Some of Hart’s advisers believed that there was a chance that Hart might find his way onto the ticket as Mondale’s running mate. But such belief was short-lived. Recalls Caddell, Democratic Party activist Miles Rubin handed him Gail Sheehy’s piece about Marilyn Young-bird on the shuttle going to New York at seven in the morning. “He said, ‘I want you to read this as if you were Walter Mondale and thinking about picking Gary for vice president.’ That’s when I knew there wasn’t a prayer that Gary would be vice president.”
IN FEBRUARY 1984, Beatty met Isabelle Adjani in Paris, a stunning, dark-haired French Algerian actress with full, sensual lips. In 1976, at the tender age of twenty-one, she had been nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for François Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H (1975). By the time she met Beatty, she was twenty-nine, he was just about to turn forty-seven. Despite their disparate backgrounds, they shared some common ground. Both were on the political left. And like Beatty, she had a “dark and depressive” father.
Beatty put her in Ishtar, where she played a fiery revolutionary. Charles Grodin, who had appeared in Heaven Can Wait and was an old friend of May’s, played a CIA agent. Paul Sylbert designed the production. Composer Paul Williams had the unenviable job of writing bad—but not so bad that audiences would run for the exits—songs for the luckless performers, Lyle Rogers (Beatty) and Chuck Clarke (Hoffman). “I began meeting with Warren and Elaine at his place in L.A., and I couldn’t get him to commit that I had the job,” said Williams. “For the longest time, he was trying to get Elaine to say what she wanted. I’d write songs, and she would kind of go, ‘I don’t know.’”
Beatty’s romance with the French Algerian beauty by no means put a crimp in his social life. Fran Drescher, star of TV’s The Nanny (1993), was blessed with a world-class body and a winning smile. She read for a small part as the wife Clarke leaves behind when he goes off to Morocco. At the audition, Beatty read with her. Her “heart was fibrillating with excitement,” especially when he walked her to the elevator, told her, “I think you’re a tremendous talent,” and invited her and her husband to dinner. She was convinced they’d made a “cosmic connection.” When he saw her next, he said, “I haven’t stopped thinking about you.” She observed that “Warren was the most powerful and openly aggressive man I’d ever met.” Then he offered to introduce her to Adjani, saying, “We were both talking about you while lying in bed last night.” Adjani told her, “You are very beautiful.” But it wasn’t until Beatty added, “We were both hoping you would like to join us for dinner this evening, just the three of us,” that the flashbulb went off: “I sure as hell knew a ménage à troiserino when I saw one,” she thought. Drescher declined. Eventually, her part was cut, and she didn’t see or hear from Beatty for many years. One day, a friend of hers who happened to sit next to him and Annette Bening at a fund-raiser and dropped her name, told her he said, “We love her, she’s so funny on The Nanny. We lie in bed and watch her all the time.” Drescher reflected, “Annette and Warren lying in bed, speaking of me.… Boy, sometimes things sure do come full circle.”
DeLauné Michel was a slender, leggy eighteen-year-old with the bone structure of a model who was working at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, and indeed doing some modeling. (Michel would later become a novelist.) “She was the hatcheck girl,” Beatty recalls. “Beautiful.” On a Saturday night in late August 1985, subbing for the hostess and wearing a polyester green Nehru jacket, she brought a telephone over to his table, which he was sharing with Adjani and another woman, also striking. Michel recognized him right away, having seen Heaven Can Wait with her grandmother in grade school. On her way back to her post, she imagined he had given her a look, but then thought to herself, Oh, good lord, come on, he’s with Isabelle Adjani, for God’s sake, she was on the cover of Time, and I’m wearing this horrible restaurant uniform. No one is looking at you. But she was wrong. The following Saturday, on cloakroom duty, she was whiling away the time reading The New Yorker when he appeared before her and introduced himself. Having already done his homework, interrogating the mâitre d’ about her, he asked, “Is your name DeLauné?”
“Yes.”
“Are you an actress?”
“No.”
“What are you then, besides beautiful?”
“A model, or trying to be.”
