Beatty knew Penn was in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, sulking. “I thought I had come to the end of it,” Penn says. “My confidence was shattered. I didn’t know what direction to go, back to films or try the stage again. It was either put up or shut up, become a filmmaker or not.” His Broadway pedigree and formidable intellect had afforded him poor protection against the kinds of humiliations routinely heaped on directors in those days. He had developed The Train in 1964, only to have it taken away from him by Burt Lancaster, whom he had persuaded to join the cast. Then there was the embarrassment of Mickey One, compounded by The Chase (1966), a Sam Spiegel production featuring Brando, Robert Redford, and Jane Fonda. While Penn was prepping a new play, Wait Until Dark, in New York, Spiegel cut the film behind his back. It was his first encounter with a producer, which he likened to the birth trauma.
Penn refused Beatty’s offer. He told him, “I don’t want to do any more movies.” He was emotionally drained, bitter and demoralized. He thought, “I don’t want to deal with those people again. I don’t like that life out there. I just don’t like it.” Beatty called again. Again Penn said, “Warren, I just don’t think so.” But Beatty persisted. Penn gave a little ground: “Let me read it again,” he said. But he was still not impressed. He gave the script to some friends, who told him, “Don’t touch it, it’s terrible.” But the actor kept at it. “He punched every button that he knew, and he knew a lot of them,” Penn recalls. “We’d been pretty close.” Beatty flattered him, wheedled and needled. He continues, “Then he hit me with the personal stuff, said something like, ‘You’re hiding out up there, you’re licking your wounds, that’s not what you do. C’mon get off your ass and let’s do it.’ Warren is very persuasive.”
According to Towne, “Penn was a court of last resort. Warren considered Mickey One highly affected and pretentious, but he thought quite rightly that Arthur was an immensely talented and intelligent man.” Dick Sylbert claimed that Beatty found Penn useful because “Arthur was obviously very malleable,” and the star could have his way with him. “Warren’s just smart about movies, and he knew what he wanted from Arthur,” he says. “He wanted somebody from the East, somebody who understood actors. After all, Arthur was the teacher at the Actors Studio.”
Beatty would not be denied, and in June 1966, he invited Penn to lunch at Dinty Moore’s with their common agent, Abe Lastfogel of William Morris. Penn was no match for the combined persuasive powers of the two men. But he remembered the endless arguments between himself and Beatty on the set of Mickey One, and negotiated an MO for Bonnie and Clyde. He recalls, “We made an agreement to tell each other very frankly what we thought of each other, violently if necessary. We also agreed that, in the case of total disagreement, it would be he who would give way and do what I wanted.” For his part, Beatty told Penn, “Look, we’re going to disagree every day. There are certain things about each other which we think are really phony, and we’re going to deal with it every day until we make a good film.” Penn finally agreed to direct it. Says Penn, “Beatty and I both had a sense that we were better than we had showed.
“Once I said, ‘Okay,’ I got enthusiastic,” Penn continues. “Warren and I were not content with the script.” Beatty asked him to do the next pass. The two writers drove up to Stockbridge to work on the script with Penn through May and June. Even though their story was set in the 1930s, Benton and Newman had written a script about the 1960s. As Newman explains it, “Being an outlaw was a great thing to want to be, whether it was Clyde Barrow or Abbie Hoffman. All the stuff we wrote had to do with epaté le bourgeois, shaking society up, saying to all the squares, ‘We don’t do that, man, we do our thing.’ The thing we loved about Bonnie and Clyde wasn’t that they were bank robbers, because they were lousy bank robbers. The thing about them that made them so appealing and relevant, and so threatening to society, was that they were aesthetic revolutionaries. In our view, what kills Bonnie and Clyde is not that they broke the law, because nobody liked the fucking banks—but that they put a tattoo on C. W. Moss. His father says, ‘I can’t believe that you let these people put pictures on your skin.’ This is what the ’60s turned out to be about. Arthur wanted to make sure that it was also about the ’30s.”
