Toback kept coming over to him, saying, “Would you stop with the cockamamie accent?”
“Whaddya mean, it’s good for the character.”
“No, it just destroys the reality.”
“Why don’t you talk to the director about this, because he likes the accent.”
“Why don’t you go over and talk to him?”
Beatty went to Levinson, said, “Barry, would you tell this guy about the accent? You like it, don’t you?”
“No.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“I didn’t want to inhibit you.”
Beatty concludes, “So I dropped the accent.”
On the other hand, three intelligences is not four, and Mark Johnson was the odd man out. “I don’t have a lot of recollections of great times on the set,” he says. He felt that Beatty was actively sabotaging his relationship with Levinson. As one source puts it, “Warren loves to mess with people. He just liked the idea of driving a wedge between Barry and Mark. So he would literally go to Barry and say, ‘Mark’s not doing a good job,’ and go to Mark that same afternoon and say, ‘Why don’t you and I form a production company?’ Barry was supportive of Mark, but that was the price of doing business with Warren.” Says Kathy Jones, who along with Buffy Shutt ran TriStar’s marketing department, “We thought something was going on to push Mark out of the picture. When we got to a meeting, we’d say, ‘Where’s Mark?’ They’d say, ‘He’s not coming.’ What we found out later is that they didn’t tell him.”
Without seeming to, Beatty controlled the rhythm and pace of the production. Levinson was not a director who shot a lot of takes. Nevertheless, Beatty required his customary quota, and Levinson generally acquiesced with aplomb. As Clegg puts it, “Warren was insecure, always wanting more takes, and Barry tried to convince him that it was okay, but then did five more takes.” Albert Wolsky, who had worked on several of Levinson’s movies, says, “I’m sure it was quite frustrating for Barry. Barry was used to being the boss, totally in control. This was a project where he shared with Warren. If Warren wanted another take, they did another take.”
In the most unsettling scene in a movie full of unsettling scenes, one that gets even more disquieting as it plays out, Bugsy confronts Jack Dragna (Richard Sarafian), whom he thinks is skimming money off the top. Shaking with fear and drenched by flop sweat, Dragna stands still as Bugsy strokes his face with a terrifying tenderness, saying, “Do you want to make love to me? Do you want to rape me?” Dragna shoots him a look saying, “This guy is crazy,” which he very well may be. Virtually foaming at the mouth, Bugsy grabs his ear. Giving it a vicious twist, he forces him down on all fours, making him crawl across the room, barking like a dog and oinking like a pig, while Virginia Hill, ear to the door, becomes sexually aroused as she listens to the theater of cruelty on the other side. Bugsy works up an appetite of his own, and when he finishes with Dragna, he sits down to dinner, and wolfs his food, shoving it into his mouth with his fingers while a rivulet of blood trickles down his cheek. This electrifying tour de force does the Marquis de Sade proud and takes pride of place among the great scenes of cinematic sadism, like the one where Lee Marvin hurls scalding coffee in Gloria Grahame’s face in The Big Heat (1953) or Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death (1947) cackles like a lunatic as he pushes elderly Mildred Dunnock, seated in a wheelchair, down a flight of stairs. As Bening once remarked, speaking of Beatty’s characterization of Bugsy, “There’s a kind of masculinity, there’s a power, there’s a force, there’s an animalistic ferocity in what he does, especially afterwards when he sits down and starts eating, you don’t see that in movies.”
The scene was based on an actual incident in which Toback says he was involved as he was about to go into production on Exposed in 1983. Needless to say, he is quick to point out that he was the ringmaster, while the barker and oinker on his hands and knees was David Begelman, then head of MGM, who had agreed to produce the movie. Toback was about to leave his office when Begelman picked up the phone and called the writer’s agent, Jeff Berg. He said, “We have a deal. I’ll call tomorrow to confirm.”
“What exactly did you mean when you said, ‘I’ll call tomorrow to confirm?’” Toback asked. “Why didn’t you just confirm it on the phone now?”
