Kazan immediately set out to deglamorize Wood, turn her into a normal person. Remembers Crowley, “He told her, ‘Of course, the eyelashes have got to come off, the lipstick.’ Whenever she tried to sneak some on, even lip gloss, he always knew it, and told her in no uncertain terms, ‘Wipe that off!’”
Beatty admitted to The New York Times that he was “scared and worried.” He was well aware that his brief stint with Adler hardly prepared him for something like Splendor. “I suppose I have a method… sloppy, I guess,” he wryly explained, the following year. To make matters worse, he was still fatigued from the hepatitis, and napped in his dressing room between takes.
Kazan was the first in a string of major directors Beatty sought out, mentors or father figures from whom he wanted to learn. His own father was, in MacLaine’s words, “a spectacular disappointment to himself.” He had tried any number of professions—he was at various times a musician, teacher, high school principal, and Realtor—and tried to spare his children disappointment by discouraging their great expectations, insisting that they play it safe. At the same time, he was overbearing. Beatty didn’t need Freud to point out that he was searching for an older man whom he could accord the respect he couldn’t give his own father. But his attitude toward them was ambivalent. Guilty, perhaps, that he was betraying his own father, he was always testing them, and invariably, with the exception of Kazan, found them wanting.
The two men were wildly dissimilar—mentor vs. protégé, director vs. actor, immigrant outsider vs. native son. Kazan was armed with the confidence born of age and success, while Beatty was virtually aflame with the arrogance of youth. This made for a potentially combustible mix, especially at the start, before they decided they liked each other. Beatty thought that Kazan, who was short and physically unprepossessing, a veritable Caliban next to Beatty’s Ariel, was jealous of him, “didn’t like good looking guys,” and indeed, Kazan went out of his way to needle Beatty over his looks, making him self-conscious about what the director called his “turkey neck.” Beatty was mumbling his way through the dialogue until Kazan called him on it, according to Dick Sylbert, who designed the production. Kazan told Beatty, “Just shut up and do what I say. I invented mumbling. I want you to say the lines.”
During the first week, the director did something that angered his star, who lashed out at the spot where he knew Kazan was most vulnerable, the director’s friendly testimony before HUAC. He snapped, “Lemme ask you something—why did you name all those names?” Recalled Beatty, “In some patricidal attempt to stand up to the great Kazan, I arrogantly and stupidly challenged him on it.” Kazan grabbed his arm, asking, “What did you say?” and dragged him off to a tiny dressing room where they had some privacy, whereupon the director proceeded to justify himself for two hours. Recalling this incident later, Beatty said he immediately understood “the terrible effect that what he had done had on his life.” Beatty continued, “He still thought that he had done the right thing.… But of course I think he did the wrong thing. There were a lot of people that suffered. And they suffered badly. Arthur Miller was a friend of mine. Lillian Hellman was a friend of mine, as was Joe Losey, Adrian Scott, Carl Foreman.”
But regardless of whatever judgment Beatty rendered upon behavior widely considered unconscionable, the two men reached an accommodation. Says Beatty, “I like the title that Robert Vaughn used on his book, Only Victims. There were only victims. There was just too much sadness. And fortunately that wasn’t part of my generation.”
Beatty was determined to learn as much as he could from Kazan, and the director was generous with his lessons, teaching him how to break down a script, how to think about acting, where to place the camera, and so on. He also helped Beatty with his performance. The opposite of Cal, the role Dean played in East of Eden, who fought his father, Bud “does not rebel against his father,” the director explained. Kazan took him aside, and unburdened himself with tales of his difficult relationship with his own father, saying, “I’m still afraid of that little, bent over man,” as if giving the actor license to submit.
Still, Beatty was having trouble. Perhaps his problems stemmed from the fact that Bud’s issues with his father were the opposite of Beatty’s with his. Both fathers seemed to disapprove of their sons, and in both cases the sons defied them—by doing more, in Beatty’s case, and less, in Bud’s—than their fathers wished. Bud’s father oppressed him with his expectations, demanding that he do great things. Beatty’s father discouraged his ambitions.
