Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

  On Bonnie and Clyde, she not only snipped and trimmed, she prelapped the sound, that is, began the sound before the cut, which had the effect of shoving the audience into the next scene. She nearly dispensed with leisurely dissolves, the traditional way of getting from scene to scene, instead favoring direct cuts, which also served to speed up the pace and jolt the audience. She continues, “That made it jumpier, more the style of this ragamuffin group of bank robbers.” Some of the cuts consist of no more than a few frames. There are over sixty cuts in the scene in which the gang is surprised by the cops in their garage apartment. The staccato pace mimics the machine-gun style of the Barrows themselves. Sarris called it “shock cutting”—“wild contrasts from one shot to the next, which give the film a jagged, menacing quality.”

  Meanwhile, Allen recalls, “There was a lot of tension between Warren and Arthur at that time, and very often I was in the middle. Warren was sitting on the steps with his head in his hands. It got so bad I burst into tears to stop them.” When he wasn’t arguing with Penn, she continues, “Warren was sitting on the couch making phone calls. He had all these numbers in his head.” He was seeing Juliet Prowse, as well as Maya Plisetskaya, among others. His relationship with Leslie Caron gradually petered out. She blames his preoccupation with the picture, which took him to Texas, and then to New York, while she was in England. Caron was bitter, and made no bones about it. She was quoted in the press saying, “The way he discarded me after I got him to buy Bonnie and Clyde was rather ruthless.… Anyone who has come close to Warren has shed quite a few feathers. He tends to maul you.”

  Like Joan Collins, she found his attentions to be a mixed blessing. “Warren was wonderful, but the difficulties of living with him were too great for my constitution. He lived a professional life 24 hours a day, and everything had to fit in with his public image.” She had found him egotistical and narcissistic: one morning he called at 5:00 A.M., waking her. According to her he said, “You’re sleeping! You’re not thinking about me!” If he was teasing, the humor was lost on her. Worse was the cheating. She said, “He could not pass a girl without trying to seduce her. His role model was Casanova really; he wanted to be admired by the whole world.” She told a reporter, “I will not tolerate unfaithfulness. That’s why I left Warren. He was unfaithful. So it was over.”

  Beatty had by no means forgotten Julie Christie, who was just finishing Far from the Madding Crowd, which wrapped in mid-February 1967, for Schlesinger. When she was offered Petulia by Richard Lester, she took it, even though she had sworn not to bite into the Hollywood apple. She told herself that Lester, an American who spent the Vietnam War years in England, where he did hip films like The Knack, as well as A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, both with the Beatles, was hardly Hollywood, which was true.

  Earlier in the summer, the Summer of Love, appropriately enough, she flew to San Francisco, rented a place in Sausalito, and started work. Beatty knew that Lester had hired Dean Tavoularis as his production designer, and used him as a go-between with Christie, who was engaged to marry a British artist named Don Bessant. She had just purchased a flat on Selwood Terrace in London, where the two planned to set up housekeeping. She took her commitment to Bessant seriously and met Beatty’s advances without enthusiasm. The more he flattered her, the more she withdrew. His reputation as a womanizer didn’t help. Recalls Beatty, “A Hollywood movie star was silly to her.” She explained, “I was always attracted to people who appeared to think you were dross, people who I felt thought I was really stupid and frivolous, and who really didn’t give a toss what I looked like.” She refused to be his date for the premiere of Camelot that fall, the third week of October 1967, refused to see him at all.

  But Beatty finally persuaded her to let him visit her. “I got to San Francisco and tried to rent a car, but I realized that my driver’s license was expired, and they wouldn’t let me,” he recalls. “I hired a limo. This was at the height of the ’60s. I showed up in Sausalito at this hovel she was living in—the idea that she was in Sausalito was socialist enough—and I didn’t realize the buzz saw I was driving into. She was appalled. She gave me a hard time about everything.” When he would acquire one of the first car phones in Los Angeles sometime later, she made fun of him for using it.

  The two were very different. She, as Goldie Hawn once remarked, would have been more comfortable milking a cow than making small talk at a Hollywood party, while he, Christie assumed, was one of those Hollywood playboys like his pal Bob Evans, with the fake bronze tan, shirt unbuttoned to the waist, and gold chain around his neck. He took her to dinner in Sausalito and disarmed her with his intelligence and charm.

