Needless to say, Lot’s Wife was not going to be the title of the movie. Feldman was looking around for something more suitable. When Beatty was staying at Feldman’s home, the producer couldn’t help but hear him on the phone giving his customary greeting to female callers, “What’s new, pussycat?” One day, the light bulb went on. Feldman exclaimed, “Title!”
Feldman and Beatty were not happy with Diamond’s script, which they didn’t think was funny enough. They needed a good joke writer. One night Beatty went to the Bitter End, a club in the Village, to catch a kid he heard was funny, Woody Allen. Feldman was prepared to offer Allen, who had no film experience, as much as $60,000 to rewrite the script. Allen’s agent, and later producer, was Charles H. Joffe. Allen recalls, “When he said, ‘Aw, I’d like your guy to do a movie with Warren Beatty,’ Joffe didn’t believe it for a second. Joffe only asked for $20,000, and that’s what I got.” Later, Allen continues, “Feldman said to me, ‘I want you to write a script where we all go to Paris. There’s a lot of beautiful girls there, we can all have a wonderful time. You can have a small part in the movie.’” So a movie that was to star Warren Beatty, now starred him and Woody Allen.
Beatty gave Allen the script, which Allen recalls was written not by Diamond, but Claude Binyon, an old-timer whose first credit was back in 1932. The actor said, “This guy’s no slouch.” Allen rolled his eyes, and replied, “Yeah, but I’ve never heard of him,” and not bothering to look at it, started from scratch. “I didn’t have breathtaking interest in the project because I thought it was never going to happen. I thought it was just a lot of big talk. No one was going to take me off the stage and say, ‘Go write a script with a part for yourself in a Warren Beatty movie. He was this big star. But he kept coming night after night to the Bitter End, and he’d hang out with me between shows, and on the street afterwards, and we’d talk. He was very encouraging, very supportive.”
When Allen went to visit him at the Delmonico, where he was staying, Beatty was wearing a white terrycloth bathrobe and carrying a fistful of phone messages. “If we were going to go out and eat, he’d call the restaurant and say, ‘Hi, I’m calling for Warren Beatty—I still don’t know how he had the nerve to do that—and he would of course always get a wonderful table. He was very, very good-looking. He’d pass women on the street and they’d say, ‘Hello,’ and he’d say, ‘Hello,’ and you could see that he would light them up.”
When he was finished, Allen read his script—which he says had “a million great jokes”—to Beatty and Feldman, and the honeymoon ended. “You could see right away that Feldman came from the old school of Hollywood,” Allen said later. “I had named the lead female character Becky, a Jewish name. He didn’t like it. And when she met the lead male, who was supposed to be Warren, she had confident dialogue, she would say, ‘Well, you know, I’m gorgeous and I’m great-looking.’ Charlie couldn’t countenance that because it was immodest and against the cliché of what the heroine would say. He regarded me as a quote-unquote beatnik, the guy who was coming up there in sneakers and a T-shirt and giving them jokes about Charlie Parker and suicide. I think Warren was more in tune with me than Charlie was. He was trusting Warren’s instinct that I had something to offer.”
Meanwhile, Beatty had reservations about Rossen’s script for Lilith as well. He turned around and took Youngblood Hawke instead, to be directed by Delmer Daves. Then, abruptly, he changed his mind. This was the last straw for Jack Warner, who kicked Beatty off the lot for the second time. Worried that he would never eat lunch in that town again, Beatty took Lilith.
2
ALL FELL DOWN
How Beatty peered into the abyss, as his tabloid love affair with Leslie Caron blackened his reputation and he staggered from one bad movie to another.
“It got to the point where I would have to make a good picture or get myself into trouble. That’s when we made Bonnie and Clyde.”
