“‘Are they any good?’
“‘I think you should see them as soon as possible.’ I did see these movies and they became immediately my favorite movies. Jean was a major influence on me. Still is.”
But the relationship with Odets dissolved in acrimony in March of 1962. Beatty had set up one of his treatments at Fox, Fifteen Doves in Flight, which turned Camille into an interracial romance by casting a black actress in Garbo’s role. But when the deal fell apart, Odets suspected that Beatty was trying to edge him out. The actor explained that the studio would not meet Odets’s financial demands.
One night, when he was still new to Hollywood, he went to a party where he ran into Gary Cooper. Beatty always speaks admiringly about Cooper’s touch with women, saying, “He chased way more pussy than I did.” Cooper was standing next to Hayworth, his hand on her bottom, under her skirt. It seemed to Beatty that Cooper had his finger buried deep inside her butt. How Beatty divined this is not clear. He was becoming adept at interpreting looks and glances, reading people. Wizard of penetration that he was, perhaps he just parsed the language of the bodies, or maybe he was projecting his own fantasies.
Another pillar of the Hollywood establishment with whom Beatty became close was Charlie Feldman, the powerful agent turned producer, a bon vivant and ladies’ man who bore a resemblance to Clark Gable. He had founded Famous Artists, and represented everyone from Greta Garbo to John Wayne, Marlene Dietrich to Marilyn Monroe. As a producer, he had made countless movies, prestigious Serious Drama like A Streetcar Named Desire and mainstream comedy hits like The Seven Year Itch, as well as everything in between. He was romantically involved with Garbo, Hayworth, Hedy Lamarr, sisters Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland, Ava Gardner, Capucine, Angie Dickinson, Ursula Andress, and many other women.
Beatty had met Feldman a few months back on a plane from L.A. to New York when the actor was on his way to begin Splendor. It was love at first sight. As What’s New Pussycat? (1965) director Clive Donner puts it, “They spoke the same language.” Beatty appreciated Feldman’s joie de vivre. He frequented Feldman’s home at 2000 Coldwater Canyon, where he soaked up the wit and wisdom of the Hollywood alte kackers who so fascinated him. “Charlie’s patio was always an interesting lunch,” he recalls. “There would be Orson, or Zanuck, Cooper, Holden, Wayne, or Stevens or Hawks. Billy Wilder. Not to mention some fascinating European actress.”
Like Kazan, Feldman saw that Beatty was going to be big, and wanted him as a client, but the actor kept him at arm’s length. “As nearly as I could tell, Charlie had no real interest in being an agent,” he says. “But I liked that he hadn’t been to the office in ten, fifteen years. He was more fun than almost anybody I had met in Hollywood of the older guys.”
Feldman advised him not to make another multi-picture deal at MGM, which, recalls the actor, “turned out to be very good advice. I learned not to confuse [friendship] with business, not to expect people to act in other than their own best interests.” He loaned Beatty money. Says Sylbert, whom Feldman also mentored, “Charlie taught Warren a lot, like you don’t put anything in writing, you don’t sign contracts, you can walk out at any time. If directors are not your friends, you soon enough make them understand that they wish they were. Charlie always wore a red cardigan when he was going to bullshit somebody. He’d call a guy up, say, ‘Come on down,’ and he’d sit in the shade, face the guy towards the sun, and the guy would be falling asleep as he’s selling him the deal! He helped Warren to be Warren. Warren is not going to do it the way you want to do it, and he made Warren feel comfortable with that.”
Feldman taught Beatty to be stingy with information. As producer Bob Evans puts it, “Warren never answers a question, he only asks questions.” By example, if nothing else, Feldman showed him that it was acceptable to say one thing to one person and another to another. If he were circumspect enough, no one could ever accuse him of a falsehood. And if he were accused, so what.
THE STUDIO was not particularly excited about Splendor. Boss Jack Warner, writing to his number two, Benny Kalmenson, worried that it was glum and uncommercial. Bill Orr, Warner’s son-in-law, had fallen asleep watching it. (At one screening, Wood reportedly cried her way through the picture, while Collins laughed.) Aware of the studio’s apathy, Beatty frantically tried to exploit the heat generated by the picture even before it opened. Hungry to work on another quality production, he learned that José Quintero, who had launched the career of Jason Robards Jr. directing Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh in 1958 off-Broadway, was going to direct a movie based on a novella by Tennessee Williams called The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. Recalls Beatty, “I wanted to play something that wouldn’t be another what they would call at that time ‘shit-kicking-American-stumbling-mumbling-Method part.’ I thought that’s a great opportunity to go do another nationality, another accent. That was something I knew nothing about but I thought that I would learn as quickly as possible. I was $15,000 in debt.”
