How like Beatty was George? It’s true that for your garden-variety, unobsessed male, Beatty seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time on matters of the heart—he, of course, would just call it living his life—when, it might be argued, in view of his slender output, he could have been more profitably concerned with setting up his next picture. But he rarely let sex, or at least the sex act, interfere with his work. One woman reported that when they were having sex in the morning, after insuring that she came frequently enough to face the rest of the day with a smile, he pulled out, explaining that he had a lot of writing to do, and if he came himself he would be too wasted to concentrate, and would just fall asleep.
Beatty was not going to lay himself bare for all the world to see without a purpose—or purposes. One was obvious—as he had so often said—to bury Freud’s notion that Don Juans are misogynists or latent homosexuals, as if there were something unnatural and unhealthy about chasing women. As George confesses to Lester, he went to beauty school to get girls. As Hawn put it, Shampoo was “a message [Warren] wanted to get out, a part of his story that he wanted to talk about.”
But that was only the beginning. As he repeatedly made clear when he distanced himself from George, he also wanted to bury, once and for all, his reputation for being a sexual predator. Unlike Harry Horner, in Wycherly’s The Country Wife, George is not a libidinal con man so much as a passive beneficiary of the prejudices of others. He almost never pretends to be gay; rather, he’s a blank canvas on which others paint their fantasies—incorrect fantasies, as it turns out to their chagrin. They assume whatever it is they assume, and he merely refrains from setting them straight.
George is Paolo, the 1950s gigolo in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone transported to the era of Playboy, when sex had become benign, not destructive, or so it seemed. He is softer and more appealing than Paolo, and unlike him, George’s goal is pleasure, not money, so much so in fact that he can’t help jumping into bed with Lester’s wife and daughter while he’s trying to get a loan from him. As Towne once said, he’s a naïf, an innocent, a natural child, the dumb blonde. Or, as Dick Sylbert once wittily observed about Beatty’s screen persona, he always plays the girl. Despite his toughness and self-assurance, he also displayed traits traditionally associated with women, like his insatiable appetite for the telephone, his ability to listen, his taste for manipulation and indirection instead of forthright displays of power, and his capacity for empathy—when he chose to employ it. Moreover, the attention he lavished on himself provided him a window into the world of female vanity, as it was conventionally defined. Throughout his career he not only eschewed action roles, he has avoided any kind of physicality at all. (He was even dubious about riding a motorcycle for Shampoo.) His characters never get into fights, and despite his athleticism in high school, he only twice played an athlete—in Heaven Can Wait and Love Affair (a retired athlete).
George is rarely moved to seduce anyone; rather, he lets himself be seduced and used by everyone else. He’s passive and reactive, juggling his women, true, but often as not dropping a ball. He tries to manipulate his girlfriends, but he’s too clumsy, and they end up manipulating him. Again, Beatty mocked his off-screen image, as he did in his other films, worked against it, underplaying his intelligence by impersonating limited, not-so-bright men. Despite the fact that he was tall, and used his body to intimidate when he wanted to, here he needed to appear vulnerable, unthreatening, as Towne understood when he tweaked Beatty’s scene with Hawn so that he delivered his lines sitting down instead of looming over her. Women wanted to take care of him. He massaged the behavior he displayed in real life to make it more sympathetic. As Ashby recognized, the innocence and vulnerability he so skillfully projected, using the tics and mannerisms he fostered—the soft-spoken, hesitant speech, the downward cast of the eyes, the aw-shucks shit-kicking dance with the feet—combined to create the impression that he was no more than an overgrown kid, rubbing the edges off what might otherwise appear to be an unappealing character. The film renders George nonthreatening by portraying him as a hapless, not-too-bright bumbler who, if he hurts those around him, hurts himself more. He is his own worst enemy. As he is left standing on the side of Mulholland Drive, staring despondently at the distant expanse of the city beneath him watching Jackie go off with Lester, we feel sorry for him.
