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STAR
How Warren Beatty
Seduced America
PETER BISKIND
Simon & Schuster
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Copyright © 2010 by Peter Biskind
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DESIGNED BY KYOKO WATANABE
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Biskind, Peter.
Star: how Warren Beatty seduced America/By Peter Biskind.
—1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Beatty, Warren, 1937–
2. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography.
I. Title.
PN2287.B394B57 2010
791.4302’8092—dc22
[B] 2009022225
ISBN 978-0-7432-4658-3
ISBN 978-1-8473-7839-2(ebook)
To Betsy and Kate with love
CONTENTS
Warrenology: An Introduction
1. A Star Is Born
2. All Fell Down
3. They Robbed Banks
4. Easy Writer
5. Don Juan in Hell
6. Orson Welles, C’est Moi
7. From Russia with Love
8. One from the Hart
9. Fatal Attraction
10. Material Boy
11. Letting Go
12. Mr. Beatty Goes to Washington
13. In His Own Way
14. He’s Been Up So Long It Looks Like Down to Me
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
STAR
WARRENOLOGY:
AN INTRODUCTION
“You know what I think about these histories that we do on DVD, it makes me think of what Winston Churchill said, ‘History will be very kind to me, because I intend to write it.’”
—Warren Beatty
FINISHING THIS BOOK was like recovering from a lingering illness, although admittedly one that I had brought on myself. I had wanted to write a biography of Warren Beatty since I met him in 1989, when he was shooting Dick Tracy. I had admired his films for a long time. Like everyone else, I was undone by Bonnie and Clyde when I first saw it in 1967, vastly entertained by Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait, and stunned by Reds. A veteran of the antiwar movement and a documentary filmmaker myself for a time, I was used to ragged, 16 millimeter black and white agitprop and was astounded that the biggest Hollywood star of the 1970s had given the Gone With the Wind treatment to the Russian Revolution and the formation of the American Communist Party—and gotten a big studio, Paramount, to pay for it. During the reign of Ronald Reagan, yet.
Then came Ishtar, but I was unfazed. Everybody, even Beatty, has flops. As editor of American Film in 1987, I wrote about it myself, and even put him, Dustin Hoffman, and Isabelle Adjani on the cover, in costume, all looking impish, as if they’d just gotten away with something, which, as it turned out, they hadn’t. I was besotted, even though he refused to talk to me while I was working on that piece, delegating his cousin David MacLeod to do the honors, and only later, when it was too late, did he say he wished he had. Very Beatty-ish, as I would learn.
I first met Beatty in person, as opposed to the characters he played, or the simulacrum in the tabloids and gossip columns, when I covered Dick Tracy for Premiere magazine in 1989. I was struck by how original a film it was, flavored with a dash of Charles Dickens and a dollop of Bertolt Brecht, in equal measure. Beatty actually allowed me on the set for a couple of days, a rare privilege indeed, until one night, very late, I was standing in the back of a soundstage, way out of his eyeline, I thought, when he took a piece of chewing gum from his mouth, fashioned it into a little ball, and playfully flicked it at me. I’m in, I thought to myself, somewhat prematurely. He was shooting countless takes of Glenne Headly, who played Tracy’s girlfriend, repeating the same line again and again, still managing to flub it. After the twenty-fifth or so go-round, he walked over to me and threw me off the set, saying I was making her nervous. (I don’t think she even knew I was there.) I spent a couple of hours with him in his trailer while he explained to me that he would be happy to talk to me about anything I wanted—except Dick Tracy, again very Beatty-ish. Did I want to talk about Reds? Well, yes, but I was actually doing a piece on Tracy. He even explained why he didn’t want to talk about Tracy: “It’s fundamentally destructive to the ability to look at a movie and have your own feelings about it, because it’s obliterated by all this chatter that comes from us about our work, and—I always say it’s like somebody coming into a kitchen where there is a seven-thousand-pound soufflé, and stamping their foot.” The next day, I returned to New York. Eventually he was ready to talk to me about Reds, for Vanity Fair, some fifteen years later! Beatty is not a man who likes to be rushed.
After the movie had wrapped, I went back to L.A. and spent a good deal of time with him, again trying to draw him out on the subject of Tracy. It was almost impossible. He would parry questions, change the subject, make a joke, lapse into silence, or answer a question with another question. In those rare instances when he did respond, he insisted the answer was off the record. Sometimes he would tell me two thirds of a story but withhold the punch line, so it made no sense. In 2008, at the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award ceremony, his oldest friend, screenwriter Robert Towne, locked eyes with him and complained, “In forty-five years you never opened yourself up.” He once told The New York Times’s Lynn Hirschberg, “If you have something to hide, then hide it.” Adds filmmaker James Toback, also a close friend, “Warren has a theory. Never disclose to anyone what isn’t absolutely essential to disclose. There’s very little accidental about Warren; if he says something, there’s a reason for it.” But, as Hirschberg once observed, acutely, “Even when he is saying nothing, he is saying something.” What she didn’t say is that the reverse is equally true; even when he appears to be saying something, he is saying nothing.