“You’re from Louisiana?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like to help you. Call me. I’m at the Ritz-Carlton. On Central Park South.”
“What’s your room number?”
“Just say my name. They’ll be able to find me.”
He turned and walked into the men’s room. He didn’t really have to go, was just nervous, and he thought to himself, Fuck, now what do I do? He washed his hands and gave the attendant a dollar. On his way out, he regretted not getting her number, wondered if she would call him.
But she did, and a few days later, Michel found herself in his suite. Dressed casually in jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers, he grilled her about her background, ascertained that she came from a literary family in New Orleans. Andre Dubus was her uncle, and James Lee Burke is her cousin. Her father, whom she worshipped, had abandoned her and her sister after he divorced their mother some years earlier. Enclosing her in the bubble of his attention, Beatty said, “Do you know how many beautiful women I’ve seen? You are—purrfect.” Then, changing gears, he added, “You’re the daughter I never had.” She recalls, “This was right before we had sex for two hours. I did not find it odd that he would say that. That was the basis of our relationship. It was a father-daughter relationship. To me that was how he expressed his love, and he wasn’t literally my father, so it wasn’t really incest, but what he was clearly saying was, he didn’t have a daughter. I at that moment did not for all intents and purposes have a father, and I needed one. He just gave me a level of security that I did not have. I found someone incredibly powerful, incredibly intelligent, incredibly gifted, and to me, nothing but supportive and kind. He steered me through very difficult years. Warren never made a promise to me that he didn’t keep. He was an absolute rock.”
In the course of their lovemaking, he muttered, “I love you.” She recalls, “He was very uncomfortable saying ‘I love you.’ He literally had a hard time getting the words out. He kind of coughed through it. But he said it immediately when I met him, which made sense to me because I did feel a connection with him that was not like one that I’ve had with other people. I felt like he had a piece that fit perfectly into the part of the puzzle that I had, and vice versa. Not sexually, but psychically. He did have all those women in his life, and yet for some reason none of them fitted that shape, and for some reason, I did. Maybe part of it was my extreme naïveté, a kind of innocence which he saw, and a common Southern background.”
AIDS was in the air, but for heterosexuals, it wasn’t yet a reality, and Beatty didn’t use condoms. Or at least not always. He had been at a New Year’s Eve party the year before. When the clock struck midnight, suddenly his voice was heard above the general merriment—the smooching and carousing—saying, “How do we know AIDS is a homosexual disease? Do you know any other homosexual diseases?” Everyone just froze.
After that first time, Beatty declined to have sex with her again. She understood that somehow her relationship with him wasn’t about that. They talked and talked, sometimes in person, often on the phone. She learned to call him in the morning and late at night, when he seemed softer to her, more vulnerable. She had the impression that as the day progressed, he became tougher, more guarded. She also understood that it was a clandestine relationship. She never met any of his friends with the exception of Jack Nicholson. Beatty always gave her a $100 bill to cover her cab fare home. So far as her modeling career was concerned, he promised to help her, and was as good as his word. She says he introduced her to Frances Grill, who ran a modeling agency called Click, walking her pictures down to the Click office in the Carnegie Hall building. She went to Milan to work. When he talked t
o her long-distance, his preternaturally alert phone antennae sensed that she had picked up some bad habits. He asked her repeatedly, “Have you been smoking?” “Have you been doing drugs?” She recalls, “He would always say to me at the end of every phone call, ‘Don’t do drugs. Read books.’” (Beatty has no recollection of her modeling, says she was an actress.)
There was a proprietary element to the relationship, the way he would say, “Get over here!” or demand to know if she loved him, or promise her that “I’m going to be in your life for a very long time.” Later he would encourage her to see other men, but when she did, he made fun of them and wanted to know all about the particulars of the sex they were having, or asked, “Do you love me more than him?” It was all on his terms, which they both knew, even if it was hard for her to accept. She knew he was seeing many other women, but tried not to think about it.
