Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

  One day, while Caron was working on his cut, he claims that Beatty came to him and said, “We can save some money, because Ennio Morricone is coming to America, and rather than having to fly to Italy and show him the film, we can show it to him when he’s here if you would be willing to show it somewhat sooner than you are contractually obligated to.”

  “I have no trouble showing it to anyone else. He doesn’t make me nervous, you do!”

  “Oh, no, no, no, you don’t need to worry. I’m a director, I understand the process.” Caron continues, “We had a screening, Ennio cried, I thought everything was wonderful, the lights went up, and sitting in the back of the room was a stone-faced Warren Beatty.” The star had final cut, and according to Caron, said, “‘I want to do a bunch of things.’ And that was pretty much the last I had to do with the film.”

  Jones recalls that Caron had the ten weeks stipulated by the Directors Guild to finish his cut—“He had his time,” he says—and that the problem was not that he didn’t have the opportunity to finish it, but that it reflected an altogether different concept of the picture from Beatty’s. “So Warren came in,” he continues. “On one side of me I had Glenn, on the other side of me I had Warren. It was tense. Glenn was very silent, and then gradually, he moved further and further back. Warren was still by my side, but Glenn was up against the wall, and then he disappeared. He felt intimidated, or felt it was a lost cause. Warren included him in the recut, but Glenn backed away from it.”

  Adds Davis, “Glenn just abdicated. And after his ten weeks he quit the movie. He just left, literally disappeared.”

  Caron says he tried to work with Beatty once he took over: “I certainly didn’t abandon it. One day I turned around and I was no longer in the editing room. Whoa! How’d that happen? Every day I’d call and say, ‘May I see it today? May I see it today? Can I see what you’ve done? Can I give you my notes? Can I have some input?’ I would never get calls back. I didn’t know how to fight it. I’d fly out there, but I was never allowed back into the editing room. I was really fucked.”

  Jones hadn’t worked with Beatty since Heaven Can Wait. “The editing on that film was about making it work better,” he explains. “Love Affair was just trying to make it work, period. Individual scenes worked okay, but the overall film didn’t. The script relied too much on twenty- or thirty-year-old dialogue. They were too loyal to the old film. We [never] believed in the Warren-Annette relationship. The scene where Warren comes back, goes to her apartment—that goes on forever and ever and ever, and is very sentimental. Warren kept saying, ‘It’s a great yarn.’ But he also said he didn’t know where the picture was going, he felt lost at sea.”

  WARNER BROTHERS finally invited Caron to a test screening somewhere in California. “I know Warren felt very strenuously that it was going to be a huge hit, and was very aggressive about it,” the director says. “I was appalled by his lack of objectivity. My recollection is it scored a 69. I thought, This is the biggest piece of garbage. We shot a much better film than this. I flew back on the jet with [Warners Chairman] Bob Daly, and I said, ‘Bob, I can really help this movie,’ and he said, ‘Glenn, you don’t understand,’ and he pointed across the aisle at Warren. He said, ‘I need him. I need him to do Oprah, I need him to do—’ and he rattled off a bunch of names like that. He said to me in the nicest way possible, basically, ‘You’re never getting your hands on this movie again!’”

  Benjamin MacLean Beatty, named after his mother’s family and Bening’s father, was born on August 23, 1994. When Toback visited the Beattys in Malibu, he decided the baby was really named after Ben Siegel, “the progenitor of Warren’s inner self,” and the occasion for his introduction to Bening. Toback looked upon Beatty’s wedded bliss with some skepticism, like others who had known the star in his salad days, but he had to admit that married life seemed to agree with him. Beatty told everyone within earshot that he was totally devoted to his family, and it appeared to be true.

  Kathy Wenning, the Witnesses editor on Reds, recalls running into Beatty in New York. “I saw this familiar-looking person, walking down Madison,” she says. “He stopped, and yelled, ‘KATHY!’” She says that he told her, “‘You know, I’m a changed man! I’ve finally met the love of my life.’ It was very sweet.”

