Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

  Despite his activism on behalf of Democratic Party issues, Beatty managed to maintain friendships with many prominent Republicans whose views he abhorred. Politics was never personal with Beatty. A decade later, Beatty had occasion to meet General Douglas MacArthur’s wife. He recalls, “One night I got a message at my hotel, ‘Mrs. Douglas MacArthur would like to have dinner with you.’ I thought it was some friend of mine making a sick joke. I called the number, and it was John Kluge, who I didn’t know. I said ‘Mr. Kluge, this is Warren Beatty. Did you call me?’ And he said, ‘As a matter of fact, I did. I’m having a little birthday celebration for Mrs. MacArthur and she would like you to come.’

  “‘Mrs. Douglas MacArthur?’

  “‘Yes, she’s a wonderful woman.’

  “I came to the dinner. Sinatra was there, and various well-known people. I was seated next to Mrs. MacArthur, who was an extremely beautiful woman of ninety-two, I think. We got along very well. By dessert, we seemed to be old friends. I said ‘Let me ask you a question.’

  “‘What?’

  “‘I’m just so interested. I can’t help asking you this question.’

  “‘What’s that?’

  “‘When you were with your husband in moments of extreme intimacy—’

  “‘You mean when we were fucking?’

  “‘Yes. What did you call him?’

  “‘What did I call him when we were doing that?’

  “‘Yes.’

  “‘General.’”

  Beatty liked older women, in fact, very old women. In the mid-1990s, he would work ferociously to get Katharine Hepburn into Love Affair. He was good friends with Diana Vreeland, the former editor of Vogue, when she was in her seventies. Ditto Lillian Hellman, who was certainly no beauty. “I met Lillian at the opening night of Barefoot in the Park in 1964 at a party at Tavern on the Green,” he recalls. “She was a compulsive smoker. Julie Christie and I spent Christmas with her years later. As a present I gave her a box of the biggest Nicaraguan cigars I could find. They were huge, about half a foot long. I also gave her an incredibly elaborate box that contained every kind of snuff known to man. And then I gave her a course at Schick Center to stop smoking. Inside of two weeks she smoked all the cigars, sniffed all the snuff, and never went to the Schick thing once. She just could not stop smoking. She had all kinds of problems, emphysema and her carotid artery was all blocked up.”

  Peter Feibleman, who was a sometimes lover and longtime friend of the playwright—and wrote a wonderful book about her called Lilly—brought her out to L.A. when she was in her late sixties. “Lillian hated actors, hated theater people,” he recalls. “She liked Maureen Stapleton, that’s about it, and Warren. He took her out to dinner. To a big fancy restaurant where she dropped her teeth into her spaghetti. She was almost dead. When he got back, he said, ‘She’s a fascinating woman. I’d rather have dinner with her than with any woman I know.’ But it went no further. He had sense enough not to dive into the La Brea tar pits, and that’s what having an affair with Lillian would come to. He’d be dead. She had an enormous jealous streak.”

  Years later, Feibleman also introduced Beatty to Kitty Carlisle Hart when she was about ninety. “I made the mistake of thinking, Poor little old lady,” he says. “But that flirtation was visible across the street. There was no little old lady, and there was no man doing anybody a gracious favor. They liked each other on a sensual level. Yes, he does love older women.”

  The last week of August 1968, Beatty and Christie went to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. At one point, the actor was summoned to an audience with Hubert Humphrey, the presumptive Democratic candidate. Even though Beatty had supported Bobby, he never bought the vilification of the Johnson-Humphrey regulars by the Kennedy wing of the party. “We were taught to hate them,” he says. “If it weren’t for the Vietnam War, LBJ would have gone down as a great president.” Beatty had a more nuanced appreciation of party veterans like Humphrey, and were the vice president nominated, Beatty was inclined to support him.

  “I was in the park being gassed, I looked at my watch, it was 6:15, and I had to cross the street to the Hilton Hotel to have the meeting,” Beatty recalls. “Humphrey was impressed by Bonnie and Clyde, and he wanted me to make a campaign film for him. I told him that I could only do that if he came out against the war. He looked at me and said, ‘You wait, in the next few days, you’ll be surprised, I’m going to make a statement.’ ’Course he didn’t make it until the last week of the campaign. But I remember having the sense that an actor had the luxury of spanning both sides of the river, and how much access films gave you to the levers of power in the country.”

