Star

by Peter Biskind

Such was the mood of unease and apocalyptic paranoia that shaped the script of Shampoo, and permeated Beatty’s next film, The Parallax View, directed by Alan J. Pakula in the spring and summer of 1973.

  REGARDLESS OF the outcome, as the campaign ended, Beatty was pleased with himself. Says McGovern, “He was one of the three or four most important people in the campaign. And he never sought credit.” Years later, in a rare moment of public self-regard, looking back on his participation he said, “I’m real good at it. I’m discreet. I don’t kiss and tell. I don’t tell secrets about, y’know, political things. I try to be shrewd.… I think my interest in politics has saved my… soul. You’ve gotta have a life. You’ve gotta relate to people. Otherwise, you’ll make movies about movies and it just won’t be very interesting. So you’ve gotta make movies about life, and my avenue into life, my way of getting to know people, has been political.”

  Beatty’s immersion in the campaign had opened his eyes. If he had any ideas about throwing his own hat in the ring, he gave them up, for the moment, at least. He turned back to film. He had a lot of projects still in the air, scripts half finished, ideas floating around his head.

  One of them was The Parallax View, set in contemporary America, still in the shadow of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Based on a novel by Loren Singer, adapted by Lorenzo Semple Jr. and rewritten by David Giler, The Parallax View told the story of the murder of a presidential candidate, followed by the suspicious deaths of nine of the ten witnesses. The final witness is a journalist who begins his own investigation of the previous deaths, and uncovers a vast conspiracy. Alan J. Pakula, who had directed The Sterile Cuckoo (1969) and Klute (1971), and would go on to make All the President’s Men (1976) and Sophie’s Choice (1982) was attached. He was considered a hot up-and-coming director, and he was one of the people Beatty was eager to work with. The Parallax View was set up at Paramount.

  The picture featured Paula Prentiss and Hume Cronyn. It was shot by the gifted Gordon Willis, who had already done The Landlord for Hal Ashby, Klute for Pakula, and would shortly become celebrated for the moody, golden hues that infused his work on The Godfather. Known as the Prince of Darkness, Willis was one of the new breed of DPs who liked to work in low or available light. Most of the picture was shot in and around L.A., with exteriors shot in Seattle.

  Beatty found the theme appealing. The preoccupations of the story—conspiracy and attendant cover-up—couldn’t have been more topical, and were being played out in real life as the movie was being shot. The Watergate hearings, broadcast live by the networks, had begun on May 17, 1973, and riveted the nation. They were still in progress when production began. Almost every day there were new, startling revelations that shed light on the duplicity and lawlessness of the Nixon administration. During breaks, cast and crew would gather around a TV on the set or crowd into Beatty’s trailer to watch the hearings on his. Explained Pakula, The Parallax View “brought out all my personal pessimism—I heard the first Watergate and CIA rumblings on the car radio daily as I was driving to work on it. It suggested that man is doomed.”

  To make matters even more interesting, Hollywood was in the grip of a nasty writer’s strike that had closed down the town. The rewrite of the script was finished a scant six weeks before the start of production. No one was happy with it, but the decision was made to go ahead anyway, at least in part because Beatty had a pay-or-play deal. But Pakula didn’t mind starting without a script. “He liked chaos, he liked to create a situation where he could come in and pull it all together at the last minute,” recalls Jon Boorstin, an intern on the film who was Pakula’s nephew by marriage, and son of Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin. “Alan thrived creatively on that sense of uncertainty. He would shoot a movie and not know how it was gonna end. But Beatty wouldn’t do it.”

  Despite his dismissive remarks about his movie career, the actor knew that after his disappearing act, following three flops in a row, he couldn’t risk another. He knew the script needed work. According to Howard Koch Jr., first AD, whose father had been head of production at Paramount, and who would work with Beatty again on Heaven Can Wait, “We always said, ‘How come we’re getting new pages if there’s a writer’s strike,’ and literally, nobody else in town was shooting, except this movie.” It was acceptable under Writers Guild rules to work on the script, but not to hire a writer. Yet, it seemed like one or more writers were indeed plying their trade. He goes on, “We were able to continue because we said we weren’t making any changes to the script, but there were tremendous changes made to the script, by a scab writer. Every day, either I or someone else would pick up some pages from [the writer’s] house.” Says Frank Yablans, who was then head of distribution at Paramount, a former booker, scrappy and belligerent, “It was done sub rosa. Beatty was the greatest mind-fucker who ever lived, period. He always held himself above it all. He was the king, and the instigator. I’m sure Evans had something to do with it. Towne went along too. He wanted to be one of them. They were all very close.” (Towne denies that he worked on the script during the strike.)

