Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

  The competition shaped up to be one between the Old Hollywood—represented by two mild, bleeding-heart pictures, Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night, in addition to an inept musical, Doctor Dolittle, that had bombed at the box office, nearly finishing the job Cleopatra had started at Fox—and the New, in the form of Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate. Estelle Parsons, a reluctant attendee, gave expression to the suspicion with which New York regarded Hollywood, and vice versa. “The idea at the time was that films like Bonnie and Clyde might get nominated, but they couldn’t win, because they were not Hollywood films,” she says. “Most people who voted lived in Hollywood, and they voted for the bigger movies where the jobs were.”

  The host that night was Bob Hope, who joked about President Lyndon Johnson’s recent decision not to seek reelection. The Old Hollywood laughed. The New Hollywood, including Beatty and Christie, Hoffman and his date, Senator Eugene McCarthy’s daughter Ellen, and Mike Nichols, sat stone-faced through Hope’s patter. Martha Raye read a letter from General William Westmoreland thanking Hollywood for raising the morale of U.S. troops in Vietnam through its work with the USO. Through it all, the Barrow gang was confident, expecting to clean up. “We were so fucking sure we were going to win the Oscars,” recalls Newman. “Ken Hyman came up to us in the lobby, and said, ‘Got your speech ready, boys?’”

  Benton and Newman indeed had their speeches ready. When Steiger and Claire Bloom announced the nominees for the writing awards, Newman was halfway out of his seat. Benton buttoned his jacket and straightened his tie. As he heard the words, “And the winner is…” he actually stood up. Sadly for him, the lucky man was William Rose, for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Benton fell back into his seat like he’d been clubbed. Newman, meanwhile, couldn’t believe his ears. “They gave it to this English twit, William Rose!” he complains. “As the guy came back down the aisle with his Oscar, I had the impulse to tackle him and scream, ‘It’s mine! Give me that God damn thing!” (Memory plays tricks. Rose wasn’t present, and director Stanley Kramer accepted the award for him.)

  Despite its clutch of nominations, Bonnie and Clyde was for the most part passed over, as Parsons predicted. It lost Best Picture to In the Heat of the Night. Ironically, Leslie Caron presented Best Director, and seemed visibly relieved when it went to Nichols, for The Graduate. After all the Sturm und Drang, Bonnie and Clyde won only two awards, Parsons for Best Supporting Actress and Guffey for Best Cinematography, ironic in view of his reluctance to do as he was told. “You know the really great thing when Guffey won the Oscar?” Beatty recalled. “He got up there and he thanked… Jack Warner.” At the time, he (or Dunaway to whom the quip was also attributed) said, “We’re all disappointed. As a bunch of bankrobbers, we wuz robbed.”

  “There were people in Hollywood who just hated that movie,” remembers Benton. “The thing that ticked off Crowther is that there was banjo music while they were shooting people. It was perceived to be a thumbing-your-nose attitude, a moral flipness, an arrogance, because nobody in this movie ever said, ‘I’m sorry I’ve killed somebody.’”

  “WE DIDN’T know what we were tapping into,” said Penn. “The walls came tumbling down after Bonnie and Clyde. All the things that were in concrete began to just fall away.” Contradictory though they may have been, due to the different agendas of the various contributors, the film embodied several of the decade’s intellectual preoccupations. If the 1950s saw American culture turning away from the 1930s infatuation with Marx toward Freud, the second half of the 1960s reflected a fatigue with the insistent navel-gazing and pop psychologizing of the postwar work of Williams and Inge, and a rebirth of interest in social relations. “The Freudian nature of their own relationship puts me to sleep,” said Beatty, referring to the outlaw couple. “I’ve seen too much of that.” Towne too went out of his way to dismiss the Freudian interpretation of the story. “The feeling was, If he could only fuck, he wouldn’t shoot people,” he says. “In the end he can fuck, and she says, ‘What would you do if you had to do it all over again?’ ‘I wouldn’t do it in the same state!’ So you realized, that wasn’t going to make any difference.”

