Jennifer Lee, then in her early twenties, was a statuesque beauty who grew up in an upper-middle-class home in the Berkshires, and seems to have had sex with every man in the movie and music worlds before she married Richard Pryor. Of all the bimbographies that litter this period, hers, called Tarnished Angel and based on her diaries, is one of the best. In the spring of 1971, having dropped out of Finch College and living in New York City, she was doing some acting and modeling when actress Nancy Allen, future wife of Brian De Palma, introduced her to Beatty. They dropped in on him at the Carlyle. He opened the door wearing a white terrycloth robe, and welcomed them with, “I just got out of the shower.” As Lee wrote, despite the fact that he was thirty-three, old, to her, “he’s very warm and sweet and adorable… like a young boy, with a strong, tight body, and lots of energy.” Allen made her excuses and left. Lee thought to herself, I know what he had in mind for the three of us, and now there’s just us chickens. Do I want to be alone with this knockout? She said, “Maybe I should go home, too.”
“Aww, come on. I’m not going to bite you.”
“Nancy’s messed up your plans, huh?”
“Yeah, but I always have a back-up. I don’t think I’ll use it tonight. We’ll save that for later.” When the phone rang, it was Christie, whom Lee referred to as the “ball-and-chain main squeeze.” He politely excused himself and took the call in the bathroom.
Beatty and Lee became friends. She knew he was seeing a great many women, but consoled herself that she was at the front of the line. He offered to pay for her first term at Stella Adler’s. Of his skills in bed, she recalls, “For all his reputation, he’s not a particularly great lover. (He’s not that well endowed.) In fact, it’s almost as if his reputation gets in the way. His need to be ‘great’ in bed transcends any true consideration of his partner’s needs, so it all boils down to his experience, his conquest. When he tries to relate intimately it’s too hard—it’s like crossing a line into serious narcissism. He likes to give directions, not only about positions, but about how you should feel and react. The pressure to have the biggest most earth-shattering orgasms can get a little relentless. I’ve definitely had to fake a few.”
If Ekland and others are to be believed, Lee was in a minority. How many women were there? Easier to count the stars in the sky. But devotees of the Guinness Book of Records want to know. Beatty used to say that he couldn’t get to sleep at night without having sex. It was part of his routine, like flossing. This was who he was. As the evening progressed, he would disappear with his little black book, looking for a phone. Simple arithmetic tells us that if he had no more than one partner a night—and often there were several—over a period of, say, three and a half decades, from the mid-1950s, when he arrived in New York, to 1991, when he met Annette Bening, and allowing for the stretches when he was with the same woman, more or less, we can arrive at a figure of 12,775 women, give or take, a figure that does not include daytime quickies, drive-by blowjobs, casual gropings, stolen kisses, and so on. (Of course, this figure is only a tad more than half of the 20,000 women with whom Wilt Chamberlain claims to have had sex, but it’s impressive nevertheless.)
There were so many women that it’s hard to characterize his sexual preferences by how he behaved with any particular one. Different women served different purposes. He compartmentalized sex the same way he compartmentalized everything else, and it would take a prodigy of empirical research, no less than an Alfred Kinsey, to draw a comprehensive sexual profile. There was nothing particularly outré about Beatty’s sexual practices. He enjoyed oral sex, both giving and getting. He liked anal sex as well, giving not getting. He was not averse to spanking, in which he played the spanker, not the spankee but he did not appear to be much interested in exploring the exotica of, say, the Kama Sutra.
Doubles and triples, i.e., more than one woman at a time, were de rigueur in those days, although some women weren’t thrilled by the idea. For Lee, it worked, more or less. “The extra person becomes just an object in the process, one that guards against the dangers of intimacy, but during these sessions Warren and I can connect in a way that we can’t when we’re alone,” she writes. “This [second] woman, whoever she may be—a top model, a wealthy married lady—becomes our object, our device. So a strange thing happens, beyond sexuality, Warren and I become freer to communicate. We enjoy another kind of intimacy, one that’s born out of complicity: shared glances, private jokes, awkward moments. If I drift, even if only for a moment, he gets concerned, asks if I’m okay, and pulls me back into this mad reality. Although he’s the ringleader in our sex games, he’s imbued me with an ego-gratifying authority and a sexual savvy, often allowing me to take charge. After our lady leaves, we discuss the experience, compare observations and personal moments. And the silence is filled with tenderness and relief, if only for a brief time.”
