On this subject, Beatty was quoted as saying, “The decision to end an affair is never mine. And it’s never without considerable cost. Where sex is involved, you become very vulnerable and when separation takes place—God, the pain. Even the promiscuous feel pain.” In regard to his inclination to play the victim in these relationships, writer Peter Feibleman says, “He was the best-looking, most successful stud in Hollywood for a very long time. He has to say, ‘She was right, I was wrong.’ He has to be the girl in the relationship. You have to denigrate yourself a little. Because otherwise they will bury you. That’s the correct position for any gentleman. And above all, Warren Beatty is a gentleman.”
Sometime after Beatty and Phillips had ended it, she encountered filmmaker James Toback on a plane. Speaking of Nicholson and Beatty, she told him, “‘One liked to watch football the whole day and one liked to make love the whole day,’ and I’ll leave it to you to figure out who was who,” he recalls. “She told me how much in love she’d been with Warren, and how addicted she’d been to him. So addicted and dependent on him that she couldn’t get away. Still, she felt she had to, and when it was her birthday, and he asked her what she wanted, she said, ‘Since I can’t say no to you whenever you call, but I know I really should, what I would like as a present is for you not to call me and ask to see me anymore.’ And he didn’t.”
Singed by her passage through the Beatty flame, it took Phillips a considerable amount of time to get over it. “I was emotionally churned up when Warren and I split.… and for the first time in my life I finished up on a psychiatrist’s couch. I was terrified I was going to end up in therapy for years.” In 1978, she said it took her a year to realize that when he said, “I want to marry you… I want you to have my babies,” he was just being agreeable, saying things he thought she wanted to hear. “I think he’s probably emotionally crippled for life. Warren knew that he would never live up to my expectations. It wasn’t that he couldn’t. He just didn’t want to. He feels that marriage, or a one-woman relationship isn’t a happy, productive life. He feels that it’s shallow, meaningless, and boring. So he has a stream of shallow and meaningless relationships all the time. He makes a point of not getting too close to you. The closer he gets, the more afraid he gets. And so he goes off and has another meaningless affair.… He thinks they’re healthier, or at least the only kind he can have.”
It has always been said, even by Phillips, that Beatty raised Chynna like his own child, but she also disputed this. “He loves people thinking that he’s really concerned about children,” she said, also in 1978. “But it’s just an image. He never really put himself out to care, only when it was convenient to him.… They did like Warren, but only so far as they knew he couldn’t give them much. So they didn’t expect much from him.”
Phillips’s state of mind was suggested by the title of her first and only solo album, Victim of Romance, released in February 1977, as well as several of the cuts: “Paid the Price,” “Baby as You Turn Away,” “Having His Way,” and “No Love Today.”
Years later, Phillips has mellowed. “I don’t have bad memories of our time together,” she says. “I grew a lot through my relationship with Warren. I learned a lot about myself, a lot about human nature. It was a great experience for me, and we’re still very good friends.”
BEATTY HIRED his first cousin, David MacLeod, to help him with Reds. MacLeod was the son of his uncle, Alex MacLeod, his mother Kathlyn’s brother, who had been hit by a car and killed. MacLeod senior had enjoyed the distinction of being the only Communist Party member of the Canadian parliament. Among other things, David had been a speechwriter for Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau. He was six feet tall, slender, with fair hair, thinning, and glasses. MacLeod watched Beatty’s back. He was everywhere and nowhere, the only person Beatty fully trusted. If the star was secretive and suspicious, MacLeod was more so. He was loyal, energetic, and detail-oriented, but he used to say about his cousin, somewhat enigmatically, “Warren’s gonna be the most interesting guy you could ever talk to, and he will walk you right up to a big pit, and will get more even more interesting as you get closer to that pit. But it’s up to you to make your way around it.”
Friends like Towne tried to discourage Beatty from making Reds. The star ran it by Gary Hart, who responded, “Give me a break.” The great cinematographer Néstor Almendros, a Cuban exile and bitter foe of all things red, told him, “Listen, you can make pictures about homosexuals, you can make pictures about murderers, but you cannot make them about Communists!” Beatty, who listened to everyone and no one, was undeterred.