  Still, the picture did come out in the middle of the sexual revolution, and it was hard entirely to escape the long arm of psychoanalysis, or deny the conclusion that if Freud were dead, it was long live the post-Freudians: Wilhelm Reich, Norman O. Brown, and Paul Goodman. Bonnie and Clyde was a sequel, of sorts, to Splendor in the Grass. Instead of the pathos of young lovers capitulating to small-minded adults, here the children would have their revenge against the grown-ups, and then some. What a difference six years would make. Bonnie and Clyde carried a message of sexual liberation. Sex would make you free. In its clumsy libidinal economy, Clyde’s gun does what his dick can’t, and when his dick can, there’s nothing left for his gun to do, so he dies. It was all summed up by that ubiquitous antiwar bumper sticker: Make Love, Not War.

  If Freud was out, at least in its orthodox form, Marx was back in, courtesy of Beatty and Penn. The beating heart of Bonnie and Clyde is best detected in the picture’s populist embrace of bank robbing as a blow against plutocracy, as well as the transformation of the outlaw couple into modern-day Robin Hoods. From the moment Clyde introduces himself and his partner, saying, “I’m Clyde Barrow and this is Miss Bonnie Parker. We rob banks,” the movie throws down a gauntlet: the unapologetic, unabashed romanticization of bank robbers and killers. In the crucible of the Vietnam War, the good guys were stepping over the line that separated them from the bad guys, and vice versa. In Dr. No (1963), James Bond casually exercised his “license to kill” by executing a larcenous metallurgist, coldly counting each shot until he knows the man’s gun is empty. By making villains of traditional authority figures—bankers, cops, parents—Bonnie and Clyde went considerably further, turning conventional morality on its head. The film legitimated violence against the establishment, the same violence that seethed in the hearts and minds of hundreds of thousands of frustrated opponents of the Vietnam War.

  Beatty had no trouble embracing Penn’s populism. As he put it, “The political message in ‘Bonnie and Clyde’? You better give the have-nots some money, or they’ll shoot you.” That was the commonsensical foundation upon which he would base his liberalism in the years to come. “Warren’s fundamental belief about politics is that the world is a safer and better place for everybody if nobody gets shit on too bad,” explains Jeremy Pikser, who would work on Reds and co-write Bulworth with him. “He doesn’t want anybody in the world to be so poor, miserable, and so pissed they want to kill rich people. ’Cause that’s bad for him. [He readily admits that this is the point of view of] a rich, selfish, self-interested individual. He realizes that his life is an embarrassment of riches, so envy is not a good thing for him.”

  But populism was only part of the Bonnie and Clyde story. The misfits of the Everyman-on-the-run films of the 1930s and 1940s like Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once and Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night are victims; they just want to be normal, but society won’t let them. Those pictures took that yearning and milked it for pathos. Here, it’s the reverse. Until the final ambush, Bonnie and Clyde aren’t victims. They freely choose to do what they do; they like robbing banks. Except for a few fleeting moments when they dream about living like other people, they disdain normalcy; it makes them vulnerable. They would much rather live fast, die young, and leave good-looking corpses than reel in the years rocking away on the back porch. Theirs is not a moral journey. Bonnie and Clyde flays bourgeois morality; there is a straight line from it to the brutality of Taxi Driver, nearly a decade later.

  It was not only the violence of Bonnie and Clyde, not only their refusal to say they were sorry that antagonized “them”; it was the flair and energy with which the film pits the hip and the cool against the old, straight, and stuffy. Beatty not only “shoved it up the asses” of a generation of Americans that was on the wrong side of the generat
ion gap, the wrong side of the Vietnam War, but also a straitlaced generation of Motion Picture Academy members of whom Bob Hope was the public face, that hoped to go quietly, with dignity. Bonnie and Clyde wouldn’t let them. It unceremoniously pushed them out the door, and they understood that perfectly. On some level, Crowther, Hope et al. must have seen themselves in Sheriff Hamer, Dylan’s Mr. Jones who didn’t understand what was happening there, didn’t get the joke, and must have been angered by it. By discarding the way things had always been done, by daring to do them differently, and in most ways better, Beatty and Penn, Benton and Newman, flipped the bird at the people who had come before them and cut a fresh path through the tangled undergrowth of convention. If there is such a thing as cinematic patricide, Bonnie and Clyde would have to plead guilty to the crime. Newman was right. Like The Graduate, young audiences recognized that Bonnie and Clyde was “theirs.”

