Star

by Peter Biskind

  Altman says he told Beatty, “‘Let’s have him convey his whole back-story without ever telling it.’ And Beatty got frightened of that. Those opening shots, when he’s coming into town and he’s talking to himself, mumbling—where he’s saying, ‘I got poetry in me.… ’ Beatty was nervous about doing it that way, but I said, ‘Just do it, what the hell, it’s just another lousy movie.’”

  Recalled Christie, “We didn’t have a clue what we were making because [Altman] would get ideas overnight, or somebody would do a brilliant improvisation that just went on and on and he’d suddenly incorporate that, though it had nothing to do with any story or anything.”

  The town became a character in its own right. Altman had the cast and crew live in the settlement in which the drama would unfold as it was being built. Says Beatty, “Bob had a talent for making the background come into the foreground and the foreground go into the background, which made the story seem a lot less linear than it actually was.”

  One Altman touch was the picture’s mellow yellow hue. He says, “One of the big problems was that the lenses were so sharp, and the stock was so good, that it was going to look like a Christmas card.” He used to walk around the set with a Polaroid Land camera, as big as a loaf of bread, wearing an old yellow velour sweatshirt. One day he pointed the camera toward his stomach, snapped a picture, then took another of the set, creating a double exposure with a yellowish cast. He went to the DP, Vilmos Zsigmond, and told him that that was what he wanted the film to look like, and that he wanted to flash the film.” Says Beatty, who nearly used the technique on Reds before deciding it was too risky, “It was considered a very bold thing to do. You flash the positive, but you don’t flash the negative, because then you can’t do anything about it if it’s fucked up.”

  Altman also experimented with the sound, creating layered soundtracks. He disliked dubbing dialogue later in the studio: it undercut the feeling of spontaneity for which he strove. But the weather in and around Vancouver at that time of year was punishing, and hell on the sound recorders, who lost syllables, sentences, and whole pages of dialogue in the howling wind. Altman thought the sound was just fine, he’d gotten what he intended. One weekend, during the shoot, editor Lou Lombardo, who had been in L.A. editing Altman’s previous picture, Brewster McCloud, put in an appearance on the set. According to Altman agent George Litto, “Bob had a lot of guys that just said, ‘Yes.’ Lou had no fear. When Bob did something he didn’t like, Lou would say, ‘It’s shit.’” Lombardo worked for Sam Peckinpah as well as Altman, and once a pert, fresh-faced young entertainment reporter asked him to compare the two directors. He leaned back with a look of mock profundity, and said, “Sam Peckinpah is a prick, and Robert Altman is a cunt!” Altman showed him some rushes. Lombardo loved what he saw, but hated what he heard, or rather, didn’t hear; the sound, he said, was “fucked.” Altman blew up. “He stormed off into his bedroom, slammed the door, and never came out,” recalled Lombardo. “I was [just] trying to tell him the fucking sound is bad.” How bad no one would know until it was too late.

  As the production proceeded, the relationship between Altman and Beatty began to fray. John Schlesinger’s companion, Michael Childers, shot stills on Nashville, 3 Women, and a couple of other pictures for Altman. “Bob was crazy,” he recalls. “Smoked too much goddamn dope. He could never make up his mind. It was ‘Why don’t you improvise, and I’ll come back, we’ll film it in a half an hour.’” Neither, of course, could Beatty make up his mind. Adds Childers, “Talk about an actor who could not make up his mind screaming at a director who could not make up his mind!”

  Trained in television, Altman shot quickly from the hip and was satisfied with one take, for the same reason he preferred to use the sound recorded on the set to dubbing later. This in itself put him on a collision course with Beatty, who was used to big budget productions where money was no object. He invariably did take after take, slowly working his way into his performance. Altman complained about Beatty’s “nit-picking, the way he pushed and bugged me.” The actor wanted to know the purpose of every setup, of every camera move, entrance, exit, and bit of business. As Jack Nicholson once put it, “He’ll chew something til the cows come home.” Every so often, Beatty had to put Altman in his place, remind him who was boss. In one instance, he nixed Altman’s planned trip to the Astrodome in Houston, Texas, for the premiere of Brewster McCloud, on the grounds that the director needed to be fresh for his Monday morning call.

