Star

by Peter Biskind

  In his own way, a newly chastened Katzenberg had arrived at the same conclusions reached by Columbia chief David Puttnam a half decade earlier. He railed against blockbusters, writing that they had a shelf life “somewhat shorter than a supermarket tomato.” He seemed to feel that Dick Tracy had not made enough money, and was more trouble than it was worth. Katzenberg wrote that “the number of hours it required, the amount of anxiety it generated and the amount of dollars that needed to be expended were disproportionate to the amount of success it achieved.” Were Beatty to pitch another $40 million project, Disney should “soberly conclude that it’s not a project we should choose to get involved in.” He added, “We have to avoid filmmakers like… Warren Beatty, talented as they may be, because their movies spin out of control.” He also claimed that he’d passed on Bugsy for that reason.

  Not everyone at Disney agreed with the memo. Says Bill Mechanic, then head of world-wide video, “You talk yourself into thinking that the movie is going to be the biggest thing ever. I don’t think it fulfilled its ambitions, but it did what it should have done.” Nor did anyone at Disney seem to be prepared for Beatty’s reaction to the memo. Says Press, “I had to live with Tracy so long, I could see what Jeffrey was talking about. There was a price to be paid beyond what the movie cost. It was just common sense.”

  But Beatty was furious. From his point of view, he had been profligate with neither time nor money. He considered Katzenberg a good friend and felt he’d been stabbed in the back for a movie that had broken the $100 million ceiling. He responded, “Take his time? What the hell does that mean? He took my time, which, by contract, I didn’t have to give him. It is fascinating that a man could have a picture that is as profitable as Dick Tracy—they got the negative cost back out of cassette sales alone—and try to put a negative spin on it because it didn’t do as well as Batman. It never could have been Batman.”

  Katzenberg tried to mend fences. He sent Beatty an olive tree, a chocolate dart board with his own likeness in the bull’s-eye, and two white doves in a gilded cage. Says a Disney source, “Warren hated all that stuff. He was hurt. I don’t remember an instance when an executive had so clearly pointed to one person as being responsible for all of his mishegas.”

  According to Beatty, midway into postproduction Katzenberg began pestering him to do a sequel to Tracy, and far from turning down Bugsy, the Disney executive was desperate to get it. He repeatedly called Beatty and Barry Levinson, who was slated to direct, in an effort to secure the picture. Beatty says Katzenberg was annoyed, and continued to woo him through the period he was writing his memo.

  “Jeffrey treated me very well,” Beatty reflected. “Maybe he treated me too well. Maybe that was a problem for him. He had to put up with someone who had complete artistic control in his contract. They don’t ordinarily affiliate themselves with gorillas like me. I think Jeffrey works too hard.” He continued, “I’m told he tried to correct what he said about Tracy in that memo. But he sort of leaked this out on some fucking cable channel at 4:15 in the morning. That’s like saying it on a quiet street in Fresno.” Beatty didn’t speak to Katzenberg for over a year.

  As everyone had predicted, Beatty and Madonna had gone their separate ways. A few weeks after Tracy opened, it had come to her attention that he had turned down the Newsweek cover story because the magazine wanted to use a picture of him with Madonna. He insisted on himself alone, and that’s the way the cover ran. She castigated him for excluding her from the cover shoot, as well as what she believed were his ongoing and multifarious affairs, although, according to her brother, she was cheating on him. Reportedly, he denied the affairs to her face and insisted that she only see him. She replied, “Go to hell.”

  On the heels of the Newsweek fracas, at the beginning of August, Beatty had screened a cut of Alek Keshishian’s revealing documentary about her, Truth or Dare, in his screening room. “There’s a lot of stuff with Warren that I cut out—there were phone conversations I thought were really moving and touching and revealing, but Warren didn’t know we were recording. It wasn’t fair,” Madonna explained. “He, more than anybody, was reluctant to be filmed. Ultimately I don’t think he respected what I was doing or took it seriously. He just thought I was fucking around, making a home movie.”

