Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

  “I was on call twelve, sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. He told me, ‘Whatever I need you’re going to get for me. And you better get it.’ Once he wanted fresh cranberry juice. It was out of season, and I said, ‘I can’t find this.’ He said, ‘That’s not what I want to hear.’ It was like, My God, this is a guy who expects to get what he wants. Eventually, the prop master got it for him. It was a lesson to me: for a guy like this, you had to dig deeper.

  “Every morning before we went to the set, we’d take a schvitz. They closed down a health club, the two of us would go, and sit there, looking at each other, for an hour, in the steam. He had a nice body, and he wasn’t uncomfortable being naked. He wasn’t modest. But he wasn’t an exhibitionist either. His dick was normal, not ridiculously big.”

  Both on the Paramount lot, and on location at Filoli, the Georgian mansion near Palo Alto designed by Willis Polk in the early twentieth century, where the exteriors of the Farnsworth scenes were shot, Beatty was besieged by girls. Lieberman continues, “There were always a handful of women who were circling. I never knew where the fuck they came from, from Warrenville. He’d ask, ‘Who am I fucking right now?’ Warren enjoyed messing with your head.” Beatty would part the curtains on the windows in his office, peek through and say, “That one’s pretty, bring her in.” Lieberman went outside, and asked, “Do you want to meet Warren Beatty?” He recalls, “When Warren would be busy, part of my job was entertaining the girls. Keeping them company while they were waiting for an audience with him. They would always say, ‘I won’t sleep with him.’ Then they would be with Warren, and—bang! Because he definitely has that thing. He just turns on the spotlight, and you’re on stage. Even when he met my wife, he got up in her grille. It was like, ‘Dude, turn it off. I’m married to her!’ He didn’t want my wife; this is just who he is.” Beatty continued to needle Lieberman about being married. “He’d say, ‘Don’t you want to fuck this one, don’t you want to fuck that one?’ ‘Why’d you get married, are you insane?’” Depending how busy he was, the girls would file in and out at odd hours of the day. If he was asked, “So, how’s the day going?” he was liable to say, “Another day of fucking and sucking and coming in their hair.”

  Not everyone Beatty invited in looked like Christie. One person who watched this scene unfold, fascinated, observed, “I think that Warren could have been choosier. Some of the women weren’t worth running after. They were less than plain, overweight, and mustachioed.” Lieberman once said to Beatty, “You’re Warren Beatty, why don’t you get some standards? How can you let some of these girls blow you?” Beatty looked at him blankly, as if he were speaking a foreign language, and replied, “Why not?”

  HEAVEN CAN WAIT began production late in the summer of 1977. Directing for the first time, Beatty was, as Koch describes him, “like a kid in a candy store.” First and foremost an actor himself, he liked actors, trusted them, and was good with them. If ever there were a filmmaker to whom the axiom “casting is nine tenths of the job” applied, it was Beatty. He cast the best, and empowered them, gave them the permission to go for it, made them feel comfortable, beguiled them, and then goaded them beyond all reason, drove them, infuriated them, bored them, broke them. He didn’t impose his vision on the actors so much as squeeze them until they wept with frustration and gave up whatever it was they were holding back.

  As a director, Beatty often behaved as if collaboration was the heart of the directorial process. If he trusted his lieutenants, he delegated, let them do their jobs, and nothing was too insignificant for him to require their input. Paul Sylbert says that he never needed to either intimidate nor manipulate Beatty the way he did Elaine May and other directors he worked for: “I never tried to block Warren from doing something. Because he never did anything that would hurt the movie. He just lets you do your job. Kazan did the same thing. Hitchcock did the same thing. He’s not a Hitchcock, and he’s not a Kazan, but he’s up there with these people. His mistakes—and we all carry the seeds of our own destruction—come from the fact that he is what he is, but that’s also what produces the good stuff.”

  Nevertheless, no one was more aggressive about asserting his directorial prerogatives than Beatty; no one exercised more control over every single aspect of making and marketing a movie than he did. And no one was more relentless in accumulating credits.

