Then one day, around the year 2000, while I was working on Down and Dirty Pictures, a book about Miramax, Sundance, and the indie filmmakers of the 1990s, the phone rang. It was Warren. He said, “You know that book about me that you always wanted to write? Maybe now would be the time.” I perked up. But after having made the initial contact, he then turned skeptical, and I found myself in the position of having to convince him. (This I would learn was a ploy he had put to good use in his negotiations with studios.) Initially his position was that he wasn’t going to cooperate. He is suspicious and mistrustful, and had a million reasons why he shouldn’t. He didn’t want it to seem like it was a vanity book, written by a friendly journalist. I said, “Neither do I.” But I had never wanted to do a book without his cooperation, because I wanted his voice in the book. None of the many articles and books about him had captured it, his sense of humor, his intelligence. I pointed out that I’d have a hard time getting a contract without his cooperation. But he retorted that people who agree to cooperate with books about themselves always regret it. Tom King’s biography of David Geffen, a good friend of Beatty’s, had recently been published, and no good had come of that from Geffen’s point of view. Could I come up with a list of five biographies wherein the subjects cooperated that did not turn out to be hatchet jobs? I dutifully compiled such a list, which included the adoring William Shawcross book about Rupert Murdoch, a biography of George Soros, and I forget what else. We talked and talked, and talked some more. Time passed. These conversations often returned to the same subjects and rehashed them. At one point, months later, he again asked me for a list of five biographies where the subjects cooperated and were glad they did. Politics, his friend Pat Caddell once said in another context, “is a game where the winner doesn’t get to take his chips home. You come back the next day and they’re back on the table.” That is a good description of how Beatty works. You’ll argue and argue and argue, and you’ll leave at the end of the day thinking the issue has been settled. Then you will return the next morning and you’ll be back at square one, because he’s raising the same points all over again, the ones you thought had been disposed of the day before. He is so slow to act that he makes Hamlet look rash.
I had forgotten the original list by that time and came up with another. We went over each book. I was fully aware of his reputation for procrastinating and for leading people along—writers, directors, producers—who wanted him to star in their projects, or filmmakers who wanted to do documentaries about him (he had just led actress Lee Grant, who had appeared in Shampoo, on one such merry chase)—and then backing out, leaving them high and dry. Finally he agreed to cooperate. He said, although not in so many words, that he wanted his children to be able to read something that gave him his due as a filmmaker.
On one occasion, I was sitting with him in an Italian restaurant in Beverly Glen, the Beverly Hills mini mall in which his office is located, delivering a speech I had prepared on a potentially sensitive issue, to the effect that although I was grateful for his cooperation, I couldn’t give him access to the text, or allow him to tell me whom I could talk to and whom I couldn’t. Gradually I noticed he was staring at a young woman at the next table. I said, “Warren, did you hear anything I said?”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“I have the feeling she’s very smart. And she’s sad…”
When I managed to get his attention, I told him I would have to write about his romantic exploits, which were too notorious to ignore. Readers would expect it. He said that that was okay with him; it was like another lifetime, distant, behind him. So, on that basis, I convinced my publisher to give me a contract, and began the book.
THAT, AS it turned out, was the easy part. I went out to L.A. from New York, where I live, to begin the interview process. We sat down a few times, but he was clearly uncomfortable, watchful about what he said, dispensing his responses one grain at a time, telling me nothing I didn’t already know. Finally, at lunch one day, he told me that the only reason he had agreed to do the book was because he thought that once word of my book spread, the other writers with books in progress, specifically Ellis Amburn and Suzanne Finstad, would just go away, which of course was ridiculous. In other words he was just using me to scare other writers off; I was no more than a pawn on his chessboard. I was so shocked I thought I had misheard him, especially since he didn’t seem particularly apologetic or in any way acknowledged that he had manipulated me. My next thought was, I don’t know why I’m so surprised. I had been hearing about this kind of behavior for years. Buck Henry always called him the “master manipulator.” Wasn’t I paying attention? Did I think I was special, that it couldn’t or wouldn’t happen to me? Then he told me he was too busy to do any interviewing with me at the moment, but not to take it personally. Maybe some other time. And so began several years of cat-and-mousing. I realized that this book would fall under the category of Be careful what you wish for.