On the other hand, Beatty was able to draw on the relationship he had had with sometime actress Ellie Wood when he was at Northwestern. Wood was a junior when he was a freshman, and she had heard all about him from a dorm mate, his girlfriend in high school. Like Deanie, Wood was chaste. “It was never consummated,” she recalled. “We never made love. We just kissed. The fear of hell had been put in me. I was too well brought up.” He told her that his father was her mother, which is to say, that they both had authoritarian parents. Wood came to New York the same year Beatty did. They lived a block away from each other, but when she knocked on his door, he wouldn’t respond. She recalls, “It was as if a curtain had come down.”
By several accounts, the reputation for being difficult that Beatty earned on A Loss of Roses was proving prophetic. “Warren was a little ‘snotty’—I don’t know a better word for how he behaved and can’t find one in my thesaurus,” Kazan wrote in his autobiography, adding, “but he was to grow into a formidable man.” According to Bob “B.J.” Jiras, Natalie Wood’s makeup man, who later became part of Beatty’s regular crew, as well as a friend, “The enemy—who none of us liked—was Warren. It was as if Warren Beatty had already become a movie star, had already made twenty movies. That was his attitude.” The crew didn’t like him either, and nicknamed him “Mental Anguish,” shortened to “M.A.,” in honor of his propensity for obsessional overanalysis, and the torment he put himself and everyone else through getting his part down. Added Don Kranze, Kazan’s assistant director, “Warren was a pain in the ass. He was very young, anyway, but his emotional maturity was about thirteen.… We all sort of felt about Warren that he’s an immature boy playing a man’s game.”
Not unlike other leading men, Beatty paid close attention to his appearance. His acne was a plague that he tried mightily to get rid of, especially after it had flared up during Roses, as a result of the makeup he was wearing. Occasionally, the six-foot-one actor was known to wear lifts in his shoes and to pump up his arms lifting weights before scenes in which his biceps would show, not unusual among actors. Crew members made fun of him for his vanity, barbs he eventually learned to deflect by calling attention to it before others did, when he would play variations on the tune of, “I’m the vainest actor in Hollywood,” or, “You’ll never meet an actor who’s as narcissistic as I am.” Kranze liked to tell a story about Beatty sitting in front of a mirror separating his eyelashes with a pin. According to one possibly apocryphal story, Kazan had the mirrors in his dressing room covered up so that he wouldn’t be late to the set. At the wrap party, the director needled him with the gift of a hand mirror.
Barbara Loden, who played Bud’s louche older sister, was having an affair with Kazan while he was still married to his first wife, Molly Thatcher. (Kazan and Loden later married.) Loden diagnosed Beatty with surgical precision. She thought he was just scared, afraid of being a movie star, and concealing his fears behind a patina of arrogance. She concluded that he had contempt for Hollywood, while at the same time seeking entry. She feared that, like Brando, he didn’t have much regard for the profession he had chosen, and therefore would never respect himself.
Collins haunted the set, alert for the errant spark she feared might ignite an affair between Beatty and Wood. She was due to leave for Rome in the middle of June to shoot Esther and the King, the kind of lavish sword and sandal spectacle that, along with Cleopatra and The Greatest Story Ever Told, was going to bury what was left of the old studio system before the new
decade ended. Neither was looking forward to being separated, and Beatty tried to persuade her not to go. But this time she was determined. She had already been suspended several times by Fox for turning down assignments, and she didn’t want to risk another suspension. Moreover, not only had Sons and Lovers (1960) turned out well, but Mary Ure, who played the role she turned down on his advice, would be nominated for an Oscar. She wrote, “I was not about to let him interfere with my career again.”
Like Collins, Wagner spent his time monitoring the love scenes between Beatty and Wood. He didn’t really know Beatty, outside of the fact that both men went to the same gym. Crowley couldn’t help noticing that the tensions between Wood and Wagner were getting worse. “Their marriage was crumbling,” he says. “R.J. and she were trying desperately to get it back together. Natalie was fit for the loony bin.”