  The real originality of Bonnie and Clyde, however, lay in the fact that it recognized that in America by mid-decade, both Marx and Freud were dead, not to mention God—as memorialized on the April 8, 1966, cover of Time magazine. But if the kings were dead, it was long live the king, in this case Andy Warhol. Fame and glamour, as the Beatles recognized, had become more potent than sex, class, or religion. “Warhol was giving parties at the Factory with Viva, Edie, Candy Darling, the fifteen minutes of fame bit,” says Newman. “None of those people did anything; they just wanted to be celebrities. Likewise, our take on Bonnie and Clyde was that they wanted to be celebrities. They saw in each other the mirror of their own ambitions. Although they were both at the bottom of society, in each other they saw someone who validated an image of what they could be. Clyde creates for her a vision of herself as a movie star, and from that moment on, even though he couldn’t fuck her, he’s got her.” And similarly, near the end, when Bonnie reads him her “poem,” “The Story of Bonnie and Clyde,” published in the newspaper, he tells her, “You told my story. You made me somebody they’re going to remember.” It is then that he’s finally able to perform sexually; fame is an aphrodisiac.

  For all the talk about the Depression and the Vietnam War, Bonnie and Clyde is a paean to coolness, to the right of the young and the beautiful, of movie stars, of celebrities, to write their own rules, to do as they please. This was something Beatty understood. Bonnie and Clyde were not so different from him when he started out, famous before he’d made a movie, a celebrity because he wanted to be a celebrity, acted like a celebrity, and was packaged like a celebrity by his publicists. He was the Paris Hilton of the late 1950s; he anticipated Andy Warhol’s celebrity factory by a good half decade. And indeed, in the first blush of his stardom, and later as he gained enormous power, he did do as he pleased, he did write his own rules.

  Still, as the hollowness of that became increasingly evident to him—he wasn’t reading T. S. Eliot for nothing—as the gossip columns and magazine interviews turned yellow and brittle before the ink was dry, Beatty struggled to give his celebrity some substance, to realize, to concretize, to incarnate himself in the only way he could: to make, finally, a great movie.

  Beatty was both puppeteer and puppet, a trope that appears in many of his movies, Bonnie and Clyde being the first. Seducing Bonnie by, in essence, promising to make her a star, Clyde does a casting couch number on her. In other words, he becomes the producer inside the movie, Beatty’s fictional alter ego. This makes Bonnie and Clyde a movie about itself, as movies often are, a representation of its own journey to the screen, an act of aesthetic narcissism, a mirror held up to itself. There was a whole lot more to the outlaw couple than there was to the somnambulists who glided, like exotic fish, through Warhol’s films. Bonnie and Clyde were like the performance artists of the 1960s, or the outsider artists of today. Their legend was their art. They were their own subjects, and their medium was crime. Bonnie and Clyde offers up a metaphor of art as an offense against official culture, not unlike Godard’s oft put analogy between the camera and the gun, or Scorsese’s portrait of himself as a killer seated in the back of the cab in Taxi Driver. As such, the subject of the movie—transgression against the status quo—replicated and foretold its reception. Like its eponymous heroes, the picture was nearly killed in return.

  NINETEEN SIXTY-EIGHT was a year of unprecedented upheaval in the United States. The spirit of hope that had launched the Summer of Love the previous year had curdled, giving way to a roller-coaster ride of highs and lows through a blasted landscape of war, assassinations, political protests, and police brutality. On Wednesday, January 31, at half past midnight, North Vietnam and its guerrilla allies in the South launched the Tet Offensive, sending seventy thousand troops out of the jungles to brazenly carry the war to the cities. The Johnson administration had been insisting for months that there was light at the end of the tunnel, that the endless escalations, the Phoenix program, the strategic hamlets, the electronic battlefield, the carpet bombings and rain of Agent Orange would inevitably bring the insurgency to its knees. But now the scale, audacity, and synchronicity of the attacks provided a dramatic indication that this was no more than wishful thinking, turning an increasing number of Americans into doves.

  The killing of Martin Luther King in particular changed the tenor of American politics. While it may be an exaggeration to say the “dream” was dead, suddenly the struggle for racial justice and against the war grew uglier. Beatty was drawn to the turmoil in the streets. Two weeks after King was assassinated, Columbia University in New York City erupted into violence, became the scene of a widely publicized confrontation between student protesters and police. He visited the Columbia campus with Julie Christie. But whereas many in the antiwar movement had given up on electoral politics and regarded themselves as revolutionaries, Beatty, who underneath it all was deeply conservative, both aesthetically and politically, as always, leavening his idealism with a bracing dose of realism, was more comfortable working inside the system. Unlike Godard, in whom he had little interest, he would never have embraced Maoism, or any other “ism.” And with Johnson out of the race, it wasn’t unreasonable to look to the 1968 presidential election as part of the solution, not the problem. Reviewing the presidential politics of that year, Hunter Thompson wrote in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, “it was clear that the next president would be Gene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy, and The War would be over by Christmas.”

