Despite their surface macho and self-confidence, however, the three young actors were finding the road to stardom to be a bumpy ride, with abundant traps and dead ends along the way. Beatty had managed to shed his TV stigma (he had a recurring role on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis) and achieve a brief glimpse of potential stardom opposite Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass. He’d become an instant fixture in the gossip columns, and producers were showering him with scripts. Still the seemingly shrewd young actor had proceeded to involve himself in a succession of box-office flops, which cumulatively labeled him both “difficult” and “noncommercial.” By 1967, when I arrived at Paramount, the word among studio executives was that Warren Beatty was more trouble than he was worth.
Clint Eastwood, too, had fled his TV career after some angry salary battles on Rawhide, but his initial forays in film had left him unsatisfied. The Italian director, Sergio Leone, had made him a semi-star in Europe as the silent, steely-eyed hero in A Fistful of Dollars, but Clint knew a career could not be built around spaghetti westerns. By the late sixties, Clint Eastwood was regarded as an aging TV star whose ambitions were getting in his own way.
Like Beatty and Eastwood, Robert Redford, too, was having trouble making his way as a young actor. His native talent and Middle America good looks were landing him interesting roles, but his movies, The Chase and This Property Is Condemned, were tanking. He was the third or fourth choice for the lead in Barefoot in the Park, in ’66, but won the role, and the movie gave the young actor positive buzz. Redford was now getting offers to do light comedy, but those were not the roles that interested him. He wanted to be accepted as a serious actor and as a serious person, but that was not the way Hollywood saw him.
By the end of the sixties, an abundance of actors in Hollywood found themselves frustrated by the chaos of the system, but what set Beatty, Eastwood, and Redford apart was that each was about to seize their moment.
Even as a raw young actor, Warren Beatty seemed determined to be active in his own rescue. He understood that he was initially dismissed by some directors as yet another pretty boy. If he got lucky, he’d become another Troy Donahue, a career that had no interest for him.
Beatty observed that, both in Hollywood and on Broadway, there existed small enclaves of talent who fed off one another. It was as though the shrewd, truly gifted individuals in the creative community built walls to fend off the losers and the talentless. In his head, Beatty began to formulate his own list of the elite and to figure out scenarios on how he could join them.
On Broadway, he laid siege to the two hot playwrights of the moment, Tennessee Williams and William Inge. A gay Midwesterner, Inge had become an instant icon with hits like Come Back, Little Sheba and Picnic. And though Beatty was aggressively straight, he was also downright attractive to Inge. Indeed, the playwright saw to it that his young protégé played a lead role in his new play, A Loss of Roses. It flopped, but Inge’s theater friends labeled him Beatty’s “fairy godfather.”
Beatty’s quest continued in Hollywood, where he courted publicity as aggressively as he courted roles. Beatty’s ongoing affair with Joan Collins and his kinship with R. J. Wagner and Natalie Wood ensured his continued appeal to the gossip columnists. The agent turned producer Charlie Feldman decided Beatty would be a desirable addition to his salon, which meant introductions to filmmakers like Billy Wilder as well as stars like Cary Grant and Rita Hayworth.
Beatty had campaigned zealously for the lead opposite Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass, directed by Elia Kazan. At age twenty-three, Beatty was thrilled about working with Kazan, yet insecure about his acting talent. In an interview in the New York Times, he admitted, “I suppose I have a method—sloppy method.”
Yet the film earned some positive reviews for Beatty, with Time magazine pointing out his “startling resemblance to the late James Dean,” and the New York Times describing him as “a surprising newcomer.”
Most important to the young actor, however, was that the movie presented him as a symbol of male sexuality. It was Beatty’s fantasy: his career had been eroticized. The gossip columnists helped by pointing up his affair with his costar, Wood.
Beatty had by now launched himself into two other projects—a drama titled All Fall Down, also written by Inge, and a turgid piece titled The Roman Spring of Mr. Stone, in which Beatty was cast as an Italian lover. According to Bosley Crowther, the New York Times’ esteemed critic, Beatty was “hopelessly out of his element playing a patent-leather ladies’ man in Rome.” Crowther was even tougher on All Fall Down, in April 1962, writing that Beatty’s character emerged as “sloppy, slow-witted and rude.”