  The director recalls that Beatty was indeed unhappy with the film and that some footage wherein Madonna is talking to him on the phone may have been cut, but that “no scenes” where he is on camera “were cut at his behest.”

  Madonna turned thirty-two on August 16. She picked up Tony Ward, age twenty-seven, on the beach at Malibu during a party thrown for her by friends. Recalls Jeremy Pikser, who had been hired by both Beatty and Madonna to write scripts, “He tried to stay friends with her but she was mad at him.” There was some backing and forthing about which script Pikser would write first. He continues, “She said I had to write hers first because she didn’t want to wait on him again. She was very strong-willed and so big, she wouldn’t put up with his bullshit. In those days, that’s what it was all about, how much bullshit they would put up with.”

  BEATTY ALWAYS seemed to think he had all the time in the world, but now it was running out. At fifty-three, he was doing a good job resisting its ravages. He was doing everything in his power to maintain his youth. Marshall Bell, who had a bit part as a crooked cop in Tracy, had become one of his regular workout partners at the gym in his home. Bell called it “the sparring chamber,” and he didn’t mean physically. “I had to be really careful,” Bells recalls. “He’d go, ‘What do you think of so and so?’

  “‘Well, I hear that she got all the way up to the top by using her dinosaur brain.’

  “‘What the fuck is a dinosaur brain?’

  “‘You know, dinosaurs have a brain down in the groin.’

  “‘How the fuck can you talk about people like that. I won’t have that!’

  “‘I’m sorry.’ He went upstairs. Am I supposed to leave? I thought, I shouldn’t have said that. How dare I throw slanderous stuff out there about somebody behind their backs, just to sound clever. I thought he would have laughed. He probably thought that that’s what I thought he was gonna do, so he [did the opposite]. Then he came back down again, and said, ‘I think you were right about that person.’ That’s total sparring. I threw a punch, and he knocked me down, and then came back and said, ‘I’m calling the fight.’”

  But sometimes the sparring wasn’t much fun. Bell continues, “I’ve been the recipient of stuff from him, where if it were cranked up about three times, which wouldn’t be very hard, I could see that making somebody cry. Just a real tough character.” He understood, like many of Beatty’s friends, the asymmetrical nature of the relationship. “I share things with him, but there’s no reciprocity,” he reflects. “What you get back is, you get Warren. That sounds so sycophantic, but that’s a pretty big deal. You know you’re on a chessboard, somewhere, but that’s okay, and fun.”

  Beatty’s affair with Madonna had been grueling, and he was feeling a little bruised. He compensated by throwing himself into a series of affairs. Observes Bell, “When you’ve made your mind up you’re gonna do something that’s gonna change your life, sometimes you go in the opposite direction. He wanted to get that part of his life out of his system, because once Bugsy began, that was the end of it.” Or, as Shirley MacLaine put it, “He’s 50 from the neck up and 14 from the waist down.” His new relationships included supermodel Elle Macpherson, as well as twenty-two-year-old Stephanie Seymour, a ravishing Victoria’s Secret model then married to rock star Tommy Andrews, with whom she had a son named Dylan. Jeremy Pikser remembers seeing her at Beatty’s Mulholland Drive home. “I was in his living room when he was making out like crazy with Stephanie Seymour,” he recalls. “There were a few other actresses and model types there, these incredibly young, tall, beautiful creatures who, to me, were virtually another species. She was sitting on his lap. He was kissing her, totally going wild. That’s how he described it, ‘I’m g
oing wild!’ He had a vodka and cranberry juice. That was the only time I ever saw him drink hard liquor. I was astonished. He was trying to let go, and not be in control, which for him meant having a vodka and cranberry juice! He can never just let go. It was part of, ‘Madonna’s not going to make me look like an old guy’ phase. ‘I’m gonna get somebody younger and prettier than she is.’ He was gonna let off steam, and have a good time for a while, not worry so much about who he was and where he was going. He was in a low place, emotionally, trying to amuse himself by acting like ‘Warren Beatty.’ Trying to have more ‘fun.’ What the fuck! It was clear to me that this was not his plan for a life.”

