In many ways, he was the very opposite of Bill Clinton as a political and psychosexual animal. Bill Clinton went into a room and seduced en masse. The triumph of his en masse seduction turned him on and he had to relieve himself with some faceless voter. But Warren held himself aloof and superior en masse. He seduced individually and relieved himself individually.
Bill Clinton liked pressing the flesh and laying on hands. Warren needed his own grand space. He didn’t like to be touched in well-lighted rooms. The flesh he liked to press was horizontal, not vertical. Bottom line: Bill Clinton was a politician who could act; Warren was an actor acting the role of politician.
Bill Clinton, for example, knew that a politician had to be a whore for the cameras. Cameras could invade him from a thousand different angles at any moment. He’d been invaded so often, he couldn’t feel it anymore. Warren tried to give cameras only his right profile. He tried to control the lighting, the distance, and the shutter speed. To Bill Clinton, a camera meant any schmuck at any campaign appearance. To Warren, a camera meant Vilmos Zsigmond or Helmut Newton. Not to mention that in his last couple of movies, it looked as if Warren had given instructions to be photographed through gauze.
It was the narcissism of the actor as opposed to the politician. Actors had to approve the cover art on magazines. Politicians had to grin and bear it. Actors made their living with their faces. Politicians made their living with their faces, too, but there were, at least in most cases, other dimensions in the package. In a town filled with narcissistic actors, Warren Beatty, I knew firsthand, won the prize in the Cracker Jack box.
He lived for more than a decade in the penthouse suite of the old Beverly Wilshire Hotel, and days after he moved out, I found myself there, staring at his mirrors, staring at myself. I had come from Marin County to spend a day on a set and the studio had taken out the penthouse suite for me. But I had finished my business early and was in a studio-supplied limo on the way back to the airport when I was struck by intense nausea and stomach cramps. I sought relief in a couple of gas station rest rooms, but both the nausea and the cramps were worse, and I remembered the accommodations the studio had reserved for me at the Wilshire.
I instructed my driver to take me there, checked in, and was led to what had been Warren Beatty’s penthouse suite. There were mirrors everywhere—everywhere—on the walls, the ceiling. The suite was one big mirror. You could see yourself from every angle. I saw myself. I was sweating, pale, with a greenish hue. I raced for the bathroom. There were mirrors all over the bathroom, too. I left the bathroom door open and saw myself sitting there, not just in the bathroom mirrors but in the living room mirrors, as well. I saw myself looking godawful from six different angles. I saw myself wiping myself and throwing up from six different angles.
I thought, What sort of man wants to look at himself all the time, twenty-four hours a day, every day? Doing everything that human beings do. Was this routine benign Hollywood narcissism or self-devouring, all-encompassing neurosis? Did Warren Beatty enjoy watching himself defecate? Because he’d put himself in a living space where he was forced to watch himself defecate. Was this the ultimate Hollywood hubris, to watch yourself on the can? Or was it self-punishment for his life of opulent excess? Was this how he kept in touch with ordinary Americans? Was this the daily self-abnegation that fueled his bleeding liberal heart?
An hour later, I checked out of the Wilshire and went back to the airport. My various evacuations had cost the studio $2,800. I wondered how it would appear on the production budget.
Considering him now as our possible new president, I remembered, too, the experience (some in Hollywood called it a “near-death experience”) that I’d had with him on one of my movies—Jade, produced by Evans. It was an experience many in Hollywood had had with Warren, who was also an Academy Award–winning producer and director.
The word on Warren in Hollywood was that he had unmade more movies he’d been involved in than he’d made. He considered himself not an actor, not a star, but an auteur. Or, to use the Sorceress’s word, a “storyteller.” Warren would commit to do a movie and then he’d work with the writer to rewrite the script. Then he’d work with the director to redo the schedule. Then he’d work with the cinematographer to redo the shots. Then he’d work with the costume designer to redo the costumes. Then he’d work with the hair person and redo the hair. Then, when everything had been redone to his satisfaction, he’d pull out of the movie. He’d claim he’d lost confidence in the script, which he’d forced to be rewritten to his design. He’d claim he’d lost confidence in the director, who was suffering a nervous breakdown.
