MEANWHILE, IN a parallel universe, two men named Robert Benton and David Newman were toiling away at Esquire, then enjoying its moment in the sun. Benton was the art director, Newman an editor. Benton and Newman were an odd couple, a pairing of opposites, Benton the designer, Newman the wordsmith. Benton was the soft-spoken Gentile from Texas, the Felix Ungar of the two, finicky, precise, and orderly, while Newman was the Oscar Madison, a New York Jew, loud and opinionated. But they shared a love of movies. The early 1960s saw the tide of film culture crest in the United States, particularly in New York, which was awash with movies from all over the world—Italian, Swedish, Polish, Japanese, Brazilian—the kind of adult fare that had prompted the weekly and monthly reviewers to turn up their noses at Splendor in the Grass. Dedicated cineastes, pale as newts, threaded their way from tony venues like the Museum of Modern Art through seedy art houses like the Thalia or the New Yorker on the Upper West Side to railroad flats on the Lower East Side where a bedsheet could easily serve as a screen on which flickered an image thrown by a creaky 16 millimeter projector that sounded like a coffee grinder.
The New York Film Festival made its debut that year, 1963, showing, among others, Joseph Losey’s The Servant, Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water, and Alain Resnais’s Muriel. It was a time when unprepossessing critics—Pauline Kael, a tiny woman of fierce opinions (she was known as the “bird woman of Petaluma,” an allusion to her diminutive stature and her place of birth, a chicken farm in Petaluma, California) who could easily have passed for a small-town spinster in one of Inge’s plays, and Andrew Sarris, best known for popularizing the French auteur theory in America—could become culture heroes, commanding vast gatherings of glassy-eyed college students. Kael’s collection of her reviews, I Lost It at the Movies, would become a best-seller in 1965, while Sarris would strike back (the two had a long-running feud) with The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929 to 1968, which became the cineastes’ bible. Sarris’s acolytes termed themselves “auteurists,” while Kael’s, many of whom she placed in prominent positions in various publications, affected hearing loss when they were scornfully referred to as “Paulettes.”
In any event, besotted though Benton and Newman may have been with, say, the bleak black and white visions of Ingmar Bergman or Michelangelo Antonioni’s gnomic tales of the anomie that appeared to enervate the whole of Italy with chronic fatigue syndrome, or the bloody choreography of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai spectacles, for them it was the French cinema that fascinated them most, defined by those twin giants of the Nouvelle Vague, the cold, austere, intellectually bracing Jean-Luc Godard, and the warmer, fuzzier, more sentimental François Truffaut. Both Godard and Truffaut wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma and had a taste for American studio films, particularly of the gangster variety, albeit refracted through French eyes. “All the time, everywhere we went, the only thing any of us talked about was movies,” recalls Benton. He and Newman had just seen Godard’s Breathless and couldn’t get it out of their heads. Nearly as much, they loved Truffaut. “Within two months, I saw Jules and Jim twelve times,” recalls Benton. (Newman and his wife, Leslie, named their daughter Catherine after Jeanne Moreau’s character in that film.) Benton continues, “You cannot see a movie that often without beginning to notice certain things about structure and form and character.” He and Newman educated themselves simply by watching movies. In the early 1960s, film schools virtually did not exist. At the Museum of Modern Art, a kid named Peter Bogdanovich was programming retrospectives of Hollywood directors. “Bogdanovich did two brilliant monographs, one on Hitchcock and one on Hawks,” continues Benton. “Those were the closest things we had to a textbook.”
By way of one of those cosmic coincidences that suggest there’s no such thing as chance, Benton and Newman discovered that they were both reading the same book, The Dillinger Days, by John Toland, which in its footnotes touched on the escapades of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, who cut a swath of mayhem across five Southwestern states from 1932 to 1934. Benton was no stranger to the legend of the outlaw couple. He was born in Waxahachie, and grew up in East Texas. His father had gone to Clyde’s funeral. “They were great, great folk heroes,” he recalls, famous for their daring getaways against overwhelming odds. Although they had been dead for a good thirty years, in East Texas their memory was fresh. Clyde had at least one sister still alive, as did Bonnie, when the film would be shot in 1966.
