Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

  Not everyone was satisfied with Bradley’s formulation. They wanted Beatty to go further. “What Arianna, Marc Cooper, and Pat Caddell wanted him to do was to actually run, and screw around with the Democrats,” Bradley continues. “People were saying he should run as an independent, like Jesse Ventura, or he should go for the Reform Party nomination, but I knew that there was approximately the chance of a snowball in hell that he would do that. If he was going to run at all it was going to be as a liberal Democrat in the primaries.” Beatty was—and is—a “yellow dog Democrat,” a Texas term for a party loyalist: before backing a Republican, he would vote for a yellow dog were it running on the Democratic ticket. Beatty much preferred to bore from within. As he puts it, “We’re living in an era where Mary Matalin can be married very happily to James Carville. It’s more and more like one party, one happy party. So the question becomes, I think, not do we need a third party; it’s that we need a second party.”

  Despite all the negatives, the idea of an exploratory campaign was too intriguing for Beatty to ignore, especially since the potential field of candidates was so dismal. Bening was urging him to do it, while a core group of four advisers, who naturally dubbed themselves the Gang of Four (Huffington, Caddell, Bradley, and Cooper), aided and abetted by a handful of fellow travelers, began spinning various scenarios over meals and cell phones. Recalls Cooper, a short, husky man with a sharp wit and ready opinions who was once Salvador Allende’s translator, “That group of four—I think it was just us, but who knows who Warren’s talking to at three in the morning, there could have been twelve groups of four like this—we suddenly became the unofficial consulting team.” He continues, “It was bizarre. I didn’t even know him. I’m not a political consultant; I never claimed to be. I was just one of probably ten thousand satellites orbiting around him. I was just having fun. But the conversations went very far very fast.

  “We saw polls in places like California immediately after he came out as a possibility, where he was getting 10, 12 percent of the Democratic vote without even campaigning. We figured, If he does the TV circuit, writes a couple of op-ed pieces, the best-case scenario is that he could poll 18, 20 percent, enough so that Gore would have to look over his shoulder and recalibrate, just as Kerry would have to recalibrate his campaign because of pressure from the Deaniacs. He seemed kind’a on board for that.” It was the Ralph Nader strategy, but unlike Nader, the actor was not willing to be a spoiler.

  Bradley was encouraged, but he couldn’t help noticing that “Warren would talk about his interest in it, but he would dance around it. Larry King had extended a standing invitation to appear on his show anytime he wanted to. Beatty agreed or seemed to agree to do it. So I would say, ‘Let’s just pick a date. How ’bout next Wednesday.’ Then he’d say, ‘Well, what would I be saying?’” He asked Cooper to craft him language for the Larry King show. “So I wrote on ten issues,” Cooper remembers. “Warren would say, ‘It’s good, it’s good. But can we get this down to thirty seconds, fifteen seconds?’ That sounded like somebody who’s skilled on camera and knows what he’s doing and was getting ready to go on TV with sound bites.”

  But invariably, in the course of discussing what he might say, the target date slipped. Bradley recalls, “We could never quite get to the next Wednesday part, so we thought, ‘Maybe we should just arrange it for him.’ We presented that, and it was, ‘No, no, I know Larry.’ But it wasn’t happening. Then it was, ‘Is this the first show I should do? I’m not sure it’s a serious enough show. Maybe MacNeil/Lehrer. I think MacNeil/Lehrer is much more substantive.’

  “‘Well, yeah, but it’s incredibly boring and I never watch the show. Meet the Press?’

  “‘Meet the Press is not the kind of show you jump into right off the bat. It ups the ante, and might make it appear that I’m actually running, rather than thinking about running. Maybe I should go on Nightline.’

  “Then it was, ‘Is he ready for Nightline? How will it work? What kinds of questions is he gonna get?’ and by musing about different scenarios, he kept sliding from one thing to another without focusing and just going in. Ultimately, he didn’t do any of them. Warren is a perfectionist, and for him, the perfect is the enemy of the good.”

