Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

  On July 29, Mama Cass died. Nicholson was distraught, and production was suspended for a day. Initially, it was reported that she choked on a sandwich. The joke, tasteless as it was, and probably originating with Sylbert, who had a tongue like an asp (he once said of someone that he was so uptight you could “sharpen a pencil in his asshole”), was that had she given the sandwich to Karen Carpenter (who died of anorexia), both women would be alive.

  Eventually, despite the rough patches in the beginning, the production settled down. The weight of Shampoo lifted from his shoulders, Beatty regarded The Fortune as a walk in the park. He and Nicholson enjoyed each other, and set the tone, or tried to. Unless there is a real disaster in the making, everybody’s a “genius,” on a movie set, and this film was no exception. The principals were relentlessly upbeat.

  The Fortune wrapped at the end of August 1974.

  THE FALL of 1974 and winter months of 1975 were given over to planning the marketing of Shampoo, which Beatty supervised with his customary zeal and meticulous attention to detail.

  Begelman saw Shampoo for the first time at a screening room at Goldwyn. He was appalled by “the line,” or rather, the notorious exchange in which B-movie producer William Castle, who plays the fat cat sitting next to Jackie at a Republican election-eve dinner, says, “I can get you anything you’d like, what would you like?” and she says, “Well, first of all,” looking at George Roundy and diving under the table, “I’d like to suck his cock.” He asked Beatty to remove it, a request the producer rejected out of hand. (When Towne was asked what was “behind” that scene, he cracked “$30 million in film rentals.”) To Beatty, it was the very point of the movie. “It wasn’t just a dirty moment where she says a dirty line,” he says. “The subject of Shampoo is hypocrisy, the commingling of sexual hypocrisy and political hypocrisy. The reason Julie’s line made for such an explosive moment was because it shredded that hypocrisy.”

  The early screenings were not encouraging. Shampoo was previewed in Santa Barbara early in the new year with disappointing results. “The audience was fairly conservative, the screening went very badly,” Beatty recalls. “We all felt awful, the cards were terrible.” Says Devlin, “One third of the audience walked out on Julie Christie’s line. The studio had never had anything like that happen. Columbia thought they had the greatest disaster in their history. This did not surprise David Begelman, who still hated the picture.”

  Beatty drove back to L.A. with Begelman, who gave him a little pat on the knee and a pep talk. He said, “They can’t all be hits, so you go on to the next.” The next night, the picture was screened at the Directors Guild without a single change. “The roof came off the theater,” says Beatty. Lester Persky says that superagent “Sue Mengers hated it, came up and said, ‘It won’t do $4 million.’ That’s because it struck home to her, she was reacting to the woman’s position.” Ashby also couldn’t help noticing that the women in the audience, mostly spouses of the directors, were not happy. They felt insulted and demeaned by the picture’s portrait of the sex-starved Hollywood wives who were putty in George’s hands. “All of them were getting up-tight,” he recalled. “One person said to me afterwards that his wife said, ‘I know what that asshole [Beatty] is out doing all the time.’”

  Shampoo opened on February 11, 1975, one of the worst times to release a picture, months too early for Oscar awareness. Devlin, who had another movie with Columbia (Harry and Walter Go to New York), happened to be in Begelman’s office “when the Teletypes started coming in with the critics’ reviews of Shampoo. They loved it. He should have been elated—the studio was saved, he was going to be thrust into the limelight as this great executive—but he was totally shocked and depressed because his judgment was wrong. He had put all of his bets on the other horse, The Fortune.”