In August 1963, Benton and Newman embarked on an outline. Working at night, with the banjo picking of Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs’ “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” on a Mercury record blaring scratchily from the stereo, they wrote a seventy-five-page treatment, which they finished by the end of November. With the nothing-to-lose bravado of neophytes, they set their sights on their patron saint, Truffaut, to direct it. After all, they felt they had written a European film. “The French New Wave allowed us to write with a more complex morality, more ambiguous characters, more sophisticated relationships,” says Benton. By November they finished the treatment, or so they thought, and by January 2, 1964, their script ended up in the hands of the great man.
MEANWHILE, BEATTY was trying to nudge along What’s New Pussycat? On November 22, 1963, he met with Stanley Kubrick in his Central Park West apartment in order to persuade him to direct it. “Warren used to go to school on Stanley stories,” recalls Warners publicist Joe Hyams. “‘What did Stanley do on this movie? What did he do on that movie?’” Says Beatty, “Stanley was the best. He always liked to perpetuate the feeling that he was a mad genius, that he knew things other people didn’t know. Although he was sitting in London, he would know what was happening in the balcony of the Grauman’s Chinese.”
Dr. Strangelove would not be released until the end of the following January, but Kubrick was afraid that it was so scornful of the Cold War pieties on which President Kennedy had campaigned—he alarmed voters with the so-called missile gap—that he would block its release. He asked Beatty to arrange a screening for the Kennedys, which the actor did, although his clout was not yet of the dimensions that would have enabled him to corral the president or his brother Bobby; he had to settle for wives, relatives, and hangers-on. Beatty was leaving Kubrick’s on his way to meet with Feldman and Woody Allen, when he heard that Kennedy had been shot. (Allen recalls that on that day he was in L.A., working on the script at the Gene Autry Motel across Sunset Boulevard from the Interlude, the club at which he was performing.)
In February 1964, Beatty met Leslie Caron at a dinner party thrown by her agent, Freddie Fields, co-head of Creative Management Associates (CMA) at the Bistro, a popular Beverly Hills restaurant, to promote her Oscar prospects for The L-Shaped Room (1963). With her dark, bobbed hair, blue eyes, and lips forever pursed in an enchanting pout, Caron, born in 1931 and six years older than Beatty, was the star of An American in Paris, Lili, and particularly Gigi, in which she had starred opposite Louis Jourdan and Maurice Chevalier in 1958. Beatty had seen all her films and had a crush on her. “It was like lightning had struck,” he told Sylbert. But there was a hitch: she was married to Peter Hall, the director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, with whom she had two young children, Christopher and Jenny. Still, husbands were never much of an impediment to Beatty, and he asked if he could see her home. She said yes, and the two embarked on a discreet but passionate affair. “That was it,” says Sylbert. “It was like an explosion. Blew up the marriage, the children. You couldn’t quite understand why. Who was Leslie Caron? He is in a certain way a fan.”
From her point of view, Caron recalled later, “I was struck by his appearance and his personality. He had star quality: very good looks, a great smile, he was tall and athletic. Seduction was his greatest asset. Once he was interested in a woman, he would never let go. He enveloped her with his every thought. He wanted total control of her, her clothes, her makeup, her work. He took notice of everything.” She added, “We practically did not leave each other for the next two years.” Like the other women he saw seriously, he put
Caron into psychoanalysis.
As Beatty was guiltless with regard to Wood and Wagner, so he was with regard to Caron and Hall. He did not deserve the reputation for being a home wrecker that was hung around his neck by the tabloids; their marriage was already fatally stressed. Both Caron and Hall were driven and ambitious. Their careers kept them apart, hers in Hollywood and his in England. “My tiredness, her anxieties and our perpetual separations chipped the marriage away,” wrote Hall. “We both had affairs. By 1962 there wasn’t much left but resentment.”
That same month, Caron was nominated for Best Actress, along with Wood for Love with the Proper Stranger, and MacLaine for Irma La Douce. America, America, which Beatty had badly wanted and didn’t get, was nominated for Best Picture, along with Tom Jones, Lilies of the Field, Cleopatra, and How the West Was Won, a lame bunch, save for Tom Jones, but consistent with the creative malaise that clung to Hollywood like smog.