To the celebrity press, Beatty was brimming with superstar self-confidence. After the opening of All Fall Down, he left for a two-month vacation with the newly divorced Natalie Wood, who adorned the cover of Life magazine. Yet Beatty’s interactions with studio executives were earning him a reputation for indecisiveness. He committed to Youngblood Hawke, then changed his mind. He turned down commercially promising projects like the film adaptation of Barefoot in the Park (which Robert Redford eagerly accepted) as well as Visconti’s The Leopard. Studio chiefs like Jack Warner openly expressed their dismay with Beatty’s behavior. Hollywood’s working filmmakers felt he was a poseur who would court an Inge, but turn up his nose at studio projects.
Beatty compounded his problems by committing to yet another film that had snob value but little else. Robert Rossen, who had won awards for All the King’s Men and The Hustler, asked Beatty to play the lead in a downbeat drama called Lilith, which was set in a mental hospital. Beatty admired Rossen and the script reminded him of The Snake Pit. The character of Lilith, a nymphomaniac, also appealed to him. Rossen invited Beatty to join him in working on the screenplay and choosing his costar. She turned out to be Jean Seberg, an actress who had made an impact in Saint Joan.
Throughout principal photography, dire rumors spilled from the set of Lilith. Beatty was quarreling with his costar, Peter Fonda, and with his director. Rossen was quoted as saying, “If I die, it’ll be Warren Beatty who killed me.” In September 1964, Lilith was greeted with negative reviews and skimpy box office results.
A worried Beatty now did not want to let any time elapse between jobs. He quickly agreed to shoot an existential New Wave crime drama directed by Arthur Penn titled Mickey One. Penn called the plot a metaphor for McCarthyism. Most studio executives who read it couldn’t figure out what it was about.
Beatty’s troubles were mounting. Mickey One was destined to be yet another pretentious disaster. Meanwhile, Beatty was battling his friend Charlie Feldman, who was trying to develop a comedy with Woody Allen titled What’s New Pussycat? The producer let it be known around Hollywood that Beatty had accepted a rich deal to star in Pussycat, but had reneged. At the same time, the ubiquitous gossip columnists were reporting that the actor was having a secret love affair with Leslie Caron, breaking up her marriage to Peter Hall, director of the Royal Shakespeare Company (they’d had two children).
What’s New Pussycat? turned out to be a hit, with Beatty’s role assumed by Peter O’Toole, who had just finished Lawrence of Arabia. Peter Sellers came aboard as his costar. Once again, Beatty had misjudged an important property.
I would run into Beatty now and then during this period and was always confounded by him. When he walked into a party it seemed as though a neon banner proclaiming “superstar” lit up over his head. He always knew how to work the room, flirting with the women, paying homage to the heavyweights. The fact that I’d worked for the New York Times had been implanted in his memory bank, and when he saw me, he was uniformly polite and attentive. Within minutes, it was clear that he had read everything and was up on every rumor and intrigue both in Hollywood and in Washington. Beatty was smart and intended that I know it. There was no personal subtext to all this, but once, early on, he gave me a quick onceover and said, “You’re a married guy, right?” When I nodded my affirmation, I felt that I had shifted from
one category to another in his mind. I would not have access to Beatty’s formidable inventory of spare girlfriends.
By 1965 Beatty had decided to recast himself as a cultural rebel. Though a product of middle-class mainstream America, he felt an urgent need to break out of that mold. The pressure was now on to find a project that would express sixties rebellion and present him in a new aura.
Beatty had negotiated a meeting in London with Francois Truffaut to determine whether the French director might cast him in Fahrenheit 451, a project Beatty admired. To the young American, Truffaut was the personification of the New Wave auteur who was rewriting the lexicon of cinema. To the Frenchman, however, Beatty seemed at once egotistical and unsophisticated; indeed, he had no interest whatsoever in casting him in his picture. During their conversation, however, Truffaut explained that he had been flirting with a screenplay titled Bonnie and Clyde. He related the story line, and then explained why he had decided that the movie was not right for him as a director.