  Acting, directing, and producing, all at the same time, took its toll. It tired him out, made him irritable. Koch continues, “Warren doesn’t come off frightened. You don’t see that side of him. Even if he doesn’t have an answer for something, or doesn’t know what he wants, he’s not going to let on. He would do it in other ways, by not giving us answers. But he was a frightened guy. Who isn’t insecure? He is human.” Paradoxically, wearing so many hats offered him some protection, allowed him to indulge his customary elusiveness. As Henry puts it, “When you take on that many functions—dealing with the cast, the money, the studio, there was all this stuff on top of where do we put the camera and what do we put in front of it—you can always be somewhere else. You can always say, ‘I’d like to discuss this with you, but I gotta go see to that.’”

  All of this took time. “He agonizes over decisions, so you can imagine how slow this process is,” says Sylbert. “Sins of omission are his biggest fears. His whole life is done that way. Very careful. Cautious. I’ve always thought he has two brains. Just like a cow has got two stomachs. He ruminates. It goes from one to the other.”

  Video assist, a new toy that enabled directors to watch the scene they have just shot instead of waiting days for the rushes to come back, was intended to speed things up, but for Beatty, it just provided more cud to chew on. “Heaven Can Wait was one of the first movies where you could actually come back and watch yourself on video,” says Koch. “Warren likes to look at himself, and he likes to look at all the other actors, and the fact that he could not only be in the scene as an actor, watch the scene live as the director, and then watch it again on video, took an awful lot of time. I used to say, ‘Do three or four takes, then come back and look, because every time you go back and forth, all of a sudden it’s an hour. And we’re way behind schedule. Warren didn’t care.”

  Grodin defends Beatty’s slow pace. “I was sitting in on a scoring session with Warren on Heaven Can Wait,” recalls Grodin. “The music techies said to him, ‘You should spot the music and how long.’ Warren replied, ‘We’re not making hamburgers here. I can’t just snap my fingers. I’m not sure.’ The techies rolled their eyes. A lighting crew will think nothing of spending five hours setting up lights, but if the director spends more than a minute talking to the actors, it’s indulgent. It’s no coincidence that people like Warren make the better movies. If you want forty pictures a year, you don’t go to him. If you want something that’s going to be around for a decade, you do.”

  Still, says Koch, “I had to put up with a lot of shit from Warren. When you’re making a film, your director needs to make decisions. I would say, ‘Okay, Warren, we’re movin’ outside, we’re gonna shoot out in front of the big tree.’ Because we had discussed it. He’d get out there and say, ‘I don’t know, do you really think we should be out here in front of this big tree? Maybe we should be inside.’

  “‘Warren, we’re here, the whole company’s here, the light’s right, we’re ready to go—’

  “‘I don’t know, maybe we should be inside.’ The reason he’s difficult is you can’t get inside his mind. I want that man who’s my boss, the number one creator, to tell me what he’s thinking so that I can tell the DP to light it the right way, whatever. Warren is someone who keeps everything to himself. A lot of times, when he does a lot of takes, he may not even be paying attention, he’s thinking about something else. Or he wants to see how far he can go. So the difficulty with Warren is not just one thing.”

  Koch’s pièce de résistance, the scene for which he was hired to orchestrate, was the Super Bowl sequence in which the Rams were ostensibly playing the Steele
rs. In fact, it was shot during halftime of a preseason game between the Rams and the Chargers at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum on September 1, 1977. The production was given a grand total of fourteen minutes to shoot everything that was needed. “I had to get two football teams, cheerleaders, coaches, referees, all out there,” he recalls. “I had to have all six cameras in the ready positions, and Warren had to be in the scene. But we were thrilled, because therefore he couldn’t control it. Billy Fraker and I controlled it. Warren caught the immaculate reception—he threw the ball, it got tipped, popped up in the air, he caught it behind the line, ran down the field for the winning touchdown and got put up on everybody’s shoulders—at least seven or eight times.”

  When those fourteen minutes had elapsed, the Rams and the Chargers returned to the field. Beatty came up to Koch and said, “No, no, no—I want to shoot more.”

  “We’re done here, Warren. We’re done.”

