Bonnie and Clyde opened in Denton, Texas, on September 13, 1967, went wide through the South and Southwest the next day. Beatty was like a man possessed. “He was like a bulldog that got his teeth in this thing,” says Hyams. “The passion he had then, checking sales contracts, and distribution—we all used to say that he’d be a much better producer than an actor.” He tracked the box office, visited theaters himself. Rumor had it that he tried to replace an older projectionist at a Chicago theater with a younger one because he thought a youthful man would get the picture and show more care. Recalled Guy McElwaine, then his West Coast publicist, “Warren had the studio send a memo to all the theater managers telling them to raise the sound level of the picture. Then he wrote personal notes to all the projectionists and stuck them in the film cans, with the projectionists’ names on each one. If a normal film was played at 15 decibels, he wanted Bonnie and Clyde played at 22 decibels.” Beatty intended the sound of the gunshots to startle the audience, as they had in Shane, directed by the man he so admired, George Stevens, fourteen years before.
Meanwhile, Beatty was flying to San Francisco to campaign for Christie, with whom he was making considerable progress. An accomplished storyteller, he held her spellbound with his tales about the stupidity of the Warners executives. She was impressed by the fact that he was trying to do something about it, and realized that far from being an apologist for Hollywood, he was as anti-studio as she was. Eventually, she returned to London and the new house she was going to share with Don Bessant, and to all appearances, resumed her relationship with him. “Bessant was still her guy,” recalled a friend, Irish actor Kevin McHugh. “But word was out that Beatty had already ‘happened,’ that he was going on in the background.… No one in the circle spoke about it, it was just known.” It wasn’t long until Bessant moved out. “I don’t think the split had anything to do with Warren Beatty,” reflected Bessant’s mother. “She was becoming very famous. It did make things a little difficult and Don wasn’t into that kind of life.” Beatty and Christie became an item. Those who had a stake in her, like John Schlesinger, worried that he would take over her career, even “closing the Christie corporation down altogether,” so that she could devote herself to him.
As it turned out, the London opening on September 15 was a smashing success. He had organized midnight screenings every night for five consecutive nights the week before the premiere, making it the hot ticket that the hip influentials—John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Mary Quant, Vidal Sassoon, the photographers, the designers, the theater people, the press—fought over. Recalls Lederer, “He ran roughshod over everything to get this done.”
Beatty likes to tell the story about how he stunned a projectionist by appearing in the booth of the Warner Theatre in Leicester Square because he could barely hear the gunshots. According to the star, the projectionist said, “‘You’re the producer of this picture?’ and I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’ve really helped you out in the sound here. I’ve made a chart, and I turn it up here and down here, and so on. It’s the worst mixed picture. I haven’t had a picture so badly mixed since Shane.’”
The movie became a hit in England, more than a hit, a phenomenon. The Bonnie beret was all the rage. Quipped Hyams, “It helped start the no-bra trend, because Faye didn’t wear a brassiere in the film. That’s a contribution Warren made that nobody gives him credit for.” Magazines in New York that ignored the picture when it opened were overwhelmed by calls from their London stringers. Life woke up and did a fashion layout on Dunaway.
In June, Warner had gone to New York, where he announced the sale of his controlling interest in the studio to Seven Arts Productions, for a sum variously reported at $32 million and $95 million. The new owner, Eliot Hyman, retained him temporarily, as well as Kalmenson, Lederer, and Hyams. He made his son, Kenneth, head of production. But the groundswell that was building for the picture was too late to affect the bookings in the U.S. According to Penn, “Once the word came down from somebody like Benny Kalmenson to the exhibitors that it’s a dog, they booked it for a very short period and then they booked another film in afterwards. It was customary for a picture to have a five-week guarantee, but we didn’t.”
According to Beatty this was the real problem, not the grosses. “They were very happy with it,” he recalls. “It had done very nicely. Much better than they had hoped.” But Reflections in a Golden Eye, a turkey starring Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor that Seven Arts had made before it purchased Warners, was booked in right on its heels, pushing Bonnie and Clyde out on October 11. “In effect,” continues Beatty, “to have kept Bonnie and Clyde going would have lost them the theaters for Reflections, which cost three times what Bonnie and Clyde cost, or more.”
