In the beginning of June, Caron called Hall, informing him that she was flying to London to pick up the children and take them to Los Angeles, where they would live with her. Hall reacted angrily, and on June 8, 1964, he filed for divorce.
Beatty and Caron believed the affair was still their secret, but Grant invited journalist Roderick Mann, a friend, to the set. Mann published an interview with Caron on June 14, 1964, wherein he dropped a small bombshell, namely, that “for the past two weeks she has been enjoying the company in Jamaica of Warren Beatty, the handsome Hollywood actor, who flew down here amid great secrecy and promptly went to ground.” Mann also mentioned that she had visited him in Chicago, and that she was undecided as to whether to settle in Hollywood, but would make a decision after her two children had spent the summer with her there. The response from Hall was swift. He charged Caron with adultery and named Beatty as a co-respondent. The judge granted him a restraining order preventing Caron from taking their children out of the country for seven days. Then Hall filed for custody.
Beatty’s relationships with Joan Collins, who was single, and Natalie Wood, who was separated, were one thing, but appearing to break up the marriage of a mother with two children, even if it wasn’t true, was something else, and when it became public, it was ugly. The British press in effect affixed a scarlet “A” to Beatty’s chest. He himself wasn’t happy with his behavior. As he once observed, “When you’re falling in love you’re a fascist. You lie, you cheat when you’re with someone else, or you’re breaking somebody up.” It was only the year before that The L-Shaped Room had won a BAFTA award and only months before that Caron had been nominated for an Oscar, but it might as well have been another lifetime.
Beatty accompanied Caron back to London. He had just accepted $200,000 to star in and co-produce Pussycat, but confronted Feldman in his suite at the Dorchester. He accused him of reneging on their agreement—creating a role for Capucine, and letting Allen write him out of the script. Recalls Sylbert, who was associate producer, “Warren said, ‘Charlie, I’m not going to do it.’ Charlie was in shock. Furious. You didn’t fuck with Charlie Feldman.” Adds Beatty, “I finally walked out in a huffing bluff or bluffing huff, thinking they wouldn’t let me go. But they were only too happy to let me go. He went around pretending that he was upset because I walked off the movie when in fact I think he was ecstatic, because he was able to go to these people who were much more important in getting money. And also he didn’t have to deal with me.” Peter Sellers, then the biggest comedy star in the world, came on board to play the Groucho Marx part, Peter O’Toole, fresh from Lawrence of Arabia and Becket, replaced Beatty. Beatty had invested a considerable amount of time and energy into Pussycat, and he was devastated. “I diva’ed my way out of the movie,” he said. “I was wrong. And hurt. I was really hurt.” He and Feldman didn’t speak for four years, until just before Feldman was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 1968. The picture turned out to be a big hit, and a turning point for both Beatty and Allen. “Woody was very unhappy with the movie that was finally made,” continues Beatty. “I was even unhappier, because I would have gotten rich off it. After that, Woody was always in control of whatever he did. And so was I.”
IN MAY 1964, the neophyte brother-and-sister producing team Elinor Jones and Norton Wright paid Benton and Newman $1,700 for an eighteen-month option on their treatment that expired on November 27, 1965. Truffaut thrilled the writers by expressing interest in directing, then dashed their hopes with talk of a prior commitment (Fahrenheit 451), and kept them on tenterhooks while he plucked he-loves-it, he-loves-it-not petals off the Bonnie and Clyde blossom. He promised to make a decision by late July, and suggested a first-of-that-month deadline for the writers to turn in their script. When they got back to New York, they scrambled to transform the treatment into a screenplay, where description became dialogue. Like real screenwriters, they were late, failing to finish until early August, but when they handed in their draft, Wright and Jones were over the moon about it.
The script, with Truffaut attached, went out to the studios, most of which worried that the main characters—killers, after all—were unappealing, and that Truffaut was ill-suited to direct this material. Their chances were not helped by the fact that their screenplay featured a ménage à trois: Bonnie was in love with Clyde, and Clyde with Bonnie, but he needed the stimulus of C. W. Moss to get off. Rumor had it that Clyde had turned bisexual during a stint in prison, and they ran with it. After all, it was in keeping with Benton and Newman’s notion that the couple were cultural outlaws, as well as with the experimentation that was becoming obligatory in the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Besides, Jules and Jim was built around a ménage à trois. But the studios weren’t impressed. Benton and Newman were turned down all over town. Months passed. Benton thought that Bonnie and Clyde was dead.