  The reviewers were mostly ecstatic, but under the sway of auteurism, and showing how little they knew about how films were actually made, they reflexively treated Shampoo as a “Hal Ashby” film. Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times, “Hal Ashby’s Shampoo remains the American film comedy of the year. A witty, furtively revolutionary comedy of manners.” Writing in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael, a closet auteurist herself, raved, “Shampoo is the most virtuoso example of sophisticated kaleidoscopic farce that American moviemakers have ever come up with.” Beatty and Towne had been courting her, and it worked. “Warren and Bob Towne recognized her value, and they were going to snow her, work her,” says Paul Sylbert. “They could smell that this woman was a perfect setup for this kind of thing. It was very conscious.” She was susceptible to the blandishments of stars, especially star-auteurs and glib writers who practiced on her vanity, dazzled her with their attention. “Everyone knew that Kael was feedable, that if you sat next to her and got her drunk, and fed her some lines, you could get it replayed in some other form,” says Buck Henry. “There’s a trick that Warren and Jack had with intellectual women. They would turn them on by suggesting that they were hot for them. If any woman had shown up from the Partisan Review, they would have commented on how beautiful she was. Rose Bird was the chief justice of the California Supreme Court, widely condemned for her liberal death penalty decisions, and ultimately run off the court. Warren and Jack told her she was glamorous and sexy, a hot babe, and if that isn’t a turn-on to a woman who has spent most of her life in law school, nothing is. They seduced Pauline Kael with ideas, with their scripts.”

  Beatty arranged a special screening for Kael, along with Towne, Michelle Phillips, and Kael’s friend, Richard Albarino. According to him, they sat around and discussed the movie afterward, and then went out for drinks. “She’d take out her notebook and say, ‘Oh, that’s really good,’ and write it down. She’d be very bald about it.” When she came to L.A., Towne took her out to Trader Vic’s. “Towne had Kael wrapped around his finger,” says Henry. Indeed, Towne, the co-writer, rather than Beatty or Ashby, was the focus of her review, just as Benton and Newman were the focus of her famous piece on Bonnie and Clyde. Towne has a cameo in the picture, and she flattered him by writing that he looked like Albrecht Dürer. He started dropping her name in conversation in a way that suggested that he and Kael were intimates, that he had explained his views to her—that Shampoo was a version of Renoir’s Rules of the Game and Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night. When her review came out, it was sprinkled with references to Bergman’s film. No one could prove it of course, but people were suspicious. “You think Kael recognized what was behind Shampoo?” continues Henry. “He told her.”

  According to Beatty, Towne called Kael almost every day when she was at The New Yorker, and dropped her when she retired. Towne got to all the critics, he says, except for Canby. Beatty claims that the writer never liked the ending of Shampoo, and called Time magazine critic Jay Cocks to discuss it with him before Cocks wrote his review—in which he criticized the ending, to wit, “The ending is a betrayal of all that is best in the film, revealing that the film makers have been interested in apologizing for George, not satirizing him.”

  Despite the glowing reviews it received at the time, Shampoo has never gotten its due, probably because it is a comedy—comedies have always been undervalued in Hollywood—and worse, an adult comedy, that is, a satirical comedy of manners. The script and the performances are across the board superlative, and the picture is chock-full of brilliant scenes and small, throwaway touches that are gone almost before they’re registered.

  Beatty was uncharacteristically doing a lot of press to promote the picture, but he was typically ambivalent about it. “You can kill a movie just by turning up in magazines and newspapers and on talk shows until you make people sick of you,” he worried out loud. “I’m not even sure this press tour was a good idea.” He considered each request carefully and turned down a lot of them. Inevitably, the Today show came up. “I don’t think I can do that,” Beatty said. “Ms. Barbara Walters has made a public statement of the fact that I am the most difficult subject she ever tried to interview.” Going
over the invitation list for the premiere, he stumbled over the name John Dean, of Watergate fame. Without missing a beat, he vetoed it, saying, “I don’t think so. It’d turn into John Dean night.”

  Beatty had long been both amused by and discomfited by his reputation—self-created, of course—as the Playboy of the Western World, as Diane Keaton would later call him. He was aware of the difficulties that he faced with the press. “I know that movie actors are over-rewarded in our society and that the press has to cut people like me down to size,” he told critic Frank Rich. “They make me into an insane eccentric with an incredible fear of losing my youth who lives in a bomb shelter, who contemplates or is going through plastic surgery and who has devastating relationships with women. It goes through cycles.… My tide goes in and out.”