  In September 1968, about a month after Soviet troops had invaded Czechoslovakia, Beatty and Christie flew to the USSR to explore the possibility of making the John Reed film there. He knew some Russian, and had written a script called Natural State about a romance between an American man and a Russian woman that took place during the Cold War, presumably inspired by his relationship with Maya Plisetskaya. Nobody knew who Beatty or Christie was. They stood on line waiting for tables at restaurants in Soviet Georgia, the birthplace of Joseph Stalin, like everyone else. “You couldn’t believe the atmosphere there,” he says. “Everybody was bugged, every telephone call was recorded.” He went with the intention of seeing whether he could get official cooperation, and whether he could cast a Russian actress in the part of the woman in his Cold War script. The answer was no on both counts. He asked to meet a particular actress and was told, “She can’t really meet you yet because she has a broken leg.”

  “Is it in a cast?”

  “Well, they’re putting it in a cast. You can see her in a few days.” A few days went by, and he asked again, “Can I meet her?”

  “Not quite yet, but in a few days.” Not knowing their man, they were thinking he would give up and return to the United States. But a few days later he called again, said, “I don’t understand, why can’t I meet her?”

  “Well, she broke the other leg!”

  Says Beatty, “They didn’t want her to be in a Western film.”

  The Soviet director Sergei Bondarchuk, who had just directed War and Peace, also wanted to make a movie about Reed. He had seen Bonnie and Clyde, thought Beatty looked like Reed, and asked the actor to do it. But Beatty didn’t like the script, thought it was “anti-American,” and turned Bondarchuk down. “I didn’t want to spend five or six or eight months over there having coronaries and not come back here with anything,” he says. Nevertheless, he put Natural State aside, and instead asked, “Can I talk to some people who might have known Reed?” They said there was a woman who claimed to have had an affair with him. He said, “Can I meet her?” As in the case of the actress with the two broken legs, the response, at least initially, was nyet. He insisted, turned it into a confrontation, and finally they took him to her apartment on the seventh floor of one of those drab postwar buildings that looked like—and probably were made of—cinder blocks stacked like Legos. Eleonora Drapkina was about eighty. Her mother had been close to Nadya Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, and there is a photograph of Eleonora at the age of fifteen, an incredibly beautiful girl, standing next to Lenin. Drapkina examined Beatty with interest, and told him he was the worst-dressed millionaire she’d ever met. He asked her his stock question that told him how candidly people would speak of the regime: “What do you think of Solzhenitsyn?” Says Beatty, “The party line on him around the film ministry was, He’s a wonderful writer but very crazy. I had just finished reading The First Circle, fantastic about the labor camps, and I thought he was a great writer, and anything but crazy. But nobody would say a good word about him.” She replied, “Without doubt, he is the greatest living writer in the world.” He thought, Ahh, this is getting interesting, and asked, “Did you have a romance with John Reed?”

  “A romance? I fucked him!”

  “Were you ever in a labor camp?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Where was i
t?”

  “Ummm. North of Minsk.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “Oh, sixteen years.”

  “How do you feel about Stalin?”

  “Only hate. But of course the revolution was in its early stages.”

  He recalls, “It was at that moment I thought, I have to make a movie about that kind of passion. I’m going to make it without the Russians. And just the way I want to make it. I felt some sort of need to protect this poor American who was buried in the Kremlin wall. His ideals were not solely the property of the Soviets.”

  Adds Jeremy Pikser, whom Beatty hired as a researcher on Reds, “Old women are Warren’s biggest fetish. I don’t think he actually had sex with old women, but he has a major soft spot for them. From the moment he met this old woman who said she’d fucked Jack Reed, he wanted to make a film about him.”

  BASKING IN the afterglow of the success of Bonnie and Clyde, an enormous personal triumph, Beatty became, if not necessarily an auteur in the French sense, one of the most powerful figures in the industry, a serious actor and a canny producer who had accomplished the unthinkable: forced a studio to eat crow. He said at the time, “If I went to someone now and said I wanted to make a musical of the Last Supper, they’d probably say, ‘Okay, let’s talk about it.’”