  Meanwhile, back in the cutting rooms, Dede Allen was fielding worried calls from Rudy Fehr, who was the studio’s head of editing. On one occasion, she recalls, he complained about the love scene. He said, “‘Miz Allen, you can’t have that scene’—it was where she goes down on him—he was shocked and horrified.

  “‘You’ll have to speak to Mr. Beatty about that.’

  “‘You just have to put your foot down. You know we can’t have a scene like that in a Warner Brothers movie.’ And of course we had a scene like that in a Warner Brothers movie.”

  In June, with the editing nearly done, Beatty, accompanied by Penn, showed a cut of the entire film to Warner in the screening room in the mogul’s palatial home. Warner wouldn’t sit in a warm seat, so if the room were used before he used it, his chair was off limits. He was famous for his reviewer’s bladder. “I’ll tell ya something right now,” he said, turning to Penn. “If I have to go pee, the picture stinks.” The movie was about two hours, ten minutes. They still had to take about fifteen minutes out of it. Finally the lights went down, the film started, and five or six minutes in, Warner excused himself. He returned to his seat for another reel, and then he relieved himself again. And again. Finally the lights came up. There was a dead silence. “What the fuck is this?” asked Warner. Silence. “How long was that picture?” Son-in-law Bill Orr, sitting with him, said, “Chief, it was two hours and ten minutes.” Replied Warner, “That’s the longest two hours and ten minutes I ever spent. It’s a three-piss picture!” Beatty and Penn didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Beatty struggled for something to say. Finally, speaking with painful deliberation, his sentences swallowed by the ominous silence that filled the room, he said, “You know what, Jack? This is really kind of an homage to the Warner’s gangster films of the ’30s, you know?” Warner replied, “What the fuck’s an homage?”

  Beatty showed the film for Father Sullivan of the Catholic Legion of Decency, who swore Dunaway didn’t have any panties on in the opening scene where she charges down the stairs. Recalled Beatty, “Faye was wearing a sheer blouse and no bra. Father Sullivan kept saying, ‘Run it again, that’s her breast, that’s a nipple.’

  “‘No, no, no. That’s a button.’

  “‘No, no, no, run it again.’” Bonnie and Clyde was locked later that month. By that time there was so much animus against the picture at the studio that the few old hands who were impressed were hesitant to say so. Allen had been spreading the word that the head of trailers was enthusiastic. He came to her, terrified, and whispered, “Don’t tell anybody I liked it, or I’m gonna get fired.” Dick Lederer knew they were going to bury it. It wasn’t even on the release schedule. The head of distribution was a man named Morey “Razz” Goldstein. Without having seen the picture, he decided to release it on September 22 at a drive-in in Denton, Texas. “September, in those days, was the worst time of the year to send out a picture,” says Lederer. “It was just throwing it away.” One day in New York, Lederer got a call from a fan of the movie at the studio who said, “I just saw a rough cut of Bonnie and Clyde; it’s dynamite, a special movie.” Encouraged, Lederer went to Benny Kalmenson, said, “Benny, listen. Don’t lock in Bonnie and Clyde just yet. Let’s take a look at it before we make our decision. There’s a rough cut available. Warren will scream, but I can get it sneaked in overnight.” K
almenson, a former steelworker, ran Warner’s New York office. He was a squat, heavyset man who dressed and behaved like one of James Cagney’s bad guys, from Public Enemy or White Heat. “He was always saying, fuckin’ Warner this, fuckin’ Warner that—every other word was fuck, fuck, fuck,” recalls Lederer. As Beatty observed, his “language made Jack Warner sound like Mother Teresa.” In this case he replied, “Fuck it, if you want to do that, fucking do it.”

  The next afternoon, Lederer screened the picture for himself and his staff. He was bowled over, but it made no difference. He went over to Goldstein’s office, found the four division managers in a meeting. Goldstein said, “Dick, we’ve seen the movie, and we’re sticking with our original schedule. But I tell you what we’d like to do, one of those great country premieres in Denton. You get the old cars and raise hell, and you bring Warren, and Arthur and Faye, and we’ll have a great time.” Lederer was furious. He turned to the division managers and said, “Listen. No problem getting the old cars, but that’s about all I can get. The only place Warren is gonna go when he hears what you’re doing is into this office with a knife, to cut off your balls, one by one.” He walked out. Lederer was right; Beatty wasn’t happy. He fought for better play dates. Goldstein was unmoved, said, “You guys are all crazy with this movie, give up on it already.”

