At the last minute, Penn sheepishly tried to withdraw. He asked Beatty, “Would I be letting you down terribly if I didn’t do this movie? I don’t think we’ve accomplished what we needed to accomplish with the script.” He felt that what he referred to as the film’s “dramatic profile” flatlined. “There was a then-and-then-and-then quality to it,” he says. But Beatty refused to let him go, saying, “I’m sure that we can do it.” Penn suggested bringing in Lillian Hellman or Arthur Miller for a rewrite. Beatty didn’t think they needed to roll out the big guns, and suggested Towne instead, who shared Penn’s view that, in Towne’s words, “It’s too episodic. You knew how they die, so there was no mystery, no suspense. The only question was where and when. You have to build up to that.” Says Penn, “Towne was a very helpful presence. He was a guy with whom I could talk about the subtextualized aspects of the film.” Towne worked for three weeks. The extent of his contribution is still the subject of debate.
Towne was responsible for some small but telling touches. “When I was a kid, I noticed four things about movies: the character could always find parking spaces at every hour of the day and night; they never got change in restaurants; and husbands and wives never slept in the same bed. Women went to sleep with their makeup on and woke with it unmussed. I thought to myself, I’m never going to do that. In Bonnie and Clyde, Bonnie counts out every penny of change, and C.W. gets stuck in a parking place and has a hard time making a getaway.”
Benton and Newman were not thrilled by Towne’s input. Newman says, “Towne was Warren’s buddy—they were as tight as you can be—and Warren wanted him around. We didn’t like that, but there wasn’t anything we could do. We had no power. Towne did three things: he added three lines of dialogue to the makeout scene in the beginning of the movie in the car, where Clyde can’t get it up; he wrote a speech for Bonnie’s mother; and he rewrote the first scene with the sheriff, Frank Hamer, where he spits on her, they put him in the rowboat and they strand him in the water. I never liked that scene, still don’t. That’s all he did. Nothing else.”
Beatty started to gather his crew and cast. “In a very calculated way Warren assembled a bunch of talented people who were either looking for their first break or looking to revive a flagging career,” says Newman. “Arthur was fired from The Train, so he was in the toilet. Warren had done all those flops and had this reputation as a difficult actor, or difficult person. Everybody was going to bust their humps for that movie. It was a great tribute to Warren as producer.” Theadora van Runkle was a costume designer wannabe, a former illustrator who wasn’t even in the guild, and worked for scale. “When Warren Beatty asked me how I was going to make Bonnie look sexy, he was pleased enough with the answer that she shouldn’t wear a bra—and gave me the job,” she recalled. Two exceptions to the young-and-cheap rule were veteran cinematographer Burnett Guffey, who was sixty-one at the time, and editor Dede Allen, who had cut Kazan’s America, America and Rossen’s The Hustler.
Casting the picture turned out to be surprisingly difficult. It was done out of New York, the site of a revolution in casting. Casting director Nessa Hyams recalls, “Most of the casting people were in L.A., and were middle-aged, ex–service men, functionaries. Their idea of casting was to call the agents, who brought all the kids in—they were very similar in look and style, sort of nondescript, blond hair, blue-eyed kind of thing. But there were a lot of young actors running around New York not yet discovered.”
Penn and Beatty had both worked in the theater and live television—a rich gene pool for the New Hollywood. The cast was filled out with actors out of this milieu, like Estelle Parsons and Gene Hackman. Penn chose Parsons for Clyde’s sister-in-law, Blanche. She got a paltry $5,000 for her trouble. “I didn’t have much interest in doing films,” she explains. “I was devoted to theater.” She thought, I’m not interested in this, it’s a secondary-type role. But as she read through it, she found it more compelling, and changed her mind. “I was quite surprised when I realized what the message was: the bad guys are good!”
Parsons says it was she who suggested Hackman, who played Clyde’s brother, Buck. Beatty had had one scene with him in Lilith and liked him, so he hired him. Michael J. Pollard, who would be C. W. Moss, was an old friend of Beatty’s who had appeared with him in A Loss of Roses. “I was doing a TV show, a western,” he recalls. “I ran into Warren in a clothing store when he was living at the Beverly Wilshire. We both said, ‘What are we doing here?’ The next thing I knew I was in Bonnie and Clyde.” Even then, Beatty did the producer shtick like a veteran. He told Pollard, “We’re going to get you a nomination for an Academy Award!”