Beatty, accompanied by Caron, returned to New York to begin rehearsals for Mickey One. On March 2, 1964, he flew to Chicago for the beginning of the shoot. Despite Penn’s ambitions, Mickey One was about as far from Truffaut and/or Godard as Chicago from Paris. Sylbert derisively called it “Mickey One 1/2,” as in, “Let’s be a foreign filmmaker, say, Fellini.” A pretentious play by Alan Surgal, written under the influence of the Protestant existentialist theologian Paul Tillich, with whom the writer was infatuated at the time, became even more pretentious in the hands of Penn, who indeed turned it into a parable of McCarthyism, elliptically told, with other Big Ideas tossed in for good measure.
Shot in funky black and white, the budget was low, $1.1 million—the only way Penn could get it financed—but it wears its poverty on its sleeve, as if a threadbare look guarantees its authenticity. The plot, such as it is, presented the story of a not-yet-ready-for-prime-time stand-up comic on the run from the mob for reasons that remain opaque at best. The symbolic tableaux Penn scatters about the film like plums in a pudding were visually striking and might have worked had they been organic to the story, but they just come off as clumsy, portentous, and finally embarrassing.
To Penn, making a European film meant breaking up the narrative. “Movies didn’t have to tell that story like a railroad track,” he says. “They could go sideways, with self-referential tangents. That was a very liberating idea, which unfortunately I was unable to accomplish. Because my main storyline was not strong enough, the tangents became the dominant aspect of the film.” Well put.
Beatty was fully aware of just how problematic the project was, but even though the two men were better matched than he and Rossen, Mickey One proved to be yet another fractious production. “We had a lot of trouble on that film because I didn’t know what the hell Arthur was trying to do,” the actor said later, with unaccustomed frankness. “I didn’t know what Penn wanted.… I’m not sure that he knew himself.… [The picture is] unnecessarily obscure. It reaches further than it needs to.… Arthur felt that I never really trusted him on it, and he was absolutely right.” He would complain to the director, “Nobody’s going to understand this fucking scene. Why don’t we just say what it’s about?”
“No, Beatty, we’re not going to say what it’s about.” Big mistake.
One of his major objections was that although he was playing a stand-up comic, his jokes didn’t get any laughs. “I felt they were pretentious jokes… jokes about cosmic situations—you know, the danger of nuclear attack, the ownership of the military–industrial complex—they weren’t very funny jokes.… I think I know when I’ve got a funny joke to tell and when I don’t.”
For his part, Penn was equally frustrated: “At that stage in the game, I don’t think Warren was as adept an actor as he later became.” He was embarrassed by acting, self-conscious and ill at ease. “He doesn’t like strong displays of emotion and he knew that he had been getting along very nicely on his good looks and his persona,” Penn observed. The director couldn’t get the kind of performance out of Beatty that he wanted, in his words, “a certain flamboyance. I didn’t know Warren well enough. I kept thinking, That’s just an acting choice. He ought to be able to make another choice.” Penn kept pushing and prodding, “Come on, you can do it better than that. Let’s get out here and do it.” But finally, he realized that it was not just an acting choice, “it was antithetical to Warren’s personality. He’s very wary, and moves very, very carefully. Understandably, in that he lives in a minefield. There were many love affairs that I didn’t know about, that were potential stuff for the papers.”
Indeed, this was one of the worst performances of Beatty’s career. He seemed either stiff, or, under Penn’s prodding, melodramatic, as if emoting in a silent movie. It feels as though he’s acting. Beatty’s character was supposed to be Polish, because Penn believed that the best comics are outsiders of one ethnicity or another, but that was clearly beyond the actor’s range, and the director finally gave up. The lack of specificity accentuated the abstract, free-floating feel of the film, grounded in nothing.
The movie wasn’t helped by a wooden performance by Alexandra Stewart, who played opposite Beatty. Before he signed her, Penn had consulted Truffaut, who told him, “Oh, she’s wonderful, she’s just wonderful.” He goes on, “So, virtually sight unseen, I hired her. I didn’t know that Truffaut was having an affair with her. She had no inner fire, and Warren didn’t respond too well to that kind of passivity. When he didn’t get the kickback from her that he was expecting, he would give me a look, as if to say, ‘What did you get me into here?’ So it was misbegotten from the outset.”