  Beatty rented a second suite in the Beverly Wilshire, just under his penthouse, and hired an assistant, Susanna Moore, a nineteen-year-old sometime model who grew up in Hawaii and later became a novelist. She went up to see him, nervous, the phone ringing off the hook, Warren very flirtatious. At the end of the interview, as she was about to leave, he stopped her, walked over and said, “There’s one last thing I haven’t checked yet—I need to see your legs. Can you lift up your skirt?” Moore duly lifted her skirt. “Okay, you got the job.” Moore recalls, “Warren has to control and dominate. He would say, ‘I had a script for you to read, you weren’t there.’ He’d want to know where you were the night before, are you fucking him, and so on. He was willing to get into conversations about women’s clothes or their makeup: ‘You shouldn’t wear that color, you’re too beautiful to wear green.’ Women love that, because men are so frequently not paying attention.”

  Hits like Bonnie and Clyde always raise the ante, the “what’s next” question, and the actor cum producer was tired, suffering from postpartum Bonnie and Clyde depression. By December 1968, Beatty couldn’t even talk about the film. He would tell the press, “I don’t think it’s so revolutionary or different. It’s a well-made film. We worked hard on it. It came out nicely. But after all, it’s only a movie.” Instead of developing another picture himself, he thought it might be easier just to act in someone else’s movie. “I’m kind of exhausted,” he confessed. “Bonnie and Clyde took a long time.” But even that seemed beyond him. He never liked anything, couldn’t make up his mind. He was offered every script in town. But few of the projects that came in over the transom piqued his interest, and he was very good at just saying no. He had a million reasons for turning down scripts, ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime, as in, “I’m just lazy” to “it’s not important enough,” which at least had the virtue of making him sound like a serious person.

  Ultimately, Beatty did nothing. “People were dying in Vietnam, and the immediacy of that problem, and the racial problems that were underneath it, these were very immediate things,” he recalls. “It was very hard in 1968 to go into a soundstage and find that more interesting than what was happening outside. Making movies next to [participating in] that was boring. Boring.” He continues, “There was a wish to act, and to feel identity through that action. People took chances and risked their lives. Martin Luther King put it very well when he said, If you don’t have something to die for, you don’t have something to live for.”

  Despite fatigue, depression, and distractions of one sort or another, Beatty did find time to labor over the script of Shampoo with Towne. But it was not a happy collaboration. Over the course of a few months in 1969 they met repeatedly for lunch, usually at the Source or the Aware Inn, eating radishes and downing cup after cup of chamomile tea. After these sessions, Towne would go home and write. “Warren and I had some arguments over the script,” he recalled. “He wanted to have one strong woman’s role for Julie Christie, and I ended up writing two strong women’s roles, or two roughly equivalent women’s roles. His view was that neither role was strong or good. He was very angry about it, and I was very angry about his being angry about it, because I thought the script was really pretty terrific.”

  But beyond their disagreements, it soon became evident to Beatty that something else was wrong; the script wasn’t happening. Towne suffered from writer’s block. “Bob would love to work for money on rewrites on which he got no credit, and would do it quickly,” says former Columbia executive Jerry Ayres. “Over three weeks, he’d have a whole new script ready. But something that had his name on it would become all involved in the neurosis of completion and failure, and take forever.” Bob Evans, who later hired him to write Chinatown, says, “Towne could talk to you about a screenplay he was gonna write and tell you every page of it, but it never came out on paper. Never. You know why? He’s on the phone with Warren half the day. He’s really Warren’s nigger.”

  Towne had two weaknesses. He had difficulty with structure, a real liability for someone who often turned in massive scripts the size and weight of doorstops. Then too, for all his artful dialogue and clever set pieces, storytelling was not his strong suit. “Robert had written a script that was very good in atmosphere, and in dialogue, but very weak in story, and each day the story would go in whatever direction the wind was blowing,” says Beatty, referring to Shampoo. “He would just never finish. It has to do with talking, an unwillingness to make choices. It’s symptomatic of depression.”