Lederer continues, “I was discouraged by that September opening, after we’d broke our asses, I just gave up on the picture. I had done my best, and it died anyway. I never felt it could be resurrected. I really didn’t.” He added, “It had played 2,000 play dates, which at that time would normally account for 90% of the revenue that you would obtain, and the film only had $2 million in rentals.” Bitter, Penn observed that Americans discard movies the same way they do paper cups.
The apparent failure of Bonnie and Clyde stung Beatty, not in the least because he had to watch Mike Nichols’s picture, The Graduate, get the kind of box office that he felt belonged to Bonnie and Clyde. Beatty was intensely competitive. Although he would never say a bad word to the press about another movie, another person, another anything, in private he was cutting. Buck Henry, who wrote The Graduate and would later collaborate with Beatty on Heaven Can Wait, recalls, “He said to me, ‘I saw your guy’s movie the other night,’ meaning The Graduate, ‘and I was really pissed off and worried until you guys fucked up at the end.’ He meant the driving sequence, which he thought was lame. In effect, he said, ‘I was so relieved that you didn’t make a great film.’ It was so purely Warren that I laughed. ’Cause when I remembered it years later, I thought, I’ve never heard him say so-and-so made a good movie. ‘Got a lot of laughs out of Airplane’—that’s about as good as it gets. He’s looking for the flaws: ‘Is their film better than mine?’ I’ve only heard him say a good word about one movie in all the time I’ve known him, and that was Doctor Zhivago. To have that movie as a touchstone is somewhat limiting.”
Five weeks or so after Bonnie and Clyde had been given up for dead, Time magazine plastered the picture on its December 8 cover as Exhibit A for a story bannered “The New Cinema: Violence… Sex… Art,” by Stefan Kanfer. Kanfer was heralding the revolutionary decade to come, in which Hollywood filmmaking would not only become thoroughly Europeanized, it would be revitalized by the energy and iconoclasm of the new youth culture spawned by the antiwar movement. He cited the jarring shock cuts in Point Blank, the lesbian scenes in The Fox, the violence of Bonnie and Clyde, and the fractured narrative of films like Blow-Up, to make his point that studio-backed films were changing in ways unimaginable a few short years before. He defined the characteristics of the New Cinema: sexual boldness, unfettered by the Code; disregard for time-honored pieties of plot, chronology, and motivation; a promiscuous jumbling together of comedy and tragedy; and a new, ironic distance that withholds facile judgments based on conventional morality, which in turn blurs the distinction between heroes and villains. Time lavished particular praise on Bonnie and Clyde, calling it “the best movie of the year,” a “watershed picture,” bracketing it with the likes of The Birth of a Nation and Citizen Kane. Kanfer even compared the climactic ambush to Greek tragedy.
After the magazine hit the newsstands, Beatty paid a call on the new Warners head. He said, “Eliot, we have to rethink this. The movie’s been mishandled. I want you to rerelease it.” Hyman looked at him as if he were crazy. It was a bold demand. Studios didn’t rerelease pictures. To do so was to admit a mistake, acknowledge that they had botched the initial campaign. “There’s a conflict of interest in your booking Reflections in a Golden Eye, a Seven Arts movi
e after Bonnie and Clyde,” continued Beatty, undetered. “I’m going to make trouble for you.” Hyman refused again. He had been shocked when he discovered the size of Beatty’s profit participation. It was so large Hyman had no financial incentive to put the movie back in theaters were he so inclined, which he wasn’t. Finally, Hyman said, “I’ll release the picture if you reduce the size of your cut.”
Now it was Beatty’s turn to refuse, and he did so, saying, “I’m gonna sue you, Eliot.” Hyman regarded him coldly, figuring the odds, as he nervously flipped his pencil up in the air, caught it, threaded it through his fingers.