—Warren Beatty
WHILE BEATTY DITHERED over his next project, his relationship with Natalie Wood was winding down. They broke up, they got together, they broke up, they got together. Lana Wood remembers them in different rooms. “Natalie would lie by the pool in the sun for an hour and then when Warren would appear in his trunks, his usual book tucked under his arm, she would get up and go into the house,” she writes. “There was always a distance between them.” Beatty was not very good in the role of the dutiful boyfriend. He was rarely where he was supposed to be when he was supposed to be there, and if he did show up, he was liable to be hours late, driving Wood crazy. As Shirley MacLaine once quipped, he was a guy who couldn’t commit to dinner, and it was literally true. “After a few hours, [Natalie] began to look at her watch, and by evening, she became distraught and began crying,” recalled Lana, describing an average afternoon. “She stammered, ‘Warren.’ Later that night, hours after he had said he would be home and several hours after they had been due to arrive at a dinner party, Warren sauntered in. Then it started. Natalie and Warren fought, and when the screaming became too much, Warren slammed the door and left again and did not return that night. Natalie, weeping, went to bed.” Despite the attraction, the chemistry wasn’t there. “Natalie was a lightweight,” says Dick Sylbert. Gavin Lambert, who first met Natalie in 1956 when he was director Nicholas Ray’s assistant, and eventually became her biographer, observes, “My impression was that she was in love with Warren. And very focused on him, because she was always like that. When there was somebody important in her life, that was the one person. Natalie was very much a commitment girl, and he was not a commitment guy.”
Recalls Natalie’s assistant Mart Crowley, “The morning of the day she was going to go to put her handprints in the cement in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, she asked me, ‘What am I going to wear?’ I told her, ‘No low-cut dresses, no push-up bras, a suit and some good jewelry, because remember, you’re a star and you are going to be a lady.’ But Warren wasn’t going to Grauman’s, he wasn’t even going to get dressed up to be beside her, he was just at the house making mischief. He wouldn’t let her get ready. The hairdresser would be trying to work on her hair, and he’d throw her on the bed, kiss her and roll her around, messing up her hair. I’d be screaming, ‘We’re going to be late.’ He chased me around the bedroom to get me out of the room, and finally tackling me. I was just furious with him, because of how late he was making us. All for no reason. Just because it wasn’t about him. She had a deep affection for Warren, but she also felt that it would never work.” Wood, still in therapy, concluded that she was flagellating herself for divorcing Wagner by trying to make a go of a relationship that had no future.
In March 1963, Wood began Love with the Proper Stranger in New York, with Steve McQueen. Three weeks later, Lilith commenced principal photography, also in New York. Wood’s therapist, Dr. John Lindon, had been pressing her about her inability to make commitments. She in turn had made it clear to Beatty that his sudden disappearances wouldn’t do. He, on the other hand, made it clear that he didn’t want to be pinned down. They both knew the affair was pretty much over and parted on friendly terms.
An alternative version has it that Wood returned to L.A. to shoot the last five days of Love with the Proper Stranger in late spring. On April 26, 1963, she was supposed to have dinner at Chasen’s with friends, including director Alan Pakula and actress Hope Lange, whom the director was then seeing. Beatty showed up, but disappeared for a weekend with the blond hatcheck girl. After he had his way with her, he was supposed to have returned to Wood’s house, only to find that she had burned his clothes. (She apparently told Joan Collins she had done so.) Beatty always denied the whole thing, the hatcheck girl and the burned clothes. Says Lambert, “Natalie told me she never burned his clothes, and as to the hatcheck girl, Warren could be unfaithful, but—he wouldn’t do that kind of thing.” Many years later, Wood said, “Warren goes through women on an industrial scale, [but] he does it with charm.”
IN THE beginning, Robert Rossen welcom
ed Beatty’s participation on Lilith, treating him more like a friend and collaborator than an actor for hire. He involved him in script revisions and casting. After the part was offered to Natalie Wood, who turned it down—the prospect of another picture with Beatty was apparently too much for her—the two men crisscrossed Europe, checking out Lilith wannabes, a casting couch dream come true for the actor, although which of the lucky women he had sex with is best known to himself. The list included Jean Seberg, who had made a splash in Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan in 1957, and then again in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless in 1960. Beatty and Rossen flew to Paris to see her, and then hired her.