  Beatty rhapsodized about marriage with all the zeal of a recent convert, and with much the same enthusiasm as he had railed against it only a few years earlier. The middle-of-the-night calls became fewer and fewer, and he began to arise at a normal hour. To paraphrase Michelle Phillips, “Children-izing replaced womanizing.” Says Dick Sylbert, “He won’t let the marriage fail. I don’t know how he could face himself. He just won’t do it. He has a wife, a new image, new points in the community. She may be dead, he’s gonna stuff her and sit her up in a chair. I don’t think anybody knows the compulsive nature of this guy.”

  Michael Childers ran into Julie Christie one day and asked her if she’d seen Beatty. According to him, she explained, “I only call him when I need something from him.” Of Bening, she said, “She made him a decent human being, which he never was. I’m proud of Annette, I don’t know how she put up with it all.” Perhaps in a better mood, or speaking for publication, Christie later reflected, “In the Sixties you did not know you were going to get older. But you do and you are. People become much dearer. When I see someone like Warren, with his four kids, there is that wonderful recognition of the life we have led. And a terrific sense of mortality, which is like a blessing almost: you suddenly realize what life is about.”

  Love Affair opened on October 21, 1994, in 1,585 theaters and grossed a weak $5,438,758 for a per screen average of $3,431. As one wag put it, “Love Affair fell off the screen. Beatty would have gotten better reception on his cell phone in the Holland Tunnel.”

  Outside of Roger Ebert, alone in his admiration for the movie (“This is one of the few Idiot Plots that works”), the reviews were uniformly unforgiving. In The New York Times, Janet Maslin called the script “tongue-tied,” and Beatty’s role one that brings him “to the brink of self-parody.” The film itself she called “schmaltzy,” while Katharine Hepburn was “ill-served” and appeared “uncomfortable.”

  No one can run away from a bomb fast enough, certainly not Towne, who always dissociated himself from flops he had written or directed, according to Beatty. He was embarrassed by the credit and publicly made fun of the movie.

  But Beatty was not one to wallow in self-pity. As Toback put it, he “will refuse to acknowledge that there is a problem for which pity, or even concern, would be called for.” As he blamed Columbia when Ishtar tanked, TriStar when Bugsy underperformed, so Beatty blamed the Warner Brothers marketing department when Love Affair barely opened. “The campaign was not going well,” recalls Davis. “I had been saying, ‘We shouldn’t be doing it this way.’ The second week the movie was in theaters, he called me at six o’clock in the morning, which means he hadn’t slept, and yelled at me: ‘This ad campaign is awful. I can’t believe we’re doing this.’

  “‘Warren, I told you at least seven times I thought this was a bad idea.’

  “‘If I didn’t hear you, you didn’t tell me!’ We changed the ad campaign.”

  But the new ad campaign made no difference because that was not the problem. That Beatty was madly in love with Bening may have made for a successful marriage, but not necessarily a successful movie. The picture had all the freshness of moldy cheese, especially after the cleverness of Sleepless in Seattle. It’s ripe with romantic clichés—star-crossed lovers, incapacitating accidents, improbable coincidences—not to mention smothered by mawkish Christmas cheer. Despite the flattering tricks a camera can play, Hepburn looked like she had long since passed on—dead star walking—and Beatty was not doing her any favors putting her in front of a camera. Dick Sylbert used to scornfully refer to Love Affair as The Crying Game.

  By the time Love Affair finally limped out of theaters in the first week of January 1995, it had grossed a mer
e $18,250,211 domestically, a fraction of its budget, forgetting additional P&A costs. Nobody came out looking good. Delicious—or malicious, depending on your point of view—gossip, some true, some not, ping-ponged from Burbank to Malibu and back. Sample, from an anonymous source: “I ran into Connie Hall on the street in New York. His hair had turned white and was hanging down limply on either side of his head, like Nick Nolte in Down and Out in Beverly Hills. I said, ‘What happened to you?’ ‘Love Affair!’” (In truth, Hall’s hair had gone white before the beginning of the production.)