  Living on a steady diet of new pages was hardly unprecedented for a production, but it is not a recipe for speed. Continues Boorstin, “Every morning during the shooting, they would sit around for two or three hours and talk about the script, rewrite, and then they’d go to work. As an intern, I thought everyone did this. I didn’t realize that with eighty people standing around waiting, this would drive them crazy. It was unheard of in a Hollywood production.” Koch adds, Pakula would “call me and say, ‘We’re shooting at the marina.’ The trucks would pull out, and we’d go to the marina, but there was nothing to shoot. The scenes would come in, there’d be phone calls back and forth, and then Warren and Alan would work on a scene, and if there were scenes with Hume, he would come in and the three of them would work for hours and hours on the pages they had just gotten until they finally got the scenes right.”

  Koch had mixed feelings about Beatty. Like others, he experienced Beatty as a black hole, a maw of antimatter that swallowed everything and gave nothing in return, neither light nor heat. He says, “We were friends in the way that you’re allowed to be friends with Warren, which is, he wants to know everything you’re doing, everything you’re thinking—‘I’m maybe gonna do a movie at Fox, what do you think of the head of Fox? Or d’ya think Paramount might be better?’—and then you say, ‘Well, Warren, what’s goin’ on with you?’ ‘Naaah, nuthin’ much.’ ‘C’mon Warren,’ and maybe he’ll give you a little—‘Dating a girl, but it’s no big deal.’ And you never get there with him. Because he’s closed. It was very difficult to work with him. Everybody was subservient to him. He will suck you dry of all your creativity, your craftsmanship, and then once all of that is done, then maybe he’ll feel comfortable for a minute, but then he’ll come back and ask for a little bit more.”

  This was the first acting Beatty had done since Dollars wrapped in April 1971, and he was rusty. Pakula didn’t mind indulging his penchant for shooting double-digit takes. Like Beatty, he would say, “It’s only film.” One of the director’s strengths was his ability to deal with difficult actors, which would shortly see him through All the President’s Men, with Redford and Hoffman. “Both Allan and Warren are very canny, very crafty, very manipulative people who know how to charm someone and get them on their side,” says Boorstin. “That whole process of the rewriting I’m sure was as much about managing Warren as it was about changing the script. Because I didn’t see the script doing a lot of changing around.”

  In one scene, Beatty does nothing more complicated than sit at a table stirring soup. The actor did take after take to get just the right amount of steam coming off the soup. Charlie Maguire, the production manager, whom Beatty had first met on Splendor in the Grass and who went on to work on many of his films, took the slate used to mark the start of each take and kept it as a souvenir. It said, “Warren Stirs Soup. Take 98”!

  Beatty is a self-confessed obsessive-compulsive, the kin
d of person who straightens up a picture hanging on the wall, squares up a coffee table, moving it a fraction of an inch to the left or to the right so that it lines up with the walls. It’s a clinical term for a perfectionist, and the behavior is fairly common, but it merely labels, doesn’t “explain” his behavior—the serial takes, the return to and reopening of subjects already aired and seemingly closed, even his dating habits. What’s more interesting is the uses to which he puts his compulsive behavior. Instead of trying to rein it in, he let it range free, probably because he could—and yoked it to his purposes, whatever they happened to be at any given time, for better or for worse. These included breaking actors down, getting his way with writers—and often, making good movies.

  With little of Pakula’s patience, DP Gordon Willis was another story. He was a tough, gruff customer who even at the beginning of his career liked to take control of the set. “Gordon had no patience with actors,” Boorstin recalls. “He would get pissed off. He thought [all the takes were] just a waste of time. How many times can you stir the soup? After six or seven takes, it wasn’t getting any better anyway.”

