Hall was at the end of his career and he didn’t really care what he said to anybody, including Beatty. The star told Hall in no uncertain terms that he and Bening had to look beautiful. “Warren is very, very arrogant about the way he looks,” says Davis. “Particularly at that time, when he still wanted to be a romantic lead. None of these guys want to age. They’re movie stars, that’s their currency. He absolutely, 100 percent, told Connie where to put the lights. Now Connie was a frustrated director, but no cameraman likes that.”
Hall took his revenge by underlighting Beatty. Says Clegg, “It was very dark, dark, too dark. Where was Warren? Connie was very ornery about it, wouldn’t back down, ‘No, this is right.’ They argued about it.” Caron adds, “From the moment we started, Connie was a problem. Every Friday, he’d get up on a ladder and scream at the top of his lungs, ‘I’m off this fuckin’ movie.’ He’d quit. Before every setup we’d place the camera, we’d videotape the rehearsal, Warren would watch the videotape, and he didn’t like the way he looked. Warren set up a monitor in his motor home so he could see where we placed the camera. He would say to me, ‘Tell him to bring the key light around.’ I’d say, ‘That’s Connie Hall. I’m not going to tell him to bring the key light around. You look fantastic for a fifty-seven-year-old man. That’s character.’ But he was uncomfortable with that. We’d go back and forth, and finally, I’d go over to Connie and say, ‘We have a problem.’
“‘What?’
“‘He wants to bring the key light around.’
“‘He wants to look like a faggot?’
“So you’d see scenes where he’d literally just shut the light off, so you couldn’t see the things that Warren found objectionable, the lines on his face, the bags under his eyes. Warren was either in the dark or we were blasting him with light. Connie was not one to sculpt a face. That’s not what he’s interested in. It was a real wrestling match.”
As was his wont, Beatty remained Eastman Kodak’s best friend, insisting on take after take. Says Caron, “We would do endless takes on Warren. Endless.” Davis adds, “There’s the scene at the end of the movie when he sees Annette for the first time on the couch, and realizes she’s crippled—Warren walking into the room, no dialogue—ninety-five takes! A day and a half of shooting. One time I was walking by him, and I looked at my watch, he said, ‘Are you rushing us?’
“‘No, why?’
“‘ ’Cause you looked at your watch.’
“‘I looked at my watch to see what time it was.’
“‘Don’t fucking rush us. Get the hell off the set!’
“By the next day, he’d forgotten about it.”
Clegg recalls the same scene: “A hundred forty takes. There was no dialogue. I had a wedding to go to, left on a Thursday night, came back Monday, and we were still shooting. There was no difference between take 1 and take 140.” She concluded that he was deliberately holding up the production. “He still wanted Hepburn,” she explains. “He’s a smart guy, and he figured out a way to stop the locomotive. There’s something about him that slows the whole process down. There were many days when he was in the trailer writing or whatever, and you’d just sit and wait. There was nothing going on. It was like we were all prisoners. He took my assistant to type stuff for him. It was like she was caught in a Venus flytrap. And when he was going after Hepburn, I laid off the crew twice while he tried to get her, for a week, and then another week to wait for her. If he doesn’t have what he wants, or he doesn’t feel comfortable, he creates a delay. He does 150 takes.” Says Buck Henry, “I have a friend who visited the set, and noticed the clapper board, which said, take 102. He said to Connie, ‘What’s going on? Is that a mistake?’ Connie said, ‘No, no, we’ve been shooting it all day. Fortunately, there’s no dialogue in the scene.’ Maybe there’s a piece of Warhol in Warren.”
(There was apparently a legitimate reason, of sorts, for the great number of takes of this scene: a fluke of lighting created a shape that looked like a goiter on Beatty’s neck, so the first sixty odd takes had to be discarded, and another sixty shot.)