Every book presents its own peculiar problems, and this one was no different, which brings us to the “illness” thing. This was not an easy book for me to research and write. It was difficult emotionally to return to a period I had already written about, not to mention the fact that some of the principals were very unhappy about the way they were portrayed in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, and refused to cooperate, like Robert Towne. Lots of people who knew Beatty well, like Dick Sylbert, had died. Among the living, Beatty inspires such a potent mixture of respect, devotion, and lest we forget, fear, that his closest friends and even mere acquaintances feel obligated to honor the same constraints that govern him. He still maintains relationships of one sort or another with most of his former girlfriends, like Leslie Caron, who are all afflicted with a contagion of silence. Ditto his sister, Shirley MacLaine, ditto his good friend Jack Nicholson. Invariably courteous, Beatty himself was on and off, depending on which side of the bed he got up on in the morning.
While I was working on the book, I always had certain guidelines in my head. I decided that anything of a personal nature that occurred after he and Annette Bening married was off limits, because I didn’t want to be in the position of writing anything that might embarrass them or their four children. Prior to that seismic event, on the other hand, anything goes. I agreed that when anyone said anything terrible about him—of a serious, as opposed to a trivial, nature—I would allow him to respond, which I thought was only fair. But Beatty has a way of turning things—even of a generous nature—against you. So when I went to him with some not so nice things someone had said about him and asked him to respond, he accused me of trying to draw him into controversy and refused. Or responded, off the record. With Beatty, you often find yourself damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
Still, when reading the remarks of his detractors, it is always well to handicap them, that is, to remain mindful of the envy factor. To paraphrase producer Art Linson, who once sued Beatty, “How can you not hate a guy who’s better looking than you are, smarter, and richer? Everything I say is from envy.” His reputation precedes him: people rarely come at him without an attitude, preconceived and often negative, if for no other reason than he has been indecently fortunate in the gene department, which is the reason he has fine-tuned his skills at self-deprecation. He has a lot to deprecate.
Once I embarked on the book, I realized that trying to “explain” Beatty would be futile. It is all too easy to connect the dots between his childhood in Virginia and his behavior as an adult, especially since the tropes that have characterized his behavior throughout most of his life are not all that mysterious and manifested themselves early on: womanizing, ambition, compulsion, and indecision. But for me, such psychologizing holds little interest. It’s too reductive, and in the end, what does it tell us? He’s compelling because of the life he has lived—the films he has made, the people he has known, the tumultuous events that engaged him throughout the course of his long career—but not particularly for how he got there. He wasn’t born
poor, he didn’t struggle against adversity, or at least not more than most actors do. He wasn’t self-invented, didn’t have to translate himself from one culture to another, didn’t have to overcome a drug habit or other vice or trauma. From the beginning, he put the gifts with which he was blessed to good use. Besides, he has jealously guarded the details of his family life growing up; the little we know about his childhood comes from his sister, who has her own axes to grind. I just wasn’t interested in his difficult father and sainted mother, let alone his grandparents and forebears—even though I’ve tried.
Moreover, Freudianism, the most popular scaffolding available to biographers to make sense of their subjects, has been reduced to cliché by nearly a century of use and misuse. True, Freudian formulations—the Oedipus Complex, penis envy, castration anxiety, narcissism, etc.—played a prominent role in many of Beatty’s films, especially in the early years, when the cultural sway of Freud was still pronounced. He himself spent several years in psychotherapy, as did many of those who influenced him, including Kazan and playwright William Inge. I even dipped, almost at random, into a couple of psychiatric texts on sexual obsession and addiction, supplied by a couple of friendly analysts, but they shed little new light on his family drama. Freud is important to Beatty’s work, but not so useful as a lens with which to view his life.