  Throughout the Democratic primary campaign that pitted Kennedy against McCarthy, Charlie Feldman lay dying of pancreatic cancer. Beatty reconciled with Feldman shortly before he was diagnosed in January 1968. “It was Bonnie and Clyde that caused me to reconcile with him because I realized that it was my relationship with him that made me produce my own pictures,” he says. “I made a lot more money from Bonnie and Clyde than I would have made on Pussycat, and it was a better movie. Plus, if I had done Pussycat, I doubt that I would ever have done Shampoo, so in a way both Bonnie and Clyde and Shampoo came out of Pussycat.”

  Beatty sat at Feldman’s bedside throughout his final days, spelling his new wife, Clotilde Barot. She recalls, “Warren would stay with me until four o’clock in the morning.” He told her, “I’ll take over, I’ll read a script, I won’t make any noise.” She adds, “When Charlie started to throw up blood, Warren was there.” Feldman died on May 25, 1968.

  Eleven days later, on June 5, the hammer fell again. Kennedy, who had just handily defeated McCarthy in the California Democratic primary, was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, just after he gave his victory speech. With the killing so close on the heels of King’s death, the hope inspired by Kennedy’s campaign—the contagious image of the smiling, golden-haired prince embracing and embraced by those less fortunate, farmworkers, wounded veterans, poor blacks and whites—gave way to a pervasive feeling of doom, a dark, foreboding sense that the times had become unhinged. As a political figure, Bobby didn’t have nearly the gravitas that King did, but in many ways his death was more cataclysmic, changing the face of American politics�
�for the worse—for years to come in ways that could barely be imagined. Shortly after the assassination, in a note to Jean Howard, former Ziegfeld girl, Hollywood photographer, and Feldman’s former wife, Beatty wrote, “I have never been so depressed. It was the worst thing that’s ever happened to this country and the saddest. God, will it ever end.”

  Politically speaking, Beatty was just getting his feet wet, and wasn’t taken seriously as an asset by the Kennedys, even though he had campaigned for RFK in Oregon. They were not in the market for charisma, having more than enough of their own. Bobby’s brother-in-law and Southern California campaign manager Steven Smith, who died in 1990, “thought Beatty was full of shit,” says a source. “Steve was a backroom guy who was pretty tough. He didn’t like the whole actor thing. He thought Beatty was a lightweight. Beatty really wasn’t in that Kennedy loop. He wasn’t close to any of them, and still isn’t.” Nevertheless, the star admired Bobby. As he put it some time later, “JFK was a very impressive figure to me, and the atmosphere that surrounded him was dazzling. But Bobby was a much stronger influence.” In the late 1990s, he described himself this way: “I’m a Bobby Kennedy Democrat, or where I think a Bobby Kennedy Democrat would be now.”

  In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, Beatty, like many others, was preoccupied with, as he puts it, “picking up the pieces.” He campaigned for the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, as well as several candidates for public office, like Adlai Stevenson III, in Illinois. He trod the hustings on behalf of Senator John Glenn’s Emergency Committee for Gun Control, and in support of a gun control bill sponsored by Senator Joe Tydings of Maryland. On July 6, 1968, he addressed the crowd at a Giants-Cardinals baseball game at Candlestick Park in San Francisco and was booed. “I loved the way, say, that he would go to baseball matches and stand up in the interval and talk about getting rid of guns,” recalled Christie. “He would be this little tiny figure in this big baseball stadium, and I would be looking down at him. I thought he was wonderfully courageous for doing that.” Later that day, he put in an appearance at a Sonny Liston fight at the Cow Palace. “They asked me to get up and say some words in favor of the Tydings bill between rounds,” he recalls. “Because it seemed like everybody in the Cow Palace had a gun, you know. And they threw hot dogs at me. It was hilarious, in retrospect only.” The heckling he received at the two events helped to convince him that perhaps he would be more effective behind the scenes.