One day she was in his suite looking at glossies of Ishtar’s Moroccan locations when the phone rang and a young girl came up. She was pretty, of course. Wondering why the other girl was there, intruding on their idyll, she comforted herself with the thought, He loves me. Some time passed, and then he got up and said, “Honey—” She thought, Thank God, he’s finally making her leave. Instead, he took Michel’s hand, saying, “I’ll walk you down.” Waiting for the elevator, he covered her face and hands with kisses, but she shoved him away, snapping, “Stop it.”
“Are you mad at me?” he asked, trying to kiss her again.
“Quit it. What is your problem? Haven’t I told you no?” The elevator descended to the lobby. They found themselves amidst a corps of soberly uniformed attendants, the Ritz-Carlton’s finest. “I thought you loved me!” she shrieked.
“Come on. We’re getting you a cab,” was his only reply, his face reddening. She pummeled him with her fists, until he got her into a taxi. As it whisked her off, he said, “I’ll call you in the morning.”
Michel got over it. She realized that although he was not hers exclusively, although they weren’t even having sex, he gave her his most important gift: phone access, night or day, New York, L.A., wherever. “I could call him, would call him, did call him every day, anytime, and he always took my phone calls. He never did not come to the phone. He would immediately say, ‘Where are you? How are you?’” But one day, when she got him on the phone, he told her he was leaving for Morocco, where long-distance phone service was dubious at best.
9
FATAL ATTRACTION
How Elaine May taught Beatty that no good deed goes unpunished, while he watched Gary Hart end up a footnote to history instead of president.
“Warren and Elaine—you couldn’t get closer than those two—suddenly it was like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But no shouting. It was worse than shouting. They stopped talking to each other. Ice.”
—Dustin Hoffman
AT THE TIME Ishtar began shooting toward the end of October 1985, Morocco was not the most hospitable location for a major Hollywood production, especially one that featured a rich Jewish movie star. On October 1, Israeli war planes had bombed the headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Front in nearby Tunis. A week later, most likely in reprisal, six PLF hijackers seized a cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, and dumped Leon Klinghoffer, a Jewish wheelchair-bound passenger, overboard into the warm waters of the Mediterranean. To make matters worse, the Moroccan government was involved in a protracted struggle with guerrillas of the Polisario Front on its southwestern border with Mauritania. According to one source, “We had been out looking for locations when this extremely agitated Moroccan general came rushing up. ‘You have to wait for the minesweeper!’ he shouted. ‘There are mines all around here. You could lose a leg.’ We had been walking for three days. Everyone went white.”
The air was alive with frightening rumors. “We heard there were armed Palestinians headed our way,” recalls Paul Sylbert. “There we were with Dustin, who sort of stuck out.” Hoffman feared that he and his family were prime kidnap targets. Says associate producer Nigel Wooll, who had worked on Reds, “Dustin was very nervous, very, very nervous. He agreed, I think, to come over because the King of Morocco gave him his own personal bodyguard.” (Each of the principals, Hoffman, Beatty, and May, were assigned bodyguards.)
Associate editor Billy Scharf, who had also worked on Reds, flew into Casablanca on his way down to the location near Laayoune on the Atlantic ocean in southwestern Morocco, close to the site of the fighting. The entire area was a military zone, and the atmosphere was tense. He had to board a small turboprop for the flight south and bring with him some baggage destined for the production, namely, large, sealed wooden crates marked “Warren Beatty” and “Dustin Hoffman.” Recalls Scharf, “I was standing on the tarmac, [surrounded by] police with machine guns, going ‘They have to be opened, they have to be opened, you can’t leave.’ I was scared—praying to their God and my God. I didn’t want to have to show if I was circumcised or not. I wanted to take a dump in my pants.”
The stars, along with the rest of the above-the-line talent, were staying at the nice hotel in Laayoune. Continues Scharf, “There was a swimming pool in the back, Dustin was there with his snorkel, complaining, ‘The snorkel doesn’t fit,’ like a little kid. I took the opportunity to introduce myself, ‘Hi, I’m Billy Scharf, we haven’t met, but I have to ask you, I just flew in with these crates for you, I hope there was something important in them, because I had machine guns pointed at me. Can I ask you what was in them?’ ‘Yeah, my matzoh!’”