Like Kazan, Rossen was a New York director with a distaste for studio production. Save for one week at Filmways Studios, Lilith was shot almost entirely on location. Production began on Long Island in late April 1963. It was a long shoot, twelve weeks or so in all, and no sooner had it begun than Beatty realized he’d made a serious mistake. The warmth he’d enjoyed with Rossen evaporated virtually over night. Recalled Seberg, “At the outset, Rossen and he had a relationship which was strangely fraternal, very intimate, very like accomplices, even. Oddly, this relationship of intimacy stopped at the first day of filming, and from then on, it did nothing but deteriorate more and more.” Beatty wanted out, but of course it was too late, and he felt trapped.
Rossen was not a fan of Strasberg, Adler et al., which put him at odds with his star. As always, the actor showered Rossen with a thousand questions. “If the director was indecisive, Warren would absolutely destroy him,” says screenwriter Robert Towne. “He’d ask so many questions—and he can ask more questions than any three-year-old—that the director didn’t know whether he was coming or going.” Beatty tried to engage Rossen in lengthy analyses of each of his scenes. The director’s response was, “I hired you because I thought you knew how to act, for Christ’s sake. Don’t ask me how to play the part. You’re supposed to know how to play the part.” According to assistant cameraman Tibor Sands, who later helped Beatty shoot the Witnesses for Reds, “Beatty was extremely difficult on the set.”
It was said that Beatty resented the attention Rossen lavished on Seberg. Sands felt that Rossen was too soft to deal with Beatty. He continues, Beatty’s behavior “was getting worse and worse until Rossen slapped him in front of everybody. That calmed him down.”
The camera was an old-fashioned Mitchell. It took fifteen to twenty seconds to get the camera up to speed, and when Rossen called “Action,” Beatty prepared himself for the take “by taking deep breaths and squinting into the sun while the camera was rolling,” Sands recalls. “By the time he was ready, half the roll was gone.” Beatty also put off some of the actors, including Seberg. “I was intimidated by Warren Beatty,” she said. “He talked a different language than I did in his work.” She wrote to a friend, “Warren Beatty’s behavior is just unbelievable. He’s out to destroy everyone, including himself.”
According to Peter Fonda, who had a supporting role in the film, and who credits Beatty with encouraging him to get into acting, Beatty threw all the actors off stride, “because we all had to work to a tune that Warren had in his head. Warren asked for more and more takes, and we were running into overtime, which really annoyed Rossen. Warren would change the lines, and Rossen felt that he was screwing with his script—he wrote it—although Warren was just doing what most actors do, make the lines speakable.”
Beatty famously held up the production while he argued with Rossen over whether his character would say, “I’ve read Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov” as Rossen wished, or, as Beatty preferred, “I’ve read Crime and Punishment and half of The Brothers Karamazov.” Adds Sylbert, who designed Lilith, “Warren was a man who was seriously smarter than the people he was talking to. And he was just as resistant as he would ever be any time he had another director except himself. He was brutal on directors.”
Beatty made no secret of the fact that he thought Rossen was making a mess of the movie, and told him so, which enraged the director. The actor attributed some of the problem to Rossen’s drinking. Finally, in frustration, Beatty intentionally mucked up some of his scenes, as he later confessed, by mumbling, so much so that he earned the nickname of “Whispering Jack Smith,” after a singer popular in the 1920s and 1930s.
Again, Beatty was aloof with the crew. “I don’t think that anybody liked him,” Sands continues. On one occasion, his dressing room was trashed, the door torn off the hinges. They made fun of his self-regard.
Fonda took it upon himself to protect Seberg from Beatty. In one scene, the script called for Seberg to slap Beatty. Fonda recalls, “She got him the first time. The second take, he stopped her by putting his hand up in a karate-like chop. He did that several times, and she was starting to get bruised. I said, ‘If he hits her again, I’m going to slug him. I’ll step on his dick in the parking lot.’ The next day there was a guy there from Columbia, who said, ‘If you hit him, we’ll sue the fuck out of you.’ I wasn’t really about to go fight him. I was this skinny 23-year-old kid, and Warren was pretty buff.” According to Sands, Fonda was so distressed by Beatty’s behavior that during the wrap party, at the end of July, “Peter was running around trying to enlist members of the crew to throw Beatty in the pool, because they didn’t like him.”
