Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

  “She said, ‘Oh, Glenn, don’t do it.’

  “‘Oh, no, no, no, it’s gonna be great, blah blah.’

  “‘That’s what you think. He’ll ask you to do it for all the right reasons, and then forget them the second you say yes.’”

  Her words made no impression. Caron goes on, “I loved him as a filmmaker, I liked the things he stood for. As a director, to have him come to me and say, ‘Direct me’—how can you not be flattered? It wouldn’t have mattered what anybody said.” He agreed. But when he looked up at the sunny skies overhead, he couldn’t help but notice clouds gathering on the horizon.

  Beatty had begun to staff up. As usual, he surrounded himself with the best in the business. He hired Nando Scarfiotti to design the production, Milena Canonero for the costumes, Ennio Morricone, who had scored Bugsy, and Bob Jones, who had edited Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait. “I had never done a production where I didn’t pick the key personnel,” Caron says. “When I came on board [as the director], Warren indicated that I’d be able to do that, but there were already people in place, and they were great people. You’d have to be a fool to say, ‘I don’t want Milena Canonero.’ It’s very hard to say no to Nando Scarfiotti. The greatest designer in the history of motion pictures. But Nando was not there because Glenn Caron was making the movie.”

  Beatty called Andy Davis, a production manager who had worked on Sid and Nancy, Tapeheads, and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, as well as several less memorable movies. He was still struggling to get a foothold. Then twenty-nine, Davis was outspoken and ambitious. He had a deal at Disney, and had heard all the Dick Tracy gossip from the studio’s point of view. “But Warren’s star was still bright, and if Warren Beatty called you, you went,” he explains. Davis asked him about Caron. “Because I knew from all the stories how he treats directors,” he continues. “I knew that Glenn was a show runner, and television is a different world. I was interested in how it was gonna work between the two of them. Warren said all the right things: ‘I want to be directed, I want somebody strong, I think this guy has the chops, he understands character,’ all that stuff.” Beatty charmed and fascinated Davis. Maneuvering his car out of the driveway onto Mulholland, he thought to himself, Oh, I get it, he’s Satan! “Because,” he goes on, “it was the most seductive experience I’d ever had in my life.”

  Like Caron, Davis was excited to be working on a Beatty picture. “There are certain directors who won’t surround themselves with people they perceive as more talented than they are,” he continues. “Warren was the opposite. He actually said to me once, ‘I’d rather have a guy who’s more talented and an asshole than a nice guy who’s not quite as talented.’ And this is a guy who never ever says, ‘It’s good enough.’”

  And speaking of a talented guy who was prickly, Beatty also wanted Conrad Hall as his DP, an increasingly sensitive job now that Beatty, fifty-six, was still playing romantic leads. As Dick Sylbert put it, “Warren will make it last as long as he can. He’ll treat himself like Cary Grant did.” To do that, he needed the right light, the right lenses, the right angles—in other words, the right DP.

  Hall, who was sixty-seven, was a crusty veteran who had shot Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, as well as Marathon Man, Fat City, and many other important pictures. Like Gordon Willis and countless other cinematographers, he had little good to say about directors and firmly believed he could do it better.

  Caron was dead set against hiring Hall. “I felt he was about the wrongest guy in the world for this particular movie,” he says. “Warren was concerned about how he would look. I told him, ‘Connie Hall doesn’t give a shit about your face. He’s interested in architecture, geometry. I wanted to use Allen Daviau, because it was clear from Bugsy that he knew how to shoot Warren. ‘No, no, no, Connie Hall, Connie Hall, Connie Hall!’ He was there because Warren had said, ‘I’m gonna do this movie, this kid’s gonna direct it, and you’ll help him out.’ Connie wanted none of that.” Caron may have been right about Hall. He was more comfortable with male dramas than weepies; his lighting was dark and dramatic. Jones agrees with Caron: “I’m not sure Connie was the right person for Love Affair.”

  In any event, the honeymoon between Caron and Beatty quickly came to an end, beginning with the writing. Like Bo Goldman before him, Caron was not happy with Beatty’s style of working. “He wanted to be in the same room with me while I was writing. But I couldn’t write in the same room with him. He was infuriated by the idea that I would work independently.

  “Warren fancies himself a writer. My sense is he’s less a writer than he is an editor. My pages would come back referencing things that had been in the previous draft. Or I would write a scene, and he would throw it away and say, ‘Let’s use the Towne draft,’ and he’d insert something from that. Sometimes he’d go back to things that were in the original movie. I don’t remember any moments of inspiration on his part involving new material.”

