by Mark Harris
“Sex never changes,” replies Beatty.
“Only in America,” says Wynn. “In Denmark it changes….. Today if a guy wants to see some broads in bikinis, he don’t need no mail-order movie—he just goes down to the corner supermarket. If he wants real kicks, he goes to an Italian movie!”
Promise Her Anything appealed to Beatty for several reasons. It allowed him to costar with Caron, who plays his girlfriend, the mother of a little boy. It kept him in England; Seven Arts, which produced the movie, agreed to shoot it at Shepperton Studios, building sets that doubled, none too convincingly, as Greenwich Village, so that Caron could be near her children while her divorce was pending. And it had a patient and easygoing director in Hiller, whose recent film, the sharp, dark antiwar comedy The Americanization of Emily, Beatty had admired. “On Promise Her Anything, you could feel Warren as a director and producer,” says Hiller. “You could feel his grasp of movies increasing—he had an appetite for everything about it. I don’t think that he wanted to be doing the actual directing or producing yet, but he was very strong. There were times when he wanted something different than I wanted, but we’d talk it out.”6
When production ended in May 1965, Beatty, for the first time in a few years, could celebrate the end of a smooth and convivial shoot. And he liked living in London, which by then had transformed itself into a third entertainment capital. If Los Angeles was the home of movie and television production, and New York represented the energy of theater and publishing, London took the best of both cities and added to it a music scene that was having worldwide impact on fashion, photography, art, and, most of all, youth. A third of the city’s population was between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four, and the never-ending party roved from coffee bar to discotheque to gallery to town house to boutique, with playwrights and photographers, rock stars and fashion models, actors and directors, all intermingling along the way. The Beatles had just finished shooting Help! for United Artists (“it’s a rollicking, rollicking, happy, smash, uhh…what are the other words you say about films?” joked John Lennon).7 The Rolling Stones had just come on the scene to challenge them for the rock-and-roll throne; the Bond films had made Sean Connery an international star; Albert Finney, Richard Harris, Terence Stamp, Julie Christie, Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave, Tom Courtenay, and Michael Caine were all emerging; and whatever fusty, embalmed image American pop-culture consumers had once had of England was giving way to a sense that it was the new center of freedom, style, and sexual openness. Since almost every American studio maintained a base of operations there, London by the mid-1960s was also a thriving hub of film production, whether they were scruffy homegrown dramas or expensive studio undertakings that drew talent from Hollywood and Europe. “In a decade dominated by youth, London has burst into bloom. It swings,” declared Time. In such a spirited milieu, Caron became “unquestionably this season’s most with-it hostess,”8 and Beatty was right where he most enjoyed being—at the center of the action.
In the mid-1960s, real celebrity meant making it in all three cities, and as Warren Beatty was traveling across the Atlantic in one direction, Leslie Bricusse was working his way west. Bricusse was thirty-four, a composer and lyricist who had begun writing songs as a Cambridge University undergraduate, where his theater club collaborators included writer Frederic Raphael and director Jonathan Miller; their first effort together transferred to the West End when the three men were just nineteen years old. Bricusse met the rising pop singer Anthony Newley soon after that; they struck up a friendship and decided to write a musical together. They first tried adapting Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night, a project that foundered over their inability to obtain rights to the film (a problem that Stephen Sondheim was able to solve several years later with A Little Night Music). The effort left them each with a new nickname, obtained by dividing the last name of the director they so admired (Newley became “Newberg” and Bricusse became “Brickman”), and an undiminished determination to get a musical to the West End.9
Bricusse and Newley worked astonishingly fast. Ten weeks after they sat down together to begin writing Stop the World—I Want to Get Off, the show, starring Newley, opened in Manchester. The bare-bones production, budgeted at just £6,000,10 moved to London soon after and became an immediate success, powered by the belted-out ballads “What Kind of Fool Am I” and “Once in a Lifetime.” In 1962, Bricusse and Newley brought the musical to New York, where both men received Tony nominations. Bricusse and his wife, Yvonne, both enjoyed the party circuit, and given that Newley, his best friend, had just married Joan Collins, it was perhaps inevitable that the attractions of Los Angeles and the movie business started to tug at them.