Penn told Benton and Newman that their notion of Bonnie and Clyde as radicals of style was “part of it, but only part. I’m telling you guys, I’m older than you are, you don’t know what it was like during the Depression, and I do, and I want to get that in here. There’s no social context.” He was drawn to the Dust Bowl setting. “Instead of just a couple of gun-crazy kids, these two were going to rectify the [lopsided distribution of wealth by] robbing banks, which was where the money was. That was not in the film, and it belonged there.” To him, it became less a tale about tattoos than one about foreclosures, with the thieving couple administering harsh populist justice.
They had written a scene where Bonnie and Clyde holed up in an abandoned house, and Clyde teaches himself how to shoot by blowing out the windows. Penn suggested that the old sharecropper who owned the shack return, with his family packed into an Okie truck, a nod to The Grapes of Wrath. The sharecropper says, “This was my house, the bank foreclosed on it.” Newman explains, “Arthur suggested the whole notion that these were people who perceived the bank as their enemy. The idea was to hook up with what was happening to America in the Dust Bowl.” Paradoxically, Penn also stressed the opposite, the timeless, folkloric dimension of the outlaw couple, as Newman puts it, “the myth of Bonnie and Clyde as two magic people whose reverberations, even in their own lifetime, touched deeply the secret fantasies of average Americans.”
In the second week of June 1966, Beatty went over to Natalie Wood’s home on North Bentley to persuade her to play the female lead in the new film. Penn vetoed her because, like Kazan, he didn’t want a star. Alternatively, she declined. Wrote Lana Wood, “Two months in Texas meant dealing with Warren, too, and Natalie wasn’t up to that, either, especially without her psychiatrist.” Adds Michael Childers, “She had a lot of resentment towards Warren. He was a no-can-go-there subject with her.” That same month, Beatty met Maya Plisetskaya, the Bolshoi Ballet’s prima ballerina, at a reception at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Plisetskaya was married, and five years older than the American actor, who was then twenty-nine. He was smitten. She had the classic dancer’s body, petite, with small breasts, and good bone structure. She dressed simply in plain blouses and slacks, and had no use for makeup or jewelry. Beatty told Sylbert that it was the most wonderful relationship he ever had: “She never understood a thing I said, I never understood a thing she said. We never talked.”
Beatty and Plisetskaya occasionally double-dated with Jaglom and Wood. Wood, whose parents were Russian, translated. Beatty would ask her, “Tell her how you say, ‘I love you more than life itself.’” On one occasion, the two couples drove together to a party Jack Warner was throwing for the Bolshoi. Beatty was giving her soulful looks, and saying things like, “You’re exquisitely beautiful, you have lovely breasts,” etc. She replied in kind: “You’re fantastic, so handsome, so hot,” and so on. He explained to her in detail his theories about how and why small breasts are sexy. Talk was always important to Beatty, a key element in his flirtations, seductions, whatever, and as they approached the Warner mansion on Angelo Drive, he diverted Wood into winding side roads and circuitous detours so that the talk could continue. Jaglom found all this peculiar. After all, she was Beatty’s former lover. Finally he asked Wood, “How long are you going to do this?” She replied, “As long as it lasts. It’s like phone sex without the phone.”
FOR BENTON and Newman, the trip to Hollywood was like following the Yellow Brick Road to Oz. They went west in July 1966 for ten days to continue working on the script. Beatty took them up to his penthouse in the Beverly Wilshire, aptly called La Escondida (the Hideaway). It was a small suite, consisting of two rooms furnished with a piano surrounded by a disorder of books, scripts, records, half-eaten sandwiches, and a slew of room
service trays piled against the door or buried amid a litter of phone messages, unopened envelopes, and balled-up typing paper. Outside, there was a wraparound terrace covered with Astroturf on which he lay reading, getting his Bob Evans reflector tan, or taking in the sweeping, 360-degree panoramic view of Los Angeles from the airport to the southwest, to the hills above Sunset Boulevard. He no longer went to a gym because he didn’t want to be bothered by fans, so he did his sit-ups on the patio, and always had a pair of dumbbells handy for the occasional muscle flexing. Having sex with Beatty was like a rite of passage for aspiring starlets who filed through the penthouse. Recalls screenwriter Peter Feibleman, who came to know him well, “Warren was the very definition of a stud. He just held still, and they all passed through his door. He wouldn’t let the hotel operators screen his calls. Anybody who called him got him. It didn’t mean he would talk to them, but they could get him.”