Beatty’s relationship with Caron was still under wraps, or so he thought. She visited the set in a “disguise”—sunglasses and a scarf—that fooled no one and amused everyone. The script supervisor even told her she looked like Leslie Caron!
Caron went on to Morocco with Hall on a brief vacation in a futile effort to salvage their marriage. Instead, she told him she was in love with Beatty. “‘Yes, I was having an affair with Warren,’ she said. ‘Wasn’t everyone?’” She told Hall she was moving to Los Angeles, leaving the children with him. Hall announced their separation on April 5. “I didn’t blame Leslie; I didn’t even blame Warren Beatty,” he wrote later. “He was just the catalyst for a split that had long been inevitable.” Eight days later, on April 13, 1964, Beatty accompanied Caron to the Oscar ceremony at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Caron, Wood, and MacLaine all lost to Patricia Neal, who won for her role in Hud. Tom Jones, which was British-made, won Best Picture, which struck some observers as virtually un-American. “Wonder why we hate ourselves,” wrote gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, off base as usual. The answer lay not in insufficient American amour propre, but in the sickness of the studio system.
Meanwhile, Beatty’s relationship with Feldman was dissolving in acrimony over Pussycat. He bombarded his friend with a fusillade of telegrams full of questions about the status of the project. Feldman failed to respond, even though Beatty begged him to clarify the situation so he could focus on Mickey One. Despite Woody Allen’s suspicions, Feldman liked his work. It was Beatty who now had the problem. He was supposed to play a womanizer trying to remain true to his fiancée, but who can’t resist the bevy of females who throw themselves at him. His psychiatrist is useless. He’s involved with one of his patients, who also lusts after the womanizer. As draft followed draft, the actor began to notice that his part was growing smaller, while Allen’s was growing larger. “In the original script, Woody’s part might have appeared on six pages,” he recalls. “In his first rewrite, the part went to twelve or fifteen pages, and it was funny. Then it went to twenty or thirty pages. By the time we got to what Woody thought was an acceptable rewrite, his part was almost half the script. Mine was almost as large but not quite as good. Woody couldn’t quite grasp what was funny about a compulsive, successful Don Juan.” Besides that, Beatty felt that the characters had changed, Allen’s for the better, his for the worse. Allen’s started as a nebbish who hopped around on a pogo stic
k, and became “a lovable guy who found it hard to get laid and had all the really good jokes,” he said. “My character had turned into some neo-Nazi Ubermensch who was unkind to women.”
There were other problems between Beatty and Feldman. Beatty says he had been given various assurances regarding casting and director selection. He favored Groucho Marx in the part of a mad psychiatrist; Barbara Harris as the female lead, a part that was eventually split into three; and Mike Nichols, who had yet to make a film, to direct. None of them was happening. And worse, Feldman urged Allen to strengthen the part of the French girl. Beatty still feared that his friend was going to cast Capucine in the role.
When a gossip column item appeared on April 16, 1964, to the effect that Caron would appear opposite Beatty in Pussycat, Feldman exploded, concluding that the actor had planted it, trying to force his hand. In an angry letter to Beatty he wrote, “You seem to forget that this is a venture of mine and not yours, and until you straighten yourself out in this regard this picture will not start, nor will I assign a director. Either I will cast the picture my way and do this film my way, or the picture will not get going for some time.… I don’t want you dictating to me how this picture should be done, or for that matter any picture with which I am identified.” Feldman never sent the letter, but the damage had been done. With Pussycat in trouble, or at least Beatty’s involvement in trouble, the actor began to look around for another project.
MICKEY ONE wrapped at the end of May 1964. Beatty flew to Caron’s side in Jamaica, where she was shooting Father Goose, opposite Cary Grant. At night, in Caron’s bungalow, she and Beatty fretted over his career problems. He couldn’t understand why Brando, Dean, and Clift were taken seriously while he wasn’t. He talked about quitting acting, going into directing or producing. She encouraged him.
Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America Page 9