Reds would be a sprawling, three hour and twenty minute homage to the high passions that animated the largely forgotten American left in the years before, during, and after World War I and the Russian Revolution, two upheavals that changed the course of the twentieth century. The resulting film is an achievement nearly unparalleled in the history of American cinema—ambitious, complex, and entertaining in equal measures. It is partly a biopic, centered on the short but eventful life of the writer and radical John Reed, one of the few Americans buried in the Kremlin, whose account of the bloody birth of the Soviet Union, Ten Days That Shook the World, is a classic of political journalism. The film is partly a love story, re-creating Reed’s tumultuous relationship with fellow journalist Louise Bryant, partly a historical drama that chronicles, among other things, the rise of Bolshevism and the birth of the American Communist Party, and partly a documentary, one that rescues from obscurity thirty-two survivors of that period who knew or knew of Reed, and serve as a kind of Greek chorus.
Born to comfortable circumstances in Portland, Oregon, in 1887, Reed went to Harvard. Once he cast off the remnants of his bourgeois background—says Beatty, “It took me quite a while to get over the fact that he was a cheerleader”—he found his calling as a would-be poet, journalist, and rebel, torn between his aspirations to art and to political activism—a conflict with which the star was intimately familiar. And, like Beatty at the beginning of his career, when the actor’s dating games made him a fixture of the gossip columns, he had something to prove. He was too much fortune’s child—too good-looking, too well off, too talented—to be taken seriously. Upton Sinclair once dismissed him as “the playboy of the revolution,” a phrase some applied to Beatty as well, fairly or not. (Walter Lippmann, however, once described Reed as someone with “an inordinate desire to be arrested,” a charge no one could have made of Beatty.) Reed wooed the bold and the beautiful of his time, like salonista Mabel Dodge, famous for bringing D. H. Lawrence to Taos, New Mexico. He was an adventurer, inexorably drawn to the action. And in the teens of the last century, the action was on the left, among American unions like the Wobblies (the Industrial Workers of the World), and in Mexico, where peasants were breaking eggs with their machetes, and even more so, in the seething cauldron that was czarist Russia. The love of Reed’s life was Louise Bryant, the dentist’s wife he lured to New York from Portland to join the ranks of the artists and revolutionaries who peopled Greenwich Village, among them Eugene O’Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emma Goldman, Max Eastman, Dorothy Day, and so on. Bryant too had large appetites; she had an affair with O’Neill, among others; covered World War I from the trenches of France; and accompanied Reed to Russia, all the time struggling to carve out her own career.
Reed went to Russia three times, first in 1915 to cover the Great War, then in 1917 as a participant-observer in the Russian Revolution—he was in Petrograd when the workers seized the czar’s Winter Palace—and again two years later to plead for Bolshevik accreditation for his newly formed Communist Labor Party. While he was away in 1919 the infamous Palmer Raids decimated the ranks of the American left. Reed wished to return to America regardless, but the Soviets refused, arguing that he could better serve the revolution in Moscow than sitting in a U.S. jail. He persisted, tried to cross into Finland, and ended up in a Finnish prison. (There is some evidence that the Bolsheviks colluded with the Finns to stop Reed from l
eaving.) With phony papers and in disguise, Bryant made the perilous journey to Russia to find him. But by the time she got there, he had been released to the Soviets, and spent what little was left of his life working in the propaganda ministry, writing and making speeches. The couple was reunited, but Reed died on October 17, 1920, three days before his thirty-third birthday, of typhus and a stroke. Bryant succumbed much later, in 1936, a drug addict, boozer, and pauper.
The night after George McGovern was nominated by the badly divided Democratic convention in Miami in 1972, Beatty holed up in a hotel room for four days and wrote. Eventually he produced about twenty-five pages and a step outline, but he had gone about as far as he could go on his own and needed a proper writer. The star would finance script development out of his own pocket, as he did Shampoo and would also do with Heaven Can Wait. He considered collaborating with Lillian Hellman, Budd Schulberg, and/or Paddy Chayefsky, but decided against all of them for the same reason: “It can be very hard for one generation to collaborate with an older generation,” he says. “You owe it a certain level of respect and when you’re collaborating you have to be able to take the gloves off.
“I realized that I had to get back before Stalinism and get into a frame of mind that had to do with a much more idealistic period that was Marxist and early Leninist, you know, pre-NEP [New Economic Policy]. That I had to get into a much more naive state of mind about it. I wanted to collaborate with someone who would hold my tendency to be sentimental in check and would keep up my interest in what some people undoubtedly would call ‘the minutiae’ of the movement.”
In 1976, he met Trevor Griffiths, a successful British playwright whose London hit, Comedians, Mike Nichols was then taking to Broadway. A prominent left-wing intellectual, Griffiths wasn’t about to get his head turned by a celebrity. He was burly and pugnacious. According to Jeremy Pikser, a protégé of Griffiths’s, “Trevor felt, ‘I’m a Marxist historian, a playwright. You’re a Hollywood movie star