Caron had not contested Hall’s divorce petition, and Promise Her Anything got underway in the shadow of the court proceedings. On February 2, 1965, Hall was granted a divorce on the grounds of Caron’s adultery with Beatty. The court awarded him custody of both children, and Beatty was ordered to pay the costs of the litigation.
The picture wrapped in May 1965. Meanwhile, Jones and Wright were still flogging Bonnie and Clyde. They had sent it to Penn that January, who turned it down for the second time. He was just about to begin The Chase and felt it was too similar. They took it to United Artists. Wright recalled UA chairman Arthur Krim’s horror when he came across the ménage à trois. He asked, “Am I to assume that Clyde Barrow and this character C.W. are, well, being sexually intimate with Bonnie Parker?” Wright replied, “Oh, yeah, they’re both balling her. And maybe each other! It’s a ménage à trois.” Krim shuddered. Continued Wright, “It was as if I’d spit on the flag.”
At the end of May, Beatty and Caron had lunch with Truffaut in Paris. “I don’t think Warren ever had lunch with anybody without an ulterior motive,” says Benton. But accounts of what that motive was differ. According to Caron, who wanted Truffaut to direct her in an Edith Piaf film, Beatty was campaigning for the lead in Fahrenheit 451, but Truffaut was committed to Oskar Werner—Jules in Jules and Jim—and turned him down. (Beatty says he had no interest in Fahrenheit 451, didn’t even read the script, nor was he looking for a project for the two of them.) In passing, however, Truffaut recommended Bonnie and Clyde as a vehicle for the actor, whom he apparently didn’t like. Subsequently, he expressed himself on this subject in a note to Jones: “He seems to me an extremely unpleasant person. He and Marlon Brando, and several others, are on a little list that I’ve classified in my head as ‘Better not to make films at all than to make films with these people.’” Benton speculated that he suggested Bonnie and Clyde in an effort to get the actor to stop pestering him about Fahrenheit 451. According to Beatty, “Truffaut was utterly bored by me. I think he really did not like me for some reason of principle.” In any event, Beatty flew to New York the next day. “There was this funny thing that happened when I became a financible star in my first movie,” he explains. “I was more prone to letting things be offered to me, taking it easy about going out and doing it myself.” He was determined to be more proactive. He decided to contact Benton and Newman.
One Saturday in the middle of June 1965, Benton’s phone rang. He picked it up, and a voice said, “This is Warren Beatty.” Benton, thinking it was a gag, said, “Who is this, really?” The voice replied, “This is really Warren Beatty.” Beatty said he wanted to read the script. Benton may have been a novice, but he knew he was a mere writer, and no star was about to come to his door. So he said, “I’ll drop it off. What hotel are you in?” But Beatty replied, “No. I’ll pick it up.” Explained Benton, that’s “what makes Warren great.” Still, he thought that meant sooner or later, a couple of days, maybe a week, maybe never. But within twenty minutes, the bell rang. His wife, Sally, opened the door, and there was Beatty, who took the script and left. “My wife was in blue jeans and a shirt and her hair was in curlers,” recalled Benton. “It was two weeks before she’d talk to me again.” About a half hour later the actor called, said, “I want to do it.” But Benton was worried about the ménage à trois, thinking Beatty would never buy it. He said, “Warren, what page are you on?”
“I’m on page 25.”
“Wait till you get to page 40, then call me back.” Beatty called back an hour or so later, and he spoke words Benton had been waiting years to hear: “I’ve finished the script. I understand what you mean, but I still want to do it.”
Beatty returned to L.A., where he had moved into the tenth floor penthouse of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Having uncharacteristically acted on impulse, he started to second-guess himself. Stung by a swarm of question marks, he began to worry he’d made a mistake—the story had been told before on film, the gangster picture was dead, worse, it would be treated like a western, another threadbare genre, or just another killers-in-a-flyover-state gore fest—In Cold Blood was in the pipeline at UA—anything he could think of. Caron, who at the time thought she was going to play Bonnie, urged him on. Still, he worried. Says Towne, “He was walking around saying, ‘Should I do it?’ He asked everybody, including the operators at the Beverly Wilshire.” Towne told him, “Go ahead.”