Beatty used to hang out at MFK, the drugstore in the hotel. One time, Richard Harris stepped into the elevator behind him. Harris was drunk, not an uncommon occurrence, and belligerent. He muttered, “You bastard,” trying to get Beatty to turn around. Finally Beatty did, abruptly kissing him on the mouth, surprising Harris and defusing what could have become an ugly scene.
John Schlesinger and Michael Childers had taken a suite on the floor below. “I’d watch the Warren Beatty show, the revolving doors, all the girlfriends going up one elevator, and coming down in another elevator at the end of the hall,” Childers recalls. “He didn’t have much of an education, and he had an insatiable desire for knowledge. He was always reading and reading and reading. Stacks of books on the table. He sought out people who knew a lot—it didn’t matter what field they were in—and surrounded himself with them. And he loved gossip. From L.A., he’d call twenty people up in New York just to get the daily dope.” According to Sylbert, he was always on the lookout for spats, separations, and divorces, “because he was great with wounded birds.” Sylbert adds, “He had nothing in his life in those days but pussy and movies, and since the movies were six years apart, there was a lot of pussy. And politics, which is the same thing to him, pussy in pants. It’s power.”
Beatty chauffeured Benton and Newman around town in his Thunderbird or his black Lincoln Continental convertible with red leather upholstery, two of four new cars furnished him by the Ford Motor Company every year. Every time he stopped at a light, he’d flirt with the female drivers in the adjacent lane.
Penn lobbied with the writers to get rid of the ménage à trois. “It just struck me as being way out of left field,” he says. “I was older than Benton and Newman, and I knew more firsthand than they did about these gangsters. I remembered Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd as simple, redneck guys, bumpkins more than anything else. The FBI escalated them into these great big terrible figures, but they were small-town hoods. The idea of a ménage à trois, in a situation like this, just seemed to me to be so sophisticated and so out of where the energy was that I said, I don’t think so, and when it came time for the casting, I steered them away from a hunk, which was what he was originally.”
According to Newman, Beatty didn’t go for it either. He said, “Let me tell you one thing right now: I ain’t gonna play no fag.” He thought the audience wouldn’t accept it. “They’re going to piss all over my leg,” he said, using one of his favorite locutions, meaning that he would lose their sympathy, such as it was, jeopardizing the picture’s chances at the box office.
Beatty, on the other hand, says he had no problem with it. “Newman was skeptical that this was a decision that Arthur had made on his own. But it was totally [untrue] that I wanted to play a more conventional character. I was very enthusiastic about going against convention, and when Arthur made this suggestion, I was slightly disappointed, but I also thought that if Clyde had been gay, then that would have been the subject of the story. That takes up a lot of space. Arthur’s point of view, and it certainly was mine, is that the picture was more socioeconomic than it was sexual. I thought the picture was totally about the Depression, the 1930s.”
Benton and Newman still didn’t get it. Truffaut never blinked at the ménage à trois, and if it was good enough for him, why wasn’t it good enough for Beatty and Penn? It was nonnegotiable. But in a long story meeting, Penn managed to awaken them from their francophile trance. Towne, who was kibitzing from the sidelines, agreed that the ménage à trois had to go. “None of us felt we had to avoid a taboo,” he says. “We just felt we couldn’t dramatically resolve relationships that complex, and still rob banks and kill people. You just run out of time. You look at Jules and Jim, and it takes a whole movie to go from Tinker to Evers to Chance. Without the action and the violence.” The writers gave in. Says Newman, “We were so excited that somebody wanted to make this movie, that I’m sure we would’ve done it in blackface if Warren had suggested it.”
With the ménage à trois on the writing room floor, they all thought, There’s a piece missing from the puzzle. And, Newman, continues, “with us being good Freudians, we came up with Clyde’s impotence.” Impotence was fine with Beatty, so long as Clyde overcame it in time for the end credits.
There remained the small matter of securing financing. Even with the ménage à trois pared down to a ménage à deux, the studios’ reflex reaction, in Towne’s words, was that “the characters are not sympathetic, its violence is gratuitous.” Many of them looked askance at Beatty the producer. As Time magazine sized up the situation, he was “an on-again, off-again actor who moonlighted as a global escort.”