The studios had let him get away with it for a long time, even though he hadn’t had a hit movie in many years, because he was Warren Beatty. He was, even though he had to be shot through gauze, a legendary star. After all this money—the rewriting, rescheduling, rehairing, and so on—had been spent for nothing, the studio, exhausted, would tire of the project itself—“It’s got the clap,” as they say in Hollywood—and the movie would never be made.
Knowing all this, when Evans suggested Warren as the lead for Jade, I suffered a near relapse of the symptoms I’d relieved myself of in Warren’s penthouse suite many years before. I truly felt a near-death experience, saved only at the last minute. Yes, Warren liked the script. Of course, he had a lot of ideas for it. He’d have to sit down with me at length and go over it. And he wanted $8 million. I was saved only because the director was Billy Friedkin, married to studio head Sherry Lansing, who loved her husband and didn’t want to undo his movie with Warren Beatty. Warren was replaced by David Caruso, who had many fewer ideas, who wouldn’t stick his nose into Billy’s schedule, and who wanted only $2 million.
It all made me wonder how this “storyteller” who’d never written a script by himself, this auteur who’d always gotten his way for many years in Hollywood, would fare in the White House. Would he want to redesign the lasers in the Tomahawk missiles? Would he veto every bill unless he could sit down and rewrite it with Trent Lott and Dennis Hastert? Would he take two years and seventeen speech writers to deliver last year’s State of the Union address? Would the White House photographers be hired from Vogue? Would Bob Evans be in charge of hiring White House interns? Would the Oval Office, the hallway, the bathroom, and the private study all have mirrors on the ceilings and walls? Would “What’s new, pussycat?” replace “E Pluribus Unum” on our currency? Would he show better judgment than the time he’d turned down playing JFK in PT 109? (I imagined what that would have done for his candidacy: Warren running as Jack.) Would Reds posters be sold at his inauguration? Would Madonna be named attorney general? Would Annette Bening, who had the hair for it, become the new Hillary? Would stills of Annette in The Grifters be on the cover of Time? Would the Sorceress be his press spokesperson? Would she cast her spells on him? Would the golden willard stay true to Annette?
What also troubled me was that while he was a “storyteller” and an auteur, Warren was still, underneath all of it, an actor. And in my experience, actors were only as good as the lines somebody wrote for them. I didn’t think Warren was a dummy—that wasn’t the problem—although my experience had taught me that many actors quite happily and successfully were.
The problem as I saw it was that good actors really got into a part . . . and sometimes got stuck there even if they were supposed to be someone else in the next movie. Actors in film stayed in the part for at least two months, actors onstage often much longer. But a president had to play a different part every hour of every day. Threaten terrorists at noon, praise cops at two, chat up the House Republicans at four, welcome Tony Blair at six.
What if Warren got stuck? He was, after all, a Method actor, which meant a lot of intense preparation. What if he couldn’t switch parts fast enough . . . after having supervised seventeen drafts of all the different speeches? What if his actor’s training itself bollixed him all up? If he was still at his tell-off-the-terrorists mode with Tony Blair? If he was
in his praise-the-cops mode with the House Republicans?
Fearing that I’d really hit on something, I thought about Bullworth. It was Warren’s last movie before word of his candidacy, and Warren had played a politician who told the truth. It was classic Method actor syndrome, I thought. That’s what all this was about! Warren had fallen in love with the part! Warren had been brilliant in the part! And he still wanted to play the part!
What could he do? He couldn’t reshoot the movie over and over again, could he? The studios wouldn’t let him get away with that—maybe once, but not anymore. It was like Stallone playing Rocky over and over again for so many years, but Warren wasn’t Stallone; Warren had a social conscience, true lefty beliefs he had formed in penthouses and limousines all over the world.
Warren could play Bullworth for the rest of his life and get away with it . . . if he did it on a public stage and not a soundstage. It was like watching himself on all those mirrors. He could watch himself playing Bullworth, improvising the already-written and already-shot script on TV, on the prime-time network news!