Beatty was intrigued. If Truffaut liked the story, it had to have something going for it. Upon returning to New York, he learned that yet another French auteur, Jean-Luc Godard, also had read Bonnie and Clyde and found it compelling.
In New York, Beatty obtained the phone number of Robert Benton, the cowriter of Bonnie and Clyde, and made an impromptu phone call. Benton, who worked for Esquire magazine at the time, had never met Beatty. He was convinced the call was a practical joke on the part of his cowriter, David Newman. Hearing the skepticism, Beatty explained with his customary low-key nonchalance that he wanted to read the script—indeed, that he would personally drop over to Benton’s apartment to pick it up.
Now Benton was certain this was a joke, and he was glad he had not mentioned the call to his wife. When the doorbell rang, however, she answered it wearing her hair in rollers, no makeup on, and her usual hang-about-the-house clothing. When she recognized her visitor, she almost fainted, but Beatty got his script.
Shortly thereafter came another Beatty bulletin. He liked the script and wanted to produce it.
Benton and Newman were delighted but also dubious. They knew Beatty’s reputation for procrastination. They also knew that all the studios had already read Bonnie and Clyde and turned it down. To Hollywood executives, it was a downbeat period piece. Its sexual subtext was a turnoff, and the ménage à trois scene rang the alarm bell.
Soon Beatty began second-guessing himself. Mickey One had opened to damning reviews and dismal box office results. Variety’s review called it “strange and confused.” Columbia Pictures was not promoting the film, merely booking it into a few theaters as though embarrassed by the project. Beatty was a few months short of thirty years old, worried now that stardom seemed to be escaping his grasp.
In November 1965, Beatty made two moves on his project of the moment that displayed both decision and indecision. He wrote a check for $10,000 to option the screenplay of Bonnie and Clyde, telling friends that he intended to create an American New Wave film. At the same time, he started submitting the script to exactly the sort of Hollywood directors who had no desire to make that sort of movie—establishment filmmakers like George Stevens and William Wyler. Neither “got” the material, nor did they understand why Beatty had decided he was qualified to be a producer.
Shaken, Beatty decided to return to the one filmmaker he knew sympathized with his take on the material. Like Beatty, Arthur Penn had felt whiplashed by the failure of Mickey One. He had already read Bonnie and Clyde and hadn’t responded favorably. Stirred by Beatty’s conviction, however, he now reversed course and decided to take a shot with his charming and determined young star.
Funding was now the key issue. David Picker, a young executive at United Artists, liked the script, but his zeal faded when Beatty submitted a $1.8 million budget. Beatty knew his likeliest target was Jack Warner, the seventy-five-year-old patriarch of Warner Bros. Warner was displaying occasional moments of senility, but still held tenuous control over the studio. His attitude toward Beatty had shifted as quickly as his moods: He had seemed satisfied with Kaleidoscope, a modest thriller Beatty had starred in for the studio. However, he’d also been irritated by Beatty’s refusal to say yes to studio projects like Youngblood Hawke or PT 109, which had been offered him.
Warner Bros. needed product, however, and Walter McEwen, a longtime Warner aide, felt he could engineer a green light at the studio provided Beatty handled the boss shrewdly. A meeting was set up and Beatty was suitably obsequious. Indeed, he even got on his knees and offered to lick Warner’s boots if he was awarded a deal. The young producer made his score.
When Beatty finally delivered his film, however, Warner made no effort to disguise his distaste for the movie. Beatty told the old studio chief that he should think of Bonnie and Clyde as an homage to the studio’s classic gangster pictures. Warner replied, “What the fuck’s an ‘homage’?” The film’s only internal supporter was a young marketing executive named Richard Lederer, but he clearly was a voice in the wilderness.
Beatty knew his movie would be dumped and he was right. The critics weren’t offering encouragement. Bosley Crowther, never a Beatty fan, termed the movie “a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick.” The only affirmative voice was that of Pauline Kael, then a reviewer who was auditioning for a job at the New Yorker and hence eager to cause a stir by taking on the New York Times. Her review started with the rhetorical question, “How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on?” She then launched a stalwart defense, arguing that Bonnie and Clyde needs its violence; “violence is its meaning.”