“Suppose I call him tomorrow and say, ‘I changed my mind, I’m not going to make the movie.’ What would you do about it?” Recalls Toback, “We looked at each other for about thirty seconds, I stroked his face—he was very fastidious, Begelman—he didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. He had huge ears, so I took one of them and I squeezed it really hard, slammed him down on the ground and stomped on his throat. Then I picked him up, and slammed him down on his desk, and I said, ‘What I just did to you now is a kiss compared to what I would do to you if you tried to fuck with me like that.’
“‘No problem, we’re going to make the movie. By the way…’
“‘Yeah?’
“He went into a drawer and pulled out a pistol. For a moment I had this flash of fear, I thought, This asshole’s gonna shoot me.
“He said, ‘Don’t think you scared me by threatening me like that. You think you’re not afraid to die? I’m much less afraid to die than you are. I load this pistol with a bullet and put it to my head every day, and sometimes I squeeze the trigger and sometimes I don’t. You’ll never be as unafraid to die as I am.’” (On August 7, 1995, Begelman would blow his brains out.)
“I said, ‘I want you to crawl around the room and oink like the pig that you are, and then crawl counterclockwise like the dog you wish you were decent enough to be!’ He oinked and barked with great enthusiasm. There was no humiliation with him. Or put it this way: Any humiliation with him, he relished.”
Toback related this story to Beatty shortly after it happened. Beatty, who had had his own run-in with Begelman over Shampoo, suggested, “Why don’t you write that in.”
“Because you’ll never do it.”
“Oh yes I will.”
“Oh no you won’t. You’re not going to do something like that on the screen. As you think about it, you’re gonna start to say, ‘I don’t think we should take the character out that far. He’s supposed to be the hero, and you’re gonna lose a large part of the audience right there.’”
“Write it in and I’ll do it.”
Toback still didn’t believe him and was so sure he wouldn’t do it that he never wrote the scene. He knew, as Beatty put it, “I don’t enjoy bringing myself to some sort of emotional [climax.] I can’t fake it, I’m actually doing it.” Time passed. The beginning of principal photography was just around the corner, and Beatty asked him, “Why didn’t you write that scene?” So finally he did.
Toback continues, “It was almost an act of defiance—because not only did I not think he would do it, but when he finally did, I never believed he’d do it the way he did it, which was to take what was possible in that scene and push it to the absolute limit. I was wrong. That performance allowed him to do some things on the screen that he wanted to do for a long time, because they are on some level inside him or he understands them emotionally well enough to do them and make them believable.”
Toback always thought, or pretended to think, that Beatty is, as he puts it, “a closet psychopath,” by which he means “someone who behaves outside the boundaries of the law, of decorum, of what’s acceptable, who inhabits his own universe of behavior, but has subjected himself to the acceptable so that he can pass in the straight world for being completely normal, but I would doubt that there’s a single act that hasn’t crossed his mind at one time or another. His imaginative energy has gone way in excess of what he’s allowed himself to do.”
Toback is exaggerating for effect, but there’s some truth in this. If Beatty’s films are a window on his imagination, it’s clear that much of his work spins on the axis of outlawry and convention. He (and his sister) have always been attracted to the dark side, to those with secret, taboo lives, like his cousin Da
vid MacLeod, or wild, larger-than-life figures who walk the edge: Toback himself, self-confessed compulsive gambler and sexual desperado, and so on. Beatty regularly scandalized propriety with his sexual escapades, and was officially, if briefly, an outlaw himself, when he was cited by Peter Hall as an adulterer.
As Shirley MacLaine, who hung out with Sinatra’s Rat Pack in Las Vegas, put it, as if speaking for Beatty, “I admit to an interest in gangsters—almost like a child watching a car wreck with my hands over one eye. I couldn’t stop gaping.… Of course my own proper upbringing in Virginia had nurtured in me an attraction to unruly, unseemly, rebellious behavior, because I always sensed that same repressed rebelliousness simmering under my own parents’ surface.”