The improvising, I realized, would be rehearsed, mannered, and stylized—right there in the script, as most actors’ improvisations are, but it would be fun. He would be playing Bullworth, and Bullworth was fun. Bullworth liked to say the F word, and Warren had advised Bill Clinton to fire up his stump speech in 1992 by shouting fuck a few times. I could see it now: The first president caught on camera saying the F word. This wouldn’t be like Bob Kerrey telling his homophobic joke on-camera or George Bush talking on-camera about kicking Ferraro’s ass. It was good Hollywood advice, really, used in movies since the seventies to punch up dialogue that was putting everybody to sleep, the white equivalent of blaxploitation’s motherfucker.
My fellow Americans, I don’t know what the fuck’s wrong with the economy, but I’m working on it . . . . Fucking Saddam . . . Fucking Milošević . . . Fucking Arafat . . . Fucking schvartzes—but no, that was Evans’s word; Bullworth and Warren, hip Hollywood liberals, would never use schvartzes.
As the buzz about Warren ricocheted crazily around Hollywood, the noncandidate, possible candidate, potential candidate, near candidate made a speech at the Beverly Hilton that was possibly the biggest Hollywood event until the cocktail party for the Dalai Lama. Warren was accepting the Eleanor Roosevelt Award from the ADA for “a lifetime of creative and political integrity.” (Dick Tracy? Ishtar?)
It was in the ballroom of the Beverly Hilton, and Warren arrived in his shades, with Annette on his arm. The shades weren’t dorky like Clinton’s, Annette was prettier than Hillary, and Warren even pressed the flesh. Well . . . he shook hands. Not pumping hands like Feinstein or Boxer or the old-style macho pols, but touching them a little fey, Euro-trashy, almost New Age.
He began by saying, “I had in mind a different kind of lighting—could we get the candles going again?” He made a dull speech—a few shouted F words would have helped—saying Al Gore and Bill Bradley weren’t really liberals. The speech played like a movie written by seventeen screenwriters, visually interesting but nada at the core. Warren wasn’t playing Bullworth and he was as boring as Al Gore separated from Clinton. Half of Evans’s whorehouse was there, applauding, even though Warren was upstaged by Dustin Hoffman, who, in his last movie, Wag the Dog, had patterned himself after Evans.
Dusty introduced Warren this way: “Warren Beatty wouldn’t make the mistakes of other presidents. Unlike Richard Nixon, he would have burnt the tapes. Unlike George Bush, he would have come up with something better than being ‘out of the loop.’ Unlike Bill Clinton, he would have never trusted a twenty-two-year-old girl to be discreet.” Those who knew Warren said that Dusty had to be making dumb jokes: Warren wouldn’t have burned the tapes; he would have made ten thousand phone calls to two thousand women asking their advice . . . and as far as trusting a twenty-two-year-old girl was concerned, almost all of the temptresses at Evans’s house were in their early twenties.
Dusty also said that as a nine-year-old boy, Warren called Eleanor Roosevelt to praise her and began the conversation by saying, “Eleanor, what are you wearing right now?” Then Penny Marshall introduced Warren by saying that she’d had thirteen thousand telephone conversations with him over the years and he’d begun every one by saying, “Penny, what are you wearing right now?” Then Gary Shandling introduced Warren by translating the presidency into Hollywood terms: “If you get elected, make sure you get your name above the title of the country.”
Hollywood insiders admired Warren’s gargantuan chutzpah. He was in his sixties. He hadn’t had a hit movie in ages. His last movie had flopped. His next movie, about a man having a midlife crisis, had been rescheduled (surprise!) and was rumored to be not very good. He wasn’t getting paid what he had once been. Adam Sandler was making more money than he was. And now he had put himself back on prime-time television, getting nightly exposure on the news . . . just as the video of Bullworth was about to be released.
Warren had figured out a way to get a Wag the Dog kind of box-office bump for Bullworth’s video and for his next movie. Bill Clinton had bumped up Wag the Dog. Now, by implying that maybe he wanted Bill Clinton’s job, Warren was delivering his own bump. For his movie.
It was a con job that soon had other practitioners. Activist attorney Gloria Allred started a boomlet for actress Cybill Shepherd’s presidential candidacy. Cybill immediately became Clintonesque.