Shooting in Morocco presented a raft of problems. Reports another source, “The Moroccans were extremely cooperative. But they were not set up to do a movie. It’s a very poor country. When we had a casting call for two hundred extras, eight thousand people showed up. When we would say, ‘I’ve got to have thirty camels at seven o’clock tomorrow morning,’ they would say, ‘No problem. You can have three hundred.’ Then comes seven o’clock the next morning and there are no camels.”
Ah, the camels. One saga instantly became the stuff of Hollywood legend: the hunt for the blind camel—actually, a blue-eyed camel that registered blind on film. Or blue-eyed “camels”—they figured they needed four, in case one or more broke a leg. The first stop was Marrakech, the camel market, where the animal trainer, Corky Randall, and his assistant found just the right camel, for about $700. But being shrewd traders, they didn’t want to buy the first camel they laid eyes on; they thought they could do better. Also, they had to show a photo of the camel to May, who needed choices, lest she make up her mind too easily. So they told the camel trader, “Thanks a lot, we’ll get back to you.” But, as it turned out, blue-eyed camels were a rarity. Search as they might, none of the subsequent camels they came across measured up to the first. As David Blum put it in New York magazine, “The humps would be too large or too small. The facial hair would be beige or brown. It was always something.” Finally, they gave up, went back to the first dealership to buy the perfect camel. “Remember us? We’d like to buy that camel of yours that we looked at the other day.”
“Sorry,” the dealer replied. “We ate it.”
Even before production was slated to begin in Morocco, tensions developed between Beatty and May. “In New York, before we left, we were scouting nightclubs,” remembers Sylbert. “She didn’t know that world, hadn’t been to a lot of these places. But she pretended she had. She went, ‘Oh, I remember that, blah, blah… ’ and said something that revealed she had never been there. She was faking it. Warren was both half amused and shocked. He turned around to me, and he said, ‘She’s a fraud!’ It was a striking remark, coming from him. He never says anything like that.” Sylbert got the impression that she was afraid that she was in over her head.
In the Sahara desert, May was very much a fish out of water. She must have looked around her and, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, thought, “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” or, in her case, Manhattan. As things would turn out, the blind camel, armed Palestinians, and the Polisario Front would be
the least of her problems. May would be her own worst enemy. She wasn’t cut out for the role of Lawrence of Arabia. Like Pauline Kael, she was allergic to the sun, swathed herself head to foot in gauzy veils, wore big hats and sunglasses, protected herself with parasols, and took shelter under tents whenever possible. She suffered from toothaches throughout much of the shoot, but refused to use a Moroccan dentist on principle, as if only a New York dentist would do.
From the first, dunes were a problem. Sylbert was the designated dune guy. He says, “I listened to nothing but talk about dunes.” Before they left for Morocco, he looked at dunes in Southern California and Idaho. None of them would do. “It was hopeless,” he recalls. “Nobody was satisfied. They kept talking about Morocco.”
Once they set foot in Morocco, Sylbert embarked on a tour of the country looking for the perfect dunes. He finally found them—he thought—near Laayoune. “There were these great coastal deserts,” he recalls. “Perfect. But Elaine was not prepared to use them. With all the talk of dunes, her idea of the desert was Brighton Beach. Whenever she was faced with a decision and she didn’t know what to do, she would stall, and I could see that she was stalling now. There’s a story about a costume designer, Edith Head or Diana Vreeland, working with a famous actress, and saying to the actress, ‘You’d look wonderful in yellow,’ and the actress said, ‘I hate yellow,’ whereupon Head or Vreeland replied, ‘Who said anything about yellow?’ On the drive back from seeing the fabulous dunes—me, Warren, and some others, we knew we had found our location—she suddenly said, ‘Dunes? Who said anything about dunes?’ All flushed, puffed up like an infant who’s about to wail, ‘What’s all this about dunes? I want flat!’”
Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America Page 44
