Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

  The advice Beatty had given Hart was disastrous. It merely confirmed the impression that so far as politics was concerned, Beatty was just slumming. His fascination with it was lifelong and sincere, but unlike the professional politicians and operatives among whom he loved to swim, it was never his day job. In an important sense, he remained a political dilettante, a hobbyist, a tourist. If Hart failed, it was painful, but it wasn’t his failure; he cushioned Hart’s crash landing, but then he went back to making movies.

  Beatty would never have behaved as incautiously as Hart did in similar circumstances, inviting the storm that broke over his friend. But there is also a dark subterranean river of self-destructiveness that runs through many of the characters he plays on screen. He may have established his reputation by resuscitating Bonnie and Clyde, but just as often he sabotaged himself. Beatty is as fascinated by failure as he is by success, or maybe it is the dance between the two that preoccupied him most, and perhaps it wasn’t only the opportunity to become a player on the national political stage that Hart provided, but a courtside seat at his Rocky (Mountain) Horror Show, more valuable to Beatty by far than the fabled tickets to Lakers games coveted by less complex souls. It wasn’t only Hart’s intelligence, or his seriousness, or his presidential aspirations that drew Beatty to him; it was his weakness as well, and the wounds he inflicted on himself. This, perhaps, was the mirror that Hart held up to him. Hart was truly his doppelgänger.

  BEATTY HAD still not found his Breathless Mahoney. Sean Penn had brought Madonna to Beatty’s home in 1985 on their first date, a risky move, even for him. After Desperately Seeking Susan, a modest hit, her track record in movies (Shanghai Surprise, Who’s That Girl) had been dismal. From the studio’s point of view, if Tracy and Beatty were legends that needed dusting off, Madonna presented the opposite problem: she was incandescent, smoking hot, a virtual cultural icon then at the height of her fame. But she was not necessarily perceived as an asset for a Disney movie.

  Still, everything is never enough in the entertainment business, where lack of talent is only occasionally an impediment, and she was desperate to get a foothold in pictures. “I saw the A list and I was on the Z list,” she admitted. “I felt like a jerk.” But if she were born to play any character, it was Breathless. “Everybody said I’d be perfect for the role,” she recalls. “I waited and waited for Warren to call me. He never did. Finally, I decided to be pushy, and called him. He vibes you out. He told me I made a lot of stupid choices, which I did, out of my impatience. It took him a year to make up his mind.”

  Beatty took her out to eat at the Ivy. She wore a black leather jumpsuit, partially unzipped to reveal her cleavage, and matching cap. She said, “I know you’ve heard a lot of terrible things about me, and I’m here to tell you they’re all true. How about you? I’ve heard a lot about you.” Beatty ignored her gambit. “Just as I thought,” she said. “All true.” But he liked her, her intelligence, directness, sense of humor. He reportedly said, as he deposited her at her door and kissed her, “Houston, we have liftoff.” Ignoring his friends’ dire warnings, the same way he ignored those who warned him against Sean Young, he hired her. It didn’t hurt that she agreed to work for scale ($1,440 per week). But she negotiated a percentage of the gross, as well as video and merchandise sales that would put an estimated $5 million in her piggybank.

  Beatty still needed to nail down his agreement with Disney. Recalls Goldman, “Warren was very proud of his ability with money. He said, ‘I’m not above it, I’m not an artiste, I’m in business here. I know how to deal with these people.’ He loved that side of himself.” Terry Press, who would climb the ladder to VP of marketing, but was then a lowly publicity drone, understood Beatty’s allure. “Jeffrey loved him. You walk in the room with Warren Beatty, it was like a switch was flipped. It’s a very seductive thing.”

  “Warren is not impressed by executives,” says Goldman. “Show him a studio head, and he’ll show you a head he wants to lop off. Katzenberg would call every day,” the writer continues. “Every once in a while, Beatty would give me a glimpse of the World According to Warren. By way of apologizing for interrupting our work to take these calls from Katzenberg, as he hung up one day, he said, ‘Bring him in, make him feel part of the project.’ He gave me this kind of Cheshire grin.”