  The August 1967 issue of Esquire contained more bad news. Rex Reed, who was building a formidable reputation with his snarky interviews and razor-sharp celebrity profiles, published a bitchy piece called, “Will the Real Warren Beatty Please Shut Up.” In it, Reed quipped, “Interviewing Warren is like asking a hemophiliac for a pint of blood,” which was true enough, if a writer was lucky enough to catch him in a hemorrhagic mood. But Reed also wrote that he was “the most enfant of the enfants terribles,” and worse.

  Beatty was humiliated and depressed by Reed’s piece, which served to exacerbate his already active distrust of the press. He screened the picture at the old Directors Guild building in July. He invited the giants of Hollywood, the men he had cultivated—Feldman, Spiegel, Renoir, Stevens, Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, Sam Goldwyn, Bill Goetz, and so on. His friends advised him against it; Bonnie and Clyde was hardly a film geared to a geriatric demographic. He was sticking out his neck, asking to have his head chopped off. Beatty was barely able to watch the film, acutely conscious of the mistakes, of how it must look through all those pairs of seventy-year-old eyes. His mind wandered. Seated in the back, he got up, sat down, got up again. As the “Jack Kennedy” scene ended, and the tail credits rolled, a deathly silence settled over the theater. Then the audience exploded. Through the din, he overheard somebody near him say, “Well, Warren Beatty just shoved it up our ass.”

  Beatty was buoyed by the screening. “People who I really wanted to impress, Wyler and Stevens, and Renoir and Zinnemann, were really impressed,” he recalls. He was receptive when Joe Hyams suggested that the Montreal Film Festival was the appropriate place for the premiere. “I remembered they had a picture called Mickey One, a piece of shit, and the only place in the world it succeeded was in Canada,” Hyams recalls. “I said, ‘That picture made it in Canada! This picture can make it in Canada!’” Bonnie and Clyde premiered worldwide at the opening night of the Montreal International Film Festival at Expo ’67, on Friday, August 4.

  “What a reaction. It was incredible,” recalls Lederer. “There were fourteen curtain calls for the stars, there was a standing ovation. After it was all over, Warren was on the bed in his suite with a girl on either side, dressed, but cuddling up to him. There was this nice young French girl who was the macher of the film festival. Warren said to this girl, ‘Listen, honey, where is the wildest spot in Montreal? I want to go there tonight.’ She said, ‘Mr. Beatty, this is the wildest spot in Montreal!’”

  Beatty’s bad luck was that Bosley Crowther was in the audience. “I knew Crowther,” Penn recalls. “He disliked Mickey One intensely, and I took him to task for it when we were on a panel together at Lincoln Center. One time during the festival, he gave me this terrible look, just, ‘I’m going to get you.’ And he did.”

  Bonnie and Clyde opened in New York on Sunday, August 13, at the Murray Hill and the Forum, when flower children were still celebrating the Summer of Love and blacks were burn-baby-burning the inner cities of Detroit and Newark. Crowther’s review, better described as a mugging, was even worse than anyone expected. In words that he would probably wish he had never written, he called it “a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cut-ups in Thoroughly Modern Millie.”

  Those were the days before movies opened in four thousand theaters and lived or died by the first weekend. They dipped their toes in the New York and L.A. waters and only gradually waded further out into the treacherous depths of the hinterlands. Pictures could be damaged if not killed by a bad review from Crowther. Lately he had been on a tear against violence in movies, attacking brutal films like Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen and John Boorman’s Point Blank. But Crowther saved his best for Bonnie and Clyde, savaging it on two successive weekends in the Sunday Entertainment section. “I was scared to death of his power and the fact that his review made me look bad,” says Lederer. “It really hurt me.”

