Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

  Eastman’s sexual orientation provided fodder for endless rumination; she dipped her toe into both genders, but she never seemed to make up her mind, or have a lover of either sex for any length of time. She often hid behind dark glasses, and even disguised her screen credit with a pseudonym, Adrien Joyce, as she did on The Fortune, although this may have been an attempt to disavow the pictures made from her scripts, with which she was never pleased.

  Devlin, for one, couldn’t understand why Nicholson “deferred to her wisdom,” why he didn’t recognize her limitations. But Nicholson prided himself on his eye for talent, and Eastman for him was the mother lode. According to Dick Sylbert, unlike Beatty, “Jack had no first class writers around him. He didn’t have niggers, he had schmucks.” Sylbert’s wife, Susanna Moore, was working for Nicholson at the time, and read the script for him. She said, “What is this arch piece of shit?” But if she told Nicholson, he didn’t listen. Continues Devlin, “Jack is a kingmaker. He gets enthusiasms for people, and he had such great enthusiasm for Carole that he put his faith in her, as opposed to [the script], whether or not he really understood it. Jack often confuses badly written material with complex material. It was that faith in Carole that might have gotten Warren to that table, plus his desire to do a movie with Jack.”

  Beatty also seemed to have a high opinion of Eastman’s intelligence. Before she died, she told one of his biographers, Suzanne Finstad, that as she was getting into her car after having dinner with him at a restaurant, Beatty grabbed “her arm so tightly he left bruises,” exclaiming, “I want to take you up to show you this property up on Mulholland. Because you’re going to live there.”

  “Why am I going to live there?”

  “Because I’m going to marry you.” Eastman didn’t know what he was talking about, until he explained, “This is a gonadal matter,” and she realized that he wanted smart children. “Certain men do think that way,” Eastman concluded. “They are thinking genetically of how to breed up, as they say in the animal world.” As Beatty himself put it, “I have theories about the DNA’s need to replicate itself, and let’s face it, it replicates itself in a romantic way.”

  Five Easy Pieces was the only decent script that Eastman ever wrote, or had produced at any rate, but Devlin’s jaundiced view of her talents may have taken shape in the shadow of the fiasco The Fortune became, because he believed in her enough at one time to rent her a room at the Chateau Marmont along with a typewriter so she could write the script. It was then that he became attached as producer.

  Set in the late 1920s right before the Crash, and based on two news stories from the period, the script told the story of the heiress to a sanitary napkin fortune named Fredrika Contessa ‘Freddie’ Biggars. (Rule #1: Beware of scripts in which the characters have whimsical names.) It was originally called The Mousebed Heiress, after a laboriously explained conceit in which Freddie recalls that “mousebeds” were her euphemism for Kotex. Beatty and Nicholson play two dim-bulb friends, Nicky and Oscar, who try to kill her for her inheritance. It was a premise just nutty enough to be promising, but when Eastman got it down on paper, to use a favorite epithet of Nicholson’s from those days, it was “lame-o.” Says Devlin, “I hated the script. It was terrible.” Eastman was not one to embrace criticism, and when he confided his doubts, “she went through the fucking roof.”

  According to Nichols, he read half the script, given to him by Nicholson, on the first leg of a flight to Poland, and the second half sitting on his suitcase in the Warsaw airport waiting to get through customs. In those circumstances, the phone book would have been entertaining.

  With Nichols in the cab of the locomotive, there was no stopping the train. As Devlin points out, “In those days everybody supported everything directors wanted. Directors were auteurs. Nobody knew what an auteur was, but it sounded pretty good. Don Siegel used to go around calling himself an auteur. He would go into these meetings, get into a fight with the executives, and he always said, ‘Yeah, but there’s only one auteur sitting in this room, and I’m that guy.’”

  Devlin not only went way back with Eastman, but with Nicholson as well. (He was one of several, including Gittes, who were considered “Jack’s Best Friend.”) He had a reputation for being a decent man in a business not always known for decency. “Don is extremely honorable,” says Hank Moonjean, a veteran line producer whom Nichols and Nicholson brought in to do the picture. “Whatever he says I would take for gospel.” Buck Henry also testifies to his probity: “I’m sure if Devlin said [something], it’s true.” But this virtue may not have served him well on The Fortune. When the project got the green light from Columbia, Devlin was appalled. “I was the voice of doom,” he remembers. “I said, ‘What are you doing? You have 240 pages, two acts, and no third act.’ But I was the only person there saying, ‘This script is nowhere near ready, this is ridiculous.’ And of course, that did not endear me to anyone.”