  Beatty was still carrying on his quiet affair with DeLauné Michel, who was a year younger than Seymour. After he and Madonna broke up, she entertained hopes that he would take them public and she would replace the singer as his numero uno girlfriend. She knew she wasn’t famous like all the other significant women in his life—she didn’t even know about Joyce Hyser—but she took refuge in his repeated declarations of love. Her expectations were buoyed when he invited her up to the house to watch the returns on election night, Tuesday, November 6, 1990. Most of their assignations were arranged at the last minute, sometimes when he was already in his car, on his way. This one involved more long-range planning. She felt that it was almost a coming-out party. It was a midterm contest that saw the Democrats increase—slightly—their hold over both houses of Congress. In other words, Beatty and Michel quickly found themselves in bed. While they were having sex, the phone lit up, one of his private lines, and he took the call while he was inside her. “That’s when I knew it was over,” she says.

  Sooner than she might have wished, the doorbell rang, and fashion photographer Herb Ritts appeared with Danish supermodel Helena Christensen in tow. Beatty was on good terms with all the celebrity photographers, who not only shot him (Ritts would photograph Beatty and Bening for Bugsy), but would also introduce him to a steady stream of models. Christensen excused herself and went to the bathroom. When she returned, she exclaimed, “Ooo, that bathroom was sssooo cold, my pee froze midair.” Michel thought she was vulgar, but when she wandered away again, Ritts turned toward Beatty, with his back to Michel, as if she didn’t exist, and said, “So what do you think about her—pretty hot, huh? She’d be nice. And perfect for you.” That was it for Michel. She recalls, “What more information does one need that this is the end? It was glaringly clear that he had no intention of changing our relationship. It’s one thing to be secret lovers if one or both are in a relationship, but if neither is in a relationship, and it’s still a clandestine thing—I wasn’t going to do that.” She broke it off. Michel says, “It was a double loss. It wasn’t just the loss of a lover, it was the loss of a replacement father.”

  AFTER DICK TRACY, Beatty plunged into his next picture. As usual, he had several balls in the air. One was Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, for which he participated in a table reading. Then there was Bugsy Siegel. Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel was the gangster cum playboy cum visionary developer who built the Flamingo Hotel in a patch of the Nevada desert otherwise known as Las Vegas. He was a colorful character who was a close associate of Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, and other mob luminaries. A dapper dresser and accomplished killer, he was so prone to extravagant displays of temper that he was warily regarded even by his mob pals as a psycho with serious anger management issues, liable to lose it at the mere whisper of his nickname, “Bugsy.” He was the kind of guy who, as Beatty says, “would hire a hit man to kill somebody, and then go out and do it himself. He just couldn’t resist. For the fame. The glamour. I liked it when Meyer Lansky says ‘Ben, for Clark Gable, famous is good. For Joe DiMaggio, famous is good. For you, it’s not good.’” In other words, fame kills. Bugsy was Bonnie and Clyde all over again, Bonnie and Clyde come to Hollywood.

  In 1937, Bugsy was dispatched to L.A. by the bosses back east as an advance man. Once there, he displayed a passion for movie stars, who, attracted by the frisson of danger that enveloped him like a cloud of cologne, repaid the compliment. He fell in love with Virginia Hill, a fiery mob groupie. He called her “Flamingo,” after her skinny legs, and named the hotel for her. Bugsy was obsessed with Hill, even when it became clear that she might, in true noir fashion, destroy him. (When asked if he had ever been obsessed with a woman to a self-destructive degree, Beatty says yes, but of course refuses to say more.)

  The Flamingo cost $6 million, a lot of money in the mid-1940s, and never made a dime, displeasing his underworld investors, who were further convinced that Siegel, Hill, or both were skimming off the top. On the night of June 20, 1947, he was shot in the back of the head by a sniper as he sat reading the Los Angeles Times in his Beverly Hills home. The bullet exited through one of his eye sockets. The eyeball itself was later found by investigators on the floor.