With George (and Beatty—innocent by association) firmly established as a victim, less predator than prey, the star then moves on ingeniously to turn feminism to his advantage by arguing that women are exploiting him, not the reverse, all demanding their pound of his flesh. As he put it, “Men over thirty have a hard time accepting Shampoo’s easy acknowledgment of the fact that there are women today to whom men are merely sex objects. They’re upset, unsettled by the theme that says promiscuity is no longer just for males, that there are women who enjoy uninvolved, unemotional sex encounters.… Feminists are delighted at having a stupid male sex object that they can talk about.”
By 1975, fierce feminist manifestos like Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics were starting to gather dust, but the fires they ignited still burned hot. Feminists were repudiating the sexual revolution of the 1960s as no more than another instrument of male domination. Always a formidable dialectician, and thus armed, Beatty blithely applauded women’s right to turn the tables on their oppressors, and used it to defend the Don Juans of the world. Far from being a male chauvinist, George was performing a crucial service by becoming a sex toy for emancipated women.
Beatty’s sleight-of-hand wasn’t entirely hypocritical; at times he undoubtedly felt like a sex toy, even if a self-created one. He complained about the burden of having to live up to women’s expectations. He felt that they anticipated that he would flirt and flatter, and that they would be disappointed, slighted, even angry if he didn’t come on to them. They expected that he would take them home, and give them the sexual satisfaction of a lifetime. He felt that he had to be user-friendly. “Many times I’m called upon to perform,” he sighed. “And it just won’t happen. I’m busy, I’m thinking about other things, I’m worried about Julie…” or Joan, Natalie, Leslie, Michelle et al. He had a stock excuse for those occasions when he just wasn’t up to it. He would say to a complete stranger, “I’d love to fuck you, except that—” and then he would come up with an excuse that got him off the hook. He fortified himself with vitamin therapy—B complex, E, and lecithin—to pump up his thyroid. Imagine Bill Henrickson in Big Love, amplified a thousand times. It wasn’t easy being Warren Beatty.
But at the same time that Shampoo, like Splendor in the Grass fifteen years earlier, waged a campaign against libidinal repression, and rescued the sexual revolution from feminist backlash, it shows some sympathy for civilization, if not its discontents. If George is not the predatory spider at the center of a web of seduction, he is a wild child who has so rent the fabric of the domestic contract—as loosely woven as it had become in the 1960s—that he can’t control the consequences. Beginning as a metaphorical apologia for Beatty’s own conduct, Shampoo evolves into an auto-critique, as George devolves from a thoughtless hedonist to a plaything of others, to his own victim. As Beatty himself put it, rather unforgivingly, George “has an unsublimated libido, and is approaching middle age with no economic future. He is a product of the generation that believed in making love not war. He is ignorant politically and doesn’t participate in the forensics of national survival.… He has scattered his sexual energies. Then, when things get tough, he tries to return to the nuclear family, but discovers he can’t.” In that same penultimate scene, when he’s staring down at Jackie leaving in Lester’s limo, any sympathy we may feel toward him is leavened by the recognition that he is merely getting his just deserts. The film renders a judgment as harsh as any feminist might wish.
Tempting though it may be to take Shampoo as the star’s mea culpa, his admission that he was on the wrong course, that his life of promiscuity, or serial monogamy as he preferr
ed to call it, was bankrupt, Beatty watchers did so at their own peril. They forgot that Beatty is an actor who had drawn on his own life before, and that other films had ended with his character chastened or dead. In spite of the autobiographical elements in Shampoo, it is well to remember that the humbled George Roundy was not Warren Beatty. People magazine reported, when he got the Man of the Year Award from Hasty Pudding club at Harvard, that when asked for his opinion of monogamy by a fetching female reporter, he intimately fingered her necklace, while his other hand was on Michelle Phillips’s knees. Phillips “hissed,” “Warren, get your hand off of her!” He withdrew it quickly, as if he’d been burned, while Phillips turned to another reporter and answered for him: “He likes monogamy just fine.” But he would not marry her, and Shampoo did not leave him a broken man, but an enormously powerful force in Hollywood, more so than anyone else, with the possible exception of Francis Coppola. (Had Power Lists been the currency of entertainment magazines then as they are today, Beatty would have been at or near the top.) Retribution, comeuppance, what have you—was for the movies.