Bricusse was not Arthur Jacobs’s or Dick Zanuck’s first choice to write Doctor Dolittle after Alan Jay Lerner was fired. With Mary Poppins making a tremendous amount of money, Jacobs had, even before dismissing Lerner, checked on the availability of Richard and Robert Sherman, the songwriting brothers who had composed the score for Poppins and had just won the Best Song Oscar for “Chim Chim Cher-ee.” But the Shermans were tied to Disney, and Jacobs realized that hiring Bricusse would solve a problem and save some money, since, unlike Lerner, he could write the film’s music as well as its lyrics and screenplay.11
A week before he fired Lerner, Jacobs sent Bricusse the Dolittle books and sounded him out; on May 6, Jacobs spent the day with him in San Francisco, where Bricusse was working on material for an ill-fated musical called Pickwick (an adaptation of The Pickwick Papers).12 Bricusse wanted to impress him—his second Broadway venture with Newley, The Roar of the Greasepaint—The Smell of the Crowd, had not received anything like the acclaim of Stop the World, and with Pickwick in trouble, the prospect of a Hollywood job and paycheck was auspiciously timed. Bricusse’s only previous work on a movie had been the amusingly overwrought lyrics for Shirley Bassey’s thunderous rendition of Goldfinger, but he knew how to work his way through a pitch meeting. During his meeting with Jacobs, Bricusse threw several suggestions for animal-related tunes on the table—many of which were actually concepts that he had come up with for an unfinished musical called Noah’s Ark—and also recommended the addition of a character that could serve as a female lead. The delighted producer responded by telling him, “I am here to change your life!”13
“Yesterday he had more specific ideas than the other gent has had in 14 months to think about it,” Jacobs told Zanuck in a memo. He added, perhaps too optimistically, that Rex Harrison “is a great fan” and also noted the approval of the man who had (very temporarily, it turned out) replaced Vincente Minnelli in the director’s chair, George Roy Hill. While Jacobs cautioned Zanuck that, contractually, any replacement for Lerner would have to be approved by Hugh Lofting’s widow, he felt it wouldn’t be a problem.14
In June, Zanuck agreed to hire Bricusse on a sort of trial basis, making a deal to put him up in Los Angeles, where he would write two songs and the first twenty pages of the Doctor Dolittle screenplay. Bricusse and his wife drove down from San Francisco and took to Beverly Hills instantly, moving into a house off Coldwater Canyon. The day Bricusse began to work on the film, he wrote the song “Talk to the Animals,” tailoring it to Harrison’s narrow vocal range and what he called his “unique Sprechge-sang style.”15 Two weeks later, Bricusse was summoned to the Fox lot to give the song a test run in front of the studio’s music director, Lionel Newman, and a full orchestra. Bricusse got the job. But somehow, everyone forgot to tell Rex Harrison.
In New York,Bonnie and Clyde was no closer to finding a director or a studio than it had been the day Godard had walked out of Tom and Elinor Jones’s apartment. After the publication of “The New Sentimentality,” Benton and Newman had left Esquire and moved into an office together. Benton was now married, Newman had a growing family to support, and both men felt it was time to see if they could make a living as a writing team. Inspired by a comic book that Newman’s young son had left on his living room floor,16 they had begun work together with
composer Charles Strouse on a Broadway musical, It’s a Bird…It’s a Plane…It’s Superman, which would, a year later, become their first produced work.