It wasn’t long before the gossip mills started turning. Even Kazan believed that they had begun an affair. “It was clear to Natalie, as it was clear to me, that Warren was bound for the top; this perception was an aphrodisiac,” he wrote years later in his autobiography. “All of a sudden, he and Natalie became lovers. When did it happen? When I wasn’t looking. I wasn’t sorry; it helped with their love scenes.”
Still, most knowledgeable sources agree that they were not seeing each other during the production. “If they were kissing between the flats, I didn’t know anything about it,” says Crowley. “It’s not true that Warren broke up the marriage between Wagner and her, that they started an affair during the picture. He was still going with Joan, and Natalie was crying her eyes out in the dressing room between takes, chewing her lip, just an emotional wreck. She would go home exhausted, not fit to have an affair with anybody. And she didn’t seem like any person that Warren would have gone for. Especially with Joan around. Her career was on the brink of extinction, his was just beginning, they had everything riding on this to be good, they were two very ambitious people, so they didn’t have time for each other, romantically.”
Wagner concurs. “Beatty had nothing to do with our breakup, and Natalie didn’t begin to see him until after we split,” he wrote. “If she had been sleeping with Beatty, she would have told me.” He adds, “I would have known about it.”
Beatty too has always denied that they began their affair on the set. “There’s a lot of apocrypha about Natalie and I having something going on during Splendor in the Grass. It’s utterly untrue. In fact it was a fairly distant relationship.” They struck Loden as jealous of each other, each thinking the other was getting more attention from the director. Wood disparaged him by employing the crew’s shorthand, as in, “Here comes M.A.” Adds Crowley, “She had great disdain for Warren during that picture. She told me that during the love scenes she wished Warren would bathe more!” Contradicting Kazan, Loden said that the director worried that the coldness between the two was affecting their love scenes. According to her, “Warren wasn’t coming through. Kazan said, ‘Pretend it’s Joan, Warren.’”
With the set a hothouse of marital dysfunction, Beatty scored a run for family values by springing a chopped liver surprise on Collins one Saturday afternoon on the eve of her departure. He directed her attention to the refrigerator in which was a small cardboard carton, not unlike the ones in which pet stores send goldfish home, filled with chopped liver. Buried inside was a gold ring festooned with diamonds and pearls. “Absolutely beautiful,” she exclaimed. “What’s it for?”
“It’s your engagement ring, dummy. I figured, since you’re going away soon and we’ll be separated we should um, well, um, you know… get—well, engaged.”
“Are you sure you really want to—I mean you’re not just doing this to make me feel secure, are you?” She wondered if he had bought it out of guilt over the abortion.
Popping vitamin C tablets, he replied, “No, Butterfly, I’m not—you know I don’t do anything unless I want to… and… um… well… um… I guess I want to.” They set the date for January 1961.
When Collins finally left for Rome, she said Beatty, worried that she might fall into the arms of a handsome, hot-blooded Italian, overwhelmed her with phone calls, telegrams, and letters, all professing eternal love. She asked him to help her with her part in Esther and the King. He advised her to imagine how Jesus would say the lines, and proceed as He would. Collins swore she never wandered, went to bed early, and wore a gold butterfly pin he had bought her from Buccellati. She even spent a weekend in London choosing fabrics for her wedding dress. He pressed her to visit. Finally, she flew to New York for a few days. She says he was convinced she was faithless, and nothing she said would dissuade him. They fought bitterly, and on the return trip, she began to wonder if he was so jealous because he and Wood were having an affair. She worked herself up into a fury, indignant at the thought that he dared treat her like his personal property, and chafed at her prodigious phone bills and hefty air fare she had paid to fly to New York. As she thought about her “pimply, bespectacled, white-faced” fiancé, as she put it, the Italian men she ran into every day looked better and better. The air had begun to leak out of their relationship.
