Jack Palance

Jack Palance enters the diary through the making of Tom Sullivan’s film in Montauk, where his imposing screen persona, casual approach to work, and off-camera drinking become part of the production’s texture. The entries present him less through biography than through a vivid contrast: a fifty-five-year-old actor whom the diarist thought looked thirty, appearing in a role selected for its rough, masculine quality.

Casting and Screen Persona

Tom Sullivan told Andy Warhol that the production had first considered Rod Steiger because the filmmakers wanted an older, butch actor. They called Palance, who had a farm in Pennsylvania. As Sullivan recounted it, Palance said he liked drinking and would take any role. The anecdote makes the casting sound pragmatic and personality-driven: the production wanted a particular kind of presence, and Palance was available and willing.

Palance played Rof, a character who had once managed Jayne Mansfield. Sullivan played Destin, a singer with a band. The diary supplies these details while Warhol was on location, placing Palance within a film whose plot also involved people running off with cocaine. Warhol was assigned a scene in which he took pictures of them without realizing what was happening.

Montauk: The Hotel and the Set

During the Montauk visit, Palance was staying at the yacht club hotel, but had already left because he hated the place and found its staff rude. Warhol and the others checked in there; after dinner, they went to a movie house in Southampton to watch footage from the previous day. Warhol thought the rushes looked somewhat promising, noting the airplane shots and Palance among the images. The hotel complaint and the trip to view the rushes give Palance a place in the practical, unsettled routines of location filming, not only in the film’s cast list.

The next morning Palance came into the house after being out drinking all night. Warhol recorded his age as fifty-five and remarked that he looked thirty. He was there with his dog, Patches, and his girlfriend. The brief observation juxtaposes the effects of the night before with the striking youthfulness Warhol perceived in him; it does not explain Palance’s habits beyond this particular episode.

A Performer Among Performers

Palance’s presence is part of a production in which Warhol himself was asked to act. The filmmakers moved Warhol’s scene to the beginning of the movie and gave him lines, but he judged his own performance harshly, saying he did not know how to act naturally. That self-consciousness contrasts with Palance’s established role as the butch older actor the filmmakers had sought, though the diary does not describe Palance’s performance in detail.

The entries offer a compact portrait built from casting talk, a hotel grievance, and a morning-after appearance. They show Palance as both a screen presence chosen for a specific type and a working actor encountered amid the ordinary inconveniences of a location shoot. The evidence remains episodic: it records his role, the story of how he was cast, and a few moments on set, rather than a broader account of his career or private life.