  “No, no, no, we can’t be done, we didn’t get enough.” Koch continues, “He was so upset, he was seething through the whole second half that I had let him down, because I couldn’t hold back the NFL! After the game was over, we kept shooting all night long. When he saw the dailies, he was thrilled. The difficulty was, he never wanted to let any day go, any scene go, any anything go, and he’d hold it as long as he could, before giving it up, say, to the editor to edit.”

  Despite Buck Henry’s upbeat attitude, co-directing with Beatty was no picnic, and the arrangement did not last long. It was Shampoo redux. Says Koch, “Warren was the director. It was very difficult for Buck, very difficult. It wasn’t about what Buck needed from the movie, or what Buck could give to the movie, it was about what Warren could suck Buck dry for, all the humor, all the far-out ideas that Buck would have that Warren would use and probably call his own.”

  Henry had the otherworldly detachment of an extraterrestrial, and it helped him take adversity in stride, but irony, even in the hands of a master like Henry, goes only so far. The more power Beatty got, the more he indulged in his penchant for perfection. “Certainly Warren is the only director I’ve ever really had fights with,” Henry says. “They weren’t so much about aesthetics as about tactics: the camera’s here, but maybe if it were just two inches over there—that stuff. He liked to worry things to death. We used to fight about a lot of dumb things—they weren’t dumb to him—it’s midnight, he’d say, ‘I don’t like take 32. Let’s do another.’

  “‘It’s fine, we don’t need any more.’ I think shooting an overly high number of takes tires out the actors. He feels that everybody who’s working for him is on call twenty-four hours a day, all the time. So it’s, ‘Let’s do another two hours.’

  “‘Fuck you, we’ve got to get up at six.’

  “‘What, you’re going to bed now? We’re not going to talk about tomorrow? We need to work on this. I want to talk more about it.’

  “‘I don’t. We’ll talk about tomorrow, tomorrow. I’ll see ya later.’

  “‘Wait, stick around, don’t leave the set yet.’

  “‘Everyone else has left the set. I’m leaving the set!’ Very often, he wants you to argue with him so that he can pick the opposite of what you’re arguing: Should I wear the gray pants or the black pants? I think you should wear the gray pants. I know he’s going to pick the black pants. After a while I used to think that the way to get him to do something was to argue the opposite. It’s like when you’re driving, and you just know when you choose to go west, you should have gone east. So you go east, and it’s the wrong choice. It’s that double think. I would never know what his original opinion was when these arguments came up.

  “At one point, Warren said, ‘I think we should get rid of the character actors.’ We were in the middle of shooting. I said, ‘What the fuck are you talking about? Are you crazy? They’re all wonderful. They’re all doing exactly what we want them to do.’ ’Course, almost all of them were friends of mine that I’d cast, servants in the house. I think he was testing me, but I don’t know what the test was for. Maybe how much power he had over everyone, which he always liked to do.”

  Henry had a couple of bad weeks in Palo Alto while they were working at the Filoli mansion. James Mason used to drawl softly, in his amused, world-weary way, “Poor Buck, what a burden he has to carry. He just has to get used to being treated that way.” Henry continues, “It was always about, ‘Defend your position. You really think that blah blah is true?’” Beatty had a way of leaning in while he was arguing that Henry found intimidating or, as he puts it, “He was climbing up on your shoes, moment by moment. Then sometimes Warren expressed real anger at being at odds with whomever it was he was having a disagreement with. He does not like to be crossed, even about simple, stupid things.”

  According to Dick Sylbert, “Warren beat the shit out of him. Humiliated him every day. Just like he humiliated Bob Towne. Warren said to me after Heaven Can Wait that he hated Buck because he works very hard, and Buck doesn’t. Buck reads a magazine. You’re shooting a scene, and he’s reading Scientific American.”