  Beatty did decide to write an op-ed piece for The New York Times. “In the mini-world of this campaign, that New York Times piece was crucial,” recalls Cooper. “It was The New York fucking Times! He talked me and Bill Bradley to death over that piece. When it came out, however, we went nuts. I said to Bill, ‘How could this happen? We just talked to him a half hour ago, and he said, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to publish it till everybody looks at it,” and then it’s there.’ He played—I say this with affection—a shell game with us on that.

  “The last two words were the worst possible thing: ‘Stay tuned!’ They raised expectations—there’s more coming—implied that there was some plan, but there was no plan. Stay tuned for what? My reaction was, ‘Yeah, we’d sort of like to know what was going on too!’ At that point we became kind of protective of him: on the one hand, we were prodding him to go farther out, but on the other side saying, ‘Lookit, if you don’t want to do it, then don’t do it, but don’t fuck around in the middle like this, you’re not going to do anybody any good, and you’re going to fuck yourself, your own integrity and credibility.’”

  Then Beatty was invited to speak before the Los Angeles chapter of the venerable Americans for Democratic Action at the Beverly Hilton on September 29, 1999, where he would be given their annual Eleanor Roosevelt Award. The Gang of Four was in the audience, applauding appreciatively along with an auditorium full of celebrities and gray-haired liberals. “He wrote every fucking word of that speech by himself, baring his heart,” says Cooper. “It was wonderful and amusing and enjoyable and did no damage to anybody.” But they were a little taken aback when he concluded with a peroration to a hypothetical “drum majorette” who might be thinking of running for president, whom he advised, “Look, drum majorette… speak up. Speak up for the people nobody speaks up for…” They exchanged glances and kicked one another under the table. It was, “Oh my God! The ‘little drum majorette’? Who knows what a drum majorette is? A teenage girl? This is the last thing you want to come up with, Warren! Think of something else, like an ROTC officer.”

  But it was the politics of the speech that bothered Cooper more. He realized, for the first time, that he and Beatty were not on the same page. “That event was a reality check for me,” he explains. “I realized that I may have been projecting some of my own politics onto him, that Warren’s are such that he would not really want to challenge the Democrats, turn over the tables, saying, ‘I’m going to be the skunk at the party so that we can get back on track,’ which was the premise of all our discussions. This guy has tremendous loyalty to the Democratic Party, lots of friends in Hollywood who are Democrats. There was too much at risk for him.”

  Still, as Cooper puts it, his ADA speech had “played on the ground like the Academy Awards.” Or, as Huffington recalls, “It was covered as though it were a presidential address. There were banks of TV cameras.” The Beatty gang was thrilled; their strategy seemed to be working. He was establishing his themes, and the most prominent among them was campaign finance reform. Says Huffington, “That was the beginning of his friendship with John McCain on that issue. McCain’s stance was very much about reforming a broken political system, both in terms of how money is raised by campaigns, and how lobbying is used to buy public policy, and what that does to those without a voice and without a bank account.”

  Four years later, Beatty, ever the optimist, tried to persuade McCain to join the John Kerry ticket as his running mate. “McCain hates George Bush, so it was pretty intense,” says a source. “It definitely went on. But at the same time, McCain sees himself as a Republican, so there was no chance he would do it. This was a kind of misapprehension of who McCain is.” Adds Huffington, assessing Beatty’s motives, “I think he was looking at how to st
op Hillary Clinton from being the nominee [in the future]. He does not believe that Hillary represents what is best about the Democratic Party, in terms of the ideals of FDR: fairness, concern for the working people, as opposed to the Wall Street corporate culture.”