Yet through it all in both his personal life and his screen persona, Beatty did manage to preserve that kernel of innocence, even boyishness. Who could have been more conventional than he, shunning alcohol and drugs, helping old ladies across the street, especially if they were named Lillian Hellman or Vivien Leigh or Kitty Carlisle Hart, persona grata in any Bel Air home, friend of Lew Wasserman as well as each and every studio head, even becoming a peacemaker, a go-between in industry disputes. But for Toback, it was just protective coloration, the chameleon taking on the aspects of the twig to which it clings. “I believe he’s a closet addict,” he goes on. “That’s why he doesn’t drink, why he doesn’t take drugs, why he doesn’t gamble, why he has disciplined himself in very strict ways to prevent himself from crossing the lines that he knew he shouldn’t cross.” From his point of view, in Bugsy, Beatty just typecast himself. Toback wondered, rhetorically, “What other actor… is elegant and handsome, graceful and articulate, and glib and ferociously violent under wraps, and sexually obsessed?” He once asked Beatty, “Do you act in order to avoid living out what you might otherwise had to have lived out?” Smiling, the actor replied, simply, no.
But notwithstanding the power of the performance and Toback’s theories about his character, Beatty isn’t Jewish, isn’t a gangster, isn’t psychotic; there was considerable skill involved. Always an actor who mistrusted acting, who customarily reined himself in, in Bugsy he let himself go for the first time in his career. Said Bening, “His performance [in Bugsy] was so different from anything he’d ever done, the way he sounds, and the eccentricities of the character are so seductive and repellent at the same time. But he touched on something true.” That performance constituted, perhaps, the greatest compliment Beatty ever paid to a director.
Years before, the first thing Beatty said to Toback, after seeing Fingers, was, “How did you get Harvey Keitel to do that?” In a sense, Bugsy was his Fingers, and the same question he asked Toback might well be asked of him: How did Levinson and Toback get him to do all that stuff? Says Clegg, “Barry gained his trust, and then Warren let go for Barry.”
As always, Beatty considered all the angles. Tongue somewhat in cheek, he looked at each of his pictures with an eye to how they might affect his political career, even though it amounted to no more than a chimera with which he beguiled himself and others. Bugsy was no exception. “Dick Tracy, with its innocence and purity, was virtually a campaign vehicle,” he says. “But with Bugsy, every time we would get to a scene that was particularly sick, or particularly bizarre, we’d say, ‘There goes New Hampshire, there goes Iowa.’ There’s the scene where Joey Adonis says, ‘Why don’t you suck your apology out of my dick?’ and I say, ‘Pull it out’—we said, ‘There goes California. The campaign was decimated.’”
Beatty’s infatuation with his own appearance suited the character he was playing. Wolsky, who dressed him, appreciated him for the very reasons others mocked him: “I’ve worked with so many actors who don’t give you the time, feel it’s an imposition,” he says. “An actor who doesn’t care is very hard to dress. Warren cares a great deal how he looks.”
Beatty still suffered from puffiness around the eyes. “He felt he looked better later in the day, after one, two o’clock, less puffy,” Wolsky continues. “It’s all about the close-up, so the close-ups were held for the afternoon when the swelling went down.” Said director of photography Allen Daviau, “I hope I get to do a movie with Annette after this, because I spent all my time lighting Warren!”
Special effects whiz Rob Bottin made a full body cast of Beatty to produce an eerily real looking dummy for the scene in which he is shot through the eye. “I don’t think Warren had ever seen a three-dimensional replication of himself,” says Newirth. “He was fascinated, examined his face from every possible angle, and spent fifteen minutes questioning Rob.”
On February 18, Dick Tracy was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Al Pacino for Best Supporting Actor, and a handful of people in technical categories, including Vittorio Storaro for cinematography, Dick Sylbert for production design, Stephen Sondheim for Best Song, and Milena Canonero for costume design. Save for Pacino, the movie was shut out of the major categories, like Best Picture, where the nominations went to Awakenings, Dances with Wolves, Ghost, The Godfather Part III, and finally Goodfellas, the only film in this group that deserved the distinction. Bening was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for The Grifters.
