Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

  Eventually, MacLeod plea-bargained his way onto probation—he admitted to one charge of reckless endangerment of a minor, referred to in the press as “sodomy”—and returned to the production. Ultimately, MacLeod got a producer’s credit, and Beatty took executive producer. The star remained close to Toback, but Brown felt that others who worked on that production were forever stigmatized in Beatty’s mind by the unhappy events with which it was associated. “I had hoped to work with Warren again, but he left town,” Brown says. “It seemed to leave a bad taste in his mouth.” He appeared to abandon his plans to make pictures in New York, if he ever had any in the first place.

  INITIALLY, BEATTY allotted six and a half months for the postproduction of Ishtar, aiming for a release date of Thanksgiving, possibly Christmas 1986, but it was ten months before it was locked. As long as McElwaine was still in place, Beatty did his best to satisfy Columbia. Once Beatty’s friend was replaced by his enemy, Beatty was not about to miss an opportunity to punish Puttnam for his attacks on Reds. “Warren’s feeling was that since we no longer have the pressure to do it for Guy, let’s let her [May] do it the way she wants,” Fields continued. Letting May out of the bottle had the added advantage of running up postproduction costs and interest on the loans Columbia had undertaken to finance the picture, each of which would put the new chairman in the hole.

  Puttnam believed that once production had ended, the bleeding would stop. “I was staggered by the postproduction costs that kept coming in,” he said. Beatty reportedly told one Columbia executive, “Who gives a shit what Puttnam thinks. I certainly don’t. Just tell the asshole to keep paying the bills.”

  Ishtar missed its Christmas release date. Beatty’s father had been diagnosed with leukemia. The star flew back and forth between New York and Virginia to see him. His relationship with him had always been strained. MacLaine describes both parents as withholding and distant, to one degree or another, and she felt starved for emotional connections. To her, Ira Beaty was “a stern man with light blue eyes full of suspicion, the censor of all he surveyed.… He sat in judgment on our actions and behavior.… the fear of his own feelings was sometimes too painful to witness.” She added, “My dad internalized most of his tumultuous emotions and suppressed them with liquor.”

  Most of the important things between Beatty and his father remained unsaid, which gave added poignancy to the small things. Toward the end, his father told him, “Shaving gel works better than shaving cream.”

  “What?”

  “Shaving gel. You don’t get as many nicks.”

  Later, the actor recalled, “He was right. I use shaving gel, and every time I use it, I think of my father.”

  Still, some things came out. The old man was concerned about the spiritual void he observed in his son, but Shirley MacLaine’s New Age chatter bothered him as well. Beatty recalled, “I remember my father sitting on the side of the bed, his feet were kind of dangling, and he said to me, ‘Warren, what do you think about these ideas of Shirley’s?’ I said, ‘I don’t know what to think of them.’ He said, ‘I just don’t think I want to do what I have to do to find out.’”

  MacLaine recalled, “Before my father died, I talked to him a lot about his own feelings of failure, and asked if he could accept that Warren’s success and mine were also his. In the end, I think he did see things that way, that maybe he had come into the world to help us and not himself.”

  The actor was at his bedside when Ira Owens Beaty died at Johns Hopkins Medical Center on January 15, 1987, four days shy of his eighty-seventh birthday. Beatty complained that Adjani couldn’t understand why he was so upset. She behaved, he said, as if the Chinese food hadn’t been delivered. The funeral was held in Arlington on January 19. Afterward, the actor drove back to New York. On the way he stopped in Philadelphia to pick up Joyce Hyser, with whom he would have a year-and-a-half relationship. Then twenty-nine, Hyser was smart and articulate, very much her own person, and a political junkie like him. She was a struggling actress who had been with Bruce Springsteen for five years, and then David Geffen. She was also close to Jack Nicholson. With dark brown hair, hazel eyes, chiseled features, and an athletic, perfectly proportioned body, she looked a little like Natalie Wood, which apparently struck a chord with Beatty. He had been pursuing her for some time, pestering her girlfriends, most of whom he had gone out with, to introduce her to him. One of them finally did. Initially, Hyser was cold to Beatty, who was then nearly twenty years older than she was. “I had zero interest in him,” she recalls. “To be honest, it was a joke. I made fun of him. At one point, I had a girlfriend over, and I put him on the speaker phone. I was really nasty, but the idea that I was not falling at his feet just intrigued him more.”