In this book, then, I have satisfied myself with describing Beatty. “Explaining” him is beyond my modest powers. Life is too short, a phrase that often springs to mind in relation to the art or science of Warrenology. On the other hand, he has lived one of the exceptional twentieth-century lives, filled with a wealth of experience that should be sufficient to satisfy the most jaded reader, not to mention the extraordinary body of work with which he has enriched the cinema.
1
A STAR IS BORN
How Warren Beatty shined in Splendor in the Grass, but watched his star plunge when he followed it with two flops in a row, and became better known for his romances than his performances, seducing and abandoning Joan Collins and Natalie Wood.
“He was insatiable. Three, four, five times a day, every day, was not unusual for him. I felt like an oyster in a slot machine.”
—Joan Collins
ON A HOT summer night, in 1959, Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda were having dinner at La Scala, on Little Santa Monica in Beverly Hills, when Beatty spied Joan Collins at a nearby table. Collins, a striking brunette, was a younger, svelter, later-model Elizabeth Taylor, with a British accent to boot. She had been dubbed “the British Open,” for her parade of well-heeled boyfriends. But Collins was no bimbo—she had a biting wit, which she would occasionally exercise at Beatty’s expense, as she would prove nineteen years later in her autobiography, Past Imperfect. Then twenty-six, she was four years his senior, and had been in Hollywood for five years, having appeared in a number of low-rent pictures, including Land of the Pharaohs, a sword and sandal epic wherein she lay recumbent while cradling a diamond (paste, of course) in her navel. At the time, she was training with Candy Barr to play a stripper in Seven Thieves, and hoping to wrest the lead in Cleopatra away from Taylor.
As Collins tells it, she was brooding about her lengthy and increasingly unhappy affair with a handsome producer, George Englund, then married to Cloris Leachman, and forking cannelloni into her mouth (she was always a big eater and had to fight her weight), when she noticed the indecently pretty young man boldly eyeing her from a nearby table. He was twenty-two at the time, but he looked like he was barely old enough to drive.
Although he was precocious—dating senior girls when he was a freshman at Washington and Lee High School in Arlington, Virginia—sexually speaking, Beatty was a late bloomer. Born in Richmond, the “Cradle of the Confederacy,” and raised a Baptist among Baptists, he had been a virgin until he was 19 and ten months, and had had only one or two relationships he considered “serious.” Since he dropped out of Northwestern University in 1956, he hadn’t had any. But he had discovered in himself a raging lust for women. He realized, too, that women were drawn to him. It was as if he heard them calling out to him where other men were deaf, the way canines respond to whistles inaudible to humans. Says writer Peter Feibleman, who would help polish some of his scripts in coming years, “Hollywood was candy land for him. I once asked him, ‘Why is it that every time I put my weenie in something, yours has already been there?’ He just had a tremendous appetite.” A few years off, when his career was prospering and his horizons broader, no female would be beneath his notice—stars, starlets, and models, of course, but also TV newscasters, studio executives, journalists, hatcheck girls, waitresses, dental hygienists, even daughters of friends—any woman, in other words, who crossed his path, and many who didn’t, the innocent bystanders grazing the stacks in a library, stopped at a traffic light in the next car, pulling bread off a shelf in a supermarket, or sitting, like Collins, at a nearby table. As Clint Eastwood is reputed to have said, “No matter how hot a girl is, there’s always someone who’s tired of fucking her,” and that person always seemed to be named Warren on-to-the-next Beatty.
What accounted for this passion, outside of motive, means, and opportunity, is hard to say. To hear him tell it, his juvenile immersion in a sea of estrogen was formative. “My childhood was very strongly and very positively affected by women,” he said. “My mother, my sister, my aunts, my great-aunts, cousins, all of whom were women—and I was fortunately not smothered by them.” Indeed, with Beatty, it wasn’t just lust. He had a romantic streak; he wanted to make a connection, wanted to fall in love. Collins was ground zero, as it were, for his seduction of the whole town, the women, of course, but the men as well, figuratively speaking. No shrinking violet herself, she returned his gaze with equal boldness. He raised a glass and smiled. Her dinner partner remarked, “That boy who’s looking at you is Shirley MacLaine’s brother, Warren something or other.” She took a second look. He was wearing a blue Brooks Brothers shirt and a tweed jacket. She was struck by his clean-cut, Clark Kent good looks, Kirk Douglas dimple, and sensual mouth, which would be remarked upon shortly by no less an authority than Kenneth Tynan. There was nothing wrong with that picture but the “spots” (British for acne) that marred his face, and Fonda, his date, who was giving him her full attention.