Five weeks later, on March 25, the Academy Awards were held at the Shrine Auditorium. Dick Tracy won three Oscars, including one for Dick Sylbert. Bening, who attended with Ed Begley Jr. whom she had been seeing, came away empty-handed, but later that spring she was offered the role of Catwoman in Batman Returns (1992).
A few days later, while they were shooting the scene in which Hill tells Bugsy, “Why don’t you run along and jerk me a soda,” Beatty declared his feelings. Impressed as he was by Bening’s evident talent, he wasn’t indifferent to her equally abundant charms, and couldn’t help thinking about having sex with her, although he thought it prudent to take the high road, and kept his libido in his pants. “That was way down the line,” he says. “I wanted to do what we’ve since done, but I said, ‘As much as I am inclined to make such a vulgar move upon you, I will refrain from doing so because I think it is terrible to have that pressure when people have to work together, so I won’t be troubling you with that.’ She was very gracious and laughed.”
Beatty and Bening kept their budding romance under wraps. Few, if anyone, working on the picture realized they were involved. “Barry, Warren, and I would eat lunch every day in Warren’s camper,” Toback remembers. “Annette would almost always join us. Warren and Annette didn’t hold hands, nothing. I just got the feeling that they got along very well, and he was very helpful to her in her performance.”
Toback continues, “I used to stay very late rewriting, often till one or two in the morning, and late one night I was driving off the lot in my rented Mustang convertible thinking that the only person still around was the security guard, and there were Warren and Annette walking together. They weren’t doing anything, just walking. But it was startling to see them.”
Says Newirth, “They were falling in love on that film, and you can feel it on the screen.” Indeed, the connection between Bugsy and Hill fairly crackles with sexual electricity, so just saying no might have helped their performances, but it couldn’t last forever.
Meanwhile, Beatty was doing his genetic homework. With children in mind, and gene sequencing not even on the horizon, that meant checking out Bening’s DNA the old-fashioned way, looking for the fugitive cleft lip or club foot, the tic or twitch that might indicate incipient schizophrenia, diabetes, epilepsy, whatever, anything that might mar their children. (It was the same Darwinian instinct that led him to grab Carole Eastman two decades earlier, so that he could have smart children.) There was no recourse but to meet the parents, who were straighter than straight. Her mother, Shirley, was a soloist in the church choir. Her father, Grant, was a San Diego insurance salesman who gave Dale Carnegie motivational sales seminars. Said Bening, “You ask my dad how he is, and he says, ‘Good and getting better.’” She adds, “My parents are really good moral people, good Republicans.” Growing up,
Bening was a high achiever, focused, determined, and ambitious.
Recalls Beatty, “It got to be late in the movie, and her mother and father came to visit on the set. I invited them all to come into my trailer for lunch. I thought, Oh, what nice people. This is an actress who’s human, whose mother and father seem to be very compatible and of good humor, and had [gotten] along together and been married for some forty years at that point.” He was so impressed that as they were leaving, he took Annette aside, and said, “May I amend something that I said to you?”
“What’s that?”
“It’s about fucking.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m not making a pass at you, but if I were to be so lucky as to have that occurrence, that I would probably… I would try to make you pregnant immediately.” And, Beatty adds, “We did.”
Explained Bening, “When I met Warren I was thirty-two and the biological clock was ticking.… If he hadn’t wanted to have children, it wouldn’t have worked.”
Adds Clegg, Annette would say, “I want to have five kids.”
Bening got pregnant “very quickly,” Beatty says, “because we were trying. There was never a moment, in effect, of not being married to Annette.” He continues, “It was a wonderful thing. Most people have a period in a romance that’s kind of lighthearted, you play around. With us, it was this weird thing, we just never did that. And that’s a nice thing for our kids to know. It’s very unusual. But it’s the truth.”
But romantic as Beatty was, he was not a believer in destiny. He once told DeLauné Michel, “I think back sometimes on a few of the women who were in my life before, the ones my mind naturally wanders to, the heavyweights, like you. I could have married any one of you and been happy. There isn’t just one true love for anyone; timing is everything.”
Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America Page 57