The script was written by Gavin Lambert, and told the story of Mrs. Stone, a wealthy, love-starved older woman on holiday, who finds herself alone in Rome after her husband has a heart attack on the flight over. She is introduced to Paolo, an Italian gigolo, and foolishly, as it turns out, falls in love. Although he didn’t develop it, it touched on a theme that would become a hallmark of Beatty’s career: innocence chastised by experience.
Vivien Leigh, forty-eight, had been cast in the role of Mrs. Stone. She was coming off a divorce from Laurence Olivier, who left her to marry a younger woman, actress Joan Plowright. A clinical manic-depressive, Leigh needed lots of tender loving care. Just short of a decade earlier, while married to Olivier, she tried to tear off her clothes on a flight from Ceylon to Los Angeles, and jump out of the plane. On the set of the film she was then shooting, Elephant Walk, she cried nonstop, then began yelling “Fire! Fire!” as loudly as she could, more or less quoting Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, the character she had played to wide acclaim two years before. (She was replaced by Elizabeth Taylor.)
Cast as the Contessa, who pimps out Mrs. Stone to Paolo, was Lotte Lenya, the Austrian-born actress married to composer Kurt Weill. The Threepenny Opera’s original Jenny, she would become best known to Americans as the sharp-toed Rosa Klebb in the James Bond picture From Russia with Love. Jill St. John, occasional Bob Evans girlfriend and future wife of R. J. Wagner, played the other woman.
Beatty had to be approved by Williams and Leigh. He was hardly a logical choice; sensibly, Williams was of the opinion that the role called for an Italian. When the playwright asked Lambert, “What’s going to happen with Paolo; who’s going to play him?” the screenwriter replied, “It’s not certain, but I hear, because of the Warner’s deal, that they’re pushing Warren Beatty.” Williams remarked, “Well, I don’t think he’s right.” Recalls Lambert, “We did look at a couple of Italian actors, but they didn’t have that sort of charisma and sexual dynamism that Warren had.”
Williams was recuperating from bad reviews—they supposedly gave him an ulcer—for Sweet Bird of Youth at the Caribe Hilton in San Juan, Puerto Rico. “I said to myself, Is there anything that I could do to get Tennessee’s approval for this part?” Beatty recalls. “I had never been to Italy. I thought, An Italian, he should be darker than I was, so I got something called Man-Tan. You put it on your face and you turned a sort of an orange-yellow. I found an Italian with an accent. I worked with him for two days. I got what I considered to be an Italian suit. I put on the suit. I put on the Man-Tan. I put on the accent, and I flew to San Juan. I walked into the casino just off the main lobby, and sure enough, hunched over a blackjack table was Tennessee, whom I had never met, but I recognized him. I asked the waiter to give me a glass of milk.”
Ever ready with medical advice, Beatty recalls, “In those days, they treated ulcers with milk. My father had ulcers, and he drank milk all the time, which, by the way, is the worst thing you can do. Milk is very irritating to the mucus membrane of the stom
ach—Crohn’s disease, and so on. Any Ashkenazi Jew who has a high level of stomach upset shouldn’t drink milk. Seventy to 80 percent are allergic to milk products. I’m not an Ashkenazi Jew except in Bugsy, but I have this kind of an allergy, you sometimes start clearing your throat if you drink a lot.”
Back on track, he continues, “So I wrote a note, that said, ‘Dear Mr. Williams, Anything you want.’ (Signed) ‘Paolo.’ Tennessee was kind of loaded. He looked up and he saw this geek of a young actor standing there. He recognized me from Splendor in the Grass. He threw up his hands and he said, ‘All right, all right, you’ve got the part.’” Williams biographer Dotson Rader wrote that as a closer Beatty offered himself to Williams. The story went, in Beatty’s words, “I put on a bathrobe and went to Tennessee’s hotel room, and he said, ‘You don’t have to do this. You’ve already got the part,’ which was bullshit.” Lambert recalls, “Tennessee was very impressed that he came to see him, with Man-Tan on, looking very Italian, and was eager for the part.” Williams himself observed, sadly, “He is so beautiful, just looking at him brings tears to my eyes. What a waste.”
