Star

by Peter Biskind

  Paris’s haute société provided the young star with more than enough women to distract him. Taylor would amuse (or alarm) Burton by reciting a litany of names of titled and untitled females who swarmed around the set and frequented Beatty’s hotel, including Brigitte Bardot, an SAS stewardess, and Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, whom he’d met through Burton and Taylor. They also introduced him to Maria Callas, who was heartbroken over the news, splashed about the tabloids, that her ex—Aristotle Onassis—was to marry Jackie Kennedy. One can only imagine Christie’s take on the world in which Beatty was so comfortable, given that the city had almost been consumed by the flames of revolution a scant four months earlier in the upheaval known as May ’68, which nearly closed down the Cannes Film Festival and transformed the work of French filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard. Finished with her film and back in London, Christie joined two thousand or so demonstrators at an anti–Vietnam War action chanting “U.S. murderers” in front of the American embassy in Grosvenor Square on November 23, at which an American flag was burned.

  On November 5, 1968, Humphrey had narrowly lost the popular vote to Richard Nixon. Bobby Kennedy, had he lived, would undoubtedly have won. Beatty observed, “It was the end of a lot of dreams of the early ’60s, and the morning after that election, for me the prospects were pretty grim.”

  Plagued by delays, The Only Game in Town dragged on and on. Production spilled over until the next year, and the marathon shoot didn’t wrap until March 3, 1969. Beatty and Christie promptly left for an around-the-world holiday. The issue that agitated the press was whether or not the lovebirds would marry. Beatty scandalized the women’s magazines by ridiculing the venerable institution of marriage, joking (perhaps) that the best time for a wedding was noon, because if the marriage didn’t work, you haven’t screwed up the entire day.

  When they returned, Beatty and Christie spent a considerable amount of time in London at her Selwood Terrace flat. She was so disorganized her friends had to take her to the supermarket when the cupboards were bare. The couple fought continuously. One of her housekeepers in London recalled, “There I was, poised between them, making up the bed, lips sealed, while this furious row raged. I didn’t want to know [what it was about]. I just recall feeling how absolutely farcical the situation was. And Julie could shout!” Christie complained to friends, “Warren doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t swear. That makes it a bit hard on me—because I can’t do any of those things with him either!”

  Beatty (now joined by Christie) still had trouble making commitments of any sort. Walking down New Bond Street one day, he passed a tailor, and broke stride, as if he’d forgotten something. His companion shot him a quizzical look. “About a year ago I went in and had the first fitting for a suit but I’ve never wanted to go back to him for the second fitting. I just can’t… go back.” Another quizzical look, to which he explained that he would then have to return a third time to pick it up. One Los Angeles hostess only served buffet if they were invited because she never knew if they would show up.

  On the night of August 8 and 9, Charles Manson and family ventured forth from the Spahn Ranch and murdered Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski’s wife, who was eight months pregnant, and four other people in the Benedict Canyon home they were renting. Polanski flew from London to L.A. Despite the relative obscurity of the victims, the murders hit home. No one was untouched. Everybody in Hollywood knew them, had had their hair done by one of the victims, Jay Sebring, as Beatty and Towne had, or had been invited up that night and had begged off because they were too tired, too stoned, or had something better to do, like Bob Evans. Just a few months earlier Polanski had tried to get Beatty to take over his lease. Beatty recalls, “I went up to look at the house, and thought, Yeah, I’ll stay here for a while, because I wanted to get out of the hotel, but then a couple of people walked out from another part of the house, and said that Roman had told them to take the house. They said, ‘There’s plenty of room for everybody,’ but I thought, No, I don’t want to be in a house with anyone else.”

  L.A.’s entertainment community was paralyzed by fear. With the perpetrators still at large—the cops suspected Polanski—people looked at one another and wondered. The chaos wrought by the war, the assassinations, the riots, had come home to roost in Hollywood. If the 1960s had ended the year before, when Nixon was elected, they ended again on August 9, 1969. As Sylbert put it, “All over town you could hear the toilets flushing.”

