At the time, the young star was riding the crest of a fierce wave of publicity, which the producer derided as “an astonishing campaign of self-promotion.” Beatty, he said, “had managed to get pictures of himself, together with articles, into every major magazine in the country. Using charm, sex, and unmitigated gall, he kept the nation’s female columnists in a tizzy. Before we had shot a single frame of film, he had turned a tall, nice-looking but rather awkward and completely unknown young man into one of the hottest names in the business—completely eclipsing such well-established fellow players as Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden et al.” He complained that Inge had pushed Beatty on him “almost against [his] will.”
Beatty finally made his deal for All Fall Down early in the summer of 1961, and began rehearsals on July 12. In his memoir, Unfinished Business, Houseman recalled, “Our most serious problem was young Mr. Beatty. With his angelic arrogance, his determination to emulate Marlon Brando and Jimmy Dean, and his half-baked notions of ‘Method’ acting, he succeeded in perplexing and antagonizing not only his fellow actors but our entire crew.”
All Fall Down commenced production on July 27, 1961. At the end of September, Beatty flew to Key West for some location shooting. Worried that he would have an affair with Saint, Wood joined him. She invited Crowley to come with her. Once there, she realized she had forgotten her diaphragm. Recalls Crowley, “I said, ‘Oh?’ She said, ‘Now listen. Here’s the thing. I can’t go in the drugstore and buy one myself in this town. Key West is a big tourist place. So you’re gonna have to pretend like you’re buying one for your wife!’ We found the poorest-looking drugstore we could find, that had a gravel parking lot in front. She sat in the car, I went in, and said, ‘I need to buy a diaphragm for my wife,’ and there was no problem, I came out with the package, and we just looked at each other and died laughing.”
It didn’t take long before stories began to emanate from the set, all of which had a common theme: Beatty was impossible. According to Houseman, “Our veteran cameraman, Curly Lindon, became so exasperated with him that he flew a camera-bearing helicopter within a few inches of his head.” Houseman went on to recall that “on the last day of shooting, in a secret agreement with the local police, Warren Beatty was left to languish in a bare cell of the Key West jail while the company flew back to California.”
BY THE fall of 1961, as the opening of Splendor in the Grass approached, the studio whipped the press into a frenzy. John Springer, the head of the New York office of Arthur P. Jacobs and Co., was his East Coast publicist. An affable man who also handled Marilyn Monroe, he generated reams of gossip about his client, much of which made its way into the women’s magazines, Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, and the like.
Kazan and Inge advised the young star to make himself less accessible, lest he become known exclusively as a playboy. Springer reassured him that he was not going to be photographed in a swimming pool with a starlet. Beatty figured he could satisfy the publicists as well as those who urged restraint by the simple expedient of agreeing to speak with every reporter who called him, while saying nothing. He was withholding and inscrutable. He canceled interviews at the last minute, kept journalists waiting, failed to show up at all, or if he did, he took phone calls throughout the session. He skillfully created an aura of mystery around himself, so that when he deigned to do a substantive interview, journalists were flattered to death, and thus unstinting in their praise. It was all about keeping them off balance. Eventually, however, this backfired, earning him the enmity of the celebrity press. “The press has beat the shit out of me since 1960,” he still complains. “Nobody gets beat up like a twenty-two-year-old pretty boy.”
Splendor was finally released on October 10, 1961. Beatty and Wood attended the premiere together. The reviews were mixed. The New York Times’s Bosley Crowther, then the most influential American reviewer, called it “a frank and ferocious social drama,” primly adding, “that makes the eyes pop and the modest cheek burn.” He praised Beatty as “a surprising newcomer, [who] shapes an amiable, decent, sturdy lad whose emotional exhaustion and defeat are the deep pathos in the film. Except that he talks like Marlon Brando and has some small mannerisms of James Dean, Mr. Beatty is a striking individual.” Time magazine was unstinting in its praise for Beatty, predicting that he “should make the big time on the first bounce.… He has a startling resemblance to the late James Dean, and he has that certain something Hollywood calls star quality.” At the end of the year Splendor made The New York Times Ten Best list.