  The script that Beatty and Caron came up with stuck pretty close to the 1957 version, although former football star Mike Gambril (Beatty) and schoolteacher Terry McKay (Bening), both encumbered by significant others, meet on a flight to Sydney, Australia, instead of an ocean liner. Engine trouble brings the plane down on an island in the South Pacific, where they are transferred to a Russian love boat, the site of their budding romance. Each of them has been around the block; the script alludes to Beatty’s own storied career as a lady-killer. He confesses to McKay, “You know I’ve never been faithful to anyone in my whole life.” She replies, “I’m shocked and amazed!” She’s willing to take him on anyway. They make a pit stop at Tahiti to visit Gambril’s sainted aunt, then decide to test their love by separating and rendezvousing three months later on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. He shows up, she doesn’t. He concludes she has changed her mind. The two make a go of it by themselves, but he discovers subsequently that she had been hit by a taxicab on her way to meet him and is now an invalid, unable to walk. Eventually, the lovers are reunited, both better people, more mature, more serious (and more boring) for their tribulations.

  THE FIRST role cast was that of Gambril’s agent. “I used to call it the Charles Grodin role,” Caron recalls. “I wanted Kevin Pollack, and cast him immediately.” Then one day, the director made a suggestion, said, “You know who also would have been a great choice?”

  “Who?”

  “Garry Shandling.”

  Beatty looked at him blankly. “Who’s Garry Shandling?”

  “You gotta see The Larry Sanders Show.” Caron brought him some tapes. He watched them and became enthralled with the idea of Shandling.

  Caron expostulated. “Yeah,” he said, “it’s a great idea, but we have Kevin, and Kevin’s brilliant.”

  “I want Garry.”

  Caron recalls, “It put me in a horrible position with Kevin, but that’s the way Warren was. I thought we had taken care of that piece of business, now let’s move on to the next piece of business, but wait—if he saw something better, he had no compunctions about throwing somebody overboard for the other thing. That was new to me. Ruthless is probably the wrong word, but it was the drive to constantly perfect things.”

  Like Paul Schrader, Caron discovered that in Beatty’s world, nothing was ever settled. Issues that seemed to have been resolved one day would be reopened the next, as if they had never been previously raised. “That was absolutely his pathology,” says Caron. It happened “over and over and over again.”

  Pierce Brosnan was cast as Terry McKay’s fiancé. One day, Beatty and Davis were standing outside Beatty’s trailer on the Warners lot. In the distance, they spied a man slowly making his way toward them down one of the streets between the soundstages. He was wearing a T-shirt, and his face was covered by a dark, scruffy beard. Neither Beatty nor Davis could take their eyes off him. Then they realized it was Brosnan. Davis said, “Oh my God! He’s the most stunning man I’ve ever seen in my life.” Without missing a beat, Beatty replied, “I’d fuck ’im!�
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  The real casting drama, of course, revolved around Katharine Hepburn. “Warren very much wanted to get her,” recalls Davis. “There was no one else who was acceptable.” Caron, who now found himself disagreeing with Beatty more often than not, did not share this passion.

  “Warren had this whole thing, ‘Annette deserves her, it would be so great, the audience hasn’t seen her in so long.’ I said, ‘Warren, she does a TV movie every year.’ But he was just obsessed with having Katharine Hepburn.”

  But there was a problem: She didn’t want to do it. She had more than enough reasons—then eighty-six, she was frail as parchment, physically and mentally. She had skin cancer on her face. She was a star, a legend, but this was a small role, and she never did cameos. She was afraid she wouldn’t be able to remember her lines. Nor did she like the script; she thought it was foolish. Another sticking point was that the script required her to say “Fuck a duck.” She had uttered profanity before—“shit” on stage and other epithets on film, but never “fuck,” which she regarded as vulgar, a “nasty word.” “Warren was fascinated,” says Caron, “with this idea of getting Hepburn to say ‘fuck.’ He took some sort of perverse pleasure in it. It was something I thought was beneath all of us. It was clear to me that if this wasn’t going to be her last film, it was going to be one of her last films. It seemed like not a terribly honorable way to be remembered.” In any event, for these reasons, and probably a dozen more, Hepburn kept saying, “No!”