  For his part, Caron believes Beatty blackballed him. “I was in movie jail for a very long time,” he claims. “The movie performed horribly and he needed an excuse. I was the reason. People said things like, ‘Your friend Warren Beatty isn’t doing you any favors.’ I knew I was unemployable.” Eventually, he returned to episodic television.

  Looking back on the experience from the perspective that the passage of time affords, he says, “I used to joke that, ‘The good news about this business is that you get to know all the people you admired as a kid, but the bad news is that you get to know all the people you admired as a kid.’ Moviemaking is this weird marriage of art, technology, and the management of a manufacturing process. When you do it with Warren Beatty, all the understandings that you have about how it works go out the window. It’s as if it’s never been done before, and you’re doing it for the first time. And I can’t quite explain the why of that. All I know is that it was the worst experience of my life. I was shell-shocked for a long time.”

  Unlike Caron, Davis enjoyed the production. “Warren and I had a great relationship; I felt like he and I were making the movie. In spite of Glenn.” Nevertheless, when Beatty asked him to do Bulworth, his next picture, after some backing and forthing, he regretfully declined. Several years older and wiser, he didn’t want to give up his life again. “Warren would call at eleven o’clock at night: ‘Can you come up to the house?’ There were literally Sundays where my phone would ring every ten minutes. I’d stop answering it.”

  So far as Beatty was concerned, the stories emanating from the set, partly true, partly apocryphal, were no laughing matter. No matter how big a star he had been, he was no longer. He was again and forever tarred with the reputation for being a director killer. Rightly or wrongly, Love Affair became a cautionary tale, a warning to directors to stay away from him and his projects. Increasingly, he couldn’t find a director to take him on. More and more, Beatty would have to direct himself, work solely as an actor, or not at all. He often chose the latter.

  Echoing the question Dustin Hoffman put to him many years before, Davis once asked him, “You’re a great director. Why don’t you direct a movie you’re not in?” Again Beatty replied, “I can’t afford to. I can’t make enough money.” Davis continues, “That’s one of the reasons he makes so few movies. He will only do one when he feels like he can control the situation. I asked him why he didn’t direct Love Affair himself. He said, ‘I need someone to give me perspective. I want someone to stand there and say, ‘This doesn’t work.’ But there are not that many people willing to take it on.” To Beatty, “You’re a great director” meant, at this point in his life, “You’re too old to be a leading man.” But even his friend David Geffen said, “He just can’t give up the movie star.” He had stayed too long at the party.

  BEATTY WAS apt to take time off after a hit, but a flop energized him, propelled him into his next project. He was thinking of playing the lead in The American President (1995), directed by Rob Reiner from a script by Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin was a facile writer, adept at massaging genre conventions in the service of issue movies like A Few Good Men that played the game of provoking thought without, in fact, provoking thought. Bening liked him, though, and when Beatty decided against it, as he most often did, she took the female lead and became the cement that solidified Sorkin’s relationship with Beatty. Beatty hired Sorkin to work on Ocean of Storms, an astronaut picture originally written by Tony Bill. At the same time, P. T. Anderson offered him the role Burt Reynolds ended up playing in Boogie Nights, but Beatty reportedly wanted the much younger Mark Wahlberg role.

  And then there was Town & Country, by writer Michael Laughlin, which was, in his words, “a comedy about people on the Upper East Side of New York.” Beatty couldn’t decide whether to do the movie or not, and asked his friends. Jeremy Pikser told him, “This sounds like a terrible idea, and I don’t think you should do it.” But, also as usual, he ignored their opinions, and committed to it as his next movie. Says Paul Mazursky, “What attracted him to it was all the gals.” Still, he was unsure—in this instance of whether he wanted to direct it or just star in it.

  At the same time, Beatty had been mulling over the idea of a film with a political thrust. Lifelong Democrat that he was, he had fallen out of love with his party, then in the full flowering of the centrist philosophy of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), embodied by Bill Clinton. By the second half of the 1990s, the administration’s Democratic Party-lite politics had made Clinton’s name mud among Los Angeles’s so-called Westside liberals. In Beatty’s view, the Democrats had been running away from George McGovern since 1972. The retreat proceeded through the disappointing Carter years, when the party’s candidates convinced themselves that they had to run as Reagan Democrats to win elections.