Kael’s ringing endorsement got Bonnie and Clyde a few release dates. It even earned it an opening in Paris, but the movie still was not performing well at the U.S. box office in its limited releases. To Warner Bros., it was still a “critics’ picture.” Not until the movie gleaned ten Oscar nominations did Warner Bros. finally give the film a wide opening—which yielded banner box office results. Bonnie and Clyde, together with The Graduate, suddenly were heralded as precursors of a new movement in American cinema—the long-awaited Hollywood New Wave.
By the time I met Beatty, in 1967, he was not only a reborn movie star but also something of a folk hero. He had taken on the Hollywood establishment and won. The bad calls of his earlier career were now forgotten. He was being flooded with offers as both actor and producer and, true to form, was turning them all down—even Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He was now above the Hollywood fray and let it be known that his primary concern was Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign. He was also immersing himself in books about John Reed and the Russian Revolution—tracts that would, some years later, lead to his involvement in his grandiose movie Reds.
Warren Beatty was no longer an actor for hire. Beatty was starring in a grander scheme—the Beatty Legend.
Life as a legend provided a delicious complement to political celebrity. George McGovern and his campaign chief, Gary Hart, devoured Beatty’s endorsement and support. Beatty cajoled Carole King, James Taylor, and even Streisand to bring glitter to fund-raisers and rock concerts. Beatty and his then companion, Julie Christie, were stars at the ’72 Democratic convention in Miami Beach. The Democratic cause was clearly headed for defeat at the hands of Richard Nixon, but the McGovern primary campaign was an exciting distraction for the star. Despite Beatty’s entreaties, Christie had flown off to Venice to star in Don’t Look Now, opposite Donald Sutherland. Dollars, Beatty’s third follow-up to Bonnie and Clyde, had opened to patchy reviews and mediocre business. Previous films, The Only Game in Town and McCabe & Mrs. Miller had failed to generate the sort of box office heat Beatty had hoped for.
Beatty again yearned for a hit, but found it impossible to leave politics behind him. “I understand politics and I’m damned good at it,” he told me earnestly. At the same time, the thought of running for office was anathema to him, defying all his self-protective instincts.
Given Beatty’s mood, a screenplay titled The Parallax
View provided the ideal lure. The property, based on a novel by Loren Singer, was a deftly dramatized study in political paranoia. A presidential candidate is mysteriously murdered. Several witnesses meet suspicious deaths. A conspiracy looms.
The script had been brought to my attention by Alan J. Pakula, a smart filmmaker whose first directing effort, The Sterile Cuckoo, had been distributed by Paramount in ’69. Pakula had followed up with a vastly more commercial film, Klute, in’71, and he had been looking for a thriller that had social relevance. A thoughtful but fastidious man, Pakula knew of Beatty’s interest but was worried about getting into business with him. Was Beatty serious about Parallax, or would this become another notch on his development list?
Bob Evans, too, was wary of Beatty. There was always a tacit competitiveness between them—one that involved business, women, and matters of style. “In Warren’s mind, he’s the biggest star in the world,” Evans told me. “But look at the numbers; his movies don’t make any money.”
Personally, I was eager to get Parallax moving. A Beatty-Pakula thriller was a solid commercial bet, but also one that could capture the attention of smart young filmgoers. The Nixon landslide had stirred a paranoia that Washington was out of control, and Vietnam seemed like a struggle without end. Further, the Watergate hearings were coming to a boil, with charges of conspiracy and cover-up. This could be a perfect moment for Parallax, provided I could move it forward quickly.
But that in itself posed problems. The original screenplay by Lorenzo Semple Jr. needed work, and David Giler, a solid rewrite practitioner—“body and fender” man was his informal job description—had been hired to sharpen it. In script meetings, Beatty’s mind tended to wander. He would come up with an idea, then back away from it. Pakula, by contrast, was precise, but pedantic in his presentation.
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