But by 1961, the early films of Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Michelangelo Antonioni were beginning to make their way to the United States, and in comparison to these, Splendor was puerile, which is to say, the high-brow critics sneered. Dwight Macdonald trashed it in Esquire, Stanley Kauffmann compared it to an “Andy Hardy story” in The New Republic, and Brendan Gill in The New Yorker called it “as phony a picture as I can remember seeing.” The movie did no more than respectable business.
Still, Beatty’s notices created a firestorm around the young actor. He was staying at the Delmonico on 59th Street and Park Avenue, and he likes to tell the story of the time he was walking out the door when he came upon two girls leaning against a car. One of them exclaimed, “Oh my God, you’re Warren Beatty!” and regarded him with adoration, until the other added, “God, you’re… nothing!” Beatty chalked up their disappointment to the fact that he wasn’t thirty feet tall, as he was on the screen, and thought, That’s fame for you.
One woman called Beatty’s talent agency, MCA, in New York threatening to jump out of a window if he didn’t phone her immediately. Alarmed, the assistant who took the call contacted him, saying, “I hate to bother you, but I’ve got this girl on the other phone, and her name is Mary Smith… and she’s gonna jump! Could you call her?” Beatty replied calmly, “No, no, no, this goes on all the time.”
Splendor made him an instant star, a serious candidate for the Method mantle so conspicuously worn by Brando, Clift, and Dean. Those who mocked Beatty’s mumbling and mannerisms as empty posturing were silenced both by the reception of the film and his performance. He was no longer just a pretty boy with a full dance card. Beatty had arrived.
Thematically speaking, Splendor is a true relic of the 1950s. Kazan and Inge’s quietistic work occupied a safe and sleepy interlude between the militant drama that preceded it, say, Odets’s plays—Waiting for Lefty, Golden Boy—mounted by the Group Theatre in the 1930s, and Beatty’s own Bonnie and Clyde that followed. In the ending, Deanie, fresh from a stay at a mental institution, seeks out Bud, only to find him mired in domesticity and eking out a living as a farmer, not the captain of industry his father had wished him to be.
Often the best critic of his own work, Kazan said, “What I liked about this ending is its bittersweet ambivalence, full of what Bill [Inge] had learned from his own life: that you have to accept limited happiness, because all happiness is limited, and that to expect perfection is the most neurotic thing of all; you must live with the sadness as well as the joy. Perhaps this theme rings so true because Bill himself had come to a point where he had settled for less, a place not in the first rank of playwrights along with O’Neill, Williams, and Miller but on an honorable sub-platform.” The characters capitulate to what is portrayed as inevitable. As Kazan further explained, one reason he wanted to make the film was because Inge told him, “‘I’d like to tell a story about how we have to forgive our parents.’ Bill was in psychoanalysis then, he resented his parents, and he was right at the moment when he was forgiving them—when he saw what they were and let them go.” In other words, the name of the game was no longer resistance to or rebellion against the stultifying values of a society grounded on money and sexual repression; it was forgiveness and reconciliation, whether political, generational, or personal. Freud, not Marx, ruled.
One night, at a club in L.A., Beatty and Wood were eating dinner. Beatty glanced over at the adjoining table and c
ouldn’t help noticing that John F. Kennedy, Peter Lawford, and assorted hangers-on were seated there. Lawford got up and made his way over to their table. He turned to Wood and said, “Number One would like to invite you to join his party.” Wood accepted on behalf of herself and Beatty, but Lawford made it clear that the invitation extended only to her. She demurred. “But it’s Number One,” Lawford exclaimed. Not apparently in Hollywood.
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone opened on December 28, 1961, to generally tepid reviews, certainly the first personally bad reviews that the young actor had yet received. In The New York Times, Crowther wrote, “Mr. Beatty… is hopelessly out of his element as a patent-leather ladies man in Rome. His manners remind one of a freshman trying airs at a college prom, his accent recalls Don Ameche’s allpurpose Italian-Spanish one.” As Nicholson, who labored in obscurity for many years observed, “It was much easier to do as I’ve done, with no one watching. Warren had to learn in front of everybody.” The picture disappeared without a trace.
In February 1962, Wood was nominated for an Oscar for Splendor. Inge was nominated for Best Original Screenplay. Beatty was reportedly miffed that he didn’t get a nomination as well. Wood lost Best Actress to Sophia Loren for Two Women, but Inge won.
