Dude,” she stated. “He took so much from our existence in combination.” In “Tight Heads,” each and every portrait is accompanied by way of Clark’s breezy, half-remembered impressions of her topics. Spielberg: “I had a bit overwhelm on him however he had no passion. Didn’t even make it to first base.” Dreyfuss: “He had simply damaged up with a female friend previous to doing the film and spent numerous time crying in his mattress. No longer actual a laugh.” Anjelica Huston: “A type of people who find themselves so sublime that you just’re all the time a bit intimidated even if they’re being pleasant.”
Anjelica Huston (with unknown significant other).{Photograph} by way of Sweet Clark
Clark grew up in Citadel Price, with an alcoholic father and 4 more youthful brothers, constrained by way of poverty and conformity. “You needed to be like the following particular person to be appropriate—or authorised,” she recalled. At nineteen, she and a chum heard that the Dallas Attire Mart used to be in search of fashions. A gross sales rep there informed her, “When you’re ever in New York, glance me up.” She purchased a one-way price ticket on a nighttime Pan Am flight. Quickly, she used to be modelling in Seventeen and Glamour. In 1970, she used to be an additional in a Dustin Hoffman movie, “Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Announcing The ones Horrible Issues About Me?” It used to be simple cash, and it led her to the casting director Fred Roos, who let her sit down in on his display screen assessments for “The Godfather.” “Met Francis Coppola, watched Jimmy Caan do his display screen check,” she recalled, nonchalantly. Roos invited her to L.A. to audition for “Fats Town,” and she or he agreed below two stipulations: “I need to cross to the Academy Awards and Disneyland.” She watched the Oscars from the balcony, via a couple of binoculars. When she examined for the film, reverse Bridges, it used to be “love to start with sight.”
Sweet Clark, photographed by way of Jeff Bridges at his house in Malibu.{Photograph} by way of Jeff Bridges / Courtesy the artist
A yr later, Clark shot “American Graffiti” in Petaluma, with everybody staying at a resort, together with the “dangerous boys”: Harrison Ford, Paul Le Mat, and Bo Hopkins. “There used to be a Vacation Inn revolving signal, and there can be beer bottles at the most sensible of it, so we’d all be gossiping about them and what they did the evening ahead of,” she stated. In 1974, she used to be again on the Oscars, this time as a Highest Supporting Actress nominee, for “American Graffiti,” dressed in a white pleated get dressed with a turquoise boa and accompanied by way of Bridges. She misplaced to a ten-year-old—Tatum O’Neal, for “Paper Moon”—however hadn’t anticipated to win. Via then, Clark used to be neatly into her Polaroid addiction. “I carried that digicam with me, and the rationale that I felt I may just do this used to be on account of Andy Warhol,” she defined. “He used to be a celebrity, and no one perceived to thoughts.” She liked the “magic” second when the gang would huddle round to observe the picture seem: “Everyone sought after to peer it arise.”
Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg.{Photograph} by way of Sweet Clark
George Lucas.{Photograph} by way of Sweet Clark
Lunch arrived, and Clark surfed in the course of the album, time-travelling. George Lucas: “Introverted, quiet.” LeVar Burton: “I all the time felt like he had a overwhelm on me.” Carrie Fisher: “In point of fact witty and fast, and she or he’s were given a bit hors d’œuvre of shrimp in her palms.” There used to be Bowie, in Nicolas Roeg’s “The Guy Who Fell to Earth” (1976), as an alien with faded pores and skin and carrot-colored hair. Clark dated Roeg after Bridges, and he solid her as the girl who introduces Bowie to gin and intercourse. (Roeg were given her addicted to Tanqueray-and-tonics.) There used to be a shirtless shot of some other paramour, the artist Ed Ruscha (“similar to my persona, however no longer as chatty”), whom she met at a birthday celebration. Some other confirmed Tony Sirico, whom she’d met in New York when he used to be a night-club bouncer, years ahead of taking part in Paulie Walnuts on “The Sopranos.” “I didn’t know his dream used to be to be an actor,” Clark stated. “In the midst of iciness, he’d have white slip-on patent-leather footwear and not using a socks.”
Tony Sirico.{Photograph} by way of Sweet Clark
Teri Garr.{Photograph} by way of Sweet Clark
As winsome as most of the footage are, others emanate a definite darkness, detectable simplest in hindsight: Roman Polanski, no longer but a fugitive; O. J. Simpson, Clark’s co-star within the 1983 TV film “Cocaine and Blue Eyes,” dancing with Nicole Brown at Clark’s celebration. Clark had portraits of Teri Garr and Robin Williams, her castmates within the first episode of “Faerie Story Theatre,” from 1982, wherein Williams performed the frog prince and Clark performed the queen. Clark and Williams had a fling, whilst he used to be nonetheless married to his first spouse and had a cocaine drawback. (In keeping with Clark, he known as it “marching powder.”) Clark herself used to be ingesting so much on the time and later went to A.A. She recalls telling Williams that she’d gotten sober. He requested, earnestly, “Is it arduous?”
Robin Williams and his son, Zak.{Photograph} by way of Sweet Clark
LeVar Burton.{Photograph} by way of Sweet Clark
“You get started out on equivalent footing, after which some cross this manner, some hit the skids, some blossom and turn into billionaires,” Clark mirrored. She’s acted incessantly within the intervening many years, in tasks corresponding to “Magnum, P.I.” and the 2017 revival of “Dual Peaks”; she moved to New Jersey within the past due eighties after which returned to California within the two-thousands, lengthy after the rambunctious New Hollywood of her early life were enshrined in nostalgia. No longer everybody she knew then become well-known. One photograph presentations an vintage broker named Eddie Dodson, who had a shop on Melrose Street. “After hours, he would lock the door, and also you’d deliver out the cocaine and the marijuana, and it used to be an actual hangout position,” Clark recalled. Years later, Dodson went to jail for financial institution theft, then were given out and stored robbing banks. “Within the interim, he in some way were given a role as a caretaker at Jack Nicholson’s belongings,” she stated. “How’d that occur?”
Eddie Dodson.{Photograph} by way of Sweet Clark
She regarded as the ones days, free and glamorous and a bit bad, and sighed, “In some way, as stoned as everybody used to be, we controlled to get some nice artwork in the market.”
