Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

  As of this writing, Beatty has not had a hit since Dick Tracy in 1990. Tracy made $100 million, but Katzenberg’s memo had cast a shadow over that, and some would argue that Beatty hasn’t had a hit since Heaven Can Wait in 1978. He hasn’t done anything at all, hit or miss, for over a decade, since 1998 when the bulk of Town & Country was shot. During that time, he entertained ideas for several projects, mostly plucked off a shelf heavy with unfinished scripts he had accumulated over the years, but also sequels to his hits, like Shampoo 2, or even flops, like Bulworth 2, and so on. It was reminiscent of Kazan’s plans for a remake of A Face in the Crowd, which Beatty recognized as a bad idea. He recently sued the Tribune Company to secure the rights to Dick Tracy. But none of these projects has seen the light of day.

  Such has been his exquisite timing, however, that his decline has coincided with his marriage and the birth of his four children—no accident, to be sure—so that he has been able to settle into a life of comfortable domesticity cushioned by an unassailable rationale for his slow fade to black, when other filmmakers, faced with a similar falling off, might have been driven to distraction, or at least golf or pinochle at the Hillcrest Country Club. Although his devotion to his family, oft publicly proclaimed, is undoubtedly heartfelt, it’s also true that it concealed an unpalatable truth: not only was he no longer bankable, he may have become virtually unbankable. (Beatty himself used to poke fun at politicians who left politics “to spend more time with the family,” and his case is suspiciously similar.) Despite the two audacious films he made in the mid-1990s, Bugsy and Bulworth, the studios have not been falling over themselves to finance his pictures. When his name comes up, whether as a director or producer or even actor, it’s often met with eye rolling and groans. (He was offered a juicy part as Nixon in Frost/Nixon by Ron Howard, and very possibly several other roles.)

  Not being able to find anyone to direct Beatty was troublesome enough. Not being able to find a studio to back a Beatty movie was disastrous. Says former Beatty “cheese man” Hal Lieberman, who was president of production at Universal from 1994 to 1996, “[My bosses] wouldn’t let me work with Warren. They thought he was too difficult. They said, ‘You’re gonna get in over your head. And he’s gonna fuckin’ dump on you.’” Adds Bill Mechanic, “Warren at the point of Bulworth was no longer a big star. Stardom in today’s world lasts a lot shorter span of time than it did in the past. If you don’t stay in the news, your commerciality is not assured.” The weak or virtually nonexistent box office for his last three pictures, followed by the black hole that was Town & Country—his fault or not—along with his reputation for perfectionism, for being one of the most difficult people to work with or for in the entire industry, as well as his notorious inability to commit and make decisions, may have finally done their work. Beatty may love his children and spend a lot of his time at Little League games and after-school sports of one sort or another, but the suspicion has been that he wasn’t making pictures because he couldn’t make pictures.

  It is shocking to imagine a star as bright as Beatty was, as famous and powerful, and as gifted, being virtually unemployable. There’s no shortage of reasons that explain why filmmakers go into decline. In America, at least, the movie business has always been a young man’s game. Directing is hard, as physically and mentally demanding as any job on the planet. Filmmakers grow old and get tired like everyone else, while their audience seems to remain perennially young. Once directors become successful, they too often enter a bubble of privilege and lose whatever instincts enabled them to touch their audiences in the first place. As Billy Friedkin once put it, “When you take your first tennis lesson, your career is over.”

  For all Beatty has tried to be a “real” person—dispensing with an entourage, working out of an office at the Beverly Glen Center instead of hiding on a studio lot, mixing freely with shoppers and tourists—he still lives a largely cocooned life. Jim Toback recalls, “Warren used to say to me, ‘What are you taking subways for?’ And I’d say, ‘Because you lose touch with the way people live and think, that’s why. You lose your ear for the way people talk.’ I don’t think it’s possible to stay in touch with that reality if you don’t continue to live it in some way.”