That spring, the press reported that the pair had become engaged, which was untrue, and that he had given her a Chihuahua puppy instead of a ring. But that didn’t prevent him from cheating on her when he had, or created, the opportunity. Beatty had a one-night stand with Cher, who was then sixteen. “When I was 16 years old, I fucked Warren Beatty,” she told Playboy. “Just like that. Of course, I’m one of a long list. And I did it because my girlfriends were so crazy about him, and so was my mother. I saw Warren, he picked me up and I did it. And what a disappointment! Not that he wasn’t technically good, or could be good, but I didn’t feel anything. So, for me, I felt, There’s no reason for you to do that again.”
All Fall Down opened two days after the Oscars, on April 11, 1962. The reviews were mixed. Despite his upbeat take on Splendor, Crowther was no fan of Beatty’s, and wrote starchily, “Everyone in this story is madly in love with a disgusting young man who is virtually a cretin. At least, Warren Beatty plays him so he seems like one.… Surly, sloppy, slow-witted, given to scratching himself, picking his nose, being rude beyond reason to women and muttering about how much he hates the world, this creature that Mr. Beatty gives us is a sad approximation of modern youth.” Beatty was quoted as saying he hated the picture himself, but took on the Times reviewer anyway: “Bosley Crowther has never liked me, but I don’t like him either. I told him so once at Sardi’s.” Stanley Kauffmann, writing in The New Republic, on the other hand, praised Beatty’s performance: “Warren Beatty, whose two previous film appearances were at best promising, fares much better here with the restless, bored Berry-Berry.… Physically, Beatty has the requisite magnetism; emotionally, he has the coiled-snake tension of black lower-middle-class frustration.”
On April 15, 1962, Wood filed for divorce, charging that Wagner “preferred to play golf than stay at home with me,” and that he ridiculed her friends who didn’t play golf. After she pleaded that she had to leave for Europe because All Fall Down was playing the Cannes Film Festival on May 13, the divorce was granted expeditiously. Beatty and Wood spent two months in Europe, including a week in Rome. The vacation was industriously exploited by the press. Wood appeared on the cover of Life magazine on June 15, and they were mobbed everywhere they went.
JUST WHEN Beatty thought he was embarking on his brilliant career, he had made two flops in a row, and worse, he was singled out for ridicule. He couldn’t help but take the reviews personally, and basically stopped working for sixteen months. He was desperate to play the lead in Kazan’s America, America, but the director didn’t think he was right, not enough rough edges, and turned him down. Beatty was bitterly disappointed and went on to reject Barefoot in the Park, The War Lover, and Visconti’s The Leopard. (He said he did not do costume dramas, and Alain Delon took the role.) He turned down Act One, a biopic of Moss Hart, Twilight of Honor, and most famously, PT 109, a film based on Robert Donovan’s account of John Kennedy’s World War II combat exploits. “The White House had asked Fred Zinnemann and me to please do PT 109,” the actor recalls. “Zinnemann didn’t like the script, and I didn’t like the script, so I said to the producer, Bryan Foy, ‘This is crap. You gotta rewrite it.’ I also said it to Pierre Salinger [Kennedy’s press secretary], who told the president.” Beatty adds, “Jack Warner knew that I told the president, and he got all upset. He essentially kicked me off the lot because I said, ‘Not only will I not do it, when I talk to the president I’m gonna tell him that he should not allow it to be done because it’s lousy.’ Warner said I’d never work at Warners again. I saw the president three days before he died, at a party. He said, ‘You were sure right about that one.’”
In 1962, he said that he had turned down a million dollars’ worth of work. According to Louella Parsons, he turned down seventy-five scripts and $2 million in salary between All Fall Down and the beginning of 1964. He called it all “crap.”
Looking back on this period two years later, Beatty confessed, “I was not prepared for it. I was not ready for the agony, the coarseness, the vulgarity, having to do things here, being pressured there until finally they rub out your talents. I was insecure. I’d lost the spark and I felt like I was being sold like a can of tomatoes.”