  Shampoo turned out to be a huge hit. According to Persky, it pulled in about $22.6 million in rentals in its initial domestic run (or about $60 million in grosses), five times its negative cost ($4.5 million). It became the fourth highest grossing film of 1975. Tickets cost only $3.50 in those days, so tripling the grosses to bring them in line with 2010 prices, and adjusting for inflation, gives us a $204 million grossing domestic blockbuster, with $100 million in rentals. According to Persky, Beatty made about $6 million in 1975 dollars. Other reports put the figure as high as $15 million.

  If Shampoo had an auteur, it was probably Beatty rather than Ashby. “I don’t see it as a Hal Ashby movie,” says producer Jerry Hellman. “I see it as being much more a reflection of Warren’s sensibilities. If you look at the film now, it looks very much like a commercial piece of that time, and designed to be shocking, but it didn’t have any of the quixotic, bent, off-center way of looking at life of Hal’s best movies.”

  Shampoo helped everyone connected with it, although some more than others. At least that’s what those on the shorter end of the stick felt. Ashby grumbled that he hadn’t made as much on Shampoo—which nobody in the industry considered his picture—as he should have. And he rarely mentioned the film, even to his close friends.

  For Towne, Shampoo was the last gasp of a phenomenal burst of creativity. He would be nominated for an Oscar again, as he was for The Last Detail and Chinatown, his third in a row. But he felt shortchanged. He received a fee of $125,000, and was entitled to 5 percent of the gross from the point at which the picture earned four times the cost of the negative, which was $16 million, or so he understood. Since the movie cost a little over $4 million, he figured that he was owed in the neighborhood of $1 million, but he hadn’t seen anything near that. Beatty reportedly acknowledged to a third party that he never explained the deal to the writer, said simply, “There are some things you can’t talk to Towne about.”

  About a year after the picture was released, Beatty met with Towne at the Beverly Wilshire. According to Towne, Beatty explained for the first time that Begelman had forced him to accept a rolling break even deal, which meant that the payouts to gross participants, like Beatty, as well as other new charges, were added to the negative cost—thus, the “rolling break even”—meaning that net participants like Towne would seldom see any money. (Since Beatty produced, Towne, like Ashby, Hawn, and Christie, were paid by his company.) According to Towne, Beatty blamed the anemic payday on Begelman. He said, “Begelman fucked us.”

  “He fucked you, he didn’t fuck me,” Towne replied. “My deal was with you, and you neglected to tell me that this deal was worth less than half of what I thought it was.”

  “You know what they say about Hollywood: You don’t get rich on your last picture, you get rich on your next picture.”

  “That may have been true when I worked on Bonnie and Clyde for $8,000, but the future is now, as far as I’m concerned. I’m not gonna sue, and I’ll still be your friend, but I’m never gonna work with you again. This is absolutely chickenshit.”

  Still, according to Beatty, Towne’s deal, which was made when he was still writing for Roger Corman, was doubled twice, and his cut was bigger than Ashby’s, Christie’s, or Hawn’s. His agent must have known what kind of deal he had, and for his account to be true, it must be assumed that his agent never told him and he never asked. Adds Beatty, “Towne talking about [the rolling break even] as a surprise—that’s sort of insane. It was not a surprise, it was the deal.”

  Despite the fact that Towne was making $1 million a year throughout the second half of the 1970s, he repeatedly took sizable, six-figure loans from Beatty, apparently with little intention of paying him back because he felt Beatty owed him for Shampoo. Says Dick Sylbert, “Bob thought he had it coming to him, that Warren had fucked him.”

  The co-screenwriting credit also rankled. Says David Geffen, “Bob always said that Warren extracted credit from him that he didn’t deserve. I interceded on Bob’s behalf with Warren, and it was one of the most embarrassing things that ever happened to me. I said, ‘You know, Warren, I really think that you’re out of line,’ and he went crazy, said, ‘Who told you this?’

  “‘Bob.’