  It’s not that Beatty is a stranger to the fragility of talent. “Stella Adler said, ‘Talent is the ability to preserve talent,’” he recalls. “[After the blacklist,] when Abraham Polonsky started working again, there was nothing left. It’s very hard to keep productive. It’s very hard to keep the level up for the game, for the big fight, for the World Series, for the Super Bowl, and still have a life. It’s that game that people always want to talk about when they talk about talent. They talk about it with me. ‘Why doesn’t he make more pictures?’ Or they talk about it with friends of mine, like Muhammad Ali. ‘What would have happened if he hadn’t stayed away from the ring for all that time?’ Talent is very delicate. And when you put it out there in the world of insults and acrimony and envy and lividity, it has trouble surviving.”

  As for politics, after his 1999 presidential exploratory ended, Beatty did launch a vigorous and effective campaign against a grab bag of referenda sponsored by California’s Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in a special election on November 8, 2005—all of which Beatty correctly regarded as misconceived. He addressed the California Nurses Association, drew headlines trying to crash a Schwarzenegger rally, and followed the governor around the state in a Truth Squad bus countering the governor’s message with his own. For his trouble, he was called a “crackpot” by one of Schwarzenegger’s staff, but the referenda were soundly defeated at the polls, and Beatty was briefly talked about as a possible Democratic candidate to oppose the Republican incumbent in the next election. But he quickly reverted to his default position, kibitzing by phone. He more or less sat out the 2008 presidential race. He is still close to John McCain, even though he never would have voted for him, but he couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

  Says Buck Henry, “As it stands, there are big, big fans of all his hit films, and big, big detractors of all of the ones that weren’t. I imagine if Warren had made more movies there would be a more settled and accurate notion of what kind of talent he had. What his voice was.”

  Bob Evans’s judgment of Beatty is most severe. According to him, Beatty didn’t lose it; he never had it. “You know what Warren’s greatest talent is?” he asked rhetorically, in 1994. “How many pictures has Warren made in his career? Twenty-one? How many hits did he have? Three! Bonnie and Clyde, Shampoo, and Heaven Can Wait. That’s batting three for twenty-one. In baseball, you’re sent back to the minors for that. Not Warren. He’s a major star. Every little kike producer says, ‘I have Warren Beatty, I have Warren Beatty!’ The only places Warren is known are Bel Air, Beverly Hills, Holmby Hills, and New York. But he’s maintained that aura. He’s still A-plus on every list. That is fucking talent, man. My hat’s off to him. I love him for it.”

  Granted, Beatty is probably held to a higher standard because of the great expectations his gifts invited, as well as the power he enjoyed for two decades. By setting himself up as the new Orson Welles—not literally, of course, he would never be impolitic enough to claim that—he invited these judgments with the height and breadth of his aspiration, implied by the four credits for which he was nominated twice.

  Beatty’s doppelgänger, Robert Redford, will leave Sundance behind him, which, for all its faults, is an admirable institution. If it seems paradoxical to regard someone with Beatty’s achievements as in some way a disappointment, it is because there has always seemed to be something broken about him, at least to some people, because this kind of assessment is made over and over again. “Warren is an underachiever,” says Bo Goldman. “He could have been Orson Welles. He could have made five more wonderful movies, he could have been governor, he could have done everything, but his ego gets in the way. It’s a form of narcissism. It’s always about him.” It’s a harsh verdict. But i
f the lens is moved a fraction, it seems that on the contrary, Beatty did it all, made an indelible mark on his profession and still managed to embrace the breadth and variety of the experience that was available to him. It makes you wonder if that jury of movie people values films more than the fullness of life. Beatty always says that Charlie Feldman taught him “that life is short, and that movies are written on water, that you can’t take them with you, and that the quality of your own life is the reality.”

  Perhaps it’s not the last decade that makes them wonder, but the years he spent, so unproductively, chasing skirt. Perhaps it’s the fact that Beatty turned down so many roles, in so many films, and missed so many opportunities to work more effectively and decisively in politics. He seemed to do so much less than someone with his gifts could have done. Perhaps it’s that he always seemed so emotionally closed, so self-protective that, as Mab Goldman put it, he was unable to “stand naked in the storm of life.” It is hard to avoid the conclusion that despite the many ways in which his parents, in their timidity, were a negative example for him, showed him the way not to conduct himself—in his extreme caution, in his behavioral conservatism, he couldn’t help reflecting their influence.