Beatty irritated Fonda by trying to steal his scenes. “He was timing himself for the camera to be on him, and not on me,” Fonda continues. “Maybe he was competitive.” But he liked Beatty, and excused his behavior because “I thought he was in turmoil, feeling done in by Hollywood.” Surprisingly, Fonda says, “Most of his paycheck for that film was being garnished by Kazan. Because Kazan had won a lawsuit against Warren for pulling out of a part. I was told about it by the accounting people. They showed me the check.”
But Rossen was not forgiving. He later called Beatty “psychotic,” and added, “There was nothing I could do about it, because he’s so sick that he brings his sickness into anything he does.” But it was Rossen who was sick. Speaking of her first impression of the director, Seberg observed, “When he came to see me in Paris, he was already seriously ill. He had a strange disease, a kind of infection of the skin that made dark spots on his body and on his face.” Beatty says he never noticed, but that seems implausible, especially for someone who practically lived in the Merck manual. And if so, he seemed to be the only one. “From day one on Rossen got worse and worse,” says Sands. “It looked like a heart condition. Purple lips, and he was out of breath.” According to Seberg, “At the end of the filming, he was in a complete state of exhaustion.… And the permanent confrontation that opposed him to Warren did not help matters; he even wanted to bring a lawsuit against him, and other childish things.” Before his death in 1966, Rossen said, “If I die, it’ll be Warren Beatty who killed me.” Sands adds, “Beatty probably contributed to it. I completely agree with [Rossen].” And Sylbert, “Warren’s vision of Rossen is that they had this wonderful relationship. Rossen wanted to kill him with an axe.”
Shortly after Lilith wrapped, Beatty flew to New York, where he invited Arthur Penn to Delmonico’s and asked him to direct Honeybear, a script he had been chasing, written by Charles Eastman. Penn was yet another entry on his list of Great Directors. A slightly built man of forty-one years and serious mien, he was fifteen years older than Beatty. When he came back from World War II, he wanted to make movies, but he discovered, in his words, that “Hollywood was a closed club. Back came Jimmy Stewart, back came Gable, all these people, and it was as it was before the deluge. Theater was equally closed, very much a gentleman’s game, but in TV, you could get a job. And that’s where we all started. We all shot up right through it.” Penn distinguished himself in what later became known as the golden age of live television, doing shows like Playhouse 90 and The Philco Television Playhouse. “TV just exploded in the face of the studios,” he continues. “We were not the gentleman’s club. We were arrogant street kids.”
Eventually, Penn turned to live dr
ama, where he had considerably more success, and by the time Beatty tried to recruit him to direct Honeybear, he had established himself as the premier Broadway director with a succession of hits: Two for the Seesaw (1958), The Miracle Worker (1959), Toys in the Attic (1960), and An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May (1960). He even boasted of a big movie, the screen version of The Miracle Worker, which was released in 1962 and earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Director, as well as Oscars for Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke.
Penn had no interest in Honeybear. Instead he showed Beatty a script called Mickey One, offering him the lead. “I found him very smart,” Penn recalls. “He was smart enough to have said, ‘Who are the best writers, I want to know them, I want to know Tennessee Williams, I want to know Bill Inge,’ and he managed to do so. He was a young man determined to make it.” Penn explained that he was trying “to push American movies into areas in which Fellini and Truffaut have moved,” but Beatty wasn’t impressed and said, “I don’t understand this thing. What do you see in it?” Penn described the film as a metaphor for McCarthyism. “That didn’t particularly fly with Warren,” recalls the director. “He still didn’t like the script, he didn’t like the idea of it.” Beatty kept saying, “It’s too fucking obscure.” But eager to work with Penn, Beatty finally said, “I’ll do it. I’m gonna put myself in your hands.”
Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America Page 8