  Says Beatty, “Roman did a press conference at the Beverly Wilshire, so everybody came up to my place beforehand. Then he went down to talk to the reporters, and told them he hadn’t killed his wife. They were dubious. It was impossible to escape it in this town, even if you were not friends with the people involved. The original version of Shampoo was strongly influenced by the killings. The story was stretched out over a period of months, got into drug running, and was headed towards an apocalyptic ending.”

  4

  EASY WRITER

  How Beatty went to school on the script for McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and then took a year-and-a-half leave from movies to work on the George McGovern presidential campaign.

  “Had I been the producer I would have killed Robert Altman.”

  —Warren Beatty

  BEATTY ALWAYS WANTED to make movies with his lovers, either because he regarded them as his muses, or simply because, as Joan Collins had discovered, he was a possessive man and, all too familiar with on-the-set romances, wanted to keep an eye on them. Now, having given up on Shampoo, at least for the moment, he said to his new agent, Stan Kamen, “Let’s find a picture I can do with Julie.” Kamen replied, “What about Robert Altman? He’s got a script called The Presbyterian Church Wager.” Beatty replied, “Who’s he?”

  In fact, there was no reason Beatty would have heard of Altman, who had done a lot of television, directing shows like Maverick, Bonanza, and Combat in the late 1950s, early 1960s, as well as one obscure feature, That Cold Day in the Park. Even his agent, George Litto, a short, pugnacious man, didn’t particularly like him. “Nobody wanted to make a picture with Bob Altman,” says Litto. “He was this bombastic rebel, bomb thrower, crazy son of a bitch. He was confrontational. He would get in your face and tell you to fuck off. He could be a miserable prick.”

  Like director Hal Ashby, Altman was one of those men, older than the flower children and a maverick in the 1950s, for whom the 1960s was invented. After he got high on his first joint, he never came down. He let his hair—what there was of it—go long, grew a beard, wore turtlenecks, caftans, ankhs, and beads, whatever the head shops had to offer, although he never neglected his first love, Cutty Sark.

  The Presbyterian Church Wager was controlled by a first-time producer named David Foster, a former publicist, who instantly recognized the tremendous media dividend the picture would reap by yoking together Beatty and Christie for the first time.

  Beatty read the script at the beginning of the new year, 1970. He screened M*A*S*H, which featured Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould, the director’s breakout picture, as yet unreleased. Like Bonnie and Clyde, it would be that singular thing, a commercial hit that broke creative ground. Beatty got it right away. He applauded Altman’s irreverence and antic style. If Penn was an iconoclast, Altman was more so, made Penn look positively prim. With zero patience for the conventional wisdom of the this-is-the-way-it’s-always-been-done old-timers, he subverted the star system by favoring ensemble casts. He used overlapping sound that often made dialogue unintelligible. He undermined plot with episodic narratives that refused to tell a coherent story. He disregarded cinematographic conventions with generous use of the zoom lens. Altman was always reminding the audience it was watching a movie. Like Penn, he was interested in the relation between the medium and the message, but whereas Penn could often be portentous, Altman was playful, sprinkling narrative and visual puns throughout his pictures. As Beatty puts it, “He did not wear his seriousness on his sleeve, which Penn did.”

  Best of all, M*
A*S*H was irreverent. It disrespected religion and with its liberal use of raw language transgressed the boundaries of accepted filmmaking practice. “It was the first time you saw guys during an operation covered with blood saying, ‘Nurse, get your tits out of the way,’” says Litto. It was the first major studio movie in which “fuck” was used. In short, again like Bonnie and Clyde, it was a wise-ass “up yours” from the cool to the uncool.

  Based on a book by Edmund Naughton called McCabe, McKay’s script was very much a conventional western, the story of a mysterious gunslinger riding into a godforsaken turn-of-the-century town in the Northwest. Beatty was worried about what Christie would think about the part. “Julie never wanted to do anything,” he recalls. “She was the most selective actress I’ve ever met. She tested for Doctor Zhivago in a five-day screen test. She was totally unknown, they gave her the picture and initially she turned it down!” He thought to himself, I just don’t know if Julie will want to do this. It’s an American woman, and really isn’t anything at all like her. As he predicted, she was reluctant. “Julie really didn’t want to do it, and I had to really push her, because I thought she could be very funny in it.”