  Benton and Newman had rented a house in Bridgehampton for their families for the summer. Benton told his wife, Sally, “Look, it’s just another movie. It’s been a big part of our lives, but you can’t expect anything.” Then he read Crowther’s attack, thought, “It’s not even going to last two weeks.” But the Times began to receive letters from people who had seen the film and liked it. Recalled Penn, “Then Crowther wrote another attack, a Sunday piece, and more letters poured in, and Crowther responded again, and the more he frothed, the more he created support for the film.” (Eventually, Crowther frothed himself out of a job.)

  Bonnie and Clyde became a tipping point, to use Malcolm Gladwell’s phrase, marking a shift in mass culture of tectonic proportions, away from the proper, morally and aesthetically conservative official culture of the Eisenhower era toward the anything-goes, let-it-all-hang-out counterculture of the 1960s, with its massive antiwar demonstrations and fighting in the streets. After Bonnie and Clyde, nothing would be the same. Says Beatty, “Everything was different in another year. It was the death knell of the studio system, and the rise of anarchy in the troops. I don’t think they realized at Warner Brothers how much the movie business was going to change.”

  What’s more, Bonnie and Clyde became the occasion for the emergence of Pauline Kael from the obscurity of San Francisco art house buffery into the glare of the New York media, where she flourished. She unleashed a lengthy review in The New Yorker, dated October 21, in which she not only praised the picture to the sky, but jeered at its detractors, accusing them of stupidity, Philistinism, and worse. She wrote that “Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American movie since The Manchurian Candidate. The audience is alive to it.” Kael’s review amounted to a nine-thousand-word gloss on a line by Bob Dylan, who put it a bit more succinctly: “something is happening here, But you don’t know what it is, Do you, Mister Jones?” Says Towne, “Without her, Bonnie and Clyde would have died the death of a fuckin’ dog.”

  But Kael’s readiness to pick up the flag and lead the charge on behalf of beleaguered filmmakers, to inject herself into the cultural fray and become a player herself, led her to disregard the cardinal rule of reviewing: Thou Shall Not Consort With Thy Subjects. In her own version of the joke wherein the actress, too dumb to know the pecking order on the set, has sex with the writer (instead of the director or the star), she took Benton and Newman to lunch, during which they were only too happy to unburden themselves of their intentions to a sympathetic ear. “Her review was the best thing that ever happened to Benton and myself,” recalls Newman. “She put us on the map. This was a genre gangster film in its broad outline, not a highly respected genre. What she did was say
to people, ‘You can look at this seriously, it doesn’t have to be an Antonioni film about alienated people walking on a beach in black and white for it to be a work of art.’” Snubbed, Penn groused that she regurgitated their remarks in the guise of her own insights. Likewise, she dismissed Beatty with faint praise. The actor called Kael, both chided and charmed her. When she finally met him sometime later at a screening of a documentary on Penn, she says, “He came on very strong to my daughter, who was then a teenager.”

  Kael’s review may have made an impact on the New York intelligentsia, but it had no effect on the studio. When Kalmenson finally saw the picture, he rendered his own verdict in characteristically blunt language: “It’s a piece of fucking shit!” Beatty was desperate. He followed Kalmenson into his office, and said, “Let me pay you for this negative.” Kalmenson was incredulous. No one spent their own money on a movie, especially one that looked like it was going into the toilet. Rolling his eyes and regarding Beatty as if he were an alien life-form, he replied, “Ah, get the fuck outta here, Warren, where the fuck are you gonna get two fuckin’ million dollars?” Beatty had no idea where he could get $2 million, but retorted, “I can get it, don’t worry.” Later, he thought, They’re beginning to take me seriously. They know they can get out of it if they want to. He redoubled his efforts, virtually camping out in Lederer’s office. Lederer referred to him as the “mosquito,” because he was always buzzing around.

  Bonnie and Clyde did no better than fair business in New York. Lederer went to Kalmenson, again, implored him to pull the rest of the September dates and delay the roll-out to give word of mouth time to build. “I really think this man was beginning to have an inkling that the business was passing him by,” he recalls. “This was a watershed movie for him, ’cause he knew he blew it. But he was stubborn, a man of iron will. I thought he’d kill me. He cursed me—‘I don’t want to hear any more about this fuckin’ Bonnie and Clyde, I’m not taking anything out of release, I’ve got eighteen pictures to put out, it’s gonna stay where it is, goddamn it!’ And it did.”