  Meanwhile, preproduction crept slowly forward. Caron was struck by Beatty’s preoccupation with his appearance. “One day—I want to say the entire day, it was hours and hours and hours, ten, twelve hours—we went to Milena Canonero to fit a pair of pants and T-shirts,” he recalls. “He was very particular about the way the T-shirts were cut on the neck. He liked the T-shirt to sit high, because he was self-conscious about what he called his turkey neck. Annette was exhausted, and at a certain point I just said, ‘You know, this is absurd, we have to stop.’ Finally she got him to put an end to it. Everybody was ready to go. Warren went into the dressing room to change back into his street clothes, and you could just see as he was changing, he was looking in the mirror, looking at the way the T-shirt sat on his neck, and was about to reopen the conversation. Annette just went, ‘Ohmygod, no, no, no!’”

  Beatty still wasn’t willing to give up on Hepburn. He promised her that she’d be billed above the title, just beneath himself and Bening. Still no. He mounted a campaign. She had several homes, one in New York City, one in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. He determined which one she was using and began to send her flowers every day. He found out that she liked calla lilies, and had them delivered, by the armful. Wildflowers too. Still no. The flowers kept coming, for weeks and weeks. Allegra Clegg, now production supervisor, scouted gifts for her. “Every day, it was, ‘Allegra, find the best chocolate place in New York,’ so it was Teuscher chocolates, as well as Famous Grouse Scotch, more flowers, whatever he found out she liked, to woo her to do the movie.

  “He called her constantly,” Davis remembers. “She kept saying ‘No,’ and ‘no,’ and ‘no.’ And ‘no.’ We tried to see her, and she said ‘no.’ We called her business manager. He wanted her to do the movie, but we still couldn’t convince her. I had a list of every octogenarian actress that might do it, and every week someone died and fell off the list. He would see all these people—Ida Lupino in the Motion Picture Home—but he only wanted Hepburn. One day I told Warren, ‘She is not going to do the picture. We need to find someone else.’ He refused.”

  Beatty enlisted her friends to intercede on his behalf, argue his case—among them Scott Berg, her biographer. “I’ve always been in love with Katharine Hepburn,” Beatty told Berg. “She’s very sexy.”

  “That’s what Howard Hughes thought.”

  “Did she ever talk to you about Hughes?”

  “Kate often told me, ‘What you have to remember about Howard is that he was deaf.” Berg brought up the project with Hepburn. She refused agan, saying, “Please tell your friend Mr. Beatty to stop sending me flowers. It looks like a funeral parlor around here.”

  UNLUCKILY FOR Beatty’s picture, production commenced in August 1993, just two months after the opening of Nora Ephron’s $90 million grosser, Sleepless in Seattle, which also referenced the 1957 Affair to Remember. Surrounded by A-list movie stars and Oscar-winning designers of various stripes, Caron struck several people as ill at ease and unsure of himself. According to him, he ran into trouble right away. “The first day of photography there was a scene in an airplane mock-up with Annette. We got to take 8, and I yelled, ‘Print!’ I assumed we’d move on, but Warren walked over, and looking at me, he said, ‘May I speak with her?’ Meaning Annette. I thought, Well, let’s see. You’re her husband, you’re the producer, you’re the star, you claim to be the writer, so I said, ‘Sure!’ We did, say, another thirty-five takes. He had her laughing, he had her crying, every possible interpretation of the scene, and I thought the way he went about it was sadistic, for want of a better word. I thought, Oh my goodness, I’m not in control of this thing. This is awful.

  “The next day we went to dailies and take 8 came up, and ten or twelve other takes of that scene. We then rode back to the set. Everybody left the van but Annette. She turned to me and said, ‘You were right!’

  “‘Excuse me?’

  “‘You were right, take 8.’

  “I thought, Boy, I’m not getting in the middle of this. I said, ‘Some of the other takes are interesting too.’

  “She said, ‘No, no, no, take 8, you were right.’

  “About twenty minutes later, I was standing outside my motor home smoking when Warren came out, walked over to me and said, ‘For the rest of the production, if you wish to speak with Miss Bening, you’ll speak with me and I’ll speak with Miss Bening.’

  “And that was how we proceeded. I tried to honor that. When I spoke [directly] to Annette, she seemed uncomfortable. Once I was blocking a scene on the ship, I said, ‘Annette, what if you made an entrance from over there.’ She replied, ‘Glenn, Glenn, Glenn, let’s not say anything, let’s just see what happens.’ I thought, Oh, she’s very cognizant that if I say, ‘Come through this door,’ Warren is going to say, ‘No, come through that door.’”