  When he arrived in Philadelphia, Hyser was visiting her parents. He took the entire family out to dinner. They were nonplussed. “He was Warren Beatty!” she explains. “It felt weird. His father had just died. He seemed really sad. But he could not have been more charming. He was open, talking about his dad to these people who were strangers. He had just spent a lot of time with Dustin and his family. He was forty-nine, and starting to get that sense that it was time for him to settle down. The reason he hadn’t gotten married was, he grew up in a Southern, conservative family, and to him getting married meant, that’s it, you never sleep with anyone else again but your wife. In his head, he had to know that that was going to be okay. It was on that night that I saw him in a more positive light. He became someone entirely different, not this crazy dude who had been chasing me for a year. His attraction to me was that I had a strong sense of family myself, and I had a difficult relationship with my father. We had that in common.”

  Driving through the dark up to New York, Beatty talked about him nonstop. “Parents help to create who we are, either through what they give us or what they don’t give us, and in his case it was more about what he didn’t give him,” Hyser continues. “I don’t think he knew what to do with his feelings. He seemed totally lost. Warren admired his dad. But I had the sense that his father did not approve of him.” MacLaine recalls her mother saying her father had “visited” her soon after his death. “It wasn’t entirely comforting, she said, because she wanted to be free of him and felt that even after death he was observing her.” Hyser continues, “It was hard for him to please his dad, he never felt that [his dad] was proud of him or even knew him. Warren would never say he felt inadequate, but there was something unattainable there, a distance, a disconnect, a gap that he was trying to fill. He tried to make up for it in his work, which is why I believe he’s such a perfectionist.”

  When they got back to the Ritz-Carlton in New York, he invited her up, asked if she would stay over. She declined, said, “I’m really enjoying getting to know you, but I just broke up with somebody, and I’m not going to suddenly go from him to you.” He persisted, and again she declined, saying, “I told you, No. This is boring.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” She recalls, “He was stunned.”

  When Hyser returned to L.A., Beatty followed. She moved out of her boyfriend’s house and in with a girlfriend who was in the middle of a decade-and-a-half-long relationship with Bob Dylan. Dylan lived near Beatty, off Mulholland. Wooing Hyser, Beatty was a frequent visitor. He loved Dylan, said he made him feel “normal.” Beatty was so secretive that Dylan thought he was a Mason.

  Hyser, on the other hand, did get Beatty, and fell in love. Up to that point, she was the only woman with whom he would have a lengthy relationship who hadn’t won an Oscar or wasn’t otherwise famous in her own right. Indeed, she wasn’t quite sure why he was with her. But she understood that “compared to his other girlfriends, he would say, I was ‘a day at the beach.’ Everyone else is nuts.” But days at the beach can get boring, and he asked her to do a threesome. “He said to me, ‘I bet you’re a woman who never slept with another woman, because you love your mother.’ I said, ‘Yeah, and I’m not going to be that person.’ He wasn’t trying to force me
into it, and he didn’t pursue it.”

  Hyser too recognized that he found trust and openness difficult. “Warren is a contained individual,” she says. “He’s got this other self standing over him saying, ‘It’s okay to do this, it’s not okay to do that.’ He judges himself 24/7. His relationship with women is a place where he lets go and doesn’t judge himself, especially with women he’s not that close to, which is one of the reasons he finds relationships where he is intimate more difficult. He’s pretty cynical.” If he were asked, “What makes you happy?” he’d be likely to parry the question with another question: “What is happiness?” Perhaps, she continues, he finds “happiness when he can reach a place of true intimacy with somebody—not necessarily sexually—when he feels like he can be himself, which I don’t think happens a lot for him.”

  Beatty wouldn’t do anything for his fiftieth birthday “except get upset about people who didn’t call him,” Hyser remembers. “Like Diane would never call him for his birthday. He was hurt.” (He did, however, make a dramatic entrance to someone’s else’s birthday party, around the same time as his, exclaiming, “I’m here for my birthday boff!”) He and Hyser went out to dinner with his attorney, Bert Fields, one of the few people Beatty admired for his mind and acumen. Hyser gave him a German shepherd puppy.