Outside of Beatty and Faye Dunaway, who would be hired to play Bonnie, none of the cast remotely resembled movie stars. With his Midwestern Everyman features, you’d be hard pressed to pick Hackman out of a bleacherful of Cubs fans. Parsons was no Elizabeth Taylor, and Pollard had a face that looked like it had been fashioned out of Silly Putty.
Beatty and Penn had a picture of Bonnie in their heads, someone who could have walked out of a Dorothea Lange photograph, with a pale, gaunt, and hungry look (albeit beautiful, of course), appropriate to the Dust Bowl where she was born and raised. But it wasn’t like every actress in town was beating down the door for the opportunity to work for next to nothing. Says Benton, “Warren believed in fly-fishing and trolling and casting. So, the net was wide open.” After Wood, Jane Fonda was his first choice. She recalled that Beatty was so elliptical she wasn’t sure whether he had offered her the part or not. (Penn felt her look was too sophisticated for the role.) According to Beatty, Fonda didn’t want to work with Penn again after The Chase. Her other objection was, “‘You can’t mix comedy and violence like this.’ She implored me not to do the movie.” He went on, “We got turned down by every living actress for the part of Bonnie.” They included Jean Seberg, Carol Lynley, Ann-Margret, Sharon Tate, and Tuesday Weld.
One day, back in New York, Beatty, Benton, and Newman went over to Frank and Eleanor Perry’s editing room in the Newsweek Building, at 444 Madison Avenue, to look at photos of Janet Landgard, whom the Perrys had cast in The Swimmer, their new film with Burt Lancaster. Beatty and the writers were standing in the lobby having a lively conversation about Bonnies, “We like this girl,” “She’s not right,” etc., etc. Beatty was animated, focused, engrossed in the subject, but suddenly, as if a switch had been thrown, his eyes wavered, and he tuned out. Following his gaze, they were barely able to make out a tiny figure at the other end of the cavernous lobby, some forty feet away. The figure resolved itself into a girl, an actress or a model, carrying a portfolio. Beatty walking slowly toward her looking over the top of his glasses, pointing his finger at her, a cobra and its prey, with the writers following in his wake. The girl seemed mesmerized, and started edging away, until her back was flat against a wall. He stopped right in front of her. Her eyes welled up with tears. He said, “Hi, I’m Warren Beatty.” She replied, “I know,” and started to weep. Solicitously, he put his arm around her shoulder, and took her off to a quiet corner, writing down her phone number. By the time the three men got back to the elevator, he was all business again, resuming the conversation where they had left off, without missing a beat. Newman and Benton were dumbstruck. “Shit,” says Newman. “This guy really is amazing.”
Beatty was close to settling on Sue Lyon, who had made a splash in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita, when Faye Dunaway’s name floated to the top of the pool. Dunaway had done several plays, and only two movies, neither of which had yet been released: Otto Preminger’s Hurry Sundown (1967) and Elliot Silverstein’s The Happening (1967). Penn had seen some of the former, and asked her to come to L.A. “We were getting pretty close to the wire here,” he recalls. “And I said to Warren, ‘You gotta meet Dunaway.’ But Warren had heard some bad things about her,” and he added, “Faye was not his first choice, by a lot.” She was known as “the Barracuda” even to her friends. When she appeared at the Beverly Wilshire, she had gained upw
ard of twenty-five pounds for her role in Hurry Sundown. She did come from a modest background, but she looked like she’d attended Brearley.
That evening, Beatty and Penn, Benton and Newman had dinner with her. Benton recalls, “When we left them, David and I both said, “That’s her. That’s Bonnie.” Beatty was still against her. He wasn’t impressed by her appearance, and said, “She doesn’t look like much.” Specifically, he didn’t think her face was right. Her cheekbones were so sharply defined she could have planed a plank of wood with them. Towne thought, Fuck, man. She looks like something you put on the prow of a ship. Later, back in the penthouse, Penn remembered that the star was obdurately set against her, but was outvoted by him and the two writers. According to her, she was paid $30,000. Dunaway was thrilled. “This was the first, big feature I got my hands on,” she said. “This script was amazing. It was the role which was most like me, closest to me. I was from North Florida, which is very Southern. I grew up with those kinds of people.”
