Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

  Beatty returned to L.A. in a fruitless attempt to snag a part in a Playhouse 90 production. But his luck changed when he secured a recurring role in a hit TV series, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, with production set to begin in L.A. in mid-May 1959. But outside of his sporadic appearances on Dobie Gillis, Beatty had precious little to show for himself but promised parts that might—but more often might not—materialize. MGM, meanwhile, was offering him parts he didn’t want, and withholding the ones he did want, arguing, with some reason, that he lacked experience. He was growing increasingly unhappy as a contract player.

  Then A Loss of Roses came back to life with Daniel Mann directing. (Mann had directed the movie version of the playwright’s Come Back, Little Sheba [1952], with Shirley Booth, as well as Shirley MacLaine in Hot Spell [1958].) Inge pressed Mann to let Beatty read, and in September, after five weeks of indecision during which the actor fretted, Mann gave him the part in what would be his first Broadway play.

  Beatty was thrilled. “I thought, I gotta go do the play because I’m not doing anything that means anything,” he recalls. “I felt that I was turning into a very large piece of citrus fruit. I knew I had to get out of the deal with MGM.” The studio responded, “You can’t do a play.” He said, “I said, ‘I can, too,’ so I went back and did it.” He borrowed $2,600 from Lew Wasserman to buy himself out of the contract.

  ROSES WAS due to open out of town at the National in D.C., where as a sixteen-year-old teenager Beatty was employed in the summer of 1953 to chase rats from the alley behind the theater. When he arrived in New York in late September to begin rehearsals, he found a profoundly troubled production. Shirley Booth, who was playing Kenny’s mother, didn’t think her part was big enough; Carol Haney, playing the actress whom Kenny seduces, didn’t like Booth, who in turn was disdainful of Haney for being a dancer, not an actress, while neither they nor anybody much liked Beatty, who was a novice, and struck them as tentative and unsure of himself. Booth resented the attention the director lavished on the young actor, who peppered Mann with questions about his motivation. For his part, Mann regarded Beatty as a loose cannon, who might say or do anything when he got on stage. “Warren won’t listen to me,” he complained. “He’s going to do nothing until opening night and then he’ll play on the sex appeal and charm and all the crap and do something on stage we won’t even know about.” Mann apparently contemplated replacing Beatty and told his understudy to get ready. But Inge protected his protégé. He told Mann that although the actor was insecure and undisciplined, he’d be great when the curtain rose.

  After Joan Collins finished up the instantly forgettable Seven Thieves in October, she took the red-eye to Washington, where A Loss of Roses opened on October 29, 1959. Beatty’s notices were good, although the play itself got no better than mixed reviews. Beatty meanwhile introduced Collins to his parents, Ira and Kathlyn, who were living in Arlington, across the Potomac River. She was slated to do Sons and Lovers in England. According to her, Beatty not only thought the story was tacky, he wanted her close by. “Warren kept me selfishly with him,” she said, bitterly. “Warren’s number one priority, in those days, and for many years after, was Warren.” He was getting a big publicity bonus from his connection to her, and with A Loss of Roses less than a sure thing, it was a bad time for her to disappear. “Don’t go, Butterfly,” she said he “begged. ‘Don’t leave your Bee.’”

  Butterfly heeded his entreaties. Instead of going to London, she went to New York to be with him when the play opened at the Eugene O’Neill on November 28. It was slaughtered by the critics—Inge’s first flop—and left a legacy of bitterness in its wake. Rex Reed, in a famously bitchy Esquire profile of Beatty published in 1967, quoted an unnamed cast member recalling that on opening night in New York, Beatty “changed lines, business, blocking, and completely screwed up Carol Haney so badly that she ran into her dressing room in tears.” Beatty didn’t care. He was having fun with Michael J. Pollard, also in the play. They had a short scene together. It “was written to be about two minutes long,” Beatty recalled. “We turned it into seven and a half minutes.” But Mann cared. He said, “In my forty-year career, I’ve directed some of our finest actors—Brando, Vanessa Redgrave, Anna Magnani, Elizabeth Taylor—but I have to say, Warren was one of the few to give me a problem.”