Hall made merciless fun of Beatty for his penchant for endless takes. Paul Mazursky had a bit part. He recalls, “I was sitting in the mock airplane, and Connie was shooting a close-up of Warren. They were up to about take thirty-five or forty takes, and after each take, they’d go look at the damn monitor. And Warren would say to Connie, ‘Let’s do just one more.’ I was half asleep, but I could see Connie’s neck getting redder and redder. Finally, they get to about take 48, and Warren said, ‘Okay, that’s it! Which one do you think was the best, Connie?’
“‘One and 2.’
“Warren flipped. He lost his temper, [snapped], ‘Connie, that’s not funny!’”
Echoing Paul Sylbert, when he insists that Beatty, like Mervyn LeRoy, is more a selector than a director, Caron says of Beatty, “Most directors come into a project with a point of view. You don’t sense with Warren that there’s some burning vision in his head that he’s gonna go out and get. Annette once said to me, ‘You’re more like Milos Forman. Milos has the whole movie in his head. He can act every part. He knows where the music cues go.’
“I said, ‘Yes, of course.’
“Warren was appalled: ‘How could you presume to know those things? The best we can do is build a set, try to capture it from as many points of view as possible, and then select the best takes.’
“That was anathema to me. I think Scorsese had a pretty good idea of what Taxi Driver was going to be like before he started making it. The joke about Reds used to be, It’s the best movie money could buy. He shot it and shot it and shot it until he got it right. I’m not saying that’s invalid, but is that what you think of as directing?”
What motivated Beatty to direct? Anger? Power? Ambition? “Narcissism!” says Davis. “It’s a combination of wanting to completely control his image, which he’s very concerned about, and he also thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room. And when you think you’re the smartest guy in the room, you don’t think anyone can do it better than you can.”
Davis blames the dysfunctional relationship on Caron, not Beatty, although he does acknowledge that despite never seeing him “yell at Glenn, he was nasty. He would get very personal. But if you’re going to open the door and walk into the world of Warren Beatty, you should know what you’re walking into. You shouldn’t be surprised. I wasn’t surprised. The door was open for Glenn. But he never stood up to Warren. One night, very late, Warren, Glenn, and I were standing outside the stage talking about their relationship. Glenn said to Warren, ‘The problem is that I’ve idolized you my whole life.’ The moment he said that, he gave up any power that he might have had. The guy had an opportunity, and he didn’t know what to do with it. It was Glenn.”
Caron believed at least part of his difficulty with Beatty stemmed from the fact that the actor was working with his wife. “This was the first film he had done married,” Caron says. “I don’t think you can underestimate that, because a lot of the films he did, one of the ways he propelled himself through them was by romancing someone. The act of wooing provided some sort of creative fuel. He didn’t have that here. There was no one to impress, to show off for.” After all, Beatty did tell Norman Mailer, “It sometimes seemed that I had very little interest in making a movie until I was romantically motivated.” Caron goes on, “Whenever there was a scene with a lot of women, he would be at his most difficult for me to deal with. He would want to assert himself.” Adds Clegg, “He was flirting with everybody, but there was nothing extracurricular that I saw.” The couple behaved like “two people totally in love,” says Davis. “She knows who he is, and is not afraid to give him shit. She would tease him.”
The Hepburn episode (without Hepburn) was supposed to transpire in Tahiti. Needless to say, Warners was not happy about it, wanted them to shoot in Hawaii. They went to Tahiti anyway and shot exteriors. One day, in the middle of the Tahiti shoot, Caron looked up to see Jim Toback standing behind a pa
lm tree. He exclaimed, “My God, Jimmy, what are you doing here?”
“Warren brought me in to rewrite.”
Recalls Caron, “I was surprised, because I was the writer, and I was the director, and I hadn’t been consulted.” He thought, If you’re looking around for someone to rewrite a romantic comedy, Jimmy Toback wouldn’t be the first person you thought of. I’m not inherently scatological. But there’s part of Warren that is. He needed a guy to be able to say all this stuff to.”
Again, Davis considers Caron naive. “Why would you be surprised that Toback showed up in Tahiti?” he wonders. “Jimmy was around all the time. One of the great two hours of my life was having lunch at the Essex House with Warren, Toback, and Norman Mailer. When I got to the table, they’d already been talking for at least five minutes about their bowel movements, and continued for another ten minutes after I sat down.”