A bad situation can always get worse, and on September 7, it did. In a letter to Elinor Jones, Truffaut informed her that although he too loved the script, he was unable to direct it, because he was due to begin Fahrenheit 451 in the summer of 1965, and then direct The Bride Wore Black.
Benton was devastated. He thought, That’s it. It’s over. But with Truffaut out of the way, the path was cleared for Beatty, who, meanwhile, was having his own problems.
On Saturday, September 19, 1964, Lilith premiered to a shower of rotten tomatoes, figuratively speaking. It opened its commercial run in New York on October 1. The reviews were scathing. In The New York Times, Crowther heaped scorn on the young actor, writing, “a muddy performance by Warren Beatty doesn’t help. Mr. Beatty has a sodden way of moving and a monotonous expression that suggests that his character should be getting treatment all the way through the film. He does not help to clarify matters or generate sympathy.” Beatty called up Arthur Penn. The actor recalled, “I needed some confirmation, so I asked, ‘Do you think I need to talk faster?’ He said, ‘Are you kidding? Everyone does. What have I been trying to tell you for years?’”
Beatty blamed Rossen for the picture’s failure. His odd relationship with the director which skidded from admiration into a swamp of hostility, was not unlike his relationships with Inge and Odets, whom the actor wooed and then discarded. Odets speculated that his behavior—on the surface almost a parody of Freud’s Oedipus Complex—was an echo of his connection to his father, whom he revered as a youngster but grew increasingly estranged from in later years as the older man descended into drink, anger, and self-pity. Beatty was himself enough of a child of the Freudian 1950s to refer repeatedly to his “patricidal” posture toward his older mentors, as he did with Kazan. Although there was undoubtedly some truth in Odets’s characterization, it wasn’t the whole story. Inge was in artistic decline and Odets had squandered his talent on talk and booze by the time Beatty met them, so one need not invoke Freud to figure out why Beatty might have moved on from them.
A year or so after the dinner at Chasen’s marked the end of Beatty’s relationship with Natalie Wood, she and her sister ran into him in New York. Lana, then seventeen, claimed he always used to throw inviting looks her way when he was living with Natalie. She said he came on to her after dinner at a restaurant when her sister had left. She recalled that “he told me I was always provoking him by running around Natalie’s house in a bathing suit,” and insisted that he come back with her to her hotel room. Lana, who says she managed to escape, never liked him, but changed her mind some years later when he caught her in the middle of a divorce, and they had a brief affair.
A few months later, there was a strange coda to his relationship with Natalie. As was often the case with his lovers, the embers burned on well after the blaze had been doused. In May 1964, Wood started The Great Race, directed by Blake Edwards, a project she hated and did only to satisfy her contract with Warners. Toward the end of the shoot, on Friday, November 27, 1964, she was having dinner with Mart Crowley at La Scala, in one of the red leather booths. She spent the meal bitching about Edwards, who was always dumping wate
r on her and throwing pies at her. She was lonely, had no one in her life. Suddenly Beatty appeared at their table, virtually aglow with good health and fine spirits. He sat down for a moment, then left. After the dinner, Crowley drove her home to her place on Bentley Drive. On the way, she told him, “Warren’s coming over for a drink.” When they arrived, she went into her bedroom to fix her face. When she came out, she asked Crowley, “What are you doing?”
“Nothing, I’m going to go home.”
“Why don’t you spend the night here.”
“Okay.”
The bell rang, and she said, “That’s Warren.” Crowley let him in, said “Good night,” and retired to the library, where there was a couch that doubled as a guest bed. He closed the door and went to sleep. Lana Wood later quoted Crowley saying that he had heard “raised voices” between Beatty and Natalie, after which Natalie tried to take her life, the implication being that the actor had tipped her into a suicidal funk. Lana recalled that Crowley, who didn’t like Beatty either, directed several “expletives” his way, suggesting that he believed the actor was at fault.