  According to Boorstin, Willis ruined Beatty’s best moment in the movie, which profoundly disturbed the actor. It was a shot in a shabby motel room that Willis lit with just one bare bulb, no fill light. In the rushes, the scene was so dark that the performance was lost. “Alan was really upset when he saw the dailies,” Boorstin remembers. “He thought he was directing an actor, and he was directing a shadow.” Willis, who was used to working on the edge of light and darkness, was contrite, admitted that he’d gone too far. But sometimes he confessed that he didn’t think Beatty was a good enough actor to pull it off, and he underlit the scene on purpose, to protect him.

  Sometime during the shoot, Mike Medavoy, then an agent at Creative Artists Agency who seemed to handle virtually all the New Hollywood players, visited Beatty on the set. He represented director Hal Ashby and writer Carole Eastman, both of whom had films coming up with Beatty, the former Shampoo, and the latter The Fortune. Medavoy wanted Beatty to buy Eastman’s script. He recalls, “Mike Nichols wanted to do it, and Warren wanted to do it, and Jack Nicholson wanted to do it, so I knew I had a lot of leverage. I went to his trailer. Warren asked, ‘What do you want for the script?’ I said, ‘I really don’t know. What you should do is ask around town and find out what’s the most ever paid for a script, and give me more.’ Eventually Carole got a lot of money for it, a little more than $400,000. It took forever for me to confirm the deal with Warren. I think he wanted to direct The Fortune himself, although he never said that.” According to Beatty, he didn’t buy The Fortune. “Medavoy,” he says, “is fuckin’ senile.”

  Beatty tried to seduce his co-star Paula Prentiss, but she wasn’t having any of it. She said, “Obviously, it’s very tempting to go to bed with someone as pretty as that, and the temptation is always there. But it’s totally just a quickie high, and when you get close you realize it’s all packing with nothing lasting underneath.”

  Boorstin, who remembers Beatty “as a charmer, not a bully—he wanted people to like him”—recalls girls lining up outside his trailer. The intern had an attractive Indian girlfriend at the time. One day, Beatty’s assistant pulled Boorstin aside and said, “Warren wants to know how serious you are about her. Because he’s interested. But if you’re serious he’ll lay off.” Beatty was punctilious, and Boorstin responded in politically correct fashion: “It’s not up to me, it’s up to her.” But he thought, Warren’s poaching the intern’s girlfriend! The star of the movie! What is he thinking?

  Boorstin recalls being puzzled by the fact that some of the girls outside Beatty’s trailer who got past the door were not particularly attractive, especially since Julie Christie, who was doing Uncle Vanya on Broadway, was flying in to spend every weekend with him. Some were chubby, some had hints of mustaches on their upper lips. Some had the errant pimple or mole or other blemishes. “A lot of it is the chase—it invigorates him,” Boorstin says, concluding that the prey, once trapped, often became irrelevant.

  Indeed, Beatty was eclectic. A man for whom the sweet perfume of supermodels and actresses was no more exotic than the air he breathed, Beatty was interested in more than looks. Late in 1971, he implored singer-songwriter Carole King, who was pregnant at the time, to sleep with him because, he explained, he’d never been with a late-term woman and wanted to see what it was like. (She refused.) One night he got a phone call from a woman he didn’t remember, who was married and lived in Colorado. She’d had breast cancer and a mastectomy. Her husband didn’t want to sleep with her anymore. Beatty was outraged, told her, “I’d fuck you in a second, fly out here.” Says a woman to whom Beatty told the story, he would have fucked her in a second, “because he wouldn’t care about that. Obviously beauty is important to him on some level, but it so wasn’t about that for him.”

  Of course, this was Beatty’s story. Carly Simon had a different one. One day, after her mastectomy in 1997, she was sitting with a female friend in the bar at the Carlyle when Beatty walked in. “Oh, how wonderful that you’re in town,” he said. “Why are you here?” Simon told him she was on her way to see her oncologist. “She felt the warmth in his voice disappear,” said the friend, and he made his excuses and left. Subsequently, Simon wrote a song called “Scar” about her cancer, in which there was a line that presumably referred to Beatty: “that poor little puppy, so scared of misfortune and always on guard.”