Still, Beatty’s was a precarious balance, and sometimes he overplayed his hand. He boldly participated in a panel during the second Women’s Film Festival with Penn and Jeanne Moreau, moderated by feminist critic Molly Haskell. “I don’t know what I was doing,” he recalls. “Sometimes the urge to self-destruction just overwhelms you. Molly was wearing this flowing scarf, and suddenly I found myself wiping my glasses on it. I couldn’t believe what I was doing. The audience was filled with feminists, and of course they started to hiss and boo.” She was humiliated. Beatty, however, defused an ugly situation by offering to read their scripts—which of course was nonsense. At the end, they rushed the stage and swarmed all over him. Haskell recalls, “There was a lovefest with Warren Beatty.”
Beatty and Phillips went to London for the British premiere of Shampoo. He wanted her out of sight of the British tabloids and shut her up in the hotel, which she didn’t appreciate. She went back to L.A. in a snit while he continued the tour. He returned to New York, went to L.A., and was back in London in August. He was still occasionally seeing Christie, with whom he dined on the 25th at Leith’s, a hip restaurant in Notting Hill. They sat at a prominent table under a spotlight. He was dressed all in white, she in a Gypsy outfit with a large shawl. They had a dignified argument. A week later they both returned to L.A., she to her Malibu house, and he to the Beverly Wilshire. “It’s very strange,” observed Phillips, “because I don’t think they even like each other any more.”
MEANWHILE, The Fortune had been screened for Columbia in New York, at 711 Fifth Avenue, the company headquarters. The audience was packed with every warm body in the building, the secretaries and kids from the mail room, as well as the executives. The lights went down, and the opening scene flashed on the screen, a long shot of Freddie (Channing) climbing out a window of her mansion and descending a ladder, while Nicky (Beatty) drives up in the foreground to collect her. There was nothing funny about it; in fact, it’s too early in the film to know what’s going on. But one member of the audience began to guffaw loudly. The others, some embarrassed and most puzzled, turned around to see who it was. It was Columbia CEO Alan Hirschfield, who actually stood up and apologized, said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s just in anticipation—and fear of course.”
Hirschfield was right to be afraid. The Fortune was released on May 20, 1975, only three months after Shampoo. The actors acquitted themselves as well as could be expected. The problem was the script. Ostensibly a comedy, there isn’t a single belly laugh from beginning to end. Despite the appealing premise, the film is so sluggish and unfunny it makes Ishtar look like Tootsie. Every once in a while the tedium is punctuated by pratfalls that have all the humor of a burst balloon. According to Dick Sylbert, “Warren told me he knew how to fix it, but nobody would listen.”
The reviews, save for The New York Times, were dismal. In Time magazine, Jay Cocks wrote, “The Fortune is a bleak, frostbitten farce, desperate for invention and rather a sham.” It grossed under $12.5 million. According to Devlin, “Mike was shattered by The Day of the Dolphin. Now he was shattered again when The Fortune fell on its ass after one week.” He continues, “Warren was laughing, because in the course of making it, he came to detest Mike. And of course he was exulting in the success of Shampoo.”
The Fortune proved that even the star-kissed Beatty Bunch could stumble. It seemed that the lavishly talented participants—geniuses all—not only believed their own press, but their friends’ as well. As Frank Rich, who had been on the set in August, remarked in a dour postmortem published in New Times, “I heard the word ‘wonderful’ more times in ten days than I had heard it in my entire life. Everything was ‘wonderful,’ and some things were ‘very wonderful’ or even ‘extremely wonderful.’”