Crowley denies that he told Lana, who was then still in high school, anything of the sort, and says he heard nothing until three or four in the morning, when he was awakened by a soft scuffling sound at his door. “It was just a miracle that she didn’t collapse and die before she got to my room. In my jockey shorts, I stumbled to the door and unlocked it, and she just fell in on top of me, collapsed. Gone, out of it, not a word. I dragged her to the bathroom, turned the shower tap to freezing cold, and shoved her in there. I put her on her back on the floor—there was water everywhere—and I thought, She’s gonna get pneumonia, so I massaged her hands and feet, and slapped her face. When she came to in the hospital, she said, ‘You son of a bitch, my face is absolutely beat to shit, what were you doing?’”
She was taken to the old Cedars Sinai on Fountain Avenue, where George Gershwin, Judy Holliday, and many other celebrities had died. “It was really touch and go,” Crowley continues. “They pumped her stomach, determined that she had taken Seconal. Meanwhile, Warren was calling, leaving messages on her phone machine at home. At first they were, ‘Where the hell are you? What’s going on?’ Then it was, ‘What is the matter? Are you angry? What is it? Call me back. Call me.’ The calls from Warren just kept building up, with increasing urgency. I never returned any of them, because I was told by Natalie’s agents, the William Morris people, ‘This can’t get out.’”
When Wood recovered, she went home, listened to more messages from Beatty, and finally called him back. “Nothing happened,” she told him. “After you left, Mart and I suddenly decided to drive down to Palm Springs for the weekend.” Wood told Crowley, “He didn’t believe me, and asked if I’d been in the hospital. ‘That’s crazy,’ I said, and stuck to my story.” Crowley continues, “I saw him about two months later, in La Scala, and he backed me up in a corner, and said, ‘You lied to me, you son of a bitch, you said you went to Palm Springs, I know where you were, you were at Cedars. That’s why you didn’t return my calls.’ I said, ‘No, Warren, what are you talking about? We had a great time, we went to Palm Springs!’” Crowley never asked Wood why she tried to commit suicide. “She was really, really fucked up in the head at this point in her life.”
Speculates Lambert, “Maybe seeing Warren was herself grasping at this last straw. I think that she did have some idea of getting back with him, although she knew that by that time he was involved with Leslie Caron. One evening, after the suicide attempt, we were having dinner at La Scala, and at the end of dinner, she suddenly said, ‘Let’s go see Warren.’ She really cared about him a lot, and I had the feeling again that she thought something might happen, and I knew that the deal was, if after half an hour, nothing was going to happen, I would get up and say, ‘You’ve got an early call tomorrow,’ and if it looked like something was going to happen, I would just leave. We parked in the garage, she got on the house phone, turned to me, and said, ‘He wants us to come up right away.’ So we did, and there was Warren, very cool, very charming, offering us a drink, offering us pot, whatever. He knew the score as well as I did. We talked about nothing in particular, and it was pretty clear after twenty minutes or so that it was not going to go any further. I got up, and said, ‘Natalie, I think you have an early call.’ She got up at once and said, ‘Yes, I do.’ And that was it. We drove home talking about other things, and I very pointedly did not ask her, because I knew if she wanted to say something, she would. I took that to mean that she’d given up any idea that they would ever get back together again. That was the last time I saw them together.”
Still, there was nothing like a little competition to get Beatty’s attention. Even though he and Wood were long over, he remained possessive of the women in his orbit. Wood met Henry Jaglom at a party in July 1965. Jaglom was a would-be actor from a wealthy family in New York who had studied at the Actors Studio. They started to date. He took her to a club, where they ran into Beatty, who watched them leave. When they walked into her house, she looked at the phone and said, “In ten seconds that phone is going to ring, and it’s going to be Warren.” In exactly ten seconds, the phone did ring, and it was Warren.
BY MID-DECADE, Beatty’s once promising career had crumbled. Lilith was his third flop in a row, with a fourth, Mickey One, on the way. His romance with Caron had turned into a nightmare of litigation and bad press, while his relationship with Feldman had foundered on the shoals of What’s New Pussycat?