Nevertheless, he and Penn flew to Texas in August to scout locations. They found most of what they needed in the scattering of small towns that pocked the flat, desolate land around Dallas, most of which had remained unchanged since the 1930s. It was so dry and the people so spare and sparse, it seemed as if any errant gust of wind might blow them away, like tumbleweed.
UA made a bid, but it wasn’t high enough, and Beatty found himself back at Warners, which, by 1966, resembled a wax museum more than a bustling studio. “The lot seemed to me to be abandoned by then,” says Penn. “It was like a ghost town.” Jack Warner was on the verge of selling his studio to Seven Arts. He was anxious to retire. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he gradually liquidated the company. He sold off the pre-1948 library to Associated Artists Productions in 1956, and got rid of the real estate holdings. “If they hadn’t done that, if they’d had to rely on the films that were being made during that period, they would not have survived,” says Dick Lederer, then head of advertising and publicity. “He was in business to maintain an incredible lifestyle, like the Shah of Iran.”
With a surprisingly sure hand, Beatty shepherded Penn, along with Benton and Newman through Warner’s executive suites. “Warren said, ‘He’s going to say this, I’ll say that, then he’s gonna say this, then Arthur will say that,’” recalls Newman. “It was like The Twilight Zone. We went in, and it went exactly the way Warren said it would go.” Except that Beatty couldn’t get a deal.
Warner had never forgiven Beatty for turning down PT 109 and backing out of Youngblood Hawke at the eleventh hour. “He always hated me,” Beatty recalls. “He said he was afraid to have a meeting with me alone because he thought that I would resort to some sort of physical violence.” Warner always made sure his desk was between him and the star. Adds Joe Hyams, who worked for Lederer at that time, “I used to think so too, that Warren was gonna hit him. ‘Make sure I’m not in the room. I don’t want any part of it.’ Warren used to lay for him, but Warner wouldn’t let him in the office.”
Beatty, who had been known to make theatrical gestures in the past, prostrate himself on the floor when he thought it would get him what he wanted, finally managed to trap Warner in his office. All he needed were a few crumbs from Warner’s table. He fell on the rug, grabbed him around the knees, and pleaded for his movie. “Colonel!”—everyone called him “Colonel” or “Chief”—“I’ll kiss your shoes here, I’ll lick them.”
“Yeah, yeah, get up, Warren.”
“I’ve got Arthur Penn, a great script, I can make this movie for one six; if nothing else, it’s a great gangster movie.”
“Get up, get up!”
Warner was embarrassed. He barked, “What the fuck you doin’? Get OFF THE FUCKIN’ FLOOR!”
“Not until you agree to make this movie.”
“The answer is NO!” Warner paused, caught his breath. With a $1.6 million budget, Bonnie and Clyde was inconsequential, no more than a flea on the back of his pet project, Camelot. Why not indulge the meshuggah guy. He gave in.
Beatty now insists that none of this ever happened, but Hyams swears he witnessed it with his own eyes (Lederer says it was the feet of Jack Warner aide Benny Kalmenson that he kissed), and in 1971, when asked if it was true, Beatty said, “Probably. Possibly. I used to do all sorts of crazy things with Jack. He thought I was a little crazy. Well, I am a little crazy.”
Beatty and his lawyer, Jack Schwartzman, worked out the terms with production head Walter MacEwen. MacEwen’s hands were red and crusted from psoriasis, eczema, or shingles, nobody quite knew which, and he wore white cotton editing gloves to conceal them. He was an old-school, courtly man, the good cop to Jack Warner’s bad cop, but he refused to meet Beatty’s price. Beatty said, “Look, just give me $200,000, and I’ll take a percentage of the gross.”
“How much?”
“Well, 40 percent.”
“Fine.” MacEwen agreed, and by the end of August, they had a deal. The budget was set at a meager $1.8 million. Although Beatty’s bite of the back end would become an embarrassment for the studio, Warners didn’t expect there would be much, if any, back end to bite. Modestly budgeted pictures like Bonnie and Clyde were breaking even at about two times their cost, and according to the terms, the star wouldn’t see any money until the movie made almost three times the negative cost, leaving a small cushion of profit for the studio.
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