But Warner, who had never read the script, was unhappy that Penn and Beatty had populated the cast with unknowns, and tried to cancel the film at the last minute. On September 19, 1966, he memoed MacEwen, writing, in Beatty’s words, “‘Who wants to see the rise and fall of a couple of rats? Am sorry I did not read the script before I said yes.… guess we can’t get out of the Bonnie and Clyde deal. We’re going to lose every nickel.’ He said, ‘I don’t know what Warren Beatty has on his mind.’ He said, ‘These pictures went out with Cagney.’” He added that Bonnie and Clyde would lose the studio every penny it made on Kaleidoscope. When Warner said, “We’re not going ahead,” Lastfogel countered: “Oh yes, you will. ’Cause we have a deal.”
Kaleidoscope premiered on September 22, 1966. To keep Warner happy, Beatty flew to New York to do publicity, most prominently the Today show, co-hosted by Barbara Walters. In her book How to Talk with Practically Anybody About Practically Anything, she confessed, in effect, that in Beatty she’d met her match. “He answered me in monosyllables with an expression of extreme boredom bordering on distaste,” she wrote. “Finally, I resorted to the hackneyed but spoil-proof, ‘Tell me, Mr. Beatty, what is your new picture about?’” According to her, Beatty went quiet, and after an endless pause, he said, “Now, that’s really a very difficult question.” She continued, “I’d had it. Right on the air, in front of ten million, I am certain, very sympathetic viewers, I said, ‘Mr. Beatty, you are the most impossible interview I have ever had. Let’s forget the whole thing and I’ll do a commercial.’”
The reviews of Kaleidoscope were abysmal. In a mercifully brief notice, the indefatigable Crowther wrote that it was “empty of narrative substance,” while Beatty and his co-star, Susannah York, were “forced and flat, fumbling like a couple of dressed-up amateurs.” Again, he was right. Jack Warner needn’t have worried about Bonnie and Clyde eating up Kaleidoscope’s profits. There weren’t any.
3
THEY ROBBED BANKS
How Beatty electrified the country with Bonnie and Clyde, met his match with Julie Christie, and fell out with Robert Towne over Shampoo.
“If Warren never did anything but Bonnie and Clyde, it wouldn’t matter. That was such a superb motion picture, and he was great in it.”
—Woody Allen
BONNIE AND CLYDE couldn’t have come along at a more propitious moment. Another picture like Kaleidoscope, and Beatty would have gone the way of Troy Donahue. It went into production in October 1966. Of course, Warner Brothers wanted Beatty to shoot on the lot. But Beatty had absorbed the lesson taught by Kazan, who, as far back as the late 1940s and early 1950s in films like Panic in the Streets and On the Waterfront, had embraced location shooting for the authenticity it afforded. Although somewhat older than they were, Beatty shared the impatience that the fledgling film-school, movie-brat generation would show for Hollywood artifice. He fought to shoot the picture in Texas, which had the added advantage of enabling him to get far from the heavy hand of the studio. Speaking of this production, Towne recalled, “Warren said one day, ‘It’s a war against unreality.’ Without things like crab grass, telephone poles, pimples, poorly patched asphalt in the streets—you’ve got the back lot and you’ve already begun to lose your battle with all the artificial elements you fight against in trying to make what appears on film look real, or credible.”
Preoccupied with other things, like feathering his nest by selling his company, Warner gave in. Later, while the shoot was in progress, he would rail against it, complain, “Why aren’t they on the lot? Why do they have to be in Texas? Mike Curtiz could shoot on the lot! Mervyn LeRoy could shoot on the lot! What’s wrong with these guys?” But by that time, it was too late.
As the star and first-time producer of a picture that he hoped would rescue his career, Beatty was under tremendous pressure. Not surprisingly, he found it difficult to chew gum and walk at the same time, that is, produce and perform at once. Bonnie and Clyde was “the first time I’[d] produced a film, so I was constantly faced with the anxiety of knowing that in almost every area I was ignorant,” he said shortly after the film was released. Unlike the executives who laughed in his face, the crew snickered behind his back. Hackman recalled that they thought he was no more than a dilettante. Penn remembered that “they were appalled that this snot-nosed pretty boy was making a movie when it was clear he had no idea that everything he was doing was completely wrong.”