  Roses marked the beginning of Inge’s decline. But despite the caustic reviews, Beatty emerged smelling like, well, a rose. In The New Yorker, Tynan famously described him as “sensual around the lips and pensive around the brow.” Walter Kerr called him “mercurial, sensitive, excellent,” and he was nominated for a Tony. Best of all, perhaps, was that Kazan had caught one of the performances.

  Roses closed after twenty-one nights. It would be the last play Beatty would ever do. His burnished reputation aside, it left a bad taste. “There’s no more enervating experience in the world than to do a play for more than one performance with actors who don’t work well together,” he says. “It’s torture.” He added, “The New York theater’s a mess,” not worth enduring “just to win the approval of four critics who decide whether you’re going to be allowed to keep doing the play. That’s a bore.” Once again, he set his sights on the movies.

  BEATTY AND Collins moved back to L.A. in early 1960, where they lived at the Chateau. Her sister, future sex-and-shopping scribe Jackie, once visited her there in what struck Jackie as her sister’s plush movie star suite. She recalled, “I said ‘Oh this is lovely, great!’ [Joan] snapped, ‘Yes, you won’t actually be sleeping here. There is a little room at the top of the hotel where you will be sleeping.’ I found at night Warren would change places with me. He would sleep in the suite, and I would be in his little attic room. Like everybody else, I got propositioned by Warren.… But Warren would proposition a chair if it looked at him sideways.”

  Beatty and Collins ate at the Aware Inn, a health food restaurant on Sunset near Doheny. Beatty continued to pressure Collins to give up drinking and smoking. He consumed soy burgers, drank carrot juice. Afterward, they walked to Turner’s drugstore and looked for pictures of themselves in the fanzines.

  Beatty still had his sights set on Splendor, which was set up at Warner Brothers. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, especially for a first film. He was determined to work with the best directors (according to Jane Fonda, he’d made a list), and with Kazan he was starting near the top. A former member of the Group Theatre and proponent of the Method, Kazan was a titan of the stage and screen. He had directed the work of Williams, Miller, and Inge—as well as the greatest film actors of his era, including Brando, Clift, and Dean. Along with Miller, Arthur Penn, Lillian Hellman, Lee and Paula Strasberg, and most members of New York’s theater community, he was a child of the Depression and man of the left, profoundly influenced by the Communist Party USA—first as an acolyte, then as an antagonist—which lay wounded and bleeding from the hammer blows administered by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and its ill-begotten child, the Hollywood blacklist. Kazan had not only testified before HUAC as a friendly witness, wherein he sacrificed friends and associates on the altar of patriotism, but he had infuriated them by groveling before HUAC, and then added insult to injury by placing an ad in The New York Times on April 12, 1952, in which he exhorted others to do the same. Victor Navasky observed in his book Naming Names that “part of the reason he left the Party was because they wanted him to confess error and humiliate himself.” The irony of it all was lost on no one. “Kazan was a pariah,” director Arthur Penn recalls. “Lillian Hellman despised him. She frothed at the mouth.”

  Beatty was aware of this history, which was still very much an open wound in 1959—the year the blacklist was broken when Otto Preminger hired Dalton Trumbo to write Exodus and Kirk Douglas revealed that Trumbo had written Spartacus—but it wasn’t his fight, and for an actor coming up, the advantages of working with Kazan far outweighed whatever damage might be incurred by flak from the angry but largely impotent Broadway and Hollywood left.<
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  Splendor told the story of star-crossed lovers from a Kansas oil town. Bud Stamper, son of a self-made businessman, has little interest in his father’s ambitious plans for his career, and instead merely wishes to till the soil, a humble farmer. He falls in love with Wilma “Deanie” Loomis, daughter of the local pharmacist, whose wife is determined to build a firewall around their daughter’s virginity. Although lust indeed bubbles just below the surface of their relationship, Bud and Deanie’s love burns with a pure blue flame. They wish for nothing more than a simple happiness that nevertheless seems out of their reach. It’s Romeo and Juliet all over again. Verona becomes a tiny town in Kansas, while the outsized aspirations of Bud’s father and the pinched Puritanism of Deanie’s mother stand in for the Montagues and the Capulets. The story unfolds on the eve of the Great Depression, so that history joins psychology to batter the characters into submission. Inge’s story is inflected by the twin towers of 1950s American culture, Marx and Freud, whose stock always seemed inversely related. As Marxism waned in the chill of Cold War, Freud ascended, and Freudianism provided the lingua franca for the intellectual discourse of that decade.