Beatty was still looking to attach himself to the great directors. Odets had recommended him to Robert Rossen. Fifty-four in 1963, Rossen was the crusty grandson of a rabbi. He was a short, barrel-shaped man with close-cropped, sparse gray hair, and a voice like sandpaper. Like Odets and Kazan, he was yet another member of the small circle of lefty writers and directors who had saved their careers by informing on their former friends and colleagues in the early 1950s. Like Kazan and Odets, he still considered himself a man of the left. Also like them, Rossen was a romantic figure for Beatty, a hero of the political wars of the Red Decade, despite his subsequent capitulation, and another potential mentor. He had a long list of distinguished pictures to his credit, including Body and Soul (1947), All the King’s Men (1949), which won an Oscar for Best Picture, and most recently, The Hustler (1961), with Paul Newman. He hired Beatty for a project called Cocoa Beach in July 1962, set in the world of the space program at Cape Canaveral.
Nineteen sixty-two and 1963 passed in a blur. As Beatty described them, they “blended into a series of very good times, good food, a lot of good-looking girls, and a lot of aimless fun.… I drank wine.… I was becoming an adult. I didn’t want to pass up really tasting my early twenties in order to churn up momentum.” One of the good-looking girls was Kim Novak, on whom he had a crush. Beatty met her at a party, and she invited him to accompany her up to the house she kept in Big Sur. She picked him up at his hotel in a sporty Jaguar XK140 or 150. In the car with her were a terrier, a parakeet, a parrot, and a St. Bernard. They drove up the Pacific Coast Highway and stopped at Nepenthe, the celebrated hotel built on the site of a cabin once owned by Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles. “I realized that she had something going with the bartender, and that I’d been invited to make the bartender jealous,” he recalls, wryly. “I was the hot young male star. But she had absolutely no interest in me.” Beatty took this as a challenge. “I went to her house with her, but I couldn’t get to first base. I couldn’t stand it, faked a phone call, and told her, ‘I’ve got to go back to L.A., it’s an emergency, can you get me to the airport before it closes?’ She drove me to the airport, and we never spoke again.”
Rossen never finished Cocoa Beach, but he did have an adaptation of a novel by J. R. Salamanca, called Lilith, which he asked Beatty to do instead. By 1963, broke and $10,000 in debt, the actor didn’t have much choice and agreed. Lilith tells the story of Vincent Bruce, a war veteran who works as an occupational therapist in a posh mental hospital for schizophrenics. Lilith is what was known in those days as a nymphomaniac, v
oracious and indiscriminate in her choice of partners (women as well as men), an enigmatic and capricious heartbreaker, cruel in her disregard for those who orbit her star, driving them mad if they weren’t already. In other words, a female Warren Beatty, give or take some. One inmate (Peter Fonda) spurned by Lilith commits suicide, hastening Lilith’s collapse into gibbering lunacy, and Bruce, who has also fallen in love with her, ends up a patient himself, his fate up in the air.
The script contained all the ingredients necessary to pique Beatty’s interest. His relationship with Wood was nothing if not a window into the world of a world-class neurotic. Like Splendor, Lilith was another installment in the Freud-ridden tradition of Hollywood films going back at least to The Snake Pit in 1948, and including the previous year’s surprise hit, David and Lisa (1962). It was a downbeat drama about a serious subject, with a perfect, sensitive-young-man role for him, and an equivocal, read “European,” as opposed to a happy, read “Hollywood,” ending.
Perhaps atoning for his sins of conscience, Rossen struck a somber note. “Society considers the person who is outside its norms as sick,” he told Cahiers du Cinéma in 1967, sounding like R. D. Laing. “Now, my own feeling is that society itself is sick.… We have to say what is out of joint in our time.”
In the spring of 1963, Charlie Feldman approached Beatty about starring in and co-producing a project that he had originally bought in the late 1950s for Cary Grant, based on a Hungarian play called Lot’s Wife. He already had a script, by I. A. L. Diamond, who had co-written Billy Wilder classics like Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, and Kiss Me, Stupid. Beatty had a sharp sense of humor and a gift for comedy, although he had yet to find a satisfactory vehicle for it. He seized the opportunity to get away from the sober dramas that had so far defined his career. He was fascinated by “the plight of the compulsive Don Juan,” as he puts it. “It always struck me as a pathetic and funny character, a victim of himself or society or his conquests or whatever—but a victim.” But the actor stipulated one condition. He knew that Feldman would find a part for his then girlfriend, Capucine, if allowed, and he wanted assurances that nothing suitable for her would find its way into the script. Feldman, who did not take dictation, retorted, “Fuck you,” but eventually agreed, and work on the script proceeded.
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