“What the hell would you sue me for?”
Beatty was bluffing, didn’t have the foggiest idea what he would sue him for, but familiar with Hyman’s past, which he knew included some questionable associations, he thought, Eliot knows more than I could possibly dream of. So he returned his gaze, smiled thinly, and said, “I think you know.” Adds Beatty, “With a man like Eliot, that was, of course, the best thing to say, because whatever it was he knew, it frightened him.” Within a couple of weeks Hyman had rebooked the picture.
On February 20, when the Oscar nominations were announced, Beatty had good reason to feel encouraged. Bonnie and Clyde got a staggering ten, including two for him personally—for producing, with his film up for Best Picture, competing against In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Graduate, and Doctor Dolittle—as well as Best Actor, where he faced Dustin Hoffman for The Graduate, Paul Newman for Cool Hand Luke, Rod Steiger for In the Heat of the Night, and Spencer Tracy for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
Also nominated were Penn for Best Director, Dunaway for Best Actress, Hackman and Pollard both for Best Supporting Actor, Parsons for Best Supporting Actress, Benton and Newman for Best Original Screenplay, and on and on. Dede Allen was slighted, despite her editing tour de force. “The reason why I never got recognized for that picture by my peers was because they really thought it was the worst cut picture they had ever seen,” she says. “Until they began to imitate it!”
Beatty called Christie, inviting her to be his date to the Oscars. She would fly to Hollywood, share his penthouse at the Beverly Wilshire, and stay on well after the ceremony was over. He gave her a Yorkshire terrier, which she took wherever she went.
Eventually, Christie moved into the Malibu beach house rented by Schlesinger and Childers. Initially, Schlesinger was leery of Beatty, referring to him as someone who “gets through women like a businessman through a dozen oysters.” In April 1968, in a letter to a friend, he wrote, “But one can’t interfere in these matters, even though [Beatty] has tried his best to do so with her career.” He wondered whether the actor was “very good for her future.”
Nevertheless. Beatty charmed everyone, finally moving in himself for a few months, taking over the lease after Schlesinger left to prep Midnight Cowboy. “The Julie and Warren thing was magical,” Childers recalls. “He was demented about her. I knew sixteen other girls he dated, but Julie was special.” Beatty always credited her with freeing him of his sexual inhibitions. She never made judgments about what practices were right or wrong, good or bad. She was open to everything.
“They couldn’t keep their hands off each other,” Childers continues. “It was hot, hot. She would sit on his lap and they would kiss. There was a lot of fucking going on. Noisy fucking. Julie was smitten. Never in love, or at least I never heard the L-word. I think he certainly was with her. He told me that he always wanted to marry her. But she was a very independent lady and never wanted marriage. This was before women’s lib, but she was the epitome of the new free girl. Rich—rich in life, passionate, political, a hippie. She really loved her pot. And she hated Hollywood, hated the bullshit, the parties, the premieres. She wouldn’t go to film festivals, openings, anything. She said, ‘I give the best performance I can, and that’s all I’m gonna do.’ She didn’t like Warren’s whole quest for power.”
It was a heady world to which he introduced her, and it exacerbated her insecurities. “Often I didn’t feel clever enough,” she said. “He is very clever.… I felt uninformed.” But she appreciated the doors he opened for her. “I had access to politics through Warren—and power.… It is very useful to know and see how people you might loathe and despise and hate operate as human beings.”
Although Christie was appalled by the Old Hollywood establishment in which Beatty moved freely, she had no trouble fitting into the hip New Hollywood scene. She was often stoned. Although he would take the occasional toke, he was too vain, too protective of his looks and his body, too afraid of losing control to do drugs with any regularity. She would dash through the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire in a diaphanous white cotton sari with little underneath, trailing five-figure residual checks that fluttered from her handbag onto the floor as she rummaged around for her keys. Money meant little to her; one day she shocked Beatty by losing a $1,000 check in the street.
