Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

  Still, Beatty made it very clear to Harris who was in charge. She says he turned to her on the set one day and said, “Make no mistake, if I decide that I don’t want to shoot on Tuesdays because I don’t like Tuesdays, we’re not shooting on Tuesdays. And if I decide on Wednesdays everyone is going to wear blue shirts because Wednesday is blue shirt day, we’ll be wearing blue shirts, because I am the eight-hundred-pound gorilla on the set.”

  More often than she wished, Beatty would give her “the finger,” as she calls it, crook his finger and beckon her over. Her heart would sink. She thought, Oh shit! This is going to be a four-hour conversation.

  One day, he motioned her over with the finger: “Come here.” According to her, he said, in his quiet voice, making her lean in so she could hear him, “You know, New Line would benefit greatly if you would talk dirty to me between takes.” She recalls, “It was the first time he’d said anything charming. All I ever saw was an unhappy man on set every day. We were in the middle of the Monica Lewinsky nonsense, so between takes we started playing games like, ‘Who would you rather… ? Who would you rather… fuck? Bill Clinton or Al Gore? The problem was, to play the game with Warren, you had to read the papers, because if you didn’t, you wouldn’t know who the hell he was talking about. But then it always ended up back with him, ‘Bill Clinton or me? Bob Shaye or me?’ I said, ‘I won’t play the game that way, Warren.’

  “‘Why not?’

  “‘I wouldn’t do it with you, obviously, so I won’t play that game with you.’

  “‘Okay.’

  “But it was fun. One day, we were shooting in New York, he was sitting in his chair, and I got called over, the finger again, that terrible moment, ’cause we’d been shut down in the streets of New York spending God knows how much money—and he asked me, ‘How many women do you know that I’ve slept with?’ Now I was thirty-two, thirty-three?

  “‘Like, know of? Like Madonna?’

  “‘No, no, no, like, your friends.’

  “‘None. None of my friends.’

  “He was shocked. It didn’t occur to him that I wouldn’t know many women that he slept with prior to his marriage. But why would I?”

  Beatty tried to flip Harris, that is, bring her over to his side. “He didn’t do it in any kind of sexual or romantic way, ever,” she continues. “I actually agreed with some of Warren’s assessments about how New Line was handling the movie. But I was still its representative. Emotionally I was very torn.”

  The combination of Beatty and Shandling, although it resulted in some high comedy, proved toxic, at least so far as the shooting schedule was concerned. Says Henry: “Garry and Warren were in each other’s pockets.” They enabled each other. Their neuroses meshed like the gears of a high- (or low-, depending on your point of view) performance engine. Partners in crime, the two actors were constantly picking apart the dialogue. Nothing was too insignificant to change. They rarely knew their lines, which had always been Beatty’s way. The two of them would do take after take after take. There were reputedly reels and reels of exposed film that consisted solely of improvisational exercises. Beatty was working so slowly Henry thought that he had “lost faith in the movie and was consciously or unconsciously trying to deepsix it!”

  Chelsom couldn’t help recognizing that the playing field was tilted against him, and resented it. The fact that so many of the principals were friends of Beatty’s probably added to his paranoia. As Laughlin puts it, “The movie should not have been cast with people that Warren had relationships with—Diane, Goldie, and his friend Garry, who was always up at the house. It was just a bit too incestuous.”

  But Beatty was having his own problems with his friends. Apparently content to frolic in the Beatty sandbox, Shandling was by some accounts far from a happy camper. According to one source, because the two men were close, and he was “Garry Shandling!” Beatty beefed up his role, thinking he was doing his friend a favor. But as his role got bigger and bigger, Shandling became frustrated, then angry, because he was anxious to start on his own movie. Still, he wouldn’t admit this to Beatty, because he was his friend, and he was “Warren Beatty.” Instead, he complained to everyone else. As one source, close to the production, puts it, “His role was tiny, and it grew into this huge thing. Warren kept roping him deeper and deeper into stuff, and Garry wouldn’t say no to him. He was deeply unhappy, deeply unpleasant, and deeply difficult, saying things like, ‘Leave me alone, stop writing me into things, I just want to get the fuck out of here.’”