But Penn found Beatty had changed for the better since Mickey One. Authority became him, which is to say, as Penn puts it, “He was the producer, so he had a kind of proprietorship over it, where I think he felt that he had to set a good example, too. So he was not the actor personality of Mickey One. He was much more in charge.” The director continued, “He was a freer actor, by a long shot,” adding, “Clyde came from the South, a part of the world Warren was more familiar with than urban Polish Chicago. He really understood Clyde, he knew him.”
For once in his life, Beatty was the one on the receiving end of a flurry of questions. The number of details was overwhelming. “It is all detail, detail, detail. A hundred million, thousand, billion details,” he complained. “When it’s raining and your girlfriend or your wife is saying, ‘Why aren’t you doing such and such?’ and the person you are working with has to go home and return a call to his press agent, and lunch is being served, and the head of the union says, ‘Well, you have to stay out there for another ten minutes because they have to have coffee,’ and then the camera breaks down, and there is noise, a plane flying over, and this wasn’t the location that you wanted… are you going to have the energy to devote to the detail of saying, ‘That license plate is the wrong year’? That’s where the stamina, the real fight comes in. That is what’s tiring.”
Beatty was dismayed by how much energy and time he had to spend on politicking. “By the time you get any kind of personal statement on film, you’ve accomplished something in public relations, in union relations, and there’s the Screen Actors Guild, the makeup men’s union, the sound engineers, the teamsters, the caterers,” he observed, sourly. “It’s a business where the prime requisite is strength. Strength. [But] that’s not how strength should be ideally expended. I mean, it’s better to expend strength rattling around your hotel room all night because you can’t clarify an idea or a way to get your idea across or figure how you will deal with a point in a story.”
Although Beatty prided himself on never losing his cool, he was stretched to the breaking point, and every once in a while, he snapped. Toward the end of the film, just before the fatal ambush, he is supposed to be eating a peach, which squirts a spray of juice when he bites into it. During a rehearsal, the prop master announced, “There’s no peaches.”
“Why not?” Beatty asked.
“ ’Cuz they’re not in season.”
“What the fuck am I going to do, use apples?” yelled Beatty. “With fuckin’ peach juice? There’s gotta be peaches in season somewhere. I don’t give a fuck what you have to do. I want
those peaches here.” Says Towne, “Warren went nuts. But the guy did not have time to find the peaches. What we got was pears, and we injected water into them with a hypodermic, so the pear would squirt. It was that insistence on detail and attention to detail [that made him a great producer]. At twenty-eight years old, Warren was an impressive guy.”
To everyone’s surprise, it turned out that Beatty was good at producing. Dede Allen visited the set on several occasions. “There wasn’t a car that was driven, or anything, that Warren hadn’t personally checked out,” she recalls. “He was involved in every tiny detail of every shot. You learned to respect his brain very, very fast ’cause he’s so friggin’ smart. What a producer he was.” Added Dunaway, “Warren just wrote a new chapter in the book of Hollywood. I once said to him, ‘You were the first actor-producer, weren’t you?’ He said, ‘No, but I was the best!’”
Still, he hadn’t changed entirely. When Beatty put on his acting hat, he reverted to form. As was his wont, he insisted on knowing the whys and the wherefores of everything Penn did, and didn’t care how much time it ate up to find out. “Warren questioned everything that was being done,” says Parsons. “He and Arthur argued about every shot. They were yelling at each other. We would go to our dressing rooms and wait and wait. When Gene Wilder came to the set, it was like, ‘What’s happening here? Are they ever going to make this movie?’ He wondered if this was the end of the film. We had gotten used to it.” Pollard recalled the four of them—himself, Dunaway, Hackman, and Parsons—stuffed in the hot car waiting while “Warren would be talking to Arthur for hours on how the scene should be done.” As Towne once put it, according to Dunaway, “‘Whoever gets tired of arguing first, loses.’”
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