After Godard’s departure, says Norton Wright, “Ellie and I wanted to shift into high gear and see if we couldn’t make amends [to Benton and Newman] by using our connections to Bob Montgomery.”17 Montgomery, for the second time, sent the script to Arthur Penn, who, for the second time, rejected it. Penn was about to start shooting The Chase, a massive, murky southern crime-and-passion melodrama for producer Sam Spiegel at Columbia. The production was gargantuan, the cast—led by Marlon Brando—challenging, and the tone of Lillian Hellman’s adaptation utterly at odds with the original material by Horton Foote. Penn, facing all he could handle, passed on Bonnie and Clyde in a note sent by his assistant, saying that he liked the material but that its young-outlaws-on-the-lam theme was too close to The Chase, which begins with Robert Redford running for his life and just barely escaping the reach of the law.18
In the spring, Montgomery managed to get Jones and Wright a meeting with Arthur Krim, Robert Benjamin, and David Picker at United Artists, with the idea that Picker, who was enthusiastic about the project, might be able to sell his bosses on it. “It was really just to get their reaction and their ideas about what directors they would favor,” says Wright. “Picker was a young guy—he seemed to be happy and open—but Krim and Benjamin looked gloomy and troubled.”19 They had read the screenplay—at least, they had gotten as far as the scene, early on, in which Clyde and his accomplice both fall into a sexual relationship with Bonnie (in this version of the script, Clyde’s partner in crime was still named W. D. Jones, who was one of the last surviving members of the Barrow gang).20 “Mr. Krim said to me, ‘Mr. Wright, I don’t know how to say this, but am I to assume that Clyde Barrow and this character W.D. are, well, being sexually intimate with Bonnie Parker?’ And I said, ‘Oh yeah, they’re both balling her. And maybe each other! It’s a ménage à trois!’…It was as if I’d spit on the flag. He looked at me, and there was a sort of a shudder. That was the first time that we realized that the sexuality of the script could be something that would make people somewhat reserved.”21
“Their reaction was, ‘What the hell do you want to make this movie for? I mean, you’ve got naked women and homosexuals and violence—are you out of your mind?’” says Jones.22
“Without exception, it was turned down,” wrote Benton and Newman, “with comments…along the lines of, ‘Who could care less about characters like these? They are repulsive people.’”23
After United Artists said no to Bonnie and Clyde, the movie began to feel like used goods. Those who weren’t disgusted simply didn’t see anything fresh about it. “This is what he said,” wrote Jones after a meeting with a potential production manager for the film. “‘Oh my. Oh boy. Oh God. All that violence—it’s been done before a million times. I’ve read it carefully through a couple of times and I just can’t see anything special about it. It’s like a thousand TV gangster films—Public Enemy Number One and his tough moll and speeding cars and all that. I doubt a distributor’s reaction will be good.’”24
With no takers at the studios, Wright went to London, where he wooed Desmond Davis, a young British director who had been the camera operator on A Taste of Honey, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and Tom Jones before directing his first feature, 1964’s Girl with Green Eyes, an art-house hit in the United States. Davis liked Bonnie and Clyde, but Benton and Newman’s deal with Jones and Wright gave the writers approval over the choice of a director, and they vetoed him.25
“As we moved on,” says Wright, “you could kind of see the names move toward the bottom of the barrel.” Their low point came when Benton, Newman, Wright, and Jones, in an attempt to secure private financing, paid a visit to the Manhattan apartment of jazz clarinetist Artie Shaw, the last big name that Bob Montgomery was able to offer up. “We sat down, and Artie Shaw told us how terrible the script was—he said it was like looking in a sewer,” says Benton. “Literally nobody wanted to do it. David and I would laugh and tell each other that we’d be eighty years old, out on the street, and still peddling Bonnie and Clyde.”26
As Promise Her Anything wrapped in London, Beatty still wasn’t sure what his next job was going to be. Nothing in particular had excited him until he heard that François Truffaut had been thinking about making his first English-language movie. As soon as Beatty heard about Fahrenheit 451, he wanted to play Montag, the book-burning “fireman” who begins to question authority. Caron knew Truffaut, and during a postproduction vacation in Paris, Beatty asked her to set up a lunch for two—after which he would, with choreographed offhandedness, arrive for coffee.27