  Predictably, the relationship between Beatty and Keaton, never good, got worse. Explains Harris, “When you’re an actor like Diane is, and you show up on time, and you go into hair and makeup on time, and an hour passes, and two hours pass, and three hours pass, and four hours pass, and sitting in the movie star’s trailer across the parking lot is the director and three producers and a studio executive talking about things that will affect you—your role and your schedule—and you are not privy to those conversations, nor do you want to be, you feel incredibly powerless and angry.”

  According to Henry, “Diane said to me, ‘I don’t care what you write, but you have to have me in a chair facing away from him!’ She wouldn’t look at Warren. It’s funny, I did two movies with him—Heaven Can Wait was the other—and in both cases the lead actresses didn’t want to look at him.” Harris continues, “I don’t know why she did the film. Of all of us, she knew better from the beginning what it would be like. She felt that Warren had hijacked the movie. I think she blamed him.” Even Goldie Hawn, who was always a loyal friend to him, complained to Harris saying, according to the executive, “This is completely unfair. We all read the script beforehand, this is what we signed on for, this is what we’re paid for, we show up on time, we’re ready to work, and then, next thing you know, four, five, six hours have passed, they’re all in Warren’s trailer, no one’s come out, and when they do come out we’re doing a completely different scene from what we’ve prepared, or there’s no scene that day.”

  Charlton Heston was the only actor who managed to relax, perhaps because, as it turned out, he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Says Harris, “I always felt incredibly bad for Heston, because I felt like somehow the movie was poking fun at him, and he didn’t understand it.”

  Despite her frustration, Harris liked Beatty. “He’s not long in makeup,” she recalls. “And he has boundless energy. Seventeen-hour days, and he was there to the bitter fuckin’ end, wanting to do another take. One thing that always impressed me about Warren—as much as the other actors wanted to shoot themselves because they didn’t know what the fuck was going on, and their schedules were yanked all over—he is incredibly generous to the person across from him, and he’ll always stay and do his off-camera. He felt a big obligation to that, particularly with the younger actors, somebody like Josh Hartnett, who’d virtually never done a movie before.”

  On the set, he was punctilious in his behavior toward Chelsom. “It was Chelsom’s set, and Warren was being as careful as he could not to interfere,” Henry recalls. “Any arguments about procedure usually occurred way off camera.” Indeed, Beatty was so paranoid about being blamed that he barely ventured an opinion unless it was in front of producers and executives who would testify that his suggestions could not be construed as meddling. De Luca had a T-shirt made with the words “I’m only an actor” emblazoned across the front. Beatty was not amused. According to Henry, “Warren was desperately determined not to take the rap.”

  Off the set was another matter. Beatty made no secret of his unhappiness. One day the actor apparently said something to Chelsom that caused the director to rush out of his trailer, slam the door behind him, and yell at the top of his lungs, “You cunt.” For his part, Chelsom was just as adept at pushing Beatty’s buttons. According to Karsch, on one occasion Beatty became so incensed that he threatened Chelsom with bodily injury and had to be restrained. “I knew every time we had a meeting that Peter was going to say something tha
t was going to enrage Warren,” says Henry. “I could hear it coming, like a distant train, rumbling up the tracks, and then suddenly it was there.” One day, they were sitting at a conference table in the production office, discussing whether to build something or to hire someone, and Chelsom, feeling cornered, looked at him and said, “Well, everyone knows that you have approval—you have fart approval.” Henry closed his eyes and put his head in his hands. “It took Warren a minute to build to it, ’cause he started very quietly, but within thirty seconds he was screaming. This was a humdinger. Warren was red-faced. I could see him punching him out. But I sympathized with [Beatty], because Chelsom’s choice of words was really bad, patronizing and irritating at the same time. That sort of negative vulgarity that the English are very good at that Americans hate them for.” But even in the extremity of his anger, Beatty, who loved an argument above all things, couldn’t help but dissect the meaning of “fart approval” and whether or not it ultimately had anything to do with the making or unmaking of a film.

  Karsch, whom Chelsom regarded, along with Fred Roos, as the enemy, as one of “Warren’s guys,” as he puts it, says, “Warren is like a rose with sharp thorns. He can be difficult, but he just wasn’t in those meetings.” As weeks turned into months, Chelsom became increasingly marginalized. Recalls Karsch, “Diane, Goldie, Warren, and I would be in the office, talking about this and that, and Peter would be there too, watching TV—the English comedian, Eddie Izzard. Nobody paid any attention to him. It was like he wasn’t in the room. Pretty soon he started coming [to the set] at eleven o’clock, at twelve o’clock.”