Christie took her politics seriously, and indulged her profession only to support the myriad of causes with which she was involved. Says Towne, “If ever a movie star existed for whom stardom meant nothing, it was Julie. She was genuinely a blithe spirit.” But by March of 1967, with an Oscar for Darling, there was no denying, however much she disdained the movie world, that she had become a star herself.
When Christie was elsewhere, Beatty was on the phone with women. He kept the proverbial black book, even though his memory for phone numbers made it superfluous. Never identifying himself on the phone, speaking in a soft, insinuating voice rarely raised above a whisper, flattering in its assumption of intimacy, enormously appealing in its hesitancy and stumbling awkwardness, he asked them where they were, with whom, where they were going next, and would they be sure to call him when they got there. His appetite for control and thirst for information were as voracious as his appetite for sex, and it seemed that inside his head was a GPS indicating the whereabouts of every attractive young woman in Los Angeles. He told them that yes, he was in love with Julie, but he wanted to see them anyway. Not in the least put off, they appeared to find this reassuring. He explained his MO: “You get slapped a lot,” he said, “but you get fucked a lot, too.”
“Julie’s smart, and she knew there were other girls around,” says Childers. “That was part of the turf. But it used to piss her off. You could always tell when there’d been a falling out. She would curl her lips and pout. She was a screamer, volatile. They’d break up, she wouldn’t see him, the phone would ring, and she’d say, ‘If that’s Warren, tell him I’m not here.’ I’d say, ‘Warren, she’s baking bread and doing yoga today. She doesn’t want to talk to you.’ Six days later they’d be back together.” For the first time, it seemed that he had met his match.
The day after the Oscar nominations, Warner Brothers put Bonnie and Clyde into 340 theaters, including many from which it had originally been pulled. The word of mouth was such that the same exhibitors who had fled from the picture when it was first released as if it were radioactive were now clamoring to show it. But “by the time it got into the theaters again, the studio could not get very good terms, because they had screwed the release up so badly,” says Beatty. Still, the box office was impressive. In September, it had grossed $2,600 for a week at one theater in Cleveland; it played the same theater in February and grossed $26,000. By the end of 1967, Bonnie and Clyde had netted $2.5 million in rentals. When it was rereleased the following year, it netted $16.5 million in rentals (about $40 million in grosses) momentarily making it one of the top twenty grossing pictures of all time. According to Variety, Beatty walked away with somewhere around $6.3 million from the first and second runs.
Bonnie and Clyde went from triumph to triumph. As Joe Hyams reflects, “There was so much done to kill this picture, but it was really hard for the company to destroy it, that’s how good it was.” When the film opened in movie-mad Paris in February 1968, Beatty was treated like the prophet of a new era. He was just about to cross the generational divide (activ
ist Jerry Rubin had famously said, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty”), giving him, perhaps, a historical perspective, of sorts: “I would be seated at a table with Maurice Chevalier on one side, Artur Rubinstein on the other and Mr. and Mrs. Pompidou across the candlesticks. There were old men with beautiful young girls—not one but clusters of them. There were women dripping jewels, and somehow I felt, this time will never come again.”
One day, Truffaut caught up with Benton and Newman. He was dismissive of the picture, told them he was disgusted by the decision to eliminate the ménage à trois. “Beatty had no genuine innocence, no authenticity,” he complained. “He distorted the script out of fear of being ridiculed.”
Bonnie and Clyde, meanwhile, won awards from the New York Film Critics, the National Society of Film Critics, and the Writers Guild of America. The Oscars were scheduled for April 8 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. On April 4, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, sparking riots across America, sometimes in cities that had not recovered from the urban conflagrations of the previous year. Beverly Hills liberals acknowledged the occasion by driving with their lights on. King’s funeral was set for April 9, and five Academy participants—four of them black (Louis Armstrong, Diahann Carroll, Sammy Davis Jr., and Sidney Poitier, plus Rod Steiger)—threatened to withdraw if the show were not postponed. The Academy reluctantly agreed to reschedule the event for April 10. Even so, a lot of people, including Penn, still stayed away.
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