  At one point, Henry thought, Let’s not pretend anymore that we’re co-directing this. I should just go home. But he couldn’t go home because he was still acting in the picture, and some of his scenes were yet to be shot. He was frustrated, unhappy, and very angry, very suspicious: “Warren’ll put the heat on and turn it up as high as he can to the point where people either almost quit or actually quit. They get exhausted and walk away. Whether it’s just a concomitant of the way he works, or whether he likes to make people walk away—’cause in the worst-case scenario, some people believe it’s so he can take the credit. I don’t know whether he does it consciously—he doesn’t do much unconsciously—or not.” (Henry did get co-directing credit, although he did not get writing credit. The script was attributed to Elaine May and Warren Beatty.) Henry was never sure about Beatty’s motives. He said to himself, That prick will not make me quit. I knew if I quit, my credit would go with me. At other times, he thought, No, it’s just his style, just unnecessary attention to a kind of detail that buries the bigger picture. He continues, “The other side of it would be that sometimes he would make a mistake that was so wrong that when it showed up on screen, he would just laugh hysterically at the idea that he’d been thinking the way he’d been thinking, something that dopey. That’s always endearing. He has a fabulous sense of humor. If he didn’t, he’d be unbearable. You’d have to kill him.”

  WRITER-DIRECTOR Jim Toback would fill the locker room buddy slot vacated by Towne. He wasn’t as good a writer as Towne, didn’t have the range, but he was just as bright, just as grandiose, and like Towne, talked a great movie. He grew up wealthy on the East Side of New York. Toback went to Harvard and graduated magna cum laude. He worked as a journalist, writing on Norman Mailer for Commentary, among others, and shared Mailer’s posture: the tough guy intellectual. He eventually secured a contract to write a book about Cleveland Browns superstar running back and actor Jim Brown. Toback was a compulsive gambler, often putting six-figure sums on the table. He would shift fistfuls of hundreds from his “unlucky” pocket to his “lucky” pocket.

  Like Beatty, Toback had an active mind, knew a lot about a lot of things, was well read, loved Mahler, etc. etc. In short, he was good company, and kept Beatty entertained. Better, Toback was not going to compete with Beatty. If anything, he already had his own reputation as a dedicated womanizer, possibly even more skillful than Beatty, because he needed to be; he had less to work with. The two of them were companions in mischief.

  Fingers was the first film Toback directed. It was based on his own script, starred Harvey Keitel, and was released on March 2, 1978. Pauline Kael gave it a rave. Toback had known Kael slightly, but her review turned the acquaintance into a friendship, cemented in part by their mutual loathing of Andrew Sarris, who had given The Gambler, which Toback wrote, a bad review. “When he walked into a room, she would actually flush,” recalled her friend Richard Albarino. “Like a schoolgirl. Like
she had a crush on him.” (Toback says he never slept with her.)

  Toback ran into Beatty at a party thrown by actress Lucy Saroyan in Beverly Hills. Saroyan drew him toward the actor, saying, “You might not believe it, but this guy gets as many girls as you do.” Beatty replied, “Oh, I would believe it very easily.” Flattered, Toback thought, Boy, does this guy know how to seduce people. He called Beatty at his office the next day and said, “We met at Lucy Saroyan’s party last night, and I have a script that I’d like you to do.”

  “Well, send it over.”

  “I’ll read it to you.”

  “I know how to read. You can send it over.”

  “I know you know how to read, but you’ll only see it if I can read it to you first.”

  “Well, that’s ridiculous.”

  “Well, that’s the way it is.”

  “What have you directed?”

  “I wrote The Gambler and I directed this movie called Fingers.”

  “Let me see Fingers.”

  “Okay, I’ll arrange a screening for you.”

  “Fine. How about tomorrow?”

  “Fine.” For eight days in a row, Beatty canceled the screening. Finally, on the ninth day, Toback told him, “You know, if you don’t want to see it tonight or can’t see it tonight, then let’s just forget this and I’ll just move on, because this has gone on too long.”

  “I’ll see it.” That night Toback showed it to him and Ali MacGraw. After the movie ended, Beatty paced around the screening room, excited. According to Toback, he asked, rhetorically, “Do you know how good this movie is?”

  “Of course I know how good it is.”

  “How did you get Keitel to do these things?”

  “It wasn’t difficult. He’s a bold actor.”