  Once, in the middle of the afternoon, Beatty announced to Goldman, “We have to quit early.”

  “Oh, thank God.”

  “I gotta get my shit together. I gotta go get some money now.” Goldman continues, “He was suddenly the producer. Warren came back with all the money he needed for it. I thought it was kind of wonderful.” The deal was consummated in 1988 on condition that Beatty work within a $36.8 million budget, including his fee. He reportedly got $9.5 million from Disney against 10 percent (some say 15 percent) of first dollar gross and sale of merchandise, $5.5 million to act, $2.5 million to direct, $500,000 to produce, and $500,000 to write. Overages would be deducted from his share.

  DICK TRACY may have been a comic strip movie, but in Beatty’s hands it wasn’t just any comic strip movie. He had a concept. He wanted to replicate the look of the strips in the newspapers of that era, between 1939 and 1941, which used only four or five primary colors. “I wanted to try to create a naive world, something that took me back to the emotions of when I read those comics as a five and six year old: when good was very clear to me; when bad was very clear to me. When stars twinkled,” he explained. “Or the time when I first went into Times Square and I saw all of those lights and that city and I didn’t yet know what all those signs were trying to sell me. I wanted to return to a world before there were Chevrolets and Fords. When there was just Car.”

  This nostalgia for the simplicity of his youth also dictated the color scheme of the movie. He wanted to return the audience to a time “when red was Red and incredibly beautiful, and blue was Blue, and I couldn’t make up my mind which was my favorite color.… There were no gradations in the colors that are usually important to designers like Milena or Dick or Vittorio.” (Canonero gave Beatty an eye-popping lemon yellow overcoat.) But Sylbert was a different story. Kazan had trained him in the same naturalistic tradition Beatty embraced, which dictated that films create the illusion of transparency. In abandoning this principle, Beatty was violating one of his most cherished beliefs. He says, “I knew in this movie, there had to be a little of ‘I’m here, too’ because that’s just the style of the old strips, of Chester Gould. The artist is very much there.”

  Gould’s strip is first and foremost devoted to Tracy’s crusade against crime. But, referring to his film, Beatty insisted, “This is not some cockamamie detective story.… My film is about a guy torn between love and duty. My Dick Tracy is human.” The crime stopper is pulled between Tess and Breathless, the mother and the whore, family and sex. Or, as Beatty put it, “It’s about the temptation of Dick Tracy’s love life.” He even considered using the title The Temptation of Dick Tracy.

  But Goldman takes credit for pushing Tracy’s personal life into the foreground. “I gave him some kind of route into the movie,” he recalls. “What could make the thing work was a sense of family. Tracy, very much like Warren, is a man who keeps women at a distance. But he and Tess and the boy could become a family. That was something he hadn’t considered. It suited him very well.” As Beatty said later, “The movie, for me, was all about the fatigue that I felt with bachelorhood. It was all about wanting to have a family.”

  Still, at the time, in his dealings with Goldman, as with Trevor Griffiths on Reds, Beatty regarded the family as an impediment that prevented the writer from giving the script his full attention. Beatty appeared to devote every waking moment to the script, and expected the same of his writer. They started at noon and went into the wee hours of the morning, seven days a week, with no time off on weekends. “He’s obsessed by work,” Goldman recalls. “It’s like Sisyphus. He was rolling back that rock all the time. He woke up in the morning, the rock’s still there. He hat
ed praise. Nothing made him happier than to hear, ‘This is a piece of shit, you have to start over.’ It made his day. He can never get a rest from the demands he makes on himself. That’s a torment, and a torment to the people around him. One director called it masochism.”