  Beatty, who could feel the hot breath of other Bugsy projects on the back of his neck, was anxiously awaiting Toback’s script. Were he beaten to the mark, it wouldn’t be the first time, and he repeatedly reminded his friend, “There’s a Didion-Dunne script on Bugsy, and we’re gonna end up getting screwed. You’ve got to finish the script.”

  Toback was slow and prone to depression, which made it difficult for him to work. He was desperate to direct his own scripts, thought of himself as a “master creator,” which made him resent it when Beatty hired him to write scripts intended for others to direct. This in turn made it even harder for him to finish his assignments.

  Like Goldman with regard to Dick Tracy, Toback says he didn’t write with Beatty in mind. He started with the character. “I wouldn’t come up with something that Warren would do, it would be something that Bugsy would do—and then I would ask myself if there were any problem imagining Warren doing the same thing. Like picking up the girl in the elevator in the beginning. Not only would there be no problem, it’s something he could do with his eyes closed.” But he did include a number of details that were drawn from Beatty’s life, little in-jokes best appreciated by those who knew the actor. For example, Bugsy picks up a couple of beauty tips from the star, like lying in the sun with slices of cucumber plastered to his eyelids and a reflector under his chin.

  When Toback finally turned in his script, six years late, Beatty responded immediately:

  “I like it.”

  “You want to do it?”

  “Right away, while I can still walk.”

  The writer told his friend that he hoped to direct it himself. Recalls Toback, “He just listened to me. It was left, as he often leaves things, ambiguous enough so that he can legitimately go in whatever direction he wants.”

  Beatty took it to TriStar, a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment, run by Peter Guber and Jon Peters. TriStar was headed by Mike Medavoy. (Medavoy had just started there, another example of Beatty targeting studio heads new to the job.) Beatty wouldn’t give Medavoy the script; he had to go up to Beatty’s home to read it. After skimming part of it, the executive agreed to finance the picture. By that time, Katzenberg’s memo had made the rounds. “There was some caution on Guber’s part, there was none for me,” Medavoy recalls. “I disregarded it. It was the ‘it won’t happen to me’ syndrome.” Medavoy would live to regret it. “Life according to Warren Beatty is different from life according to anyone else in the movie business,” he continued. “Somehow, he is able to make his own rules and then persuade others to follow them.” Beatty received a substantial fee for acting and producing, as well as about 20 percent of first dollar gross.

  Immaculately clad in a lightweight cashmere sweater under a black suit, Beatty appeared at Medavoy’s home, and helpfully counseled him “to lose weight, and dress better. He told me he was going to be a nightmare for me, ’cause he was going to be all over me. All of which was good advice. He needed more handling than I was accustomed to. He warned me about all the things he would do to me, that he did do to me.”

  Medavoy’s wife, Patricia Duff, was a stunnin
gly beautiful blonde who a decade and a half later made the tabs when she got tangled up in a protracted and brutal custody fight with former husband Ron Perelman. She had met Beatty years before, when she was partnered with Pat Caddell in his consulting business, and was working with him on the Reds marketing campaign. Beatty had, of course, come on to her. “He was in love with Diane Keaton,” she recalls. “He was doing some soul searching about that, why she wouldn’t marry him. He was depressed about it. He was a gorgeous man and very charming, when he wanted to be. I’m sure it was genuine that he wanted to take me to bed like he did all the other women, but the rest of it, Warren making you feel like you were the only person in the room, didn’t feel true. He spoke in riddles half the time, liked to be mysterious and enigmatic. He was a little scary, like a spider who was spinning a web. So I just don’t get that close.”

  Beatty had decided he didn’t want to direct Bugsy himself. “I’m in just about every scene of the picture,” he says, “and I didn’t want to have to do all that other work.” Toback still had his heart set on directing the movie, so it skipped a beat when the star asked him, casually, “What do you think of Barry Levinson?” Beatty had been courting Levinson ever since his marvelous debut film, Diner, which opened in 1982. The writer squeezed out, “I like him,” while his stomach sank as he realized where the conversation was headed. “Have you shown him the script?” Toback asked.