  Next up was the AFL-CIO convention, beginning the week of October 10, at which labor was going to endorse Al Gore. Cooper came up with a bright idea: Beatty would address the Teamsters. “The Teamsters are the biggest union in the AFL-CIO,” he explains. “Jimmy Hoffa [Jr.] was a maverick. He didn’t want to be taken for granted, a Democratic toady. He was flirting with Nader, with the idea of a third party. I knew ultimately [Beatty] wasn’t willing to go off the reservation, but he was willing to fuck with the AFL-CIO over trade, because Gore is a big free trader.” If Beatty endorsed job protection and opposed free trade—traditional Democratic policies—“the Teamsters would go nuts, and that would throw a wrench into the whole AFL-CIO process, possibly derail the very early rubber-stamping of Gore. I talked to Warren about this for a month. He was intrigued as hell by it. We were just tinkering, but Warren loves to tinker. At no time did Warren ever say to me that I’m going to do that thing. What he said to me was, ‘Tell me about the Teamsters. Who should I talk to about this trade thing so I really understand it.’

  “You should talk to Lori Wallach from Public Citizen.” Wallach flew out to L.A. to brief him. Beatty asked Cooper to write a draft of the Teamsters speech. Cooper did. He continues, “The Teamsters had the space reserved, Warren was ready, it was all systems go. Warren had them on the hook.”

  At the Los Angeles Convention Center, Huffington and Bradley kept asking, “Where’s Warren, where’s Warren?” Cooper suspected the worst. “A few days earlier, the phone calls stopped being returned, and the process somehow went into a black hole. Which he’s a master of. Of secrecy. He loves it, he thrills to it, the intrigue of that kind of Batman operation.” Bradley called his home, talked to Bening, who told him that her husband had taken a shower and gone out. She didn’t seem to know if he intended to address the Teamsters or not. As it turned out, he did not. When Bradley spoke to him later that evening, he said, “‘Well, I just couldn’t do it.’ He didn’t want to be seen as hurting Gore.” Adds Cooper, “In the end, he had a private meeting with Hoffa. I’m sure they had a nice dinner, and then nothing happened.”

  For those involved in Beatty’s quixotic “exploratory campaign,” it was like being in “purgatory,” as a source described it. For Bradley and Cooper, it was like watching sand running through their fingers. Says Cooper, “For me, when he backed down on the Teamsters, that was the shipwreck. It was obvious that he wasn’t running and that he shouldn’t run. He would have been a bad candidate, not because he’s a bad person, but because he just doesn’t have the attributes to be a candidate. Maybe he’s too thoughtful, too meditative to be a candidate. In any event, Warren never followed up his op-ed piece. We’d stayed tuned—he just evaporated. Bill and I were left, as they say in The Godfather, holding our dicks in our hands.”

  Says Bradley, “Warren is an actor. As an actor, you can try out different sides of your personality without actually being that person in real life. Bulworth was a great fantasy of what someone could do if he were free of the strictures of having to be a conventional politician. Arianna [and Marc] did not understand that Bulworth was an alter ego, was not actually Warren. In fact, Bulworth would not have won that election in real life, he would have been carted off to a loony bin, but it was a great vehicle to make some trenchant points about American politics and culture.”

  Making Bulworth prepared Beatty for his here-he-is, here-he-isn’t run at the presidency, because it prepared him—someone who had always loved being an insider—to be an outsider. As he puts it, speaking of the movie, “You can’t really make jokes like that unless you’re willing to have your invitation to the table rescinded. And I’ve become more and more willing to have that invitation rescinded.” But it seemed more and more as though he wasn’t. In other words, he both was and was not Bulworth. The conflict between the two would paralyze him. As Cooper came to recognize, “This [campaign] was a script in development. You can have a hundred scripts in development, but ninety-nine of them aren’t real. For those of us who were writing the script, we took it very seriously. For Warren, it was, ‘I have another meeting now.’ He’s wonderfully erratic.”

  One night, in the autumn of 1999, Cooper was lying awake into the wee hours, tossing and turning, worrying about Beatty. He thought, I know what we do—let’s do a quickie book that we’ll crash out before the convention in the summer. Warren may not be running in 2000, but Jay Bulworth will. It will be a book about the Bulworth campaign, Bulworth 2000—that would, of course, be fiction, but will have within it all of the substance that Warren didn’t say, because it will contain all the memos, written by Jay Bulworth. And Warren will go on TV to promote the book. It would be a way for him to have an impact in the 2000 race without having to stick his neck out. It’s a great fuckin’ idea.”