  Beatty says there’s no truth whatsoever in Caron’s account. “I wouldn’t be stupid enough to say that,” he maintains. “If I ever said to a director that he shouldn’t talk to her, he should talk to me, she would not throw a custard pie in my face, she would put a hot mince pie in my face, and she would keep it in my face. Annette Bening is nothing if not strong.”

  Recalls Davis, who was on the set every day. “I never saw Warren tell Glenn not to talk to an actor, or anyone else.” Clegg concurs: “Glenn did speak to Annette directly.” But she continues, “You could see that he kept taking a step back, and another step back, and in a sense stopped directing. It wasn’t that Warren said, ‘Shut up.’ He would never do that. But you could see how he would talk to Annette, talk to Connie, say to Glenn, ‘Let’s do another one.’ Warren put him down that way. He was rude, but not overtly, and he wasn’t nasty. At the end, Glenn wasn’t trying very hard. He just gave up. Somewhere along the way Warren lost respect for him. He and Connie didn’t take him seriously, didn’t even talk to him. He didn’t direct Warren, because Warren wouldn’t pay any attention to him. Warren was all of a sudden the director.”

  “It’s got to be incredibly difficult to be Warren Beatty, to be as talented as he is, to be directed by somebody else,” says Joyce Hyser. “He’s not a malleable guy. If he thinks he shouldn’t be standing over here, but over there instead, that’s where he’s gonna stand. And he’s probably right. He’s a brilliant director, and it saddens me that he gets in his own way.”

  Part of the problem between the two men was structural, attributable to the vast difference between television and film production. The marriage of a top network show runner, used to working fast and economica
lly, and Beatty, accustomed to the deliberate pace of motion picture production—and then some, and then some more—was problematic at best.

  “Warren seemed to like to create anxiety,” says Caron. “I said to him, ‘I don’t know how you can be funny or creative if there’s anxiety on the set.’ It was a really contentious situation. So I made it my business to be the anti-anxiety guy. He yelled at me a couple of times. Once, in front of the whole crew, he turned to me and asked, ‘Did you direct Reds?’ I said, ‘No, but I’ll find out who did, get you his name!’ Anything to keep it light. It was really devastating to me because I was quite enamored of him. He was one of my heroes, and at the same time I was startled by the ferocity of his need to fuck things up. I guess it really gets down to a lack of trust. And inability to surrender. So much of what we do, especially if you’re an actor, is to surrender.”

  Four days into the production, Caron claims he went to Beatty and said, “You need to find someone else, I can’t work this way, and it’s clear to me you can’t work any other way.” According to him, Beatty called their mutual agent, Mike Ovitz, and Ovitz told Caron that if he left, he’d never work again. Again, Beatty’s version is different. “About a week before we started to shoot, he said that he thought maybe he shouldn’t do the movie, and I felt that maybe he was going through something—he had not had a lot of experience—I encouraged him to not worry, and I would try to carry the ball if he needed me to. In retrospect, I would say that he was right.” Beatty blames Ovitz for foisting Caron on him. “Ovitz was very, very high on him, and urged me strongly to go with him. Mike’s brother [Mark] was Glenn’s partner. We all made a mistake.”

  Caron had his difficulties with Connie Hall as well. When Hall came back from scouting locations with Caron, he reportedly told the star, “You’re going to shit-can this guy in a week. He doesn’t know anything about anything.” Caron had prepared for the shoot by meticulously drawing up a shot sheet. He recalls, “Very early on I showed up for a meeting with some notes in my hand. I said, ‘It’s a shot sheet.’ Connie laughed, and said, ‘Did you go to boss school?’ His feeling was, You show me the scene, I’ll tell you where to put the camera. I had never worked that way.” Adds Bob Jones, “Connie didn’t want any part of that [shot sheet]. When Connie threw it out, that left Glenn without any foundation to work from every day. Glenn was the director, but Connie was a big personality, and he just said, ‘I’m not going to shoot that angle, I’m going to do it right.” Recalls Clegg, “Connie didn’t respect him. It was like high school. Connie and Warren and Glenn were friends at the beginning. But Connie saw that Warren was the alpha male, so he edged out Glenn. He was rude to Glenn, cranky and irascible.”