Since Beatty’s wooing of Hepburn went down to the wire, her scenes were shot last. “By that time, my assistant had developed a relationship with her caretaker,” Davis recalls. “We conspired with the business manager and the caretaker. We just showed up at her apartment, and said, ‘C’mon, you’re coming to L.A. to do the movie.’ We put her on the Warner jet. It was with the complicity of her people, but we basically kidnapped her.”
Beatty and Scott Berg accompanied her. Hepburn slept on one side of her face, and when she awoke, the lesions were inflamed. Beatty was visibly upset. As soon as he was alone with Berg, he observed, “My God, her face looks like a fruitcake.” He instantly referred her to a doctor.
“At the airport in Los Angeles, Beatty ran around like a little boy, chasing after her: ‘Is this okay?’ ‘Is this okay?’” Clegg recalls. “She was cranky, she didn’t want to be there even then.” She refused to stay at a hotel, so he rented her a house off Mulholland, near his own. “The house had to be only one story, and not too big, because she’d freak out if there was too much space,” Clegg continues. “She walked in, and said, ‘Too many flowers.’ Warren picked up the flowers and ran out of the room with them. He did it himself. He was in awe that she was there at all, and he wanted to make it as nice for her as possible.”
Hepburn’s mood did not improve. According to Berg, Beatty couldn’t understand why she didn’t appreciate her “opportunity.” “She’ll be working with the greatest living director in the world,” said Beatty. Berg, who knew that the star planned to direct Hepburn himself, says the conversation continued this way:
“I’m sorry? Well, it’s true, Cukor and Huston and Ford are all dead.” Berg labored on. “But what about Billy Wilder and Kurosawa and David Lean?”
“I mean guys who are still working.”
“How about Stanley Kubrick,” Berg countered.
“Yeah, but he hasn’t made a picture in years.” Berg searched Beatty’s face in vain for a sign of irony—a smile, a wink, something, but finally gave up. If Beatty was putting him on, he did a good job.
Berg too disliked the idea of Hepburn saying “Fuck a duck.” He felt it was tasteless, and her fans wouldn’t like it. He wondered, “Why upset some of the people who would be coming to the movie to see her?” He was taken aback when Beatty replied, “Nobody’s coming to this movie to see her.”
“I’m sorry?” Berg blurted out, thinking he’d misheard.
“I said nobody’s coming to this movie to see Hepburn.” Berg wrote, “Suddenly I understood that this entire casting expedition had been little more than an exercise in vanity.” In the event, she did say it, quickly, so it’s almost inaudible.
Hepburn’s scenes were shot over the course of about four days, short days, about four hours of shooting time each, on the back lot at Warners. Beatty made every effort to minimize down time. Her scenes were prepped before she arrived so that when she stepped onto the set, everyone was ready to go. But the accounts of the shoot differ dramatically. Rumor has it that Beatty forbade Caron to speak to her. According to William J. Mann’s biography Kate, the actress was subjected to torture by retake. He quotes Hepburn’s longtime friend John Dayton saying, “I told Warren that Kate’s first take was always her best take.… Unless something happened, there was no reason to do it beyond the second take.” In one scene, where Hepburn was seated on a low couch, the script called for her to stand up, say a line, and walk out of frame. Beatty rehearsed her. According to Mann, she did it perfectly. He shot it—and asked her to do it again. “Dead silence fell over the set.” Dayton recalls, “Kate looked at me and gave me this evil eye. So she did it again. She had done the rehearsal, then the first take, now the second take. She had gotten up off that couch three times.” Beatty said, “Please do it again.” Hepburn shot him a look that could kill, shuffled over to Dayton, and said, “You take me home right now,” and the two of them walked off the set. According to him, all hell broke loose. He recalled, “Warren was chasing us.” But it was for naught. Hepburn’s scenes were over.