  Hyser was Jewish. She continues, “He loved that I was Jewish, and that I wasn’t a self-loathing Jew, because he said that all the Jews he knew in Hollywood were self-loathing Jews.” Beatty prided himself on his command of Yiddish, especially gross, politically incorrect sexual and racial slurs that he used to shock his Jewish friends. Speaking of an actress who wasn’t right for a role, he’d say, “She’s too pretty, I want her to be more of a mieskeit,” that is, homely. Hyser goes on, “He acted more Jewish than I did. He’s not a whiner, but he’s got the guilt, real Jewish guilt. I don’t know where that comes from.” She tried to make him more hip, bought his clothes for him and convinced him not to wear his pants so high.

  When Beatty introduced her to his friends, he often referred to her as “Springsteen’s former girlfriend.” He seemed inordinately proud of her. He’d say, “Look at her, isn’t she just the greatest?” Hyser recalls, “He seemed genuinely taken with everything I said or did. I had this guy who was worshipping the ground I walked on, and it was Warren Beatty. It was really great—for a while.”

  FOR THE most part, Beatty and Hoffman stayed away from the editing room, letting May have her way with the footage. They seemed unaware that the new release date, late spring 1987, was bearing down on them. Somewhat belatedly, they appeared to remember that each of them had say over the final cut, and that if they wished to exercise this right, they needed to get started on their own versions of the film, since May was well advanced with hers, nearly ready to mix her sound. Finally, the day of reckoning came when Hoffman was informed that, apropos a particular scene, “If you don’t get this in today, it won’t be in the cut anyway.”

  “Whaddya tawkin’ about?”

  “Dustin, the negative’s being cut next week.”

  “What? I’m going down the hall, I’m tawkin’ to Warren!” Hoffman grabbed Beatty, cried, “Waaarren, they’ve been bullshittin’ us, man, they’ve been flimflammin’ us.”

  “What do you mean?” Beatty asked him. Hoffman told him, and he became extremely agitated. Beatty has large hands, with long fingers. When he wants to make a point with particular emphasis, as he did then with May, reading her the riot act in a loud voice, he stuck his finger right in her face, almost touching her nose. Without speaking a syllable, May encircled his finger with her thumb and forefinger, moving them rapidly back and forth over his finger, as if to masturbate him. His face turned deep red, and he started to laugh. Says someone who was there, “Elaine’s so smart. She knew just how to get to him. Which allowed her to disregard what he said.”

  May was working with Rotter; Beatty and Hoffman began to edit with Scharf, Hoffman during the day, Beatty at night. Every morning, Hoffman would ask, “What did Warren do to my scene last night?” Every night, Beatty would say, “Lemme see what Dustin did to my scene today.” According to the L.A. Times, there were three separate teams of editors working around the clock and being paid double time, and the even more expensive golden time (two-and-a-half time). The differences between the cuts weren’t dramatic; they essentially boiled down to the distribution of close-ups, like, Is the camera on Dustin’s hands playing the piano, or on Warren’s face as he grabs the mike?

  A few of the alternative versions were tested with audiences. But there came a day when Hoffman learned that one of his cuts would not be tested. “The idea was there was going to be a screening where all three of them were played for an audience, one after another, to see which one got the best response,” recalls sound mixer Tom Fleischman. “I was there on a Saturday mixing Dustin’s version of the scene, when he got the word that it wasn’t going to be shown at the screening. Somehow, Elaine weaseled out of it. Dustin flipped out, just walked out of the mix. Basically walked away from the whole thing. His assistant was trying to stop him from going down in the elevator, and he was so furious he pushed her aside and left her in tears.”

  The atmosphere in the editing room was tense. “Warren and Elaine had a huge fight,” Hyser recalls. “He felt that she screwed him.” Finally, according to one source, Bert Fields was invited into the cutting room to mediate among his three final cut clients in an all-night meeting. “Bert Fields had final cut,” he says. “It’s a fact.” Along with the editors, the principals gathered in front of the KEM editing console. Fields chaired the meeting, switching back and forth among cuts. An assistant would put up one version, usually May’s, and then Fields would ask, “Anybody have a problem with this scene? We’ll run it until somebody has a problem.” Eventually, one of the three players would say something like, “That’s not the version I want to show.” Fields would reply, “Let’s see yours.” One of the assistants took notes that read like, “We’ll use Dustin’s version of this scene, we’ll use Warren’s version of that scene…” (According to Beatty, this account is “bullshit.” He says he doesn’t remember Fields ever in the editing room.)