  Beatty had been devoting himself to Shampoo. “I didn’t read The Fortune until the day I showed up to work,” he recalls. Nicholson, who was on location in Spain with Michelangelo Antonioni for The Passenger, and went right into Chinatown when he returned, had apparently not been able to focus on it, either. Devlin continues, “None of them had studied the thing, and all of a sudden they were beginning to ask the questions that should have been asked six months or a year earlier.” It seemed as if the three principals, Beatty, Nicholson, and Nichols, were all so excited by everyone else’s excitement, that they didn’t notice the script wasn’t finished.

  Beatty’s reputation for being a tough, even ruthless, negotiator, was well deserved. Sometimes Devlin found himself identifying with Freddie, The Fortune’s mousebed heiress. He thought that Beatty and Nichols were trying to kill him. “Warren of course wanted to produce it,” recalls Devlin. “And Mike had produced, or at least co-produced every movie he ever made, so it was like, ‘Who the fuck is this friend of Carole’s who’s the producer?’ From the moment the three of them decided they were going to make this movie, it was a total nightmare for me, because these guys with their power and their influence simply took over the project, and were continually trying to get rid of me. Warren can’t resist exploiting everyone, even when it’s not putting the extra dollars in his pocket. He does it for the joy of screwing people. He calls it ‘going to war.’ This left-wing intellectual uses military expressions when you’re strategizing: ‘Well, you’ll be the point man.’ ‘We’ll kill them.’ Warren is simply a man who exults in doing people in. His behavior is not based on his getting richer, it’s based on his making sure nobody else does. If he were brilliant and nice, what a combination that would be, but he’s just a prick.” But Devlin hung in, and got co-producer credit with Nichols.

  Beatty disputes Devlin’s account of these events in every respect. “I had no control over The Fortune at all,” he says. “If anything, I was in the fourth position. It was Jack and Carole, and then Mike came into it, and then me.” Indeed, he does not have a producing credit.

  Anthea Sylbert suggests that Nicholson, who often observed ugly battles between old friends going on around him—The Fortune, Chinatown, and later The Two Jakes—seemed to be amused by them. Says Devlin, “Part of it in truth is that many of Jack’s close friends are real egomaniacs, ambitious, nasty people. There’s no such thing as a picture that Towne makes, where there’s not all kinds of trouble. There’s no such thing as a picture Carole Eastman is involved with where there’s not endless amounts of trouble. It was very, very brutal, being so massively screwed by his partners, with his proxy. Certainly I would not recommend doing business with Warren and Mike to any friend of mine, if they could possibly avoid it.”

  SHAMPOO was edited in the Mulholland house, before Beatty started renovating it. Bob Jones, who aspired to be a writer and later would win an Oscar for the script for Coming Home, hadn’t formed much of an impression of Beatty. “I stayed away from Warren as much as I could,” he recalls. “I felt I was on Hal’s side, I was about
the only one. I didn’t like Warren, just for what was going on at different times. I didn’t want to have much to do with him so any chance I’d get to avoid a screening that Warren had, I’d do it.”

  Still, according to him, Beatty, now preoccupied with The Fortune, mostly stayed away, letting Ashby do what he did best, supervise the editing. “There was another whole ending,” the director recalled, “as opposed to what we ended up with. Much harder and harsher. In fact, the last line was, ‘A fuck is a fuck, it’s not a crime.’ Which was really heavy; it came down too hard.”