  In Goldman, who was by this time renting a home for his family near Malibu, Beatty saw his mirror image. With his six children, the writer was the quintessential family man, what Beatty would become, but hadn’t yet. He resented the family obligations that beckoned the writer home for dinner at six o’clock the same way, according to Griffiths, he tried to prevent the writer from returning to England and his motherless children. “His lip would curl if I said I had to get home to my baby,” Goldman recalls. “It was hard for him to understand. He’d be derogatory about family. He used to say I used my family to make a power point.” Beatty’s assistants were mostly young gay men, who never had to change a diaper. They were unburdened by families, and therefore always at his disposal. And since he saw most things politically, he gave it an ideological inflection. Goldman continues, “He’d say, ‘Enough with family, that’s just a big right-wing thing.’” In short, he was as conflicted about love as he was about work, about, in fact, most things.

  Goldman continued to find the daily writing sessions punishing. As the writer describes the process, “At first he’d say, ‘This is beautiful.’ And then the tinkering would begin. He’d start picking here, and he’d start picking there, and I wouldn’t even be aware of it. We’d sit at opposite sides of the table writing the same scene. It would be like a contest. Then he would approach me from the actor’s point of view—‘This is what would make the scene more actorable’—which would allow him to manipulate me into changing it. I’d come in with a new thing, and he’d say, ‘No, let’s go back to this.’ So we’d go back and forth and back and forth, and then after three days there’s nothing left of the scene.”

  The writer continues, “The indecision was the famous thing, where everybody in the business would say, ‘How can you stand Warren Beatty, he can never make up his mind.’ As a writer, ultimately what we have to trust is that first impulse, but what happens is that impulse gets lost in the indecision of trying to make it better. That was the problem, this desire to kill the instinct.”

  Goldman ran into Buck Henry months later, and the two compared notes. It was like a two-man twelve-step program for former Beatty writers, War-Anon. Henry talked about his own experience, how Beatty “tormented the material to death.” Goldman continues, “And never mind the material, he does that in life, he does that with women, everything. He gets obsessive, and he takes the fucking life out of you. He can’t leave anything alone. Then somehow you find that you are always arranging your life to suit his. You’d get there and you’d have to wait an hour and a half for him to get off some phone call. What would get me crazy was this feeling of being controlled—and not in a nasty way, in a very charming way—but it was still control. Even his indecision was a tool of control. If you constantly keep everything up in the air, you’re the king. But once you’ve made the decision, once you’ve said yes to something or no to something, then you’ve lost control. And the control is the result of fear, fear of life, fear of everything. He’s fearful of this going wrong, or that going wrong.

  “Finally he exhausted me completely, and I just went crazy. I called Jeff Berg, and I said, ‘I can’t take this guy anymore.’ He came up to the house, and I blew up. Of course, Warren was as cool as a cucumber. I could tell he was very angry but it would be an ice storm. He’d get very articulate, and cut you to death coldly. I was shouting, and he said, ‘Okay, you want to raise your voice? I can raise my voice too!’ Jeff just stood by like a referee. Next thing I know, I said, ‘You know how he makes me feel?’ I put my hands around his neck. Jeff jumped to his feet, and I said, ‘It’s like he’s choking me.’ To Berg’s credit, it got sorted out, and it was over.”

  Miraculously, the collaboration worked. Despite the fireworks, Goldman found a lot in Beatty to admire. When things were going well, Goldman looked at the glass and saw it was half—perhaps even three quarters—full. He said, “Maybe it’s true that he punishes the material to a fault, but I think it’s really a gifted artist’s intensity in a field where art itself has no meaning.”

  JOYCE HYSER had spent most of Christmas 1987 with her family in Philadelphia. When she returned to the Mulholland house her car, which was her pride and joy, was gone. It was a 1977 limited Champagne Edition VW, white on white. “Where’s my car?” she asked Beatty.

  “I got rid of it. It was too old, I’m giving you my car.” He had bought a new one and had decided it was time she stepped up to his Mercedes 450. But it kept breaking down, and every time she had it fixed, it cost at least $1,000, that is, $1,000 more than she could afford. She called it the gift that kept on taking. It proved to be a metaphor for their relationship. He thought he was doing her a good turn; she wasn’t so sure. They were fighting a lot, and what had been placid at first was becoming tempestuous, more like Beatty’s previous relationships. After a year with him, she was unhappy.