  “Liberal” had become a dirty word. Beatty would tell Newsweek “I know what it feels like to be a suicidally depressed Democrat.” Expanding elsewhere, he asked, rhetorically, “Where’s the party of protest? Where’s the party Bobby Kennedy was in?” Bening would attack the Clintons in 1999 for “doing what’s politically expedient in the most transparent way. You feel like there’s prevaricating, there’s lying. You just don’t trust them.”

  Beatty had lived too long, seen too much: “I have witnessed too many assassinations of people who were saying the right things, whether those assassinations were by bullet or tabloid scandal.” With the riots that had scorched South Central L.A. like a wildfire in 1992 never far from his mind, he felt an obligation to speak out for the poor. “The underbelly of this country isn’t being heard. How could they?” he asked rhetorically. “They don’t have the means of being heard. It takes money to be heard. Even though I am a pampered, rich Hollywood cultural plutocrat, my leanings are to try to articulate something on behalf of those people. As the disparity of wealth increases, there are an incredibly large number of them.”

  Beatty wanted to make a picture that expressed his disgust with the last two decades of Democratic politics. He called it a “campaign finance reform comedy,” and went on to explain, “If I’d done it straight it would have been C-SPAN. And everyone would be asleep.… I chose the name Bulworth because it reminded me of the Bull Moose Republican from that era.”

  While he was still in New York shooting Love Affair, in the fall of 1993, Beatty had approached Jeremy Pikser with a proposition. He told him he had an idea, but initially refused to tell him what it was. “He gets off on the control, and nobody knowing what’s going on except him,” says Pikser. In this case, all he said was, “I think I have something that you might be able to help me with. I don’t know who I’m going to get to write it—I could get anybody—and I know I want to be the first credited writer, and I don’t know if I really want the other writer to be you, but maybe.”

  “What’s the idea?” Pikser asked.

  “A depressed liberal senator who’s sold out his ideals, become conservative, takes out a hit on his life, meets a black girl, falls in love with her, changes his mind, goes into the ghetto with her in order to hide from the people who are trying to kill him, and then—”

  “Rediscovers his liberal roots! Great, love it, let’s do it.”

  Despite Pikser’s enthusiasm, he was still relatively inexperienced (among others, he had written two scripts for Beatty that had gone nowhere), and the star began looking elsewhere for a writer. He made a list. As he pointed out, he could have anyone. Or almost anyone. The
blowback from Love Affair had put a deep chill on the relationship between him and Towne, not to mention Towne’s lingering resentment over the Shampoo payout, and Beatty’s irritation at the dilatory pace at which the writer was repaying the loans he had made him. His relationship with Elaine May was still strained, and the star didn’t seem particularly interested in her anyway. He had conversations with playwright Tony Kushner, who was hot off Angels in America. Pikser pushed Larry Gelbart, who had written Tootsie, among other things.

  Finally, Beatty came back to Jim Toback. He was a known entity to whom Beatty didn’t have to explain himself, didn’t have to worry about offending. He even had credentials, of a sort, his friendship with and book about Jim Brown. But given Toback’s track record of procrastination, Beatty kept him on a short leash, paying him by the week. There was no disappearing for months at a time. Every day it was, “Where are the pages?”

  Pikser, meanwhile, who needed money, asked Beatty for work. The star hired him in the spring of 1995 as a development person. In March and April, he worked on Howard Hughes, which was still set up at Warners. He was having story meetings with Beatty about it, and pinning cards on walls. He saw a script, but he didn’t know who wrote it. Marshall Bell was at his home one night, talking to Pikser about Hughes. “Warren was in the next room,” Bell recalls. “He came in, said, ‘What are you gonna do, tell fuckin’ Marshall about everything?’” Bell understood that part of the deal with being friends with Beatty is, as he puts it, “to dance around information that doesn’t pertain to me. I was talking to Pikser about Hughes himself. I’m trained, I would never have asked, ‘How’s the script going?’ God forbid I should have known there was a script being written. But I haven’t brought up Howard Hughes since.”