IN 1975, Paul Schrader struck a deal at Warners to do a project called Hardcore, about a small-town girl who runs away from home to L.A., where she disappears into the squalid underworld of pornography, with Schrader writing and directing, and John Milius producing. On Thursday, February 26, 1976, Warners announced that Beatty would star as the father who searches for his runaway daughter, as well as produce and possibly direct. Once Beatty came on board, Schrader realized right away that he was in trouble. For starters, the star wanted to recast the script. “He felt that he was too young to have a daughter,” says Schrader. “He wanted me to write it as his wife.” The two men fell into bitter disputes almost at once. “I would go up to the Beverly Wilshire where he was staying, every morning, and then write every afternoon,” he continues. “I’d argue with him in the morning, batter him down and win. I’d go home, and go back the next morning. He would start right where we left off. The same argument. I’d win again. And I’d go home. After about four or five meetings, I realized that I was going to have the same argument over and over until he won it. As for me, I just felt defeated. It got to the point where I wanted to throw the typewriter and say, ‘Look, you write the fucking thing, you know?’” When it was all over, Beatty asked him, according to Schrader, “‘Do you want to write Reds?’ and ‘Do you want to write Howard Hughes?’ And boy, I thought, I just want to go home. Get me out of here.” Ultimately Schrader did direct the picture, with George C. Scott in the Beatty part.
By August, when Beatty withdrew from Hardcore, it was reported that his friends in politics warned him not to do the picture, and some interpreted Beatty’s departure as an indication that he was planning to run for office. Meanwhile, his affair with Michelle Phillips was winding down. Like some of Beatty’s other women, Phillips came to feel the relationship was one-sided. “Two people cannot both live for one person,” she says. Phillips felt suffocated. She wanted a career in movies, but “Warren didn’t want me to act. He wanted me to be with him all the time.… [After a while,] I couldn’t live under the same roof with him; we were fighting all the time.” She was offered a part in Valentino. “Warren would tell me, ‘You can’t do [the] film because we’d be separated at Christmas,’” she continues. “It didn’t seem to occur to him that he’d cheerfully spent Christmas alone for years when he lived in a hotel.” She adds, “When I told him I was going to do Valentino, he said, ‘Well, that’s probably the end of our relationship.’” She added, looking back, “I knew that [it was over] when I came back after doing Valentino, but it took us a while to finalize the breakup.” In 1978, she explained, “The last year was very difficult. The relationship became so neurotic.… I was with somebody who didn’t make me happy and I didn’t make him happy. But there was this terrible need to clutch at each other. We were both terrified it was going to be another failure and we were both acutely aware that people would say we could never make it with anybody because we were too selfish to care about anybody. Which is what they do say about Warren now. Then came the day when I finally realized that Warren was never going to tell me it was over. He’d much prefer me to do it. He doesn’t want to take the responsibility of anythi
ng not working out. I realized it would always be a part of his personality to evade the issue, and I’d have to make the decision.” When he failed to renew the lease on a beach house they had together, “I finally faced up to it and got out.” She moved into a small apartment. Phillips added, “Warren never reacted at all.”
One of Beatty’s friends commented, “Warren is not a cruel person, but he does start to get careless. He doesn’t try to hide restlessness or boredom. He’s a hint-dropper, and he gets less and less subtle until the message hits home. He has a thing about leaving on good terms, so he never wants to be the one to walk out.” Characteristically, he manipulated the women into such untenable positions—often by being flagrantly promiscuous—that they had no choice but to leave. Continued Phillips, “That is what Warren makes his women do.” She adds, “When Barbara Walters asked him about all the women in his life, he said, ‘Well, they always broke up with me, I never broke up with them.’ While I was watching the interview, I was holding my stomach laughing so hard [I fell] on the floor. That certainly is the strategy that works for some men. But you can’t go with a hundred different women and a hundred different women reject you, over and over again when you’re such a wonderful person.” Phillips thinks he manipulated women into leaving him because he was worried about his reputation. “He’s always tried to have the image of a very serious person. I’m sure that he didn’t want to be looked upon as a predator. But once Warren and I broke up, we did break up. I left him, don’t forget. I got to save a little face too.”
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