Beatty was also uncertain about the nature of his relationship to the picture. He was by no means sure he wanted to star in it himself, something he neglected to tell Benton. The historical Clyde was very much a runt, and he imagined Bob Dylan in the role. He thought of his sister for Bonnie, but couldn’t place her with Dylan. It’s also possible that after four years of struggle he recognized that he was not nearly so good an actor as Marlon Brando—nobody was—nor was he going to posthumously profit from a fiery crash, like James Dean. Maybe it was time for him to take out some insurance. He had always been a sponge for information and obsessed by detail. He was finished ceding decisions to people for whom he had little respect. The lesson he took away from the Pussycat debacle was that, like Woody Allen, he must produce.
In a few short years, under the sway of European film and the French auteur theory, everyone would want to become a director. But not quite yet. And after his experiences with Quintero, Frankenheimer, Rossen, and Penn, Beatty was becoming weary of chasing directors. Rossen had produced Lilith, and Beatty heard him when he said, “For me, producing means… control of my material from the beginning to the end.… When I was in control as a producer, I did my best pictures.” In the early 1960s, anyone who knew anything wanted to be a producer, move into the vacuum created by the fall of the studios, still run by an ancien régime of geriatric moguls, out of touch with the changing world around them.
Into the breach rushed powerful independent producers like Sam Spiegel, David Selznick, Sam Goldwyn, and the Mirisches, who usurped the functions that had traditionally belonged to the studios, and could lay claim to being “creative producers” who hired the directors. More often than not they saw the project through from beginning to end. Not only did superstar directors like Kazan and Rossen, as well as enterprising agents like Feldman and Ray Stark, turn to producing, even actors like Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, and John Wayne were taking control of their destinies by setting up their own production companies.
Still, the actors who produced were established stars at the top of their games with decades of successful pictures behind them. “Pretty boys didn’t really produce pictures,” as Beatty himself put it, “certainly not at that age.” (Orson Welles produced that young, but he had a glittering reputation as a wunderkind at the time.) Nor were they hands-on, as Beatty intended to be. They delegated the nitty-gritty details of production—and they were legion—to their producing partners. Beatty’s friends warned him against it: “You’re not actually going to call yourself a producer, are you?”
“No… Yeah, I’m actually going to say, ‘Produced by.’”
“That’s not very smart.”
But Beatty had become comfortable thinking of himself in the role. “Up until the very last minute, I had intended to call in an outsider to actually produce the picture, because… it would be too much work,” Beatty explained. “But I changed my mind.… I found, in other pictures that I have done, some trivial, some not, an awful lot of people were saying to me, ‘What the hell do you think you are? A producer?’” The year before, Beatty announced the formation of his production company, Tatira, named after his parents, Ira and Tat, his mother’s nickname when she was a little girl. But Jones and Wright’s option still had five months to run, so Beatty had to sit tight and watch What’s New Pussycat?, released on June 22, 1965, clean up at the box office, strengthening his resolve to control the pictures he developed.
Meanwhile, UA production head David Picker, who had dissented from Krim’s decision to turn down the Bonnie and Clyde script, came back to Jones, telling her that UA would
finance the picture if she and Wright could bring it in for $800,000. This in turn brought Truffaut back in, who wanted Alexandra Stewart for his Bonnie, and Terence Stamp for Clyde. Jones, like Benton and Newman, was thrilled that Beatty had shown interest, wrote to Truffaut asking if he would contemplate the American instead of Stamp. Truffaut wrote back “that it was out of the question that I would make it with Warren Beatty.” A few weeks later, on August 25, Truffaut dropped out for the second time.
Mickey One landed on screen on September 27, 1965, with a resounding thud. Crowther, reviewing the picture in The New York Times when it played the New York Film Festival, called Beatty “affected and oddly amateurish.” For once he was right.