  In addition, the intention was to end with an epilogue, set in the then present, giving a glimpse of the characters six or so years after the events that transpired in the film. In both Beatty’s and Towne’s versions, the characters had continued to make messes of their lives, each in his or her own way. As usual, the two men could not agree on which one to use and finally ran out of time. By necessity, the film defaulted to the ending they had shot, with George having dropped all the balls he had in the air: Felicia, Jill, and finally Jackie, who is, he realizes belatedly, the only one he ever loved. Standing by his motorcycle at the top of Mulholland Drive, he watches her being collected by Lester below, George’s own future a question mark. Ashby preferred it, perhaps some small reward for the patience he had displayed over the course of the production. “I like to leave a little bit of an enigma there about exactly what it is,” he said, “because I think that’s what makes it not a totally down kind of an ending.”

  According to Jones, Beatty spent no more than a week in the editing room, at the end, when Ashby was finished. Outside of wanting to pick up the pace, he basically approved of Ashby’s cut. “When Warren wanted to screw with the film, Hal stayed away,” says Jones. “After Hal left, and I started working with Warren, I liked him a lot. Then he wanted me to do Reds. Luckily I was writing.” According to Jones, Beatty asked Ashby to direct Dick Tracy. It never happened, but Beatty and Ashby parted on good terms, and remained friends more or less, until just before Ashby died.

  When Shampoo had wrapped, Beatty hired Tim Vreeland, son of his friend, former Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, and head of the UCLA architecture department, to renovate the Mulholland house. Needless to say, the renovation took forever. According to Dick Sylbert, Beatty, a stickler for details and always changing his mind, drove Vreeland crazy. The architect executed an exotic black and white Italian marble floor for one of the rooms. Each piece was different, and fitting them together was a task worthy of crossword puzzle guru Will Shortz. When it was completed, Beatty had it torn out, because he decided that it didn’t fit his profile as a Democrat, a man of the people. Beatty spent months agonizing over furniture. Then he rented some. People speculated that it was for the same reason that he had rented his penthouse for so many years: he was able to charge the rent to the studios.

  Beatty had moved Phillips and her daughter, Chynna, then six, into his new home, just before he was slated to begin The Fortune. Among other things, it bestowed an aura of solidity and permanence on their relationship, or so she thought. They camped out in the house during the renovation. Phillips took over the interior decoration, such as it was. Director Glenn Gordon Caron, who would direct Beatty in Love Affair, visited the house many years later. “I noticed there was no art on the walls,” he recalls. “It seemed odd given Warren’s intelligence, and his inquiring mind, so one day I asked him, ‘Warren, where’s the art?’ He looked at me and pointed to himself. You could almost imagine that he had thought out the room as the perfect display case for himself, where he was standing.” Beatty was undoubtedly making a joke on himself—sort of. He did have a spare, less-is-more aesthetic. “He won’t show you his life in a house,” says Sylbert. “It looks like an ice cube with a piano in it.”

  Phillips furnished the house in Art Deco—then the rage. Beatty also bought a car, a Mercedes coupe. It didn’t take too long for him to turn the inside into a mess, the penthouse on wheels. They lived like a family, but he kept the penthouse and would go there to work. He quickly adapted to his new domesticity, driving Chynna to school in the morning. “He really loved Chynna,” Phillips says. “He tried to help her learn how to read, and enjoy reading.”

  Phillips continued, “When Warren is in love, he is a very generous person. I don’t mean that financially, I mean that in a sense that he devotes himself to you. The woman in his life comes first. When he is with you, he’s with you 100 percent. You go everywhere together. If you have to go to New York, you go to New York together. If he has to open a movie in Australia, you pack your bags. He loves companionship, and we had a lot in common in that sense. We both loved to travel.” She adds, “For a very long time, I did desperately want it to work between us.” Jennifer Lee, who saw Beatty on and off throughout the 1970s, recalled being asked to join him and Phillips in a threesome, which Lee declined.

  Beatty repeatedly raised the possibility of their doing a movie together, but despite his “carrot dangling,” it never happened. Reportedly they would fly to Bali to be married in the summer of 1975, which never happened either. She remembered, “I wanted to have another child, and we talked about marriage a lot, but he was very noncommittal.” She thinks he would have married her had she gotten pregnant. But “I never pressured him to marry me,” she continued. “I waited for him to ask.”

  Phillips complained that he “never really knew how to have fun.… He could make me feel so childish and guilty for wanting to stay in bed all day eating ice cream and making love. He, too, felt guilty about doing things like that—just doing nothing. His idea of a good time is five hours on the phone.”