  Deanie’s proper upbringing in some respects mirrored that of the Beaty children, as set down by MacLaine in one of her memoirs. To hear her tell it, their parents led lives of quiet desperation. “We were taught to respect all material possessions, because it took long, hard years of work to be able to afford such things.… The three Wedgwood bowls and the matching plates and ash trays, the antique Chinese vase, the reproduction of ‘Blue Boy’ in the gold plated frame always made me think twice before I invited someone to the house. I was afraid something would get knocked over.”

  Sexual hypocrisy was a subject that would become dear to Beatty’s heart, and there was much for him to identify with in the character of Bud, whose 1920s was the actor’s 1950s. Beatty always explained the sexual adventurism for which he would become renowned in the 1960s by referring to the famously timid Eisenhower era that preceded it: “I went through exactly the same sexual revolution as the country went through,” he said. “In the Fifties when I was a kid, I was walking around in a mode of behavior that related to centuries of Protestant repression. Every cell and fiber around you was influenced by religious upbringings of the past. It was a very puritanical time.” But the resemblance to his own story stopped there. There was no 1960s to provide a happy ending for Bud and Deanie.

  For Deanie, Inge suggested Natalie Wood to Kazan. Wood was a former child star—she had made her debut at five and struck gold with Miracle on 34th Street in 1947—but by the fall of 1958, she was twenty and was having a difficult time making the transition to adult roles. Warners had not done her any favors by forcing her to do a series of lame pictures like The Girl He Left Behind and The Burning Hills, among others.

  Moreover, Wood’s private life was in disarray. She was needy and neurotic, with a controlling mother and an alcoholic father, both of whom looked to her to be the breadwinner. Recalls photographer Michael Childers, who got to know Wood well at a later date, “Her mother was the meanest motherfucking woman, this dark shadow in the background, the mother from hell. Natalie was unstable, a wreck by the time she was sixteen.” She had married R. J. Wagner in 1957, just after Christmas. The couple quickly became yet another pair of “America’s sweethearts” in the fanzines. Wagner too had come up through the contract system, at Fox. But his career had stalled before he achieved stardom. Their spacious home at 714 North Beverly Drive, with its saltwater pool, was heavily mortgaged. Wood was hooked on sleeping pills and uppers. Says Mart Crowley, who would be Kazan’s gofer on Splendor, and later became Wood’s confidant and assistant, “When they were sober they treated each other terrifically, but it was kind of Jekyll and Hyde when they drank. She wanted to go to a psychiatrist, mend the marriage. His family, and particularly his mother, a very la-de-dah lady, was totally against it. There was no craziness in the family, and she didn’t want any divorce, either.”

  The director was dubious. “When Natalie was first suggested to me, I backed off,” Kazan said. “I didn’t want a ‘washed-up child star.’” Nor was his first impression of her favorable. She was wearing ear-to-ear lipstick, a fur coat, and all the trappings of a star. He thought she was exactly what he didn’t want, too Hollywood. But Jack Warner told him he could have her cheap because he needed her rehabilitated into an asset, and Kazan was smart enough to see beneath the facade. “When I saw her, I detected behind the well-mannered ‘young wife’ front a desperate twinkle in her eyes,” he continued. “I knew there was an unsatisfied hunger there.” He sensed there was a “bad girl” hiding inside the “good girl.… I could see that the crisis in her career was preparing her for a crisis in her personal life,” he wrote. “Then she told me she was being psychoanalyzed. That did it. Poor R.J., I said to myself.”

  Wood signed in mid-January 1960, which ratcheted up Beatty’s anxiety level. He had dumped MGM and quit Dobie Gillis for Roses, but nobody in Hollywood cared about his handful of laudatory theater reviews. Kazan was testing other actors, or at least one other actor who had captured his interest, Jody McCrae, son of Joel. But Beatty campaigned vigorously for Splendor. Inge also pushed Beatty on Warner, showing him the actor’s reviews from Roses, while predicting that he was going to be bigger than Dean or Brando.