  In October 1998, they were on day 66 of a sixty-day shoot and still going strong. “We were shooting for months and months and months and months,” says Karsch. “It was ridiculous. We had so much footage you couldn’t believe it, well over a million feet of film. For a romantic comedy. It was like, ‘Oh, let’s try this out. Let’s try that out.’” Harris is more sympathetic. “Peter didn’t say a whole hell of a lot to Warren,” she says. “I think he felt that if he could just get out of the conversation and get the cameras rolling, he would be one day closer to getting the hell out of there.” Says one New Line executive close to the movie, “I don’t think that Mike De Luca ever wanted to go up against Warren. He was pretty checked out. It was arm wrestling to get him to come to set.”

  Town & Country wasn’t the only bad news Beatty had to deal with. On December 6, 1998, David MacLeod, who had been a fugitive since 1989, was found dead at the age of fifty-four on a freeway overpass in Montreal. It took the police three weeks to identify the body. The police determined that he had died by his own hand—by swallowing lighter fluid, no less—and declared the case closed. Says Toback, “If you knew MacLeod at all, the idea of his committing suicide in that excruciatingly painful way is about as likely as his committing suicide by chopping off his left foot and eating it. He was a hedonist, not a masochist. What probably happened is that someone forced it down his throat. I would say that murder would be a 25-to-1 favorite over suicide. MacLeod was incredibly careful, but obviously he made some bad decisions in terms of guessing who was watching, and who had it in for him. He just got unlucky.”

  THE CLIMAX of Town & Country was still a problem. It transpired at the “Design Center,” ostensibly located in downtown Manhattan, where Ellie receives a prestigious award and Porter makes an impromptu appearance, publicly apologizing to his wife.

  But it just didn’t work, and all Beatty’s horses and all Beatty’s men just couldn’t make it work. “The struggle over that speech—he’s wooing back his wife is what it was about—was agony,” Henry continues. “Because Warren knew it was an important speech. There was a lot of writing going on. Warren wrote, Garry wrote, even Goldie wrote. We tortured that speech. By the time we got through rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting, whatever was in it originally was gone. Changed the verbs, changed the nouns, changed the tenses. He just worried it to death.

  “Everyone was desperate by that time. They’d been shooting for six months. We had lots and lots and lots of takes. Each one of the scenes in that sequence took twice as long to shoot as it should have. They must have had all the actors on overages. There were three cameras working. Each one on a track. There were the hundred extras in the room, I’m not sure why. There were tables full of people listening to this, and a lot of eye rolling. It was just too complicated.”

  In the middle of all this, along came Keaton’s stop date. Uncharacteristically, Beatty was unable to persuade her to stay. “The last few days were shot without Diane,” continues Henry. “It’s her fucking double that we’re seeing, sideways. It was a nightmare. A nightmare.”

  The picture was now scheduled for a September 17, 1999, release. By the time it wrapped, at least 1.3 million feet of film had been shot, according to The New York Times. New Line tested Town & Country in a research screening on April 20, 1999. It went badly. “That was the day Columbine happened, which should have been an omen right there,” says De Luca. “It became clear that only Europeans find infidelity funny. Americans do not find it funny. When I was watching it with regular people, even I felt uncomfortable—I don’t care how guilty this guy feels, you really felt that it’s still regarded as an unforgivable transgression, especially in a comedy, where you’re supposed to feel good at the end. I remember walking out of the screening, and there was a group of middle-aged women, very hostile, angry faces, talking about how dare Hollywood put out a movie like this, it just goes to show they have no values. Very incensed at the idea of this character womanizing through three quarters of the movie, so I think it was a flawed concept commercially from the beginning, that I didn’t recognize.” In the past, the man who had everything had managed to make his characters vulnerable—even Bugsy—thereby ingratiating himself with audiences. This time he failed.

  This screening touched off a frantic scramble for a new conclusion. New Line decided to reshoot and recut to make Beatty’s character more sympathetic. But shooting additional footage meant that they had to wait nine months to reassemble the cast. Bening was scheduled to have another baby, in March of 2000, so the resumption of production was put off until April of that year, leaving the star with too much time on his hands.