  Some of the notes were not honored in practice. According to the source, when Beatty asked what one of the notes said, claiming he couldn’t read the handwriting, he was told, “It says, ‘Use Dustin’s close-up version.’” But he still insisted, “I can’t read that! I don’t see that,” meaning he didn’t want to see it, so that he was free to do what he wanted.

  According to Phillip Schopper, “Warren kept trying to do things mostly with Isabelle’s scenes, because she was his girlfriend. Since the relationship had become a bad one, Warren was trying to be as generous to her as could be. He was overcompensating. They fought and they fought, Warren and Elaine, things being thrown up to Bert—it was like a bake-off—and Bert going with Warren.”

  But the principals knew they had to make the process work, no matter how tense the relationships had been on the set. They were elaborately polite with one another. It was as if they all knew there was too little time left to whack away at one another. The goal was not necessarily coming up with the best cut, but rather the best cut they could all agree on.

  From their point of view, the process was working. At one point, Hoffman called his wife, Lisa, and spritzed, “We’re doing great work here!” Beatty says the cut at which they arrived was basically May’s. According to Schopper, “Elaine finally said, ‘You have to lose some of the battles to maintain the whole,’ but she won her way for the most part.” When the sun came up, Fields said something like, “We have a movie!” But the editors were scandalized. Rotter was a quiet man, not given to emotional outbursts, but he exploded, yelling, “We don’t have anything. All we have is a lot of paper. How do you know any of this stuff works?” (Rotter refused to comment.) Says the source who has knowledge of what went on in the room, “It was sad. We were just dumbfounded that these intelligent people could have ever let this
occur. This was not the way you make movies. Each change affects everything else. The movie has to be screened in its totality several times.”

  The editors derisively referred to the final version as the “Bert Fields cut.”

  AT THE same time that postproduction on Ishtar was winding down, Beatty had a second drama on his hands, considerably more riveting. Like Ishtar, it played out as a farce, although it would have grave implications for the direction of the country. On April 13, 1987, five weeks before Ishtar was due to be released, Senator Gary Hart announced at a press conference in Denver that he would run for president in 1988. This time around, he had none of the encumbrances he had struggled to overcome in 1984. True, he had lost to Mondale, but not by much. He enjoyed the name recognition he had lacked then; he had accumulated a campaign kitty of $2.1 million; and he had addressed the “Where’s the beef” issue by writing a book about reforming the military. In March 1987, the ABC/Washington Post preference poll put Hart ahead in the contest for the Democratic nomination 46 percent to 14 percent for Jesse Jackson, his nearest competitor. No other Democratic hopeful cracked 4 percent. With Ted Kennedy out of the picture—he disavowed any intention of running in December 1985—the candidacy was Hart’s for the taking. After nearly two terms of Reaganomics that left staggering trade and budget deficits, high unemployment, and the so-called Reagan recession, Hart just had to avoid mistakes of his own making. According to another national poll, he would defeat whomever the Republicans put up against him, George Bush or Bob Dole. With Hart so close to the presidency, and Beatty so close to Hart, the actor was on the verge of unprecedented access to the beating heart of the American political system. Short of winning the presidency himself, which was not in the cards, Hart was the next best thing.

  But almost immediately, the rumors about Hart’s extramarital affairs, which had bubbled under the surface of his last campaign, boiled over, and along with them, the issue of his relationship with Beatty. Among Hart staffers, “there was a widespread view that a little Warren Beatty went a long way,” says political adviser Bill Bradley. Bradley hadn’t seen any reason for Hart to shun Beatty’s hospitality during the 1984 campaign, but now he changed his mind. He recalls, “There was an item in Parade magazine that one of my brothers-in-law saw, a doctor who gave money to Hart—one paragraph, but read by millions of people. He called me up, and asked, ‘What’s he doing there at that house with Warren Beatty?’ Because Warren had created this whole mystique about himself, that he had hot and cold running starlets and centerfolds in his Jacuzzi on Mulholland Drive. If you put the front-runner for president of the United States, who’s an attractive guy known to have a roving eye, in that Jacuzzi, the imagination runs wild.”