  One day, Kazan told Beatty, according to him, “I saw a screen test of you. I’ve got to be very honest with you. I don’t know if I want you.” Beatty’s stomach turned over.

  “Well, what should I do?”

  “Do you want to make another screen test?”

  “Sure.” Beatty tested with Wood at Stage 4 of the Warners lot on March 3, 1960. He was nervous, but not so nervous that he didn’t complain about this and that. When he objected to his lines, Kazan, giving him a dark look, as if to say, Who’s directing this, you or me? merely grunted “Really,” a noncommittal, slightly skeptical response that Beatty would make his own. He recalls, “I made a suggestion where I thought his blocking was a little off. I said, ‘Why don’t I go over here and I’ll play the piano a little bit. Because I play.’ He said, ‘Really?’ About twenty or thirty minutes after that, Karl Malden came in, and Kazan said, ‘Karl, you take over.’ And he left. I thought, This is no good, I’ve disappointed him. That night, we were all supposed to have dinner together at Chasen’s. We met at Natalie’s house, about seven of us. As we were leaving, again I thought, He’s being distant with me. I guess I didn’t get the movie. Then suddenly, he grabbed me by the lapels and shoved me up against a wall. He said, ‘Look kid, you got the part, okay? You know that thing where you said to me that that was not a good idea that I had? That was good. I need that. Keep doing that.’ I felt a chill start at my heel that went up my back to the top of my head, because I thought, Unless I’m stupid, I’m not going to be poor. I have a shot. And I can do something with it.” He was paid $15,000 for the movie, but no expenses, which amounted to $19,000. He continues, “So I came out of that movie broke. But elated, because I knew that it was a good movie.”

  Beatty’s problems weren’t over, however. At the beginning of April, just after he had turned twenty-three, and right before he and Joan Collins were due to fly to New York so he could begin rehearsals on Splendor, she realized she was pregnant. “Pregnant?” Beatty exclaimed, incredulously, she recalled, “in his little boy voice,” gulping handfuls of vitamin E. “How did that happen?”

  “The butler did it. Or maybe it’s an immaculate conception.”

  “This is terrible. Terrible!” Indeed, it was. Not only was he broke, he didn’t want to be tied down, least of all by a baby. For an actress Collins’s age—she was one year older than MacLaine, and worried she was already over the hill at twenty-seven—motherhood was career suicide. Besides, they both knew they weren’t ready for the responsibility. Abortion was the only option, although years later Collins said, “I desperately wished I could keep the baby.… But the fact that he wouldn’t even consider the possi
bility hurt me dreadfully.”

  They flew east. Beatty accompanied her to a doctor’s office in New Jersey. In those days abortions were illegal and often dangerous, even fatal. He was sweating profusely, and seemed to have lost his ability to speak. She thought, He’s more scared than I am. He sat in a nearby coffee shop listening to “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” on the jukebox, while she underwent the procedure. The deed done, she recovered reasonably quickly. They rented a small apartment on Fifth Avenue and tried to put the episode behind them.

  Kazan went into production at Filmways Studios on East 127th Street at the beginning of May 1960. As always, he was on guard against making a “Hollywood” picture, which meant that he used actual locations—Staten Island, Riverdale, upstate New York—as much as possible. He couldn’t have been happy when Wood arrived in New York on the Twentieth Century Limited in a $6,500 mink coat accompanied by Wagner, Eddie Fisher, and Elizabeth Taylor, who was about to shoot Butterfield 8 in the city, along with a great many pieces of luggage. Crowley recalls, “Kazan said to me, in his macho, down-home way of not doing anything Hollywood—no limos, no great dressing rooms, no nothing—‘I guess we’ve gotta have some kind of little welcoming party, here’s some petty cash, go out and buy some liquor and some ice.’ I stacked up some cardboard liquor boxes and put a white tablecloth over them to make a bar. They walked up to me at the same instant, like, ‘What’ll it be, Mr. Wagner and Mrs. Wagner?’”