According to another woman with whom he had a lengthy relationship, Beatty liked to watch two women make love, and “then have sex with each one of them.” She speculates that he believed that every woman is a lesbian at heart, reflecting, “There was this funny thing [he did] of encouraging one woman to sleep with the other woman, because that would reveal—he told me this—their real hidden desire and love, which of course he could never participate in because he’s not a woman. It was clear that that act would have been betraying him—in a way that he cannot compete with. Another man he can compete with, a woman he can’t. I always got the feeling that he needed women to betray him, [that he] set up the woman to betray him, so that it made it okay for him to then do what he needed to do, orchestrate the breakup.”
One woman he knew suggested adding another man to the mix for variety’s sake. Beatty would never say no; in fact, he once supposedly said, “What do I care whose mouth it is?” But it never happened, which led her to believe that this was not something he wanted to do. She knew that had she suggested adding another woman, it would have happened that night. Years later, during the 1980s, he would tell one woman that he had never had sex with a man, giving her the impression that he wasn’t opposed to it in principle—he’d try anything—but in the midst of the AIDS crisis, it was too dangerous.
In the 1970s, a stunningly beautiful transvestite named Richard made the rounds of some of the hipper Beverly Hills parties. You had to be very sharp to realize that he wasn’t a woman. Unaccountably, Beatty was taken in. He was dancing with him for some time when to the amusement of those who noticed, he suddenly stiffened—as if touched by the tip of a red hot poker—when he realized that “she” had a penis.
Of course, Beatty was into phone sex before there was phone sex. He would call a woman in the middle of the night, asking softly, in his silky voice, “What’s new, pussycat,” or using another of his favorite openers. Then came the questions: “Where are you?” “What are you doing?” “What are you wearing?” He asked when she last had sex and with whom, and encouraged her to describe it. He asked if she’d like to see him with another girl, would she let another girl go down on her, or another man, even wondering how many men she could handle at a time. He might mention a friend of his who found a picture of her mother in which she was having sex with five men simultaneously. He told a strange tale about driving into the Bois de Boulogne in Paris at night with whomever he was seeing at the time. The Bois de Boulogne was filled with dark, woodsy areas and was famous as a trysting place for gay men. It was in one of those leafy groves that he stopped the car and opened the windows. The vehicle was immediately surrounded by men who put their penises through the window. His companion sucked them off, one after another, while he watched. Why gay men wished to be fellated by a woman is anybody’s guess, but these were, after all, just fantasies, intended to arouse his female audience. “It was a power trip,” observed one woman. “I felt like a puppet, but I was a willing puppet. I didn’t mind.”
Sexually, he put the women first, their pleasure before his. He was rumored to “double bag,” i.e., use two condoms, which makes a certain
amount of sense; it relegated the risk of pregnancy virtually to zero, and it reduced the stimulation that might have made him come during the long, grueling sessions in which he worked his magic. But after women started taking birth control pills in the 1960s, men rarely wore condoms (until AIDS came along), and some women report that he wore no protection at all. One, who had a lengthy affair with him, when asked if he employed tricks to distract himself—reviewing alternate takes in his head, going over deal points—just laughed, and said, “That’s where he lives.” She invoked the Aesop’s fable about the scorpion that stung the frog that carried it across the river. When asked why, the scorpion said, “It’s my nature.” In Beatty’s case, she explained, “He’s Mr. Withholding. That’s where he lives. He’s lucky he can come at all.” The immortal words of Dr. Strangelove’s General Jack D. Ripper spring to mind: “I do not avoid women, Mandrake… I do deny them my essence.”