  According to Altman, the issues were related to Beatty’s and Christie’s disparate ways of working. He says, “Warren wouldn’t start rehearsing until the camera was rolling on take four or five. Julie was always the best on her very first take, and after a while, she started losing interest, and you could see it. So I had one actor who was getting better, and another who was getting worse. Finally I tried to put the camera on her first, and then try to get him in.

  “Warren was great in the film, and there were no bad relations, but it was a touchy situation. He once said, ‘Tell anybody this and I’ll call you a liar, but this picture is about me as a movie star and Julie second, and then all the rest of the people in this picture, who don’t count.’ And he was a little upset that I was spending so much time building up an atmosphere. Because he had never made films that way. Warren is basically a control freak. He wants to run the show.”

  Eventually, Altman learned to go around Beatty, rather than through him. There is a brief scene in which the actor is sitting in his office drinking, nothing complicated. As he reaches for the bottle, he knocks it over, catches it, and pours himself a drink. As first assistant director Tommy Thompson recalls it, “We shot it once, we shot it again, we shot it about eight or nine times. After take ten, Bob said, ‘That’s good for me, print 2, 5, 10.’ Everybody was ready to go, it was one in the morning, and Warren said, ‘Wait, wait, wait a minute. I’m not happy with it.’

  “‘No, no, it’s fine.’

  “‘I want another one.’

  “‘Okay.’ Did another one. ‘You happy with that, Warren?’

  “‘No, I want another one.’”

  According to Jim Margellos, the unit production manager, “It was like a test of wills. There was so much tension between the two of them you could cut it with a knife.” Continues Thompson, “Finally, Bob said, ‘Look, I’m tired, and I can’t tell the difference anymore. Tommy will stay here with you, and you can shoot until you’re happy with it. Good night guys, I’ll see you tomorrow morning,’ and he left. I don’t know how many we did, thirty, forty, till Warren finally said, ‘2, 5, 10, 18, 27, 34, and 40,’ and we wrapped. It was four in the morning, but Warren was happy and Bob was happy.” Adds Joan Tewkesbury, “The path to success is sometimes the one of least resistance: ‘You wanna shoot the Taj Mahal? Fine. I don’t give a shit!’”

  For his part, Beatty says, “A lot of times, Bob would wonder why I was working so hard. I’m just a person that thinks, when you go to all that trouble to set up a movie and build a set and get dressed and go there, I don’t see any harm in doing a number of takes.”

  Altman got his revenge in the scene that ends the movie. McCabe, pursued through a blizzard by the company’s hired gunslingers, is fatally wounded and falls into a snowdrift. Recalls Margellos, “Warren was buried up to his ears, with snow blasting into his face from the wind machine. It was colder than hell. Bob kept saying, ‘Okay, one more time.’ They dug Warren out, put him back, and did it again. He must have done it twenty-five times.” As the film would evolve in the editing, Altman underlined his message. He cuts away from McCabe to the townies frantically trying to save the burning church, and to Mrs. Miller stoned on opium. As the wind howls and snowflakes slowly cover McCabe’s fallen figure to the doleful sound of Leonard Cohen on the soundtrack, they are all oblivious to the drama of his death. The cross cutting at once makes a bleak commentary on the foolishness of heroic aspiration, and underlines Altman’s contempt for stars.

  Some observers say that th
e McCabe shoot was a happy time for Beatty and Christie, but others think the relationship was winding down. They were affectionate with each other, and so relaxed that it seemed as if they were married. It was said that they secretly were; Christie was coy with the press, refused to confirm or deny. To gossip columnist Joyce Haber, she said, tartly, “If we are, we are, and if we’re not, we’re not.”

  Alternatively, it was reported that he repeatedly asked her to marry him, and she turned him down, not because she objected to marriage herself, but because she knew he was promiscuous. “Warren never allowed anybody to control him,” says Sylbert. “He’d cheat on them, fuck anybody he wanted to. Julie began to learn from Warren that there was no such thing as faithfulness.” Free spirit though she may have been, exposure to Beatty seems to have made her more inclined toward the virtues of monogamy, or at least that’s what she said. “Infidelity destroys love,” she observed. “If you love someone and it’s good, you’ve got to have the sense to stick with it.” Sounding as if she were referring specifically to Beatty, she continued, “You can’t just go swanning off with everyone who attracts you. It’s greedy and selfish. It sounds great to do whatever you want at a given time. But it never works out in real life—only in the movies.”