With Collins in tow, Beatty met Leigh at the Dorchester Hotel in London for tea. “He didn’t say a great deal,” says Lambert, who was present. “He realized that he was being auditioned, and he knew that he had to be charming, which was very easy for him. He didn’t have to be good-looking, because he was. He was very polite, very well behaved, didn’t show off at all. Vivien was very, very taken with him, and said, ‘Yes, yes, he’s charming, he’s wonderful-looking, he seems to me to be absolutely right.’”
Roman Spring was shot at Elstree Studios, outside London. Beatty hung out with Stanley Kubrick who was shooting Lolita there. As Collins recalled, the actor looked “devastatingly handsome. There was little trace of the spotty boy I had first seen sixteen months ago. His hair had been darkened for the part of the Italian gigolo. He had a deep tan, which, although it was out of a bottle, looked as if it came straight from Portofino. He wore a beautifully cut beige silk suit from Brioni, a cream crepe de chine shirt from Battaglia, and a brown-and-beige Saint Laurent tie. No wonder half the females in the restaurant were tripping over themselves to get a glimpse of him. The Warren Beatty sex-symbol image was beginning to emerge. Women adored him. He was loving every minute of it.” It was nastily reported that he took longer with his makeup than Leigh.
Lotte Lenya later told Rex Reed that Leigh was infatuated with Beatty: “Like most women, Vivien had a tremendous crush on Warren,” she said. “He kept her so preoccupied that she allowed me to steal our most important scenes together. One night, we were watching the day’s rushes together and Vivien gasped, ‘Oh, how could I let you do that to me?’ And I said, ‘But dalink, you were very busy this afternoon and had no time to rehearse.’” Richard Burton is reputed to have told a journalist, “They were at it in broom closets, across billiard tables, in telephone kiosks; you have to hand it to the pair of them.” Lambert is skeptical. “I knew Lenya very well,” he says. “She never mentioned anything like that. There are all these stories, that he fucked Tennessee, that he fucked Vivien, none of which are true, I don’t think. I think Vivien fancied Warren. But I think he was much too smart to take her on. It would have been a very stupid move.” (Three decades later, Madonna claimed he admitted it.)
The character of Paolo was a stretch for Beatty, but Lambert thought he did a good job. “I don’t think that at that time, there was anybody better,” he says. “He had the charm and the sexiness and the odor of sexual corruption, which he played brilliantly. The only thing he couldn’t do was the Italian accent. It’s a little closer to Tijuana than it is to Rome.” Nevertheless, Quintero—unlike Kazan, Logan, and Arthur Penn to come—had no luck with movies. He was too tentative even to shout “Action.” “It was a mess,” said Beatty. “Nobody would tell him how [to make a movie].”
After the production wrapped in March 1961, Collins returned to Los Angeles and Beatty went to Rome. “It was the high tide of American power,” Beatty recalls. “Colonial America. I was like that, a sexual colonizer. I was Mrs. Stone. Arrogant. I pranced and preened down the Via Veneto, in my phony Italian suit, going to the hotels of all the actresses, the Hassler, the Excelsior…” He was at a café with Inger Stevens, when he ran into Lee and Paula Strasberg’s daughter, Susan. She found him “charming and intelligent, with a tremendous need to please women,” and the next day, he moved into her apartment for the rest of his vacation. He was wearing Paolo’s wool suit. The pants were so tight Strasberg wondered how he could sit down. In her memoir, she remembered an evening at the home of Luchino Visconti, who wanted Beatty for The Leopard. She described the great Italian director, who was gay, as a “salon Communist” surrounded by adoring young men. On this occasion, transfixed, he neglected them in favor of Beatty, who nevertheless kissed her discretely on the back of the neck as he withdrew to the bathroom with her at his heels. “When we returned to the living room twenty minutes later, we were greeted by six pairs of hostile eyes. To my embarrassment, I realized my blouse was still unbuttoned. I wasn’t quite sure how to act, but Warren beamed at one and all an enchanting, ingenuous smile.”