WITH BEATTY away in Hamburg, Altman had a free hand with McCabe during postproduction. When the actor finally screened the picture, he wasn’t happy with what he saw, or rather, heard—or, to be even more precise, didn’t hear. “I couldn’t hear what people were saying,” he recalls. “The sound in the first couple of reels, in which one would ordinarily expect that the exposition would be laid down and had to be clear, was not clear. That sort of irritated me.” Beatty was upset, not to say furious, over the muddy track. Recalled Sylbert, “The soundtrack was a mess. Warren thought Altman was a total slob.”
Never one to admit a mistake, Altman just dismissed Beatty’s complaints, a star bitching: “Warren was infuriated. He still is, and he’ll just have to stay infuriated.” First AD Tommy Thompson took Altman’s side: “The principals thought every word out of their mouths was a pearl, and they didn’t want music, let alone other dialogue, obscuring it.” Editor Lou Lombardo, on the other hand, who had raised the issue with the director when he was on the set, sided with Beatty and reiterated this conclusion after he heard the mix. “It still is bad,” he said. “[Bob] never changed it. I think he accomplished what he wanted to do with sound in M*A*S*H—where it was audible but it was overlapped.… But on McCabe, it was recorded in there—a dirty track, a muddy track. It was like trying to get an out-of-focus picture in focus.”
According to Altman, Beatty asked Warner Brothers to withdraw the picture so that the sound could be rerecorded, but the studio refused. The new Warners regime had virtually nothing in the pipeline and was eager to get the film into theaters. Besides, they were reluctant to tangle with Altman and get a reputation for being director-unfriendly. “You think we could’ve gotten him to redo it?” says Ted Ashley. “This was an individual who presumed himself to be an artist.” Beatty adds, “Things had progressed to such anarchy in the studio system, and filmmakers were treated with so much respect, if we had photographed the movie in darkness, they would have thought that was an interesting approach, and hoped they could exploit it in the marketing.” He had to be satisfied with looping—rerecording—a handful of his lines, which only angered Altman without making the track any cleaner. Said Altman, “I can hear it every time I see the picture.” Nobody was happy, not Altman, not Beatty.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller opened on June 24, 1971, at the Criterion and the Academy theaters, in New York and L.A., respectively. Apparently, Beatty’s contract obligated the studio to a summer release. According to Patrick McGilligan’s biography of Altman, the Technicolor lab in L.A. was booked solid, and a Canadian lab was used instead, which quickly turned out four flawed prints. Even Altman acknowledges that there was a problem: “There was something wrong with the soundtrack,” but claimed he was not at fault. “It wasn’t checked by my editor and I was told that it had been checked,” he says. “And so that bad soundtrack, on top of the design of the sound, really made it impossible to hear. I screamed, ‘You’ve got to shut it off, there’s something wrong with the soundtrack.’ They said, ‘Oh, that’s the way you did it.’ Well, it wasn’t the way I did it. I left the goddamned theater and went someplace and had a steak. I was ready to get on a plane and go to Alaska.”
The press screenings were a disaster. The daily reviewers generally panned the movie. Vincent Canby in The New York Times wrote, “The intentions of McCabe and Mrs. Miller are not only serious, they are meddlesomely imposed on the film by tired symbolism… [that] keep[s] spoiling the fun of what might have been an uproarious frontier fable.”
Pauline Kael, who was a fan of Altman’s, if not Beatty’s, quite rightly raved, calling it “a beautiful pipe dream of a movie,” went on The Dick Cavett Show and talked it up. But the picture died, and Beatty’s efforts to revive it, as he did Bonnie and Clyde, failed. Although McCabe & Mrs. Miller shares Bonnie and Clyde’s distaste for authority and cynical mistrust of the “system,” as well as its unhappy ending, standard for any New Hollywood movie, it went further than Bonnie and Clyde in undermining the romance between the two leads, and concluding the film with an anticlimax photographed in cold long shots that distance the audience and minimize whatever feelings McCabe’s death might otherwise have evoked. Like the post–Bonnie and Clyde Arthur Penn, Altman was going down the road of genre deconstruction, which, it seemed, the box office would not support. “It still hasn’t grossed much money,” said Altman in 1996. John Wayne, no fan of genre-cide, denounced the picture for subverting the western. According to Altman, Beatty “was really a bit of an asshole. He was quite brutal about it when it came out, and of course blamed me for its defects. Warren is a very self-oriented person. Many people think it’s his best film, but it didn’t succeed, so he didn’t like it. He’ll never mention it.”