  “WARREN WOULD have liked to be president of the U.S.,” says Joyce Hyser. He had of course mused from time to time about running for sundry offices, including president. He hid “Easter eggs,” as Bill Bradley calls them, in his movies, allusions to his political aspirations best appreciated by his friends. (In Bugsy, for example, Ben Siegel says, “If we have a state, then we can elect a president,” while Meyer Lansky replies, “What, are you planning to run for president?”) For a millisecond in 1999, it looked like he might have his chance.

  Arianna Huffington had completed her journey from right to left and was becoming an increasingly vocal spokeswoman for progressive causes, as well as something of a social magnet for a disparate group of angry, Clinton-hating liberals that included Pat Caddell, Bill Bradley, performer Harry Shearer, and Nation writer Marc Cooper. “There was definitely disappointment in how Clinton had compromised, and failed to use our prosperity to advance major issues,” says Huffington. “He pulled back after the health care debacle on big ideas, and focused on small measures.” Clinton’s second term was drawing to a sorry close with the incumbent in disgrace, and the presidential primary season was fast approaching. Gore was the obvious candidate to succeed him, but the prospect of the famously wooden vice president didn’t excite anybody either, indicating that he had electability problems. The conversation at Huffington’s dinner table quickly turned to, “Couldn’t we do better?” Recalls Cooper, “Going into 2000, we were desperate!”

  Inevitably, in these couldn’t-we-do-better talkathons, Beatty’s name came up, most seriously at a dinner party at Huffington’s home in the summer of 1999. After all, if a nincompoop like Ronald Reagan had gone from B-actor to president, why not Beatty, whose IQ must have exceeded that of his t
railblazing friend by a good 100 points? He had charisma and name recognition to burn, no one could call him a political dilettante, he didn’t smoke or drink, and most exciting of all, who was better suited to deflate the DLC mandarins who had sold out the core principles of the Democratic Party than—Bulworth!

  Huffington floated the notion in one of her columns, entitled, “Does Bulworth have a future in the White House?” published on August 9. “Warren knew I was doing the column, but other than that he didn’t know exactly what I would be saying,” she says. “It started this amazing firestorm. I was at Warren’s a couple of days after that, and looked at his call log, which included every major TV and radio show, wanting him on. I don’t really think either he or I were prepared for the response, both from the press and from leaders. I got literally thousands of e-mails, and I downloaded about a thousand of them and put them in a book for him.”

  Beatty started gathering string, calling Democrats and liberals of various stripes, picking their brains, canvassing their opinions. Should he or shouldn’t he? He would list all of the why-the-hell-not reasons to run, and then all the reasons it would be a bad idea, most of which concerned privacy and the physical safety of himself and his family. At the time, he and Bening had three children under seven, to whom he was devoted, and another on the way. As he well knew, there are all sorts of nuts out there ready to kill famous people.

  There was, however, the issue of his skirt-chasing past. “The question was, Would his past be such that it would block his ability to get out his message?” recalls Bradley. “I didn’t think that was the case. All the stuff prior to his marriage to Annette could be explained.” In short, they decided whatever surfaced would be survivable.

  Beatty’s temperament was a more formidable obstacle. He may be preternaturally charming one-on-one or in small groups, but he is not a presser of flesh. Public speaking was a crap shoot. Sometimes he was relaxed and eloquent, other times he seemed uncomfortable and tongue-tied. As Mike Nichols puts it, “It’s hard to imagine him doing that because he is so guarded, and so relatively inarticulate when he’s ad-libbing on TV. He’s always had a hard time talking about himself.” He doesn’t like to be pinned down, and generally dislikes interviews. Bradley knew this would make him an unsuitable candidate. As he puts it, he seems like he’d make a good candidate “for about forty-five minutes.” Bradley had lunch one day with Beatty and Bening at Santo Pietro at the Beverly Glen Center, where he said as much: “I think that you should not run for president, it would be too much of a dramatic change for you, to put yourself out there in that arena on a constant basis, and give yourself up to the process.” The star understood; he had, after all, made a picture about that very subject. But Bradley told him, “I think you should use the exposure that you have to conduct an exploratory campaign, say a lot of important things about America that will influence the debate, and the direction of the Democratic Party as it goes into a critical post-Clinton election.” He explains, “He could do that without making any radical change in his life and still be who he was. And if things caught fire, then go for it.”