It’s a safe bet that the outcome of that lunch was a surprise to all three of the participants in it. Beatty showed up, as planned, at the end of the meal, and according to Caron, who acted as a translator and interpreter when needed, he expressed his enthusiasm for Fahrenheit 451.28 Truffaut politely rebuffed his inquiry, telling him that he had already earmarked the role of Montag for Oskar Werner, the Austrian actor who had played Jules in Jules and Jim and had since moved on to star as a world-weary physician, a part that would bring him an Oscar nomination, in Stanley Kramer’s soon-to-open Ship of Fools. (Truffaut, in his desire to put Beatty off, may have been less than fully honest about Werner’s hold on the role; at the time of the lunch, he had not yet signed the actor for Fahrenheit 451 and was considering Terence Stamp as well.)29
Truffaut recommended Bonnie and Clyde to Beatty, praising Benton and Newman’s script and telling him he should take a look at it. If Beatty had read the treatment a year earlier, when Harrison Starr and Godard had talked about making the movie while on the set of Mickey One, he either didn’t remember or didn’t reveal it. But Beatty came away from the lunch eager to get his hands on the screenplay, and he decided to contact Benton. Caron was also intrigued, imagining that Bonnie and Clyde might be a good opportunity for her to reteam with Beatty on screen. And, somewhat perversely, Truffaut, who had long since passed on the film, left the lunch with his own interest in Bonnie and Clyde rekindled, even though his brief encounter with Beatty had left him determined to avoid working with the actor.
Several factors, including the volatility of Truffaut’s own enthusiasms, were probably responsible for his sudden reemergence as a possible director for the movie. The start of production on Fahrenheit 451 was now facing yet another delay; Truffaut’s own hard sell of Bonnie and Clyde to Beatty may have reminded him of what he had liked about the script in the first place; and perhaps most significant, Elinor Jones had stayed in touch with him for the last several months, determined to hold on to even the slenderest chance that he might reverse himself and make the picture after all. Jones had also kept in touch with David Picker, who saw great potential in the screenplay;30 on June 5, 1965, unaware that Truffaut had just been talking about the screenplay to Beatty, she and Wright sent the director a letter, telling him that Picker was “very enthusiastic about the property and has indicated a willingness to put up full financing for the film in the neighborhood of $800,000.” Jones and Wright asked Truffaut if he would permit them to tell Picker he was still considering the movie; they quickly followed up with a telegram inviting him back to New York to reopen the discussion.31
Picker’s desire to make the movie was serious, and if Truffaut’s was just a whim, it wasn’t apparent from his behavior. On June 18, the director wrote back to Jones, telling her, “Your proposition concerning Bonnie and Clyde has come at just the right moment, provided…that we will be able to start shooting this summer.” Truffaut was ready to talk specifics and went on to enumerate several conditions that had to be met as a prerequisite to continue negotiations: He wanted $80,000 plus 10 percent of the net profits to direct the film, he wanted Helen Scott hired as his personal assistant, and he wanted Alexandra Stewart, who had costarred with Beatty in Mickey One, to play Bonnie: “She would represent for me…[a] reassuring pr
esence, since it is very important, in this, my first English-language film, that I have around me people with whom I can get along.” If Jones and Wright were able to meet those requirements, he said, he would plan a trip to New York to discuss other issues—the choice of cinematographer, his hope that Benton and Newman would be available for rewrites before and during the shoot, and the casting of Clyde, for whom Truffaut now wanted Terence Stamp (“But I will not speak to him before hearing what you have to say,” he wrote Jones).32
Jones blanched a little at the idea of Stamp, whose film The Collector was just opening in New York (“Terence Stamp?! He’s an Englishman!” she wrote in her notes), but she was determined not to let Truffaut slip away again.33 At the same time, Beatty had decided to pursue Bonnie and Clyde his own way. He flew to New York, telephoned Benton, whom he had met at a party years earlier, and reintroduced himself.
“I think he doubted me when I said who I was,” says Beatty of Benton, who was indeed incredulous.34 “Warren said he’d had lunch with Truffaut and had heard about the script, and could he see it? I said, yes, I’ll bring it to you, and he said, that’s all right, I’ll come by your apartment. Twenty minutes later there he was. My wife was so angry—she hadn’t even had a chance to put on makeup.”