Meanwhile, Beatty was still chasing Charles Eastman’s Honeybear, as well as several other scripts, including a remake of Renoir’s The Lower Depths, as well as Kaleidoscope, yet another attempt to exploit the runaway success of the James Bond pictures. He also started working with Towne on a script. Ever since Pussycat got away from him, Beatty had an itch to return to the same territory, the story of the compulsive Don Juan. Both men saw William Wycherley’s The Country Wife, a Restoration comedy, at the Chichester Festival Theatre in England. “Warren and I were talking one day about what would be a current adaptation of The Country Wife,” recalled Towne. “It’s a wonderful play about a man called Horner who lets it be known throughout all of social London that his doctor, Doctor Quack, has rendered him a eunuch. Consequently, all husbands trust Horner with their wives, a big mistake. He’s in fine shape. We talked about it, and Warren said, ‘Well, what would be the contemporary equivalent? An actor?’ I said, ‘No, it would be a hairdresser.’ And he said, ‘You’re right.’”
Towne had run into a hairdresser named Gene Shacove, who had a shop called the Razor’s Edge. The writer stopped by one day and couldn’t help noticing that the place was chock-full of stunning women—and one man, Shacove—a hip guy with a blow-dryer who rode a motorcycle. He thought, Wow. This guy has it made. The only rooster in the henhouse. And everyone assumes he’s gay. Beatty had an ax to grind in this respect. “It was that period when we were all very infatuated with Freudian thinking, and analysis caused us to think that a rose is not necessarily a rose and a camel is a horse,” he says, adding, “I wanted to challenge the fashionable assumption that the Don Juan is expressing self-hatred, self-love, hatred of women, excessive love of women, homosexuality, sadism, masochism, a wish for eternal life, and so on.” Beatty never thought about himself as someone who was inordinately interested in sex, obsessed or addicted to it in any way. His attitude was, it was perfectly normal, and society was too puritanical to accept it. And indeed, if you looked like him and were gifted with the talent for seduction that was his, why not? He did it because he could, thank you very much, Dr. Freud!
Beatty hired Towne to write the script for $25,000. The working title was Hair. Later, it would become Shampoo.
ON NOVEMBER 27, 1965, Jones and Wright’s option on Bonnie and Clyde finally lapsed. Beatty pounced, picking up the script for, he says, $7,500. Later, his company, Tatira, paid Benton and Newman a writing fee of $75,000. By this time, Beatty had decided to play Clyde himself, and hire a director. He was not enthusiastic about either Truffaut or Godard. He wisely told the writers that they had already written a European picture, so they needed an American director. His first instinct was to go with one of the giants he admired. He approached George Stevens and William Wyler. Luckily for him, neither was interested. Nor were a half dozen other directors. Beatty asked Penn, who turned down the film yet again. Meanwhile, the actor disabused Caron of her belief that the part was hers, although he says he never considered her for the role: “It’s an outlandish thought that a French woman would play Bonnie.”
With Beatty starring, MacLaine was out. She quipped, “That would be adding incest to injury!” Beatty was unamused by her attempts at humor at his expense. As in, “I’d love to do a kissing scene with him, to see what all the fuss is about.… I keep my daughter as far away from Warren as possible!” The two were estranged for years, whether because he was sensitive to the imputation that he owed his career to her, or because he disliked her husband, Steve Parker, who turned out to be a swindler, or for other reasons. “I only know what I read in the papers about Warren,” she said. “We rarely see each other any more. I’ve tried to reach out to him, but he just doesn’t seem to want to communicate with me.”
Kaleidoscope was James Bond lite, a frothy confection of glamour, romance, with a dollop of derring-do set against the glamorous backdrops of mod London and jet-setting Monte Carlo. It went into production in January 1966, in London. But Bonnie and Clyde was never far from his mind, and when the production ended in March, he was free to focus exclusively on his new picture. On the 14th of that month, he sent the writers a note, imploring them to cut down the script for the purpose of resubmitting it to the studios. “Some of these clowns may forget that they’ve already read it,” he wrote. “Please make yourselves really unhappy. Cut off arms and legs, etc.… Pick an image of some executive that Lillian Ross might have written about and try to make him happy.” He assured them that the trims would be purely strategic, that they could restore them at a later date. Casually quoting “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” he continued, “I want to emphasize also that if you have any thoughts about a new girl that you might have seen, or a new director who’s not well known, as Mr. T. S. Eliot said—it’s time now, please. To be very realistic, the men at the studios are not writing home to their mothers about Godard doing a picture that costs (so) much.… Also, they’re not holding their breaths until they get an unknown girl. This is one reason why I want the script that we submit to them to seem as unladen with problems as possible.”