Beatty had met Fonda earlier that year in February, when director Joshua Logan had asked him to test with her and a few other actors in New York for Parrish, a tortured teen picture set on a tobacco plantation in Connecticut. “I really thought I was hot shit and I had in fact turned down a couple of movies,” says Beatty. “I was broke of course. But I thought, I really don’t want to do something until I do something that’s good.” Working for Logan would have been an excellent start. A giant of the theater, Logan had won a Pulitzer Prize for co-writing South Pacific, and directed a number of hit plays.
The director had wanted Beatty to smother Fonda with passionate kisses, but the young actor merely pecked discreetly at her cheek. “I thought he was gay,” Fonda recalled. “He was so cute, and all his men friends were gay, and brilliant. And he liked to play piano in a piano bar—I mean, what were the odds he was straight? Shows you how dumb I was.” Underwhelmed by Beatty’s tepid approach, Logan said, “Look, are you afraid of Jane or something? Grab her, boy, grab her. Don’t be shy.” Beatty leapt upon Fonda, kissing her with such ferocity that Logan had to yell, “Cut! Stop! Hey, Warren, we’re all out of film. That’s enough!” Recalls the actor, “Oh my God. We kissed until we had practically eaten each other’s heads off.” Later, Beatty would reportedly say that she gave the best blow job in L.A., due to her ability to virtually unhinge her lower jaw, like a python that swallows prey much larger than itself. Coming from him, for whom blow jobs were routine as breathing, this was high praise indeed.
Collins next ran into Beatty at a Saturday night party given by Tyrone Power’s widow in the flats of Beverly Hills. He was playing the piano, doing impressions of Erroll Garner, George Shearing, Oscar Peterson, catnip to women, who
gathered around to watch him finger the ivories. They exchanged smiles, but he appeared engrossed in the music, and she went home.
The following day, Collins went to the beach to work on her tan, knowing she would have ample opportunity to show it off later when she zipped herself into a too small black faille dress for a party that evening. Her date was Gardner McKay, the six-foot-four heartthrob starring in TV’s Adventures in Paradise, who, in the considered opinion of Life magazine, was the handsomest man in America. She arrived home to find six messages from Beatty, instructing her to call him at the Chateau Marmont, where he was staying. When Beatty went after a woman, “nothing would stop him,” as production designer Dick Sylbert, who would become a colleague and close friend, put it. Before she had a chance to oblige, the phone rang. A boyish voice said, “Hi, did you get my messages?” She was impressed by the fact that although they hadn’t spoken so much as one word to each other, he had found her phone number and was so self-assured that he didn’t bother to identify himself. He invited her to dinner that night. She accepted, which meant blowing off McKay. Beatty instructed her to meet him at a place on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills at eight, adding, “I can hardly wait.”
After the party, Collins rushed back to her Shoreham Drive home, wriggled out of her dress into jeans and a shirt. She knew Beatty was a few years her junior, so she removed some of her makeup, hopped into her rented yellow Ford—he was driving a rented Chevy—and met him at the Casa Escobar for Mexican food and margaritas. She was pleased that he was an Aries, a sign compatible with her Gemini. He was pleased that she was—Joan Collins. They admired each other till well past midnight. He drove her to her car, said he would follow her home to make sure she arrived safely. As she entered her parking garage, with him right behind her, she weighed the pros and cons of asking him up for a nightcap. He got out of his car, and short-circuited her should-I-or-shouldn’t-I? interior dialogue by saying, “I’m coming up for coffee.”
Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America Page 2