Splendor wrapped on August 16, 1960. Two days later, Wood started rehearsals for West Side Story, which was already in production. Meanwhile, back in L.A., Beatty joined Collins in her rental house on Sunset Plaza Drive, which meant no more than he left his half-unpacked suitcase bursting with clothes, books, uncashed checks, and whatnot open on the floor, much to her annoyance. Beatty was edgy and anxious. He seemed to have trouble looking after himself, complained, “I’m terribly sloppy. I just can’t take care of money.” He did reserve duty for two or three weeks at George Air Force Base in Victorville, California, and worried about lining up his next movie. Inge was adapting a new novel by Leo Herlihy, All Fall Down, making sure it had a meaty role for the actor, and Kazan had signed him up for three more pictures, but he wasn’t forthcoming about what they might be. Beatty knew those personal deals most often amounted to nothing, but he was flattered.
The change of scenery had not improved the relationship between Beatty and Collins. She thought he was insecure, aggressive, insisted on always having his own way, and increasingly secretive. “I think [Warren] hides behind his glasses a lot,” she said. “You know, people who sometimes wear sunglasses even when the sun is not shining—they’re hiding.” She called him a “perfectionist,” and thought he had been spoiled by the fact that his first picture was Splendor, now rumored to be a masterpiece. In his eyes, no other project could measure up, not for him, not for her. But she didn’t relish cooling her heels, waiting for her agent to offer her the part of a lifetime, while Beatty tossed her scripts into the wastebasket. Meanwhile, her wedding dress hung mothballed in her closet.
Still, with the Kazan picture under Beatty’s belt and a new self-confidence, life started to feel good. He rented a Thunderbird. He began partaking of Hollywood’s frantic social scene, and cultivating relationships with the giants of the Old Hollywood, revealing an insatiable curiosity about everything and everybody. “During that time, everybody he met he met through me,” says Collins. He was the “most incredible person I’ve ever known for networking and contacts.”
“My first Hollywood party was at Romanoff’s,” Beatty recalls. “I wasn’t dancing because I never dance much, but let’s say I was working the floor.” He always stood out at the parties. He towered over the women, diminutive Jewish agents, writers, and executives, as well as the other actors, often shorter than himself, who filled the room. His hair was neatly cut and brushed back in an Elvis Presley pompadour, still the fashion of the early 1960s. He continues, “I looked around, and I thought, Wow, that’s Rita Hayworth. I walked over to her with my hands in my pockets and stared at her. She was dancing with a guy with funny shoes on. Strange shoes. She stared at me and I stared at her. I said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, forgive me. But I just couldn’t help it.’
“‘That’s okay. What’s your name?’
“‘Warren Beatty.’<
br />
“‘Rita Hayworth.’
“‘Yes, I know that.’
“‘And this is Clifford Odets.’ That’s who she was dancing with. I couldn’t have predicted that I would lose interest in Rita Hayworth so quickly. By now Clifford Odets was a demigod. I said, ‘You’re Clifford Odets? I can’t believe that I’m meeting you.’”
Beatty had listened hungrily when Clurman and Adler had waxed lyrical about the good old days with the Group Theatre—he was only four years old when it was dissolved in 1941—and by bonding with Odets, also a friendly witness, he was able to channel the high passions that animated it, so conspicuously absent from the tail end of the 1950s. Breathlessly, Beatty asked, “Could I talk to you?” Odets replied, “Well, you’re talking to me.” The writer invited him over that night, and the two became fast friends. Beatty had found another mentor. The actor recalls, “So I went over to Clifford’s that night, and spent many nights drinking red wine and listening to Clifford rail on about a billion things. He was a genius who loved to talk. And obviously when he got to Hollywood he preferred talking to writing. He always ended up about 3:30 in the morning talking about his shoes, because he felt that his father hadn’t bought him shoes that were big enough and that had damaged his feet so he had these corrective shoes that he wore all the time. The shoes were a major thing with him. There was nobody that Clifford didn’t know. Male or female.”
Beatty and Collins watched the 1960 presidential election returns at Odets’s home. (Later he would bring Natalie Wood over. She fell asleep.) He met Jean Renoir there. “I was so stupid,” he continues. “I didn’t know who he was. I said, ‘Who is that heavy guy over there?’
“‘That is Jean Renoir.’
“‘What does he do?’
“‘He’s a pretty good moviemaker.’
“‘No kidding.’
“‘Well, he did a little picture called Grand Illusion. He did a movie called Rules of the Game.’
Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America Page 5