Around the same time, Beatty attended a royal premiere of Born Free with Caron, where he encountered Julie Christie for the first time. She was up for a Best Actress Oscar for John Schlesinger’s Darling (1965), and had appeared the same year in David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago. In the full bloom of her success, she had become a phenomenon in England, just “Julie,” or “the face,” or “the face that launched a thousand flashbulbs,” the very embodiment of “swinging London.”
Christie’s father managed a tea plantation in Assam, India, where she was born in 1941. At the age of six, her parents shipped her to a convent school in England, where she was raised by an “Auntie Elsie.” She missed her mother, hated the school. A nun once told her, “You are quite ugly enough as it is without making faces,” and she was expelled for telling a dirty joke.
The movie world is no stranger to female beauty, God knows, but Christie was something special. Recalls Schlesinger’s partner, Michael Childers, “When Julie walked in a room, she was dazzling.” She was famous for her ripe lower lip, killer jawline, electric blue eyes, and chiseled features, later framed by a mess of blond ringlets. Waxing lyrical, Pauline Kael would write about her in McCabe & Mrs. Miller that “One wanted to see [her] on the screen not for her performances but because she was so great-looking that she was compelling on her own, as an original.” Like Beatty, she became famous so fast that she became acutely aware of her slender training as an actor, which exacerbated her insecurities. She confessed to Oriana Fallaci, “I hate myself. I’m so afraid. Afraid of not being liked by other people, of being rebuffed.… I’m afraid of being a failure, madly afraid.” She was honeycombed with anxiety. “I was always deeply anxious,” she said. “I never felt that I was cool enough, or that I was dressed right. Silly things. I was fearful.” Beatty observed, “Julie was the most beautiful and at the same time the most nervous person I had ever met. She was deeply and authentically left-wing, and making this fuss over royalty did not amuse her. She could not contain her antipathy for this type of ceremony.”
The actor liked Christie for Bonnie and took her to lunch, but eventually decided that being English, she wouldn’t work. The next month, back in L.A. on April 18, 1966, Beatty co-presented an Oscar for production design
. Wearing a shocking mini-skirt, Christie won Best Actress for Darling. He ran into her again, months later, at Pinewood Studios, where she was shooting Fahrenheit 451, and he was having lunch with Charlie Chaplin. (Chaplin was directing Countess from Hong Kong with Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren.) It was in with the new, out with the old. Caron must have seen the handwriting on the wall. “Warren has an interesting psychology. He always falls in love with girls who have won or been nominated for an Academy Award,” she said. He “had a subtle way of getting to know people. Like a detective, he would discover all about them.”
Beatty set up a meeting with Godard, if only to appease Benton and Newman, in whose hearts the Nouvelle Vague bad boy still dwelled. Godard flew in to Heathrow, but the two never met, or at least that’s what Beatty says. He recalls that he had the flu, 103 fever, and stood up the French filmmaker, later claiming that he hadn’t realized Godard had come to London specifically to see him.
AROUND THE same time, Beatty saw Promise Her Anything, hated it, and if it hadn’t quite penetrated before, he now realized his career had hit a brick wall. He’d made another entry into his oeuvre of stinkers, and he was in desperate need of a critical or commercial hit, hopefully both. He wasn’t yet “Warren Beatty,” or if he had been, for a brief moment at the beginning of the decade, he was no longer.
The actor redoubled his efforts to find a director, cast his picture, and set it up with a studio. Once again he approached Penn. He told Benton and Newman, “I don’t know if Arthur is going to want to work with me again, but I’m going to lock myself in a room with him and not let him out until he says yes.” The writers, still in love with the idea of Penn, agreed. They were even impressed by Mickey One, admired the fact that Penn had tried to do a “European-American film.” They didn’t much care that it was a mannered mess. Says Benton, “There were a lot of European movies that were messes—Truffaut made any number of messes, we’ve all made messes we don’t want to be judged by. While Mickey One may or may not have worked, it’s what was underneath it that was vital, a sensibility. We wanted somebody who spoke a kind of language. And I really believe that Arthur did. And that Warren did.”
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