  A man with as much pride as Beatty has, who has achieved as much as he did, understands that if Town & Country proves to be his last movie, it is too much of an ugly duckling to make an appropriate swan song for such an exceptional career. But it is an instructive one. The interesting question with regard to Town & Country is not “how?” but “why?” The picture is a lightweight piece of fluff, at best. Why did he agree to make it? Maybe, ever the politician, he was playing it safe after Bulworth, just as he thought he was playing it safe making Ishtar after Reds and Dick Tracy after Ishtar. Surely, with more children on the way, a more dedicated filmmaker might have slipped in another movie before the PTA ate up what was left of his career. He still hadn’t made Hughes, his only remaining one-from-the-heart project, but he had always behaved as if he would live forever—to quote George Roundy—and maybe he thought he had all the time in the world, until Scorsese beat him to it with The Aviator (2004).

  Beatty was impaled on the horns of a dilemma. As he said repeatedly, he couldn’t afford to just direct, because he wouldn’t get his acting fee. But, neither, as Pikser puts it, can “Warren just act in a movie he’s not directing without making serious problems. He needs to be able to control his environment. He can never let go, ever.” He doesn’t really trust anyone to direct him, and directors know this. Despite his good intentions, his personality is such that he just can’t help trying to “help,” at the very least, and seizing control at the very most. The good filmmakers, like Scorsese who nearly directed Dick Tracy, have been smart enough to give him a wide berth. And the not-so-good directors just brought out the worst in him. What was the upside for them? Even if they turned out well, as these collaborations occasionally did, witness Bugsy, the director would merely be credited with a “Warren Beatty picture” and tarred with faint praise, a reputation for being good at obeying orders. If they didn’t go well, Beatty might take the fall, but the director would be scarred for life, or nearly so, the fate of Caron and Chelsom. It wasn’t just that no director would work with Beatty more than once; directing Beatty could be a career ender, or at least retarder—witness those three. (May never directed again, Caron made only one more feature, then resumed his career in television—successfully—while Chelsom struggled until he regained his footing with Shall We Dance in 2004 and Hannah Montana in 2009.)

  But directing every picture in which he wanted to act was too much of a burden, too emotionally and physically draining, and it precluded him from following the path blazed by Clint Eastwood, who gracefully segued into directing when his leading-man days tapered off. It couldn’t have been easy for Beatty to sit in the audience at the Academy Awards, while Eastwood, a former TV cowboy, and seven years older than he, became a regular nominee. Indifferent as he appears to be, it was tough on him. “He hates it,” says Pikser. “He’s plagued with envy.”

  Then too, Eastwood is a different kind of director, a man of few takes, as he is of words, fast to commit and quick to execute. Beatty’s pictures were better, but Eastwood’s were good enough, and way more numerous. (By way of comparison, he has directed thirty-three pictures, to Beatty’s four, and acted in about forty-seven, excluding his TV work, to Beatty’s twenty-two, also excluding his TV work.) And perhaps most important, he has been able to keep making movies.

  Beatty was sixty-four when Town & Country was released. He had always been a romantic leading man. Unlike Eastwood—a man’s man, which is to say, an unromantic leading man—he has never been comfortable showing his age. Nor was he the kind of leading man who was essentially a character actor, like Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, or Al Pacino, which made it easy for them to slip into ensemble or even supporting roles when their starring days were over. Karsch once said to him, “Why don’t you do more supporting roles?” He replied, “I’d like to. Why don’t you find me one? One that will steal the picture!” Playing a supporting role was never, in other words, a real option. He momentarily contemplated one that Quentin Tarantino had more or less written for him—Bill, in Kill Bill. Metaphorically speaking, it was the perfect vehicle for “the phantom”: the other characters spend the entire movie talking about Bill, the film’s éminence gris, absent center, Wizard of Oz, whatever, who doesn’t appear until the final scenes. Better still, and more in keeping with Beatty’s persona, would have been had Beatty’s Bill never appeared at all, which is exactly what happened when the star finally withdrew from the project. Beatty offered several explanations: it originally appealed to him because it was a small part, but Tarantino kept enhancing it until Beatty thought it would take too much of his time. He also couldn’t help noticing the script was long, more than double the standard length, and way longer than could be accommodated by the shooting schedule he had been given. He was afraid it would go over and he’d be blamed for it, the way he was for Town & Country. (He was right about the production schedule, which did go way over.) Bill Bradley thinks it was too bloody for him, now that he had become a father.