  Altman observed that during the parties that punctuated the shoot, she sat apart, apparently bored with the gossip, and perked up only when the subject turned to politics. “She used to sit on the edge of those parties, while Warren mingled,” he said. He continued, “It’s not easy to counter that pillow talk. The only bad times we had were when the two of them obviously had fought over something or other the night before. I could feel the tension.” Beatty did reportedly say, generously, if somewhat ominously, “If ever we split up, I’ll pay her alimony—that’s if she wants or needs it.”

  The show finally wrapped at the end of January 1971.

  MCCABE HAD been a physically exhausting shoot. Beatty and Christie went off on Sam Spiegel’s boat, where he began his own draft of Shampoo, unhappy with the version Towne had finally turned in the previous January. Beatty didn’t get back to him for months, Towne claimed, and then said it wasn’t funny. “That script didn’t work. I had felt bound by some sort of decorum not to step in and write it myself,” Beatty recalls. “After McCabe, I felt, This is sort of enjoyable, so go ahead and write it. I decided to start fresh. I’d become more and more active in politics, and the apocalyptic Manson killings had long gone by the boards, so I wanted it to be the political apocalypse of 1968, which had a profound effect on me. I set my script on election night. The earlier script went over weeks or months or years, you couldn’t tell what it was. I had it wind up at a series of parties, and the aftermath of those parties.” Beatty wrote, in effect, a satyrization of Jean Renoir’s corrosive portrait of the haute bourgeoisie in Rules of the Game, which fiddled while Hitler prepared for World War II.

  Towne was ambitious, had his sights set on directing himself, and was unwilling to dwell in the reflected glory of his friend forever. He was acutely aware that writers, for all their importance, were far down the Hollywood totem pole. Towne used to joke about his dependent position, called Beatty “Badge,” borrowing from Natalie Wood, as in, “Badge can get me into the A-list parties,” and referred to himself as “Sharecropper.” He says, “I always felt like one of those parrots at Hefner’s. They would clip their wings so they could fly a little, but not beyond the grounds of the Playboy Mansion.” But to Towne, it was far from funny. According to Sylbert, he complained that “Warren was a terrible bully.” Sylbert goes on, “Warren treated him like a donkey. He didn’t listen to him, told him what to do, ‘Write this,’ ‘Write that.’” Says Buck Henry, “Like so many of us writers, Bob suffered from that thing about wanting to be rich and famous, and knowing that we’re never going to be as rich and famous as the guys we’re doing the work for. It makes a kind of tricky thing of gratitude and resentment in some people.”

  Although Towne was way too politic to trumpet his friendship with Beatty, he couldn’t resist dropping his friend’s name when he was trying to impress. He’d disappear for a week, then confide in a conspiratorial tone, “Don’t tell anybody, but I was in a hotel room in Houston rewriting Beatty’s picture.” The implication was, he was indispensable to the star. But, says Bob Evans, who would have a falling out with Towne over The Two Jakes, “Bob claims to have done a lot more writing for Warren than Warren says he did. If I had to bet, I’d bet on Warren. He has a clearer head.” Occasionally Towne let others overhear his end of a phone conversation with the actor, in which he made it clear Beatty couldn’t push him around. He would say, “You cunt… you’re just being a cunt… that’s more cunt stuff,” and so on for half an hour.

  Says screenwriter Jeremy Larner (The Candidate), who was one of the lucky few who had the privilege of overhearing Towne on the phone with Beatty, “Towne was tremendously turned on by these conversations. He had a certain relish for dealing with [Beatty].” On the other hand, Towne took Jack Nicholson for granted, perhaps because they had known each other longer and had come up together through the Roger Corman ranks. Larner continues, “His attitude towards Nicholson was that Jack was this brilliant boy who you had to let indulge himself in any way he wanted to, but with Beatty, here was somebody who was capable of being crafty, somebody more worthy of Towne’s mettle. Towne probably thought a lot more about Beatty than he did about Jack, he was more in love with Beatty. Most guys in Hollywood are more turned on by each other than they are by the women they fuck.” According to Evans, “Towne treated Jack as an equal, but looked up to Warren as a messiah. That’s the power Warren has.”