  Beatty called Altman from New York, said, “Don’t do anything until I come to town,” and then flew to L.A. to meet him. The two men hit it off, or seemed to. Beatty agreed to do the film, and finally convinced Christie as well, but there can only be one genius on a picture, and there was trouble ahead. With the two stars on board, Warner Brothers, now under new ownership (Steve Ross had bought the company from Seven Arts and installed Ted Ashley as chairman and John Calley as head of production), agreed to finance it. The business was in such bad shape that even though Beatty was in great demand, he had to forgo his customary salary up front in lieu of a cut of the back end gross.

  The Only Game in Town was released on March 4, 1970, and expired on arrival. Referring to Stevens, Beatty, and Taylor, Vincent Canby, Crowther’s replacement, wrote in The New York Times, “Assigning those three to the film version of Frank D. Gilroy’s small, sentimental, Broadway flop is rather like trying to outfit a leaky Central Park rowboat for a celebrity cruise through the Greek islands. The result is a phenomenological disaster.” The picture grossed a mere $1.5 million, and Fox, which lost an estimated $10 million on the film, and probably a whole lot more, pulled it without further ado. Beatty compared it to telling a joke underwater.

  The Presbyterian Church Wager, soon to become McCabe & Mrs. Miller, wouldn’t go into production until late 1970 at the earliest. Christie was restless. Joseph Losey, yet another blacklisted director, offered her The Go-Between, based on a novel by L. P. Hartley, which was a sort of pre-Atonement story set in Edwardian England. Christie, who was living on the beach in Malibu in a house rented from actress Gayle Hunnicutt, decided to squeeze it in before McCabe, and arrived at the location in Norfolk in the beginning of July, after which Beatty occasionally joined her. The couple, now being touted as the new Burton-Taylor, was mobbed by press and fans. Christie hated being hounded every time she poked her head out the door, said that she had begun to “feel like Lassie the Wonder Dog.” Reporters were still speculating on the likelihood that the couple would marry. Irritated, often as not she would turn on her heel, and stalk off, leaving an expletive in her wake.

  While Christie was making The Go-Between, Beatty met Britt Ekland for the second time at a dinner party that year given for Roman Polanski in London, from which she noted that Christie was “foolishly absent!” As she described the encounter, “Warren’s gaze descended on me, and the moment our eyes met I knew we committed physically.” She fell “madly” in love with him. “No man had made me happier than Warren.” Describing his technique in bed, she famously wrote, “Warren could handle women as smoothly as operating an elevator. He knew exactly where to locate the top button. One flick and we were on our way.” She thought he loved her too, but was disabused by overhearing too many “whispered phone calls to Julie.”

  When she flew to L.A. to do The Dean Martin Show, he followed, and she stayed with him in the penthouse. Beatty insisted that he didn’t want Christie to know about the affair. “She’d hit the roof if she knew,” he told her. “But I guess that is one of the gambles we’re going to have to take.” He stroked her face, assured her that “London was dead without you,” and told her how much he missed her. They watched porn together in a theater. She wondered, “How can cinema audiences be turned on by simulated sex? I will never make a porno film unless it’s for real and only with you.” Amused, he replied, “In that case we had better get a camera crew to film our activities in the penthouse.” Ekland had to go back to London for a TV show. He seemed relieved. “I realized that Warren was incapable of lasting love,” she concluded when the relationship ended after two months. “When he picked a bloom, it was only for a season.”

  The Go-Between wrapped in early September. Back in L.A., Beatty and Christie resumed their tempestuous relationship. Hunnicutt would get notes from her from time to time, alerting her to irreparably damaged articles of furniture.