  Towne would complain to friends about how difficult Beatty was. From his point of view, his friend was too linear. “He would not allow me to stop and think about everything and nothing,” he says. “Nietzsche or Blake said, ‘The straight roads are the roads of progress, the crooked roads are the roads of genius.’ Warren will not knowingly go down a crooked road.”

  Finally, Beatty lost patience. He was tired of sitting around munching carrot sticks and tossing around ideas that evaporated into thin air. He said to Towne, “Look, I don’t wanna keep waiting for what you’re gonna do. Finish by December 31 and show it to me. If you don’t do it, let’s forget it. I’m gonna do it myself.” December 31 rolled around and there was no script. “He missed that date by something like three weeks, and we just sort of lost contact,” Beatty says. “I was angry. Julie was angry. Because we had set time aside for this movie.” Towne thought Shampoo would never be made.

  BEATTY HAD turned down a myriad of better scripts and more compelling projects than The Only Game in Town, but when George Stevens called him in August, while the actor was in Chicago, and asked him to replace Frank Sinatra opposite Elizabeth Taylor, he said yes. By the time Beatty had met Stevens, the director’s best films—the light comedies of the early 1940s and two films in the 1950s—were behind him, and no one but Beatty thought he was a great director. Astonished, Dick Sylbert told him, “You can’t possibly want to do that movie.” But Sylbert realized, “He did it to watch Stevens direct. You know what he found out? Film is the cheapest thing there is. You can shoot as much as you want.” Or, as screenwriter Jeremy Pikser once observed in a different context, Beatty perversely and repeatedly adopted his friend Muhammad Ali’s rope-a-dope tactic, as if he couldn’t do good work without willingly putting his career in jeopardy beforehand. Or perhaps it was the opportunity to seduce Taylor, the very avatar of unattainable glamour and fortune in A Place in the Sun, now within reach, after a fashion, if he cared to spar with Richard Burton. Or maybe Beatty was telling the truth when he said he had lost interest in movies, that he was bored, and it really didn’t matter what kind of junk he made. Or perhaps it was his salary. It was an open secret that Taylor was getti
ng $1.25 million. Not to be outdone, Beatty asked Darryl Zanuck for the same, and it was rumored that he got it, making it by far his largest payday to date, and astronomical for the period. (Some accounts say he got $750,000.) The decision made little sense, except that it put him in commuting distance to Christie, who was in Geneva shooting a picture called In Search of Gregory, directed by Peter Wood. Schlesinger sent Wood a letter advising him how to direct Christie, which read, in part, “give her a kick up the arse and keep Warren off the set.”

  Set in the seedy underbelly of Las Vegas—albeit cleaned up for PG consumption—The Only Game in Town concerned two losers, Joe Grady (Beatty), a gambler cum piano player, in love with Fran (Taylor), a show girl infatuated with a married man. The picture was a two-hander with a tiny cast. Beatty anticipated that it would be a short shoot. But there was no such thing as a small Elizabeth Taylor picture. She was coming off a hysterectomy and in poor health, with chronic back trouble. She insisted on moving the production to Paris for tax reasons and to be near Burton, who was starring in Staircase, another forgettable movie, with Rex Harrison.

  Production started on September 26, 1968. Knowing Beatty’s proclivities for British brunettes and older women—Taylor was seven years his senior—Burton was suspicious. Confiding in his diary on October 20, he wrote, “I am ridiculously (I hope) jealous of E. nowadays because I suppose she’s working with a young & attractive man who obviously adores her. She tells me I’m a fool & that he’s like a younger brother. Ah, I say, but there have been cases of incest.” And again, “Wouldn’t it be ironic if Eliz fell in love with her leading man on this pic? It would be an ironic ending to our love affair, wouldn’t it? I think I may fire a warning shot over the bows of our young Mr B.” When Burton visited the set, he described needling them both: “I say, Eliz. Don’t you think you should be a bit closer to your lover? And W… you look a touch bashful. Is my presence making you nervous?” Whether it was because Burton warned him off, or because Burton and Taylor were such press bait that an affair with her might as well have been conducted in the windows of Bon Marché, or for some other reason best known to himself, Beatty claims he declined to press his advantage.