Still, his evasions were orchestrated with a light touch. It became a kind
of game, with me asking, and him not telling, in a million different ways. It was frustrating, even infuriating, but it was also kind of fun. As writer-director Paul Mazursky once put it, “He’s one of the strangest and shrewdest guys I ever met. Strange only in that he’s [so] close to the vest. If you’re in a relationship with Warren, he’s running it on some level. But he makes you feel nice.”
By that time in the course of my work I had met a lot of stars, but never met anyone quite like him. Indecently gifted, he acted, he wrote, he directed, he produced. A brilliant mind. Tough. Analytical. Inquisitive. Hoovered up everything and gave back nothing. Funny. Self-deprecating. And good, or reasonably good, politics. And he was classy, had style to burn. Nothing and no one ruffled his feathers. He was Captain Cool, Mr. Natural. It cost considerable effort to present a lacquered exterior like his, but he pulled it off with seeming ease. Grace. That was the magic of it: you never saw the gears grinding. Norman Mailer, when he wrote about Beatty in Vanity Fair, called it “charm,” tried to define it, and gave up.
I had never been a big believer in vaporous concepts like “charisma,” which I filed away with “karma,” “vibes,” and “auras,” but I’m embarrassed to report that when I was in his presence I felt an almost palpable sense of well-being, as if I were a better person because Warren Beatty liked me, or pretended he did. When he came to New York, he would call me up, and we would have dinner. I never quite understood it, thought, I’m not even writing about him now. Why isn’t he hanging out with Dustin, or Mike Nichols, or Elaine May? Why me, a mere journalist? Because I reminded him of Leon Trotsky, which he once told me?
Going to a restaurant with him was a sobering experience. We were often alone, because he never ate until nearly midnight, and the place would be kept open for him. The maître d’s were all over him. It was “Mr. Beatty this,” “Mr. Beatty that.” Occasionally we would go earlier, mingle with ordinary mortals. There were always women at the next table who would stare at him. I might as well have been invisible. Or, as actor Marshall Bell, a close friend, once described the experience, “When he and I are standing really close together at a cocktail party talking out of the sides of our mouths, somebody will actually ease in between me and him, and I’m looking at the back of their head. It might even be a guy.” He flirted mercilessly. I remember eating with him in a joint in the Valley (San Fernando), when he started a conversation with one such woman, cute, with one of those pert, Southern California noses, and asked her what she did. She gazed at him with a glassy, doe-caught-in-the-headlights look and said, in a small voice, “I’m an organizer.” I could see his antennae go up, as he smelled a kindred spirit, maybe a union organizer, or at the very least, someone like him, a political junkie.
“What kind of an organizer?”
“Closets.”
While I was still working on Dick Tracy, I once waited for him for two hours outside a projection booth in midtown while he showed the film to the editors of The New York Times, or some such prestigious print outlet, and then clambered into his limo headed down to SoHo for dinner. I figured that it was now or never. In the hushed confines of the limo, I said, “If you ever decide you’re ready to sit for a book, I’d like to do it.”
“What kind of book?”
“A biography.”
“I’m still alive.”
“I know.”
He never really gave me an answer, never said yes, never said no. Again, very Beatty-ish.
WHY WARREN Beatty? It’s distressing to have to make a case for his importance just because no one under forty (maybe fifty?) knows who he is. If you go to the blogs, you’ll find they’re merciless, nasty and mean, for no better reason than that he’s getting old. Ours is an unforgiving culture.
When I finished my book on the New Hollywood of the 1970s, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, back in 1998, I felt like a hummingbird, flitting from blossom to blossom, filmmaker to filmmaker, extracting the nectar and moving on. I knew there was a whole lot more to that decade, and any of those directors could be pulled out for the full biographical treatment. Of course, many of them have been. There are plenty of books about, say, Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese. There are even a couple about Beatty, but his reticence has always defeated biographers, even so fine a critic as David Thomson, who was finally reduced to fiction in Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes, alternating between orthodox, fact-filled chapters and imaginative narratives. A certain amount is known, of course, but the same stories have been recycled again and again with little added, an astonishing feat for someone who has lived in the public eye for five decades while managing, for most of that time, to lead the life of a celebrated lothario.