  The cast and crew of McCabe & Mrs. Miller flew up to Vancouver in the bitterly cold fall of 1970, arriving in mid-October. Beatty and Christie rented a glass house on Horseshoe Bay in West Vancouver. Altman looked like a hippie Civil War officer—bearded, with love beads draped around his neck. He was pictured in The New York Times wearing a battered, Humphrey Bogart fedora and a coat colorfully embroidered with strange, organic-like shapes topped by a fur collar. He had never worked with a star like Beatty. Sutherland and Gould complained and bitched, but finally did what they were told. Beatty wasn’t about to do anything he didn’t want to do. He was stubborn, would wear people down. On the other hand, Beatty had never worked with a director quite like Altman before, freewheeling and irreverent, also used to getting his own way, resistant to his charm, and moreover enjoying the confidence of coming off the huge hit that M*A*S*H had become.

  Touted as a genius by the critics, with Pauline Kael leading the charge, Altman was shedding collaborators like dandruff. He was in the middle of a falling out with McKay, a longtime friend who knew him when. Suddenly, as often happens, the script that had been good enough to attract Beatty and Christie and in turn get Warners to commit, was good enough no longer. Altman never had a high regard for writers. They were just nuisances, their scripts impediments to his creative process, which was heavily dependent on improvisation. He dismissed this script, as he did others, as no more than a “selling tool,” to secure financing for the picture. “It was one of the worst western stories you’ve ever heard,” said Altman. “It had all the clichés. This guy was a gambler, and she was a whore with a heart of gold, the three heavies were the giant and the half-breed and the kid.” Litto was skeptical. Altman “and Brian McKay had a falling-out, so he wanted to make the script irrelevant to Brian’s contribution,” he said. “It was better in Brian’s version. In my opinion, he should have stayed closer to it.”

  But that was not to be, since Beatty too turned against the script. He says he never met McKay, but at a studio meeting for which he had flown in from London, he was quoted shamelessly flattering the writer: “Your words brought me seven thousand miles.” Now he felt differently. Nor was Beatty comfortable with free-form improvisation. “It was pretty clear that Bob didn’t want to shoot that script,” Beatty recalls. “And it was pretty clear that he expected us to go and improvise throughout the movie. And I just wasn’t going to do that. I believe in improvising, but I don’t believe in improvising from nothing. So I had to write a script.” He added, “We started frenetically taking it apart scene by scene.… I had to go down into the basement of this house, where I worked, to make sure there was something we could say to each other every day.” He adds, “I would take these aphorisms from my father’s family in Virginia and combine them in the dialogue between McCabe and Mrs. Miller.”

  He continued, “I worked quite a bit more on the script than he did. I think Altman was much more happy with a
kind of hit and miss approach. My approach was more linear.… I wrote most of the scenes that I was in.” At first, he resented it, but after it was all over, he changed his mind. It built his confidence as a writer. “It was good for me,” he says. “The picture had to be written, so it was like, write or die. When it was all over, I realized that I had written a movie, certainly co-written a movie.” So it was that Beatty was angered when he saw Altman take screenwriting credit for himself, after apparently trying to get his former friend McKay’s credit removed. Beatty felt that if anyone deserved credit, it was himself.

  Christie was in the same position. As Dick Sylbert puts it, “Warren was not gonna let anybody do what they wanted with mein Julie.” She wrote her lines as well. Bob “simply turned Julie’s stuff over to her,” says Joan Tewkesbury, the script supervisor. “She had a companion who knew all the different kinds of dialects, and they would go off and take these scenes and redo them as a woman would do them in this position.”

  In the hands of Altman and Beatty, any resemblance to a traditional western evaporated the moment McCabe rode through the drenching rain into the town of Presbyterian Church. The character became a flummoxed antihero, in keeping with both Altman’s cinema of helplessness and Beatty’s inclination to play with and subvert his own star persona. “I like to play schmucks,” he said. “Cocky schmucks. Guys who think they know it all but don’t. It’s been the story of my life to think I knew what I was talking about and later find out that I didn’t.” Clyde Barrow and McCabe “shared a sort of foolishness,” he continues. “They were not heroes. I found that to be funny, and Altman found it to be funny; we really agreed on that.”