  LATE IN 1973, Beatty was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He noticed two beefy men in dark suits, narrow ties, and crew cuts seated in front of a TV screen in a room down the hall from his suite. Cables snaked along the floor of the corridor. Every time he went out, there would be a new pair of men, almost identical to the previous set, dark suits, narrow ties, and crew cuts. He was concerned about the press, apprehensive that they were spying on him. He called the desk, said, “This is Warren Beatty. There are two men in a room down the hall from me. Can you tell me who they are?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Beatty, we can’t give out that information.”

  “I need to know who those guys are.”

  The man excused himself, came back on the line, and said, “Confidentially, Mr. Beatty, they work for Mr. Hughes.”

  “Howard Hughes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which suite is he staying in?”

  “I don’t know. Mr. Hughes has reserved six rooms.”

  “Why doesn’t he take a bungalow? They’re more private.”

  “Oh, yes, he’s taken four bungalows. That’s where he puts the girls.” Beatty was impressed, and that became the seed of a decades long interest in doing a movie about Hughes.

  By the end of 1973, Beatty was able to give Shampoo his full attention. Although the script was not finished, the story, such as it was, focused on George Roundy, the hairdresser, and his attempts to raise money to start a salon of his own while in the meantime sleeping his way through the great beauties of Beverly Hills, primarily Jill, his current girlfriend, or at least so she thinks; Jackie, his former girlfriend; and Felicia, with whom he’s having an affair on the side.

  Beatty had planned to direct Shampoo himself, but he’d never directed before, and eventually changed his mind, started looking for someone else. He always wanted at least one more set of eyes looking at what he was looking at, but he worried that it wouldn’t be worth the agony, the energy drain of hashing out differences of opinion. Finally, he decided, “As long as I had control over what went in and what stayed out and what the film is, why not take advantage of the talents of another person.”

  Several directors turned him down, but he kept looking. Hal Ashby had won an editing Oscar for In the Heat of the Night, and had received considerable recognition as director for his previous three films: The Landlord, Harold and Maude, and The Last Detail, in the course of which he had worked with Beatty’s friends Nicholson and Towne. Beatty knew him slightly, and liked him. Ashby was a stoner; he smoked dope mor
ning, noon, and night. Not only did this not bother Beatty, it may have been a plus, since it would quickly become apparent that he did not intend to let Ashby do much in the way of directing, anyway.

  The two men met for dinner in November. “We talked about different ideas and he asked me if he had ever mentioned Hair which was Shampoo’s original title,” Ashby recalled. “He said he and Bob Towne had worked on it when they were doing Bonnie and Clyde and that when Towne had finally written the script and given it to him to read, he was so angry with it that he sat down the next day and wrote his own version.” He explained that Shampoo was a film à clef, a satiric swipe at the Hollywood community in which everyone has too much money, too much time, too much everything.

  Beatty showed Ashby each version. Knowing that he might well be working with both of them, Ashby diplomatically told him that he thought it best to meld the two. Soaked in sex as it was, he knew Shampoo would be a hit, whereas his own movies were too quirky to do much business. For all his dislike for the Hollywood system, he was eager to hitch his wagon to a star of Beatty’s magnitude. Says Jerry Hellman, who would produce Coming Home in 1978, which Ashby directed, “Warren was a giant star, and Hal looked up to and cherished his friendship with Warren.”

  Towne had problems with Ashby going back to The Last Detail. Recalls Beatty, “Hal and Towne never liked each other very much. Towne felt that Hal was a little lax. Hal was never a person to fight to get it right, exactly the way it was on the page.” But for Beatty, those aspects of Ashby’s style that were anathema to Towne made him attractive, just as the director’s taste for weed did. Beatty knew that Ashby would be open to “guidance.” Beatty continues, “Towne said, ‘I implore you not to use Hal Ashby, use Mark Rydell.’ I said, ‘I’m using Hal Ashby.’” He paid him $125,000 and 7.5 percent of the net.

  Beatty, who did not yet have a studio deal, went ahead and lined up key members of the crew and cast. He filled the production slots with his own people, leaving Ashby with none of his regulars, save for editor Bob Jones, who had cut The Last Detail. Anthea Sylbert, married to Dick Sylbert’s identical twin brother, Paul, designed the costumes. She had never worked with Beatty before. Her first impression was, “He’s always answering a question with a question, and he already knows your answer.”