Indeed, Beatty blamed the inaudible soundtrack for the picture’s failure to perform. “It prevented it from having a tremendous commercial potential because the audience was confused,” he says. “If it hadn’t had to meet a certain date in the summer, it would have been remedied by Altman. I don’t think he intended to screw it up.” But once again, Beatty paid a price for not producing. As he puts it, “Had I been the producer I would have killed Robert Altman.”
Over the four decades that have passed since McCabe & Mrs. Miller was released, its reputation has grown, and it often finds a place on the “best westerns of all time” lists that critics fondly compile. Despite Beatty’s unhappiness with the picture, McCabe had a significant impact on Shampoo, which is much more an ensemble piece than he had made before, much less plot-driven than even Bonnie and Clyde. It gave him the confidence to write his own version of the Shampoo script. It also served, in the spirit of John Wayne, to strengthen his conviction to steer clear of the kind of genre deconstruction practiced by Altman and Penn. As a producer and star, Beatty had a much more robust commercial sense than many of the directors of the 1970s, and in the same way that he gave a cold shoulder to the New Hollywood love affair with the French Nouvelle Vague and the cinema of Antonioni and Fellini, he recognized that there was a limit to the degree to which American audiences would indulge the zeal with which these directors flouted the conventions of the studio film.
BEATTY HAD feared the worst when Richard Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and he was not disappointed. While 1971 was free of the catastrophic assassinations that cast a shadow across the American landscape three years earlier, the storm clouds gathering then had burst into a hard rain of death and destruction. The peace talks between Henry Kissinger and the Hanoi government were deadlocked, and the Nixon administration launched an invasion of Laos in February 1971. On June 13, The New York Times had published the Pentagon Papers after the Supreme Court rejected an attempt by John Mitchell’s Justice Department to quash it.
On September 9, 1971, some ten weeks after the opening, while McCabe was still in the theaters, about one thousand convicts protesting the subhuman conditions in New York State’s Attica prison (one shower per week, one roll of toilet paper per month) and the shooting of George Jackson by guards at San Quentin the previous month, seized the facility, taking some thirty guards hostage. Four days l
ater, after Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered troopers and sheriffs to storm the prison, ten guards and thirty-two prisoners lay dead.
It was evident that Beatty’s heart wasn’t in his career. He was still rejecting scripts faster than they were being offered. “I’ve spent… something like seven years just turning down movies,” he said. “Obviously, there’s something uncomfortable for me about making them.” He said no to the pictures that made Robert Redford a star: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, and The Way We Were. He also turned down David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter (1970), Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (1969), The Godfather, The Great Gatsby, and Last Tango in Paris.
Beatty decided to shelve movies and plunge into the presidential campaign of George McGovern, a well-regarded but obscure senator from South Dakota whom the millions of Americans opposed to the Vietnam War hoped would become the new Eugene McCarthy, the new Robert Kennedy, and seize the Democratic presidential nomination from the boys in the smoky back rooms who controlled the party machine. “The McGovern campaign was at the center of the ’70s,” says Beatty. “It laid the foundation of everything that happened in the Democratic Party afterwards. The Democratic Party was at its lowest point, and the establishment guys said, ‘Oh, fuck it, we’re just giving up,’ and that’s when the real interesting guys moved in, and they were all young, because McGovern couldn’t tolerate anybody who was older. Gary Hart happened because of the McGovern campaign. Bill Clinton.”
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