“It was a very upsetting period, the first year or two years of being famous,” Beatty observed. “Very, very upsetting.” He was sufficiently concerned about his own state of mind to go into psychoanalysis with Vivien Leigh’s doctor, therapist-to-the-stars Martin Grotjahn, a minor celebrity in his own right. Grotjahn treated everyone from Danny Kaye to David Geffen. It was in the waiting room of Grotjahn’s office that Beatty first ran into Robert Towne. Three years Beatty’s senior, Towne was born Robert Schwartz in 1934, and spent his early years in San Pedro, just south of L.A., where his father, Lou, sold ladies’ clothes out of the Towne Smart Shop. Eventually, he moved from shmattas to real estate, changed the family name to Towne, and moved the family up and out to Brentwood. Young Robert grew up to be tall and athletic. But he had a scholarly bent, read voraciously, and could speak intelligently, even eloquently, about movies. He had a Talmudic stoop that came in handy in later years when he cast himself as a screenwriting guru.
Towne did a little acting, but quickly turned to screenwriting, then regarded as beneath contempt, a derelict cousin of playwriting. But with the demise of the studio system, writers began to get some respect, and Towne was actually good at it. “He had this ability to leave a sense of moisture on the page, as if he just breathed on it in some way,” says Jerry Ayres, who was then an executive at Columbia Pictures and who would hire him to write the first of his three great scripts, The Last Detail. “There was always something that jostled your sensibilities, so that reading of the page gave you the feeling that something accidental and true to the life of a human being had happened there.” But Towne liked to hear himself talk and could be numbingly verbose. Says David Geffen, who later produced Personal Best, which Towne would write and direct, “Bob was an extraordinarily boring man. He always talked about himself. He used to go to Catalina to write, and he would describe to you in endless detail watching the cows shit.”
Towne had a script, a western called The Long Ride Home that Roger “King of the Bs” Corman wanted to direct. Beatty read it, thought about playing the lead. Recalls Towne, “He set up a meeting with Roger, which was unusual, because Roger was doing his quickies with five-day production schedules, and Warren had worked with Kazan. He asked to look at an example of Roger’s work. Roger showed him The Tomb of Ligeia that I had written for him. This was not something that endeared Roger, as a director, to Warren. Warren said, ‘Look, I feel like I’m about to get married, and the bride is just beautiful, but then I learn she’s bee
n a hooker.’”
Beatty declined the picture, as he declined most pictures, but he liked Towne, and they became fast friends. Says Ayres, who was one of the few out-of-the-closet gay men in Hollywood at that time, “They were so intimate, they were twisted together like a knot. Traveled everywhere together, were on the phone all the time squabbling, carrying on like [lovers]. I’m not seriously suggesting they were lovers, but there was a sort of intermixing that was intense and as intimate as lovers.”
As time passed, “Towne was like this shadow image of Warren,” says writer Buck Henry. When Beatty grew a beard, Towne grew a beard. When Beatty took up cigars, Towne took up cigars. They sounded alike on the phone, the same whispery delivery, the same emphases, the same rhythms. They sounded so alike that Beatty was fond of calling Towne’s wife, pretending to be her husband. Towne became Beatty’s accomplice in hypochondria. Both men suffered from a variety of allergies, and they constantly compared notes. But most important, Towne would become the star’s house writer, someone he could call at 3:00 A.M. and ask to write a new scene. Towne would do it, and well.
BEATTY RELOCATED to London to be with Caron. Director and Monty Pythonette Terry Gilliam met him there some time later. “He was great,” says Gilliam. “His main problem was that he had to charm every woman that he saw, whether she was fat, ugly, tall, or old. If he got into a lift with a woman, he had to seduce her by the time they reached her floor. He can’t stop himself.”
Beatty was still looking for a project that they could do together. Perhaps influenced by his budding friendship with Cary Grant, he was on the lookout for a romantic comedy. He complained that he had done several “festival” pictures in a row, and was now looking for something popular. He seized on a cotton-candy script by William Peter Blatty, who would become best known as the author of The Exorcist, called The Babysitter, aka Promise Her Anything, in which he plays a bachelor who baby-sits for his neighbor, a single mother (Caron), in order to date her.
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