  All this having been said, it’s foolish to count him out. As Dick Sylbert puts it, “He may still pull it off. Robert Rossen, when his back was against the wall—that’s when he did something interesting.” Beatty desperately wants to direct at least one more picture of significance, one more picture that is worthy of his gifts. Lately, he has begun to talk about Howard Hughes again, which would indeed be a fitting end to his career. The word on the street is that he has a good script that is focused on the latter half of Hughes’s life, Hughes at the end of his days, which Beatty considers more interesting than the first half of his career. That would also serve to distinguish it from The Aviator. He has been talking to actors. Beatty even had a start date, March 2009, although that date has come and gone, replaced by a June or July, and at this writing, November 2009 date. Meanwhile, said Bening of her husband, “He’s preparing.… He’s always preparing.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book has been along time in the making, and many of the people who have helped me have undoubtedly forgotten about it, particularly Kim Masters and Corie Brown from the late, lamented Premiere magazine. I wish to thank my British researchers, Stephen Hyde and Sarah Cheverton, aided and abetted by Carl Bromley, who mined the collections at the British Film Institute National Library and the University of Portsmouth Library, assisted at the latter by Christopher Martin. Likewise, thanks to Sandra Archer, the head reference librarian at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and Jim Hosney and Myriam Despujoulets at the American Film Institute, who provided invaluable aid. Thanks also to assistants at Vanity Fair who gladly found articles for me and tracked down sources, especially Jaqueline Gifford, John Ortved, and Louisine Frelinghuysen. Fellow writers and journalists who sent me their books and shared contacts included Sylvia Townsend
, Brian D. Johnson, Nick Dawson, Nicole LaPorte, and Dennis McDougal. Thanks, too, to Howard Karren, John Clark, Wesley Brown, Ruth Reichl, Michael Singer, Richard Brick, and Ron Yerxa, who helped me in my vain efforts to find a decent title for this book. As always, I benefited beyond measure from the critical eyes of Sara Bershtel and Bruce Handy. I am grateful to Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair for keeping me alive while the leaves flew off the calendar and my advance from Simon & Schuster dwindled faster than the GNP. And speaking of, I commend the patience of Melissa Goldstein, my photo researcher; Bob Bender, who did a fine job editing the manuscript; his assistant, Johanna Li; copy chief Gypsy da Silva; and publisher, David Rosenthal. Kris Dahl, my agent, has always been a source of unstinting support. My wife, Elizabeth Hess, wrote and published her own book while I was writing mine, and probably could have written another one had I not been such a nuisance, while my daugher, Kate, grew up while I wasn’t looking. And last but not least, I would like to thank Warren Beatty, a truly remarkable person and exceptional filmmaker. He may not like everything he sees in the mirror I have held up to him, but he has lived a life inspiring enough to write a book about, no small accomplishment.

  NOTES

  A NOTE ON THE RESEARCH

  When thoughts are attributed to a principal, they are also derived from interviews.

  WARRENOLOGY: AN INTRODUCTION

  page

  1 Epigraph: Bonnie and Clyde, DVD, “Making of—Documentary.”

  2 “It’s fundamentally destructive”: AI, 10/2/91.

  2 “In forty-five years you never opened”: AFI Life Achievement Award, 6/12/08.

  2 “If you have something to hide”: Lynn Hirschberg, “Warren Beatty Is Trying to Say Something,” The New York Times Magazine, 5/10/98.