  “‘I want him to tell you this in front of me.’ At a party that Goldie Hawn had, Warren was so furious that he grabbed me, and he grabbed Bob, and he said, ‘Okay, he’s telling me that you said all this shit, say it in front of me.’ And with me standing there, Bob said he didn’t do it. And the reason he didn’t have the guts was because it wasn’t so. Warren called me up that night, and said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’”

  Says Beatty, “Robert has some serious problems. It was he that offered me the screen credit. I would have been happy to go to arbitration. Look, I wrote the fuckin’ story. The story had no political context with Robert, no Nixon, no nothing. All of that is 99 percent me, my work. I’ve always said, because I wanted to say nice things about Robert, that Robert wrote the first draft, but it was written by me and Robert. We used to meet every fucking day and I’d have to tell him the goddamn story. It’s absolutely not true that every line of dialogue is his. It’s an outrageous lie. Both party sequences were written by me, none of those were in Towne’s original draft at all. That’s half of the movie. Because there was so much really good writing in the first script, I very inventively combined the two, with Hal and my secretary, Helen Feibelmann, and then I took it to Towne. When he read it, he was rather amazed. I’ve always said, because Robert was a close friend of mine, ‘Of course, the best writer is Robert, of the three of us, but if you don’t write it, if you don’t put words on the paper, you can’t be.’” He adds, “This idea of his being upset about credit is insane. Half the fuckin’ time the guy didn’t show up on the set, he’d be at the doctor.”

  BEATTY WORRIED that his reputation as a ladykiller was coloring the reception of Shampoo. “Half the audience thought I was showing off how sexy I am,” he says. “Nobody understood that it was about politics.” Consequently, he hammered home the politics whenever he had the chance. “Vietnam polarized the town,” he explains. “Shampoo’s audience was the audience that didn’t want to go to war, that used every means to end the war. Then Watergate destroyed authority in the country, ended trust in politicians. What Shampoo had to say was what our generation at that time had to say about America, which was, We’re not being honest about the way we’re governed, our leaders are not being honest, we’re not honest about what we stand for. I don’t think that people today remember very clearly the heat of political passion that existed during this period. Now, nobody gives a shit.”

  Beatty indeed had an agenda for Shampoo, in fact, several. Politically, he wanted to expose American gobbledygook about sex, while ridiculing the narcissism and self-absorption of the overprivileged who stuck their collective heads in the sand while Vietnam was being bombed back into the stone age abroad, and the U.S. was burning at home. True to its avatar, Rules of the Game, it presents a rogues’ gallery of material guys absorbed by money and goods, along with narcissistic women immersed in their feelings, their love affairs, and their looks. Shampoo was a gloss on Steely Dan’s “Hollywood Kids.” “Basically the u
pper class is full of shit, man,” said Ashby. “You know, they don’t give a fuck about anybody.” He added, “They were all whores.… Everybody was selling out all through that picture.”

  But Beatty had a more personal agenda as well, revealed in the self-reflexive nature of the film, with its slew of inside jokes—Lester is undoubtedly named after Lester Persky, who financed the movie; Christie in the role of an old girlfriend, which is what she was by that time; and the cast is filled out with Beatty’s friends and acquaintances. Beatty is playing it close to the bone, so that it feels like we’re peering behind the curtain of his own life, at no more than a fragile fictional remove, so much so that it’s tempting to regard it, as Nicholson observed, as a specimen of autobiography. There is so much of him in the character that the film becomes an echo chamber of his own quirks and habits—the picture begins with George under the covers with Felicia, hopping up to take phone call after phone call, and like Beatty, he seems to be a rolling stone, living nowhere and owning nothing, save for a motorcycle and a hairdryer.

  As Nicholson once put it, wisely, “It’s my point of view that all movies are either literally or symbolically autobiographical.” Consequently, after making an unusually personal film, Beatty moved swiftly to distance himself from George, accentuating the differences between himself and his hairdressing, head-fondling doppelgänger. In the one-step-forward-two-steps-back dance at which he was so adept, he claimed that he identified more with Lester, a rich entrepreneur, than he did with George—the very same Lester whom Beatty wryly observed Christie thought he was when she “rejected” him in real life. In Hollywood, the skein of relationships, both genuine and fictional, linking “reel” life and “real” life is always tangled, but in this case it would have taken a Houdini to have undone the knot. Beatty is, of course, George and Lester, the sybarite and the businessman, which is perhaps why he identified so closely with Howard Hughes. And Christie, by accounts other than Beatty’s, rejected him more for his affinity with George than with Lester—or, perhaps, both.