  MEANWHILE, THE start date of The Fortune was fast approaching.

  The problem with the ending of the script was not that it didn’t work, but that it didn’t exist. Says Henry, “The legend is Carole has never written the end to a film. That was true of The Fortune. It made Mike crazy. He could never get the ending out of her.” Says Nichols, “The script was like 345 pages, and it had no ending nor did it ever get an ending from Carole. I had to carve a story out of all those pages. Sort of like a butter sculpture at a wedding. As a result, I wasn’t too warmly inclined toward Carole Eastman.”

  Nichols, who was coming off Day of the Dolphin (1973), an expensive flop, had dropped a lot of his team. Now he changed his mind. According to Devlin, as preproduction proceeded, “Mike got more and more frightened, realizing he had no movie, no idea what the fuck the movie was about, and he began firing people in order to bring back all the people he had that he hoped would save his ass.” Many of those he brought back were also Beatty regulars, like Dick Sylbert. Reassembling the old gang may have reassured Nichols, but it served to exacerbate the bad vibes on the set. The lines were drawn between the Beatty Bunch (Nichols, Nicholson, and Sylbert) on the one hand, and those who had never worked with them before, like Devlin and producer Hank Moonjean, on the other. And as often happens in these cases, the insiders disliked the outsiders, and vice versa. Says Devlin, “They and only they were the cool ones.”

  The first choice for the mousebed heiress had been Bette Midler, but she kept Nichols waiting, and that was the end of that. Nicholson suggested Mama Cass Elliot, to whom he was devoted, but Nichols wryly reminded him of the scene in which he and Beatty stuff the heiress into a trunk and throw her into the ocean. He quipped, “She’ll never fit inside it.” Eventually, Stockard Channing’s name surfaced. She had had virtually no film experience (it would be her second movie, and first credited role), but Nichols liked her and cast her as Freddie.

  When Nichols was finished cutting the script down, he had no choice but to say, “We’re never going to have a complete script, we’re gonna start anyway.” It was shot in Culver City on Forty Acres, the old Selznick lot, the site of Tara of Gone With the Wind fame. According to Devlin, Beatty and Nichols immediately quarreled over their approach to the movie. “There was a tremendous disagreement, on the first day of shooting,” he recalls. “As soon as Warren and Jack starte
d to perform, everything that had been said about what the film was about went right out the window.” Nobody agreed. Eastman thought she had written a Preston Sturges comedy, but Nicholson was playing it for slapstick, and making Nichols laugh. According to Moonjean, “Jack was doing Laurel and Hardy, while Stockard was doing sophisticated Carole Lombard comedy.” Devlin continues, “Mike hated what they were doing, because it was so different than what he had anticipated, and they wouldn’t do it the way he asked them to do it, so for the first several days they shot A and B versions, Mike’s and theirs. They came to despise each other.

  “Mike tried to get Warren off the film. I was in the room when he was storming and frustrated, and trying [to get him fired]. He called the lawyers and he found out he couldn’t do that, ’cause Warren was one of the owners of the project.” Beatty says of Devlin’s account, “It’s insane. Utterly insane. Just crazy. Truly bizarre. This is something constructed by somebody who might have felt left out. Jack never had any disagreements with Mike. I never had a moment’s unpleasantness on the movie.”

  Devlin claims Beatty was casually offensive to Channing. He recalls, “Warren turned to Mike, and said, ‘Would anybody believe that I would fall in love with this piece of shit?’ Right in front of Stockard! It was just as sickeningly rude to say it in front of the actor.” Adds Moonjean, “This was her first big role. She was a nervous wreck. Warren can be very cruel. I’ve known Warren a long time. I know [strangers] better than I know Warren. I try to avoid [working for] him. I don’t like him. He’s not a nice person.” Channing herself said that Beatty and Nicholson acted “like jerks” to her.

  Phillips was a frequent visitor. “Mike Nichols had to bar me from the set, because I would show up and disappear into the bungalow with Warren, and it was terribly painful for Jack,” she said. “She just ignored him and came anyway,” recalls Devlin. Phillips explains, “I was madly in love with Warren.”