  For one thing, Beatty discouraged her from pursuing her acting career, as he had Michelle Phillips. He would grill her, asking, “Why do you want to be an actress? You’re too smart for that. It’s not for you.” He loves actors, but he thought she had more to offer. She recalls, “He was more like family to me, like a brother or a father than a lover. He wanted more of a wife, someone who would take care of him. But I didn’t really fit that bill. I was too young.”

  Indeed, age became as issue. “He was too old for me,” she explains. “Not so much chronologically, but we were at different places in our lives. He had done everything he wanted to do. He had traveled everywhere, he knew all the famous people he wanted to know, he had been to all the best parties, he had eaten in the best restaurants, he was finished. He never wanted to go anywhere. He only saw movies in the house. He would have been happy just looking at TV and working.” Producer Andy Karsch recalls being in London with him sometime later. “We made all these plans to do stuff, but what did we actually do every day? We’d sit at the Dorchester, watch CNN, and order room service, exactly as if we were on Mulholland.” Hyser had the same kind of phone problems with Beatty that Goldman had. She continues, “I can’t tell you how many times we said we were going out to dinner, we’d make a reservation somewhere, I’d say, ‘Phone off,’ and he’d get nervous. He’s totally ADD. He wants to be distracted, he wants that phone call. The phone would ring, and he’d say, ‘This is really important, this is one I really do have to take. I’ll be right off.’ An hour later, he was still talking.

  “‘It’s rude.’

  “‘I’m sorry, it’s not personal.’

  “It wasn’t personal. But it was one of his gigantic character flaws. It was a real bone of contention.” Often, Hyser would end up walking out the door. He would question her, asking, “Where are you going? What time are you going to get there, who are you going to meet there?” Hyser would reply, “I’m going to dinner at the Ivy with my girlfriends. After dinner, I’d ask for the check and inevitably it had been taken care of. All the girls would go, ‘He’s so nice.’ It was nice, but later I thought, Oh my God, no, he’s not, he’s checking up on me, he wants to make sure that I am where I am. I don’t think he trusted me when I was out on my own, because he didn’t trust anybody, including himself.

  “He got me my first cell phone, really sweet. I said, ‘Give me the bill, so I can pay it.’ He wouldn’t. Why? So he could see who I was calling. Once I was shopping in New York, and I bought a sweater at this store. We were staying at the Ritz, and I came back, and that very same sweater that I bought was on the bed in three different colors. I don’t know how he knew. I would accuse him of following me.”

  Like Goldman, Hyser felt he was trying to control her. She chafed under his surveillance. “He had an idea of who I was supposed to be, how I was supposed to behave, who I was supposed to be with—there were
a few of my friends he didn’t like, because he was afraid that they didn’t like him. That’s when he would become insecure, and he was right. They didn’t think he was right for me. They’d ask, ‘Why are you with him? He’s a legendary womanizer, who’s never been faithful to anyone.’” He’d warn her, “I don’t think that person has your best interests at heart. She’s jealous of you.” She continues, “He would always question my relationships. If he didn’t like somebody he wouldn’t want me to be friends with them. And with regard to those particular friends, he was incredibly perceptive.”

  Whereas in the beginning of their relationship, Hyser was flattered by his attentions, now she found them irritating. When he said, “Isn’t she cute, look how passionate she gets, it just kills me, I love when she gets like that,” she felt, in her words, “he was being really patronizing. I was the little girl with all those cute opinions. He valued me, my intelligence, but he always knew more than I did. That was okay, it was part of my attraction to him, he was a lot smarter than I was, and I learned a lot from him, but he grew up with that Madonna/whore thing, and he puts the women he’s involved with on a pedestal. That’s what he did with me. He wanted me to be something [I wasn’t]. I was more an idea than a reality.”

  Hyser was in therapy. Her therapist always told her that her relationship with Beatty was a mistake. He would say, “You gotta get outta there, you gotta break it off, it’s not right for you.” Beatty, who was a therapy junkie, wanted to join her: “Why don’t we go see your therapist together?”