  Cooper pitched the book to Beatty, who got it immediately, said, “Let’s have a meeting.” They met, Beatty, Cooper, and Bradley. Although Beatty had misgivings—he still didn’t want to hurt Gore—he was generally enthusiastic. He said, “Let’s have another meeting.” They met again, and this time he went for it, saying, “Let’s do it. I’m green-lighting it. You guys have been so great, I don’t want to make any money off it, you will make the money off it, I’ll actually do a couple of TV shows.”

  “Terrific!” replied Cooper, getting excited.

  “But—there’s an issue with Fox that I have to resolve first. Just a little legal thing. Minor. Not important.”

  “Warren, do you have the rights to Bulworth?”

  “That’s not the issue.”

  “We have to have it done by January to get it out by the summer.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll get it resolved by next week.” Cooper started talking to publishers, and settled on Verso, a small but highly respected left-wing press. Weeks passed. Another meeting. Beatty said, “It’s a green light, but I still have to resolve this thing with Fox.”

  Every day, Cooper or Bradley et al. would speak to Beatty on the phone. “What’s happening?” One day, the answer was, “Oh, I think I’m going to run in Delaware!”

  “Great. Fantastic!” Or, as Cooper, who had had enough by that time, thought, “Please don’t. Outta the fucking blue, after the whole thing had deflated and we were on to the Bulworth book, at four in the morning Warren starts to talk about actually running in the Delaware primary! ‘Why do you want to run in Delaware?’ ‘There’s a big African-American community… ’ or some babble—Apparently, Warren had spoken to somebody: ‘You should run in Delaware.’”

  Delaware was an early primary, February 5, 2000, just after Iowa and New Hampshire, and was not an entirely foolish idea. There are a lot of African-Americans in Wilmington, while Iowa and New Hampshire are both lily-white, less reflective of the Democratic Party base. But it sounded like this time it was Beatty, not his friends, who was confusing himself with Bulworth. He may have rapped like Bulworth-from-the hood on the big screen, but whether it would play in real life was doubtful. There was another problem: the Delaware primary is invisible. As Cooper puts it, “When had Delaware ever made a difference about anything? It was like a bad movie where you think the person is dead, and they wake up for a last gasp. He had defaulted on this campaign weeks before. Then he had this last-minute regret, and now a second default? We didn’t even want it to come out that he had been talking about Delaware because it would have been too embarrassing. There was no way to explain it. While political insiders might know that that was a delirious idea, the public would interpret it that he was running for president, which he clearly wasn’t. If you liked Warren at all, it was time to kill it! ’Cause he couldn’t bring himself to do it himself. He’s an equivocator, can’t make up his mind. Many times we said Annette would be a better candidate, because she was mo
re decisive, more outspoken, more willing to rock the boat, and more willing to be unpopular.”

  Meanwhile, Bulworth 2000 had gone bust. Says Cooper, “Whatever this thing was with Fox, it never got resolved, and neither I nor Bill ever found out what that was. The window kept moving, January to February to March, and of course all the deadlines passed, and we never did it.”

  Subsequently, Beatty reverted to the role he liked best, “the phantom,” kibitzing behind the scenes, talking on the phone to political figures of all ideological stripes. Before he and Beatty parted ways, Paul Mazursky remembers being in the car with him when his phone rang. “Hello, John?” To Mazursky, he whispered, “McCain—John McCain.” Into the phone, he said, “Great! Wonderful speech last night—wonderful. You were very good. Yes, you did very well. Okay, we’ll talk. Bye.” He hung up. A few minutes later, the phone rang again. “Ralph, how are you?” He leaned over, whispered to Mazursky, “Ralph Nader!”