According to Davis, Beatty did not do multiple takes with her. He says, “Warren was too respectful.” But Clegg says, “She definitely got cranky with him about the number of takes. She talked back to him, gave him flak: ‘That’s enough.’ He’d say, ‘Oh, right, right. I’m only supposed to do a certain number of takes.’” Berg, too, was under the impression that Caron was “not allowed on the set,” but Caron insists that he directed her. “We certainly weren’t limited in the number of takes we could do.” He does not recall her stalking off the set, nor Beatty chasing her.
When it was over, Beatty told Hepburn, “If I had only met you thirty years ago.” As soon as he was out of earshot, she turned to Berg and asked, “Was that supposed to be a compliment?”
That fall, when Dominick Dunne wrote on Beatty for Vanity Fair, Berg couldn’t help noticing that when the star touched on Howard Hughes, he said, “What you must always remember about Howard is that he was deaf.”
One day before the wrap was scheduled, Martin Luther King Day, January 17, 1994, at 4:31 in the morning, an earthquake centered in Northridge, just north of the city, jarred Los Angeles. Hepburn’s rental home was badly damaged. Had she not left a day earlier, Beatty says, she might easily have been killed. His home was destroyed. Davis went up to the house later that day: “All the glass had blown out, the walls had caved in, it was an ugly mess. He was wandering around like a zombie. He had just experienced a tremendous loss and hadn’t quite processed it. Losing the house was heartbreaking.”
When production finally ended after a delay of a week or so during which the damaged sets were rebuilt, Caron practically kissed the ground. He had lost about fifty pounds. “I just kept looking over the bow, waiting to see land,” he says. He says he has no idea what the budget was or how much the picture went over. But he was impressed by the lavishness of the production. Still, according to Davis, the film wasn’t over budget by much. The picture cost about $45 million. (Other sources put the budget at about $60 million.) “We were four days over schedule. Warren’s deal with Warners was, he was on the hook if we went a certain amount over budget. He was very worried that he was going to be out of pocket. Once, when we were two thirds of the way done with the movie, he asked me, ‘How’re we doin’? Is this gonna cost me any money?’
“‘You’re okay.’
“‘How’d you pull it off?’
“‘We played some tricks, you’re gonna be fine.’ He got this giant grin on his face like a little boy, and he grabbed my face and kissed me on the lips.”
“I SHOT Love Affair with the idea that as long as I have what I need, I’ll do the things that he wants, the ninety-six takes of him walking into a room and looking at a picture,” says Caron. “Films are made in the cutting room. That’s where you attenuate performances, that’s where you emphasize them. You figure out how to take an audience through the experience. The cutting room was the place where I really wanted to impress him. But I wasn’t given a chance to do that.”
Caron’s mother was dying. She lived in New York City, and he asked Beatty, “Ma
y I cut the movie in New York?” According to him, Beatty said no. As Caron tells it, “My family moved back to New York, I flew to California, and I spent eight weeks in the cutting room with Bob Jones, who was not my cutter, he was Warren’s cutter. And Jones’s first allegiance was to him. I would have preferred someone who I knew better. The editing room is a place where you really want to feel free to try anything, but I really felt panicked there.”
It’s true that Jones and Beatty had an easy familiarity, based on months of working together. Jones knew there was no love lost between Beatty and Redford. He once worked for a couple of weeks on Redford’s Indecent Proposal. He mentioned it to Beatty, who promptly asked, “How’s his skin look?”
According to Jones, a few days after they wrapped, he had a rough assemblage ready to show them. Dede Allen, who by that time was a postproduction executive at Warners, looked at that cut, as well as subsequent ones and, Jones says, liked it best. But Caron didn’t agree. He observes, “It was admittedly a sentimental experience, but how much sugar do you offer them?”
Jones recalls that in one sequence, on the airplane, “Glenn changed all the takes of Warren that I selected. I picked takes where he was lighter, more vulnerable. He made Warren’s character a lot darker. He was deadly serious, sullen. Instead of being a playful flirt, he was almost sinister.” In other words, his character was closer to the way Caron himself experienced Beatty. Jones continues, “When we were running Glenn’s cut for Warren, he jumped up and said, ‘What the fuck happened? What did you do to me, Bob? I hate it!’”
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