When Beatty returned to Sunset Plaza Drive in May, still sporting Paolo’s clothes—in particular a beige Eisenhower jacket he never took off—he and Collins continued their downward spiral. She wryly remarked that he was the only man she knew “who could get to the mirror faster than me in the morning.” Both knew the relationship was over, but neither seemed to have the willpower to end it.
Actor George Chakiris was quoted recalling seeing Beatty hanging out on the set of West Side Story at the end of April 1961. By early June, Natalie Wood had finished with the film, and Wagner was finishing up Sail a Crooked Ship. He reportedly threw a party on the Columbia lot. Wood had promised to be the hostess, but half an hour after the appointed time she hadn’t shown up. They started without her. Later she waltzed in with Beatty. She went over to Wagner and kissed him. He asked her why she was late. She claimed she had been sitting for stills, and had run into Beatty. According to a Columbia producer, the tension in the air was palpable. She pressed flesh, then Wood and Beatty disappeared for an hour. When they returned, Beatty had Wood on one arm and Joan Collins on the other. After the party, both couples went to the Villa Capri for dinner. Collins and Wagner looked on as Beatty and Wood giggled. Wagner says he does not recall the incident.
In July 1961, Collins was offered The Road to Hong Kong, latest in the Bob Hope–Bing Crosby road series, which would take her to London. Beatty threw the script on the floor. “It’s crap,” he said. “Crap! Why do you need to do it?”
“Two reasons,” she blurted out. “For the money—and to get away from you.” There it was, out in the open. Finis. Explained Collins, “It was obvious I had to be the one to end it with Warren. He seemed content to let it drift sloppily along.”
WOOD AND Wagner announced their separation on June 21, 1961. In July, she rented a house on Chalon Road in Bel Air. Beatty moved in and the two lived quietly together, usually eating alone. The actor always wore the same outfit, a loose shirt open at the collar, and gabardine slacks. He read omnivorously and played the piano for hours at a time. He struck Natalie’s sister, Lana, as “silent, studious.”
The gossip columnists couldn’t believe their good luck when Beatty and Collins separated at the same time as Wood and Wagner, and Beatty took up with Wood. They blamed him for breaking up her marriage, but quickly jumped on board as the new romance blossomed before their eyes. That summer, Beatty and Wood became the new “it” couple. Syndicated gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen wrote, “The way Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty are carrying on… it’s a wonder they have time to eat.” Wagner, still very much in love with Wood, confessed, “I wanted to kill the son of a bitch.” He went so far as to drive over to Beatty’s, brandishing a .38. “I was hanging around outside his house with a gun, hoping he would walk out,” he recalled. “I not only wanted to kill him, I w
as prepared to kill him.” He was talked out of it by a friend.
On July 27, Beatty was Wood’s date at a screening of West Side Story, their first public outing together. Collins, who had suspected there might be some truth to the rumors that the romance between the two had been kindled on the set of Splendor, didn’t know what to think. She was aware that Beatty was fully capable of juggling more than one woman at a time, which is to say, he was secretive and compartmentalized. “Even as a kid, Warren had a private world no one could penetrate,” wrote MacLaine. “He could shut everyone out.”
Despite Beatty’s attentions to Wood, he was by no means neglecting his career. Splendor had still not been released, but Inge had finished his adaptation of All Fall Down, expanding the character, Berry-Berry, intended for Beatty. (MGM was financing, and Beatty owed a picture to the studio for settling out his contract.) Berry-Berry is a selfish, violent, and misogynistic young man, who is nevertheless idolized by younger brother, Clinton, from whose point of view the narrative unfolds. His goal in life is to have sex with as many females as possible, among them Echo O’Brien, an older woman, whom Clinton also worships. Berry-Berry invites her love, gets her pregnant, and then spurns her. She commits suicide. Heartbroken, Clinton goes after Berry-Berry, only to find him collapsed in a heap. Clinton’s hatred turns to pity, and he leaves Berry-Berry alone to face himself.
Despite the fact that none of his movies had yet been released, Beatty was paid $200,000 to play Berry-Berry. The rest of the cast, an unusually strong one, consisted of Karl Malden playing his father, Angela Lansbury his mother, Eva Marie Saint as Echo, and Brandon De Wilde as Clinton. It was directed by John Frankenheimer, and produced by John Houseman. Like Kazan, Houseman was another icon of the theater. He had worked closely with Orson Welles, founding the Mercury Theatre and producing Welles’s famous 1938 radio hoax, The War of the Worlds.
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