  For his part, Beatty wanted Towne at his beck and call to doctor every script he might give him, regardless of his other commitments. At the same time, he paradoxically resented Towne for making Beatty so dependent on him, even though the actor demanded it. He knew that Towne had his own ambitions to direct, and worried that eventually he would go his own way. Referring to his friend, he would quote Elia Kazan: “Never underestimate the narcissism of a writer.” At that point in their respective careers, each still needed the other, and eventually they patched up their differences.

  After he got back from his break on Spiegel’s yacht, Beatty went right into $, aka Dollars, directed by Richard Brooks, an instantly forgettable heist movie, yet another ill-considered choice. The film was shot on location in Hamburg, with some time spent in Norway. It is notable only because Beatty met co-star Goldie Hawn in the course of it, who became a lover and lifelong friend. Beatty was almost killed filming a scene in a railroad yard. He slipped and fell on tracks, nearly failing to get out of the way as a freight train bore down on him. His ankle was badly torn up. Dollars wrapped in April 1971.

  BEATTY WAS back and forth to London with Christie. The two of them frequented Leonard of Mayfair on Grosvenor Street, run by Leonard Lewis. It was the hair salon of choice for everyone from Twiggy to the Beatles, including, bizarrely, the Krays. Even in this crowd, Beatty stood out. He struck Lewis as “one of the most conceited men I’d ever met. He loved to be pampered with facials and massages and thought of himself as Mr. Immaculate.” According to the hairdresser, the actor took Christie to a fashionable plastic surgeon, Phillip Lebon, to have her breasts enhanced. (So much for the anti-establishment hippie. She once lost the opportunity to be the first Bond girl in Dr. No to Ursula Andress because her bust was insufficient.) “Phillip told me how devoted Warren was while Julie was recovering from the operation. He would sit beside her bed for hours on end, just stroking her hair and holding her hand.”

  Still, Beatty’s relationship with Christie was not what it once was. Christie discovered that his girlfriends, past and present, were everywhere, like houseflies. Reportedly, he would have dinner with Christie at Chasen’s, then return later that evening to have dinner with another woman. Still, says Sylbert, “He was very possessive. If I went out with Julie in London, I would get a call the next day. He would say, ‘You can take the gi
rl out in London, but you can’t take the girl out of London.’ He would know. He should have worked for the FBI. He was always worried about me. Warren always knew there was nobody he fucked that, if I put my mind to it, I couldn’t fuck too. It’s one of the reasons I got a lot of respect from him. In a way, as he said, ‘We’re all cousins.’”

  Making up for lost time, when Beatty returned from Hamburg, he saw a slew of women, including Twiggy, Liv Ullmann, model/actress Carole Mallory, and singers Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon. Simon had cut a swath through the high-profile studs of the period, including Nicholson, Mick Jagger, Kris Kristofferson, and Cat Stevens. She conceived a real passion for James Taylor, but she always made time for Beatty, whom she described as “very persuasive, very, very persuasive.” When she wrote “You’re So Vain” in 1972, there were many claimants to that particular crown. Beatty always seemed most persuasive, or at least he thought so. In 1999, he said, “Oh, let’s be honest, that song is about me, it’s not about Mick Jagger, it’s about me.” According to Simon herself, “It certainly sounds like it was about Warren Beatty. He certainly thought it was about him—he called me and said thanks for the song. At the time I met him he was still relatively undiscovered as a Don Juan. I felt I was one among thousands at that point—it hadn’t reached, you know, the populations of small countries.” Her line, “You gave away the things you loved, and one of them was me,” might well have referred to his and Nicholson’s habit of trading women back and forth. Said screenwriter Jake Brackman, who was a close friend of Simon’s and wrote many of her lyrics, “They find a new girl and then they want to share her as a male bonding thing, that passed-on feeling.”