“Celebrated lothario”: that was the rub. No matter what he achieved in film, it was overshadowed by his reputation as a superman of seduction. But by dint of assiduous attention to his image, he finally shed the reputation he enjoyed in the early 1960s for being little more than a playboy, and by the year 2000, he had transformed himself into a Thalberg Award winner. Of course his transformation was the product of considerably more than image control: Joan Collins’s boy toy turned out to be one of the most versatile and skilled talents of his generation, enjoying the distinction of being the only filmmaker since Orson Welles to be nominated in four categories by the Motion Picture Academy, as he was in 1978 for Heaven Can Wait and then again in 1981 for Reds. The first four films he produced (Bonnie and Clyde, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, and Reds) racked up thirty-five Oscar nominations—a signal distinction, if we consider the Oscars a measurement of something other than advertising dollars in the pockets of the networks.
But even if we don’t, there’s no arguing with the movies, which brings us back to the old parlor game: how many defining motion pictures does a filmmaker have to make to be considered great? Rather than argue this again, I will just give my opinion: very few. Just choosing filmmakers with towering reputations, almost at random: Orson Welles? One, maybe two: Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil. Jean Renoir? Does anyone know titles other than Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion? Elia Kazan? Two—A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront. Of course, other filmmakers—Scorsese, Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman et al.—have more, but two seems to be the minimum, even though there are exceptions, like Sam Peckinpah, with one—The Wild Bunch. In any event, Beatty can claim five as a producer—Bonnie and Clyde, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, Reds, and Bugsy; all those, plus Splendor in the Grass, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and Bulworth as an actor; and three as a director: Heaven Can Wait, Reds, and Bulworth. You can quibble with any one of these, but all together, it’s a full house.
But Beatty is not only one of the foremost filmmakers of his generation; there are other things that make him appealing as the subject of a book. He was a people collector, knew absolutely everyone, both in Hollywood and out. He is a star in the grand tradition of Clark Gable and Cary Grant, and one of the last living bridges between the Old Hollywood studio system and the New Hollywood of the 1970s. He knew moguls like Jack Warner, Sam Goldwyn, and Darryl Zanuck; agents, like Charlie Feldman, Abe Lastfogel, Stan Kamen, and Lew Wasserman. He started out with Elia Kazan, worked with Robert Rossen, and was friendly with Kubrick, Renoir, George Stevens, and William Wyler. He knew all the actors, the giants of that and bygone eras: Charlie Chaplin, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, and of course Marlon Brando. And then his own generation: actors like Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, and Jane Fonda; executives like Bob Evans, John Calley, and David Geffen. And he knew all the political figures, from the old lefties—both friendly witnesses like Clifford Odets and Budd Schulberg, and unfriendly witnesses like Lillian Hellman—to Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and Ronald Reagan, as well as sundry foreign leaders.
Moreover, I was interested in the intersection between politics and popular culture, and Beatty virtually defined it. He had always been passionate about politics and had been active in George McGovern’s presidential campaign in 1972, and both of Gary Hart’s runs at the presidency, in 1983, and again in 19
87, until Hart withdrew under a cloud of scandal. And Beatty is a great storyteller, can hold you spellbound for hours, or else have you on the floor laughing.
And then there were the women. He had courted Natalie Wood, Leslie Caron, Julie Christie, and Diane Keaton, to name a few—a very few. As much as Hugh Hefner, he was the embodiment of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and as such he was, for many men, the single most persuasive argument against marriage and family, two pillars of American ideology. Despite his slash-and-burn love life, women adored him. And no wonder; he loved them in return. Of course he preferred intelligence, good looks, and a hot body, but in a pinch, for a casual encounter, almost any female in the known world would do—blondes or brunettes, long hair or short, thin or fat, young or old, shiksas or JAPs, good skin or bad, white or black and every shade in between. He liked full-breasted, voluptuous women with dramatic curves, as well as small-breasted women with bodies like boys. He scoured lingerie ads in Vogue, checked out bathing beauties selling sunblock on billboards, headshots from casting directors, and 8 by 10s from modeling agencies. This may be somewhat of an exaggeration, but not by much. He could always find at least one characteristic to admire—the slant of a cheekbone, the golden flecks in the iris of an eye, the highlights on a head of hair, and so on. He used to say, “Women are like a jar of olives. You can eat one, close it up, or you can eat them all.”
OVER THE years, I repeated my request, but he never showed much interest, generally saying he planned to write his own book, which seemed right—why would he, a self-confessed control freak, turn over something as important as his own story, his legacy, to someone else? As the years passed, I wrote lengthy pieces about him several times, for Premiere and Vanity Fair, but I also went on to other books, and forgot about writing a Beatty biography. Besides, his career was waning, he was making fewer and fewer movies, and a lot of those were flops.
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