A magazine headline read CYBILL—“I’M HOT TO TROT.” And Cybill was quoted as saying, “I’m horny most of the time. There are few activities in life as pleasant as sex. And now that I’m suddenly single, I definitely feel very horny. I was always horny—I don’t know how to say it other than that.” She made a list of “America’s Sexiest Men,” which she called her “hit list of specimens,” the first time within anyone’s memory that a putative presidential candidate released a hit list instead of a position paper. Her specimen / positions included Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner, and Ted Turner.
Surprisingly, few people in Hollywood were surprised about Cybill’s candidacy. They knew she didn’t have a movie, didn’t have a television show, and was making car commercials. Floating a presidential candidacy was a classy stepping-stone, people felt, back to prime time.
Maybe noting all the free air Warren and Cybill were getting, Arnold Schwarzenegger dropped hints that he “could” be a candidate in California’s next gubernatorial election. “I think about running for office many times,” Arnold said. “The possibility is there, because I feel it inside. I feel there are a lot of people in politics that are standing still and not doing enough. And there’s a vacuum. Therefore I can move in.”
While the Big Guy sounded like he was being honest—“I inhaled. Exhaled. Everything”—he did have a new movie coming out (the last couple had bombed) and some studio heads were worried about his bankability at a time when other action stars like Stallone, Seagal, and Van Damme were already roadkill. A little high-minded, socially committed ink or air never hurt.
As the Warren, Cybill, and Arnold noncandidacies were dissected and parsed on the evening news, the world’s master parser, Bill Clinton, came to a Hollywood fund-raiser at the home of director Rob Reiner.
Ronald Reagan, writer-director Mel Brooks told Bill Clinton, was the greatest actor in the history of Hollywood and had turned in his best performance at the White House. “If you didn’t know any better,” Brooks said, “you’d think Reagan was the president. He even fooled Gorbachev.”
“If President Reagan could be an actor and become president,” Bill Clinton said, “maybe I could become an actor. I’ve got a good pension. I can work for cheap.”
But it would never happen. Warren Beatty was no Bill Clinton, and Bill Clinton was no Warren Beatty. They did, though, have something in common. As the balmy Evans kept saying, over and over again, humming his life’s mantra to anyone who’d listen: “Pussy hair, my boy, is stronger than universal cable.”
[11]
George W.
Bush Defines Himself
Listen, I gotta tell you somethin’. This is the God’s honest truth here. If you think my dad is a wimp, that’s . . . good. Cuz I’m a compaysionate conservative and George Herbert Walker’s wimpiness . . . works for our message. He’s such a nice guy, my dad, isn’t he? Hell yes, he really is.
Okay, you want the truth? I’ll tell you the truth, but don’t tell nobody, cuz this stuff’s not ready for prime time. Not this stuff. We’ve spent a lot of damn money obfuscatin’ this. Here goes: I’m not like my dad at all! I’m not a nice guy! I’ll kick your fuckin’ ass, boy, if you fuck with me! I’ll bust your kneecap! I’ll gouge your eye! I’ll bust your nuts! I’ll make you cry! (Did you see the big tough war hero, John McCain, the day after I busted his chops on Super Tuesday?) I’m a “political terrorist,” hoss, as that high-ass honey Mary Matalin said.
Ain’t nothin’ ”Poppy” about me! Cuz I’m my mama’s boy, Bar’s son, and my asshole little brother, Jeb, he calls her “the enforcer.”
You wanna hear a good one? The best damn one I heard in a long time? Thanks to Bill Clinton’s pecker, I’m gonna set myself in the Oval Office. Thanks to Bill Clinton’s pecker, the pigeons are gonna come home to roast. No more abortion. No more affirmative action. No gay marriage. No gay rights. No hate crimes. Prayer in the schools? Hell yes! More jails, tents, barracks to keep the thugs and the scum off the streets? Hell yes! The death penalty for fourteen-year-olds? Hell yes!
Hell yes, thanks to Bill Clinton’s pecker, I’m gonna shove it up William Sloane Coffin’s coffined dead ass, finally, after all these years. Chaplain Coffin, sir, you pompous Yankee dickhead, listen up! You never shoulda said to me that my dad—my own dad!—lost to a better man when he lost for the Senate. I’m gonna destroy everything you believed in!
And you, Bill Clinton, and you, Hillary, you uppity skank, you never shoulda kept my mom and dad waitin’ for a half hour at the inauguration. I’m gonna dismantle all your programs!
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