Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

  “What do you mean?”

  “About me playing this character?” Beatty claims that that had not occurred to him, but he immediately replied, “I certainly am,” recalling that Pacino had done Brecht’s eponymous gangster cum Hitler in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui off-Broadway. He told Pacino, “Nobody’s ever seen it. I want you to take that character and just bring it to Dick Tracy.” Which is what he did.

  But there remained the two main female roles: Tess Trueheart, his long-suffering girlfriend whom he can’t bring himself to either marry or leave, and Breathless Mahoney, the strip’s slinky femme fatale, who tries her best to get Tracy into bed. For Tess, Beatty’s interest had been piqued by Annette Bening, who at the time had done little more than an indifferent John Candy comedy, The Great Outdoors, although she had made a splash on the stage in Coastal Disturbances in 1987. They made arrangements to meet, but she bowed out. He settled on Sean Young, even though her name was synonymous with trouble. She was reputed to be temperamental and had been involved in an ugly, protracted, and highly publicized feud with James Woods, in the course of which she was accused of leaving a disfigured doll at his front door. (Woods accused her of conducting a “jihad of terror” against him. But both he and she denied that she superglued his penis to his leg, a story making the rounds at the time.) Everyone advised Beatty against hiring her, but he ignored them and did so anyway.

  Beatty asked Isabelle Adjani to do Breathless, but she passed. He offered it to Faye Dunaway, but she also declined. After months of noodling, Beatty still did not have his Breathless.

  NOT ONLY was Beatty now producing, directing, and starring in Dick Tracy, he was trying to write—or rewrite—it himself, possibly working off the original script by Jim Cash and Jack Epps, possibly a later draft by someone else. Beatty’s MO had always been to find a writer to work with. But his relationship with writers was prickly. They resented his claims to co-writing credit. And by this time he had used up several of the best ones. Bo Goldman suspected that Robert Towne, who was writing and directing Tequila Sunrise, turned the actor down. Buck Henry didn’t appear eager to work with him again, and his relationship with Elaine May was tense.

  Around Thanksgiving 1987, Goldman got a call from his agent, Jeff Berg, head of International Creative Management (ICM). Goldman had started his career writing for the theater, without much to show for it, but he had had considerably better luck in Hollywood, where he started with a bang, winning an Oscar for his first script, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), and had gone on to make a glittering name for himself with a series of literate and compelling scripts: The Rose (1979), Melvin and Howard (1980), and Shoot the Moon (1982), which starred Diane Keaton. He won another Oscar for Melvin and Howard, and in the future would be nominated again for Scent of a Woman (1992). He had also worked for Robert Redford.

  Now Goldman was trying to find financing for his adaptation of Susan Minot’s novel Monkeys, which he intended to direct, but was getting nowhere. Berg told him, “Warren Beatty is up there at his house, doodling around, trying to do this script of Dick Tracy on his own, he’s having some problems, so why don’t you call him.” Goldman had brought a touch of East Coast snobbery with him when he arrived in L.A. in the early 1970s, and prided himself on being unimpressed by movie stars. He didn’t really know Beatty. He recalled once going to the movies with actor George Furth and a very young Carrie Fisher, who dropped Beatty’s name. Goldman asked, “Warren who?” They replied, in one voice, something like, “Warren Beatty, ‘the Pro.’” He recalls, “I suddenly realized he was some sort of high priest. His name was spoken in whispers.”

  Goldman had actually met Beatty only once, on a lovely spring day in 1981 in New York, and hadn’t particularly liked him. Shoot the Moon was in post, and the writer had met Keaton for lunch. Afterward, Keaton cabbed over to the Carlyle to meet Beatty, and Goldman accompanied her. Goldman was most impressed by Beatty’s hygiene. He looked like he’d just emerged from the shower, pink and well scrubbed. The star was well into editing Reds and complained, “All I do is sit in the cutting room and eat pastrami sandwiches. I’m sick of New York.” But, Goldman continues, “He was chilly and distant with me, I thought because Diane was fond of me. I got the feeling he was thinking, What’s so great about this guy?”

  Subsequently, Goldman blamed Beatty for ruining the prospects of Shoot the Moon. “It was ready for release in October of 1981,” he continues. “But Keaton was contractually prohibited from releasing another movie in the same calendar year as Reds. So we had to release Shoot the Moon in January 1982, right after New Year’s, the worst possible time for a tough movie like this. The Alans—director Alan Parker and producer Alan Marshall—begged Beatty to release her from the obligation. His answer was, ‘Nope, nope, nope.’ It died as a result of the release date he had screwed us on.”

  So when Berg made his suggestion, Goldman demurred, thought to himself, I’ve never liked funnies, I don’t know from Dick Tracy. He talked it over with his friends. “Everybody warned me,” he continues. “Warren at that time was kind of an aging glamour boy. People would say to me, ‘How the fuck could you work for him?’ He had a reputation for being controlling, making people jump through hoops. They said, ‘He’s not for you, Bo.’” But Berg pressed him. The writer reflected on his life: his six children, his stalled attempt to launch Monkeys, and his cramped one-bedroom apartment in a funky part of Hollywood he rented while he was there working. The fact was, he needed the money. Goldman drove up to the house on Bad Boy Drive for a meeting.

  “Warren was sitting up there in his home with his thumb up his ass, trying to move the script ahead,” he recalls. It was a crisp fall day, a chill was in the air, and Goldman marveled at the view of the Valley out the big picture window in the living room. Beatty took him for a stroll around the grounds. When the subject of Keaton came up, he said, “Let me show you what I built.” Walking toward Mulholland, they crossed the lawn. Pointing to a Jacuzzi half hidden by a hedge, Beatty said, “I built this for Diane. She’s shy. I wanted her to be able to bathe without embarrassment.” Goldman was impressed, thought to himself, This is a guy capable of very deep feeling.

  Beatty worked in the kitchen perched on an uncomfortable bar stool at a waist-high butcher block table picking at leftover turkey cooked by Joyce Hyser, who was still living at the house. He pitched the project. Goldman recalls, “He told me, ‘I think we’ll get Pacino to play Big Boy, maybe Madonna to play Breathless, I have Vittorio, I have Milena,’ all these first-rank people, but there was no script. It was in shambles.” Still, Goldman understood the appeal of the material for the star. “People have always told Warren that he could have been a detective. He’s always asking, ‘Where were you? What did you do?’ There’s something lonely about comic strip characters trapped in that box. Warren was a very isolated man. By his own choosing, of course. And the whole comic strip is such a control thing. First this panel, and now that panel. Warren once told me he doesn’t like to travel much, because when you travel, you fall into other people’s hands. The air traffic controller says, ‘Okay, we’re bringing you in on runway 1.’ He wants that to be his decision.”

  At that time, Goldman was making about $1 million a picture, but Beatty offered him half that, and he took it, as so often happened, because he wanted to work with him. The screenwriter got a modest advance, about $5,000. Goldman continues, “I couldn’t get my expenses out of him, stingy fuck that he is. He hates to part with a penny. His attitude is, ‘Get in line.’” The writer had to appeal to Beatty’s attorney, Bert Fields, to get his per diem.

  Goldman excelled at character, but the actor warned him, “I don’t want to see any psychology in this fucking thing. Don’t try to earn your money here. Remember, this is an entertainment.” The writer may have been eager to collaborate with a director of Beatty’s stature, but he got more of a collaboration than he bargained for. “I used to work very closely with Milos, but I would do the writing overnight, and then I wo
uld give it to him the next day. I said to Warren, ‘I’ll take this home,’ and he said, ‘No, no, we’ll do it right here. Right here at the table. The whole thing is to demystify it.’ That was where I first heard that hip word. We’re going to ‘demystify’ writing by just sitting there and doing it in front of each other. Warren wouldn’t let me go home, wouldn’t let me out of the room. I’d have to write the scene right there in front of him. He wouldn’t be watching me, he’d take a call or make a call, but he’d come back in five minutes.” There were no names on the script—Beatty always removed the top page—and Goldman never found out who wrote it. “It felt like his writing,” he recalls. “In other words, it wasn’t very good.”

  To Hyser, Goldman was the answer to a prayer. She told him, “Thank God you showed up, he sits here for hours watching football on TV.” In the aftermath of Ishtar, Gary Hart’s implosion, and the rest of it, Beatty was frustrated, uncertain, and depressed. He seemed to have lost his way. He wasn’t at all sure that Tracy was the right project for him. She had never heard him say, “I’m really excited about this project,” and now he complained, “I don’t know why I’m doing this; I’m too old.” Hyser recalls, “I don’t think that filmmaking makes him happy—except when he’s casting the women’s roles!”

  She continues, “Warren loved Bo. Bo really respected him. But you can respect him, admire him, honor him, and it doesn’t make it any easier to work with him. Warren was almost incapable of changing a light bulb, but if you did something he couldn’t do, he didn’t like how you did it. Even in his writing. They’d get stuck, Bo would say, ‘Oh my God, this is it.’ He’d get so excited, and Warren would say, ‘No. No good.’ Bo’s eyes would pop out of his head. I would see him sitting at the table with this long face, tearing out whatever hair he had left. Warren would sit and ponder a sentence for hours. Everything took so much time. He could be maddening.”

  Goldman was fascinated by Beatty. Due to the snail’s pace at which the work proceeded, he had plenty of time to think about what made him tick. “Warren is Scottish,” he explains. “He’s suspicious, and slow to make friendships. I believe his father was superintendent of schools in Arlington, Virginia, an academic administrator, beyond which there can be nothing worse. It’s like being a customs official on the French-Italian border. My guess is, those things in Warren came down from him. I met his mother, who was a lovely woman, her own person, very impressive. She wasn’t sweet at all, but I thought that whatever sweetness was down deep in Warren emanated from her.”

  Goldman quickly realized that Beatty loved to argue, and whatever the subject, he always wanted to win. He was impressed by Beatty’s voracious appetite for the printed word. “He’d arrive with The Wall Street Journal and Foreign Affairs under his arm, all this double-domed material,” the writer recalls. “How does he read these fucking things? But he did. He’d say, ‘The Wall Street Journal is the only good paper in America.’” Every Friday a uniformed nurse showed up to give him shots for his allergies. He had no sense of time. “That was the thing I learned with Redford, their time is the time,” he continues. “The poor woman would be sitting there for hours waiting to give him his allergy injection.” Beatty reminded him of Redford. “They hated each other,” he recalls. “Warren was eager to hear any bad news about Bob. I’ve always felt that Redford didn’t have half the talent that Warren did.”

  The writer continues, “Warren gets bored very easily. He’s incredibly restless. He can’t function unless he’s doing two, three, four things at once.” In the era when car phones were a novelty, Goldman marveled at the fact that Beatty was able to drive and use the phone at the same time. “The thing was invented for him,” he continues. “Once a guy came up to his home with a suitcase full of phones. It was like that scene in Taxi Driver where the guy sells these guns to De Niro. Warren put this guy through his paces. The guy was pushing this phone and that phone, and Warren was poking holes in his sales pitch. Like somebody who kicks tires. He humiliated the guy. It was like he handled studio people: This guy’s trying to con me. Well, nobody’s gonna con me, I’ll con him first.”

  There would always be people around to amuse him, a potpourri of the current flavors, like Sean Penn or Bob Downey Jr. Sometimes old girlfriends would turn up. “Julie Christie surfaced there once,” Goldman recalls. “Her career had disappeared, and she didn’t look well, seemed like some daughter of a college roommate, or a distant cousin’s niece, a poor relation. I felt sad for her. I had the feeling he was kind to all his old girlfriends.”

  One day the two of them had lunch with Bob Towne. Towne was on his way to the airport headed for London to score Tequila Sunrise. “Warren wanted whatever crumbs he might get from Towne,” says Goldman. “Nothing goes wasted with him. We were listening to the Sage, but Warren treated him strangely, like a child who’d left the nest. He was real pissed off that Towne had one foot out the door. Here was Towne, who was like his waterboy, and now his star was up while Warren’s was down after Ishtar. He felt that he had big-shotted him, that he couldn’t control him. It was like professional athletes who were suddenly on opposing teams and hated each other.”

  Beatty was always on the phone, making or receiving calls. His assistant would pad silently across the room and hand him a note with a name and a phone number, in the unlikely eventuality that he didn’t already know the number. Goldman would remonstrate, say, “No interruptions today, please.” Beatty would reply, “Okay.” He’d tell his assistant, “No phone calls today. Just interrupt me if Katzenberg calls.” Gradually, the list got longer and longer.

  Sometimes the call would be blowback from an old girlfriend who wanted something—a loan, a job, just reassurance that he’d still take her call. He’d glance at the scrap of paper his assistant shoved in front of his nose, and grunt, “Uh huh, I gotta take this call.” He’d put the receiver to his ear and say, “Really, really.” And then, “You know something? You’re a very, very disturbed person.” And hang up. “Can you imagine?” Beatty explained. “She wanted me to buy her a piano.”

  But most intrusive were the calls from his myriad friends in politics. Hyser explains, “There’s nothing more important in the world to Warren than politics. Having Gary, Jesse, Joe Biden on the phone asking him for advice makes him happy. Politics makes him happy. If one of them called, he would talk for an hour in the middle of writing while Bo was sitting there waiting for him. I would yell at him about Bo, ‘He’s gonna get up and walk out on you too.’ It’s amazing that Warren has been able to retain a relationship with anybody he’s ever written with.”

  Every so often Goldman was caught up short, when the other Warren Beatty raised his head. The writer recalls, “Once, a girl’s name came up, he said, ‘Well, I fucked her.’ That was the only time he’d ever said anything like that, been crude, but I said to myself, I’m never gonna work with this guy again, I was revolted by his manner. It was like he was trying to live up to some press clipping.”

  In many respects, Beatty and Goldman were a good match. Each was among the best in their respective fields, each respected the other, each was a hard worker. But Beatty was a director who fancied himself a writer. Goldman was a writer who was a wannabe director. That spelled trouble. It was, as Goldman put it, “a marriage made in hell.”

  WITHOUT GARY HART, the race for the Democratic candidate for president devolved into a game of dodge ball among the remaining contenders, who were disparagingly dubbed the Seven Dwarfs: Michael Dukakis, Jesse Jackson, Joe Biden et al. Beatty made it his business to meet and grill every one of these contenders, and found them all lacking. Susan Estrich, Dukakis’s campaign manager, invited the candidate and his wife, Kitty, to a dinner heavy with Hollywood liberals. Kitty sat next to Beatty. She regarded him with a blank look, and asked, “What do you do?” Returning it in kind, he said, “I’m Warren Beatty, the actor.”

  Beatty continued to believe that Hart should have toughed it out. He was offended by the idea that a candidate’s private life c
ould disqualify him from doing important things in America. The actor began urging Hart to reenter the race. He thought that if it were done right, it could be a moment of high drama, and the senator might get away with it. After all, polls had shown that nearly two thirds (64 percent) of respondents surveyed thought the media treatment of Hart was “unfair.” During the summer of 1987, Beatty told Hart, “If you think you can contribute to public life… you have an absolute obligation to run despite it being painful.” Shrewd as Beatty was, he seemed to be in denial, ignoring the tremors that lingered well after the Donna Rice earthquake. Perhaps he couldn’t help but see himself in Hart’s shoes, and so wanted to believe that his own peccadilloes would be ignored or forgiven were he ever to run for office. He desperately wanted The Gary Hart Story to have a happy ending.

  In December 1987, at Beatty’s urging, seconded by Jesse Jackson and a handful of others, Hart returned to the campaign. It was indeed a dramatic moment when he strode to the steps of the state capitol in Concord, New Hampshire, and announced, “I’m back in the race.” His welcome, however, was chilly, particularly on the part of the press, which he had blamed for derailing his campaign in the first place. Time magazine, no friend to Democrats, called his comeback “self-indulgent folly.” Hart staffers wryly referred to the new campaign as “88B” to distinguish it from its aborted predecessor, “88A.” That aside, there just weren’t enough troops on the ground to support his campaign. During the interregnum between 88A and 88B, key staffers had defected, often going to work for rival candidates. As Bill Bradley put it, “Warren is the kind of guy likes to do things out of his back pocket. He didn’t take into consideration the infrastructure necessary to do a national campaign. Or even a serious statewide campaign. Gary couldn’t raise any money.”

  Hart ran in the New Hampshire primary, but he faced repeated humiliation. At one high school where he was explaining his “new ideas,” the students joked about “winning one for the zipper.” Hart received only 4,888 votes, approximately 4 percent in the state that had put him on the map in 1984. In March 1988, he withdrew for the second time, returning to his home in Troublesome Gulch, augmented by 135 acres of adjacent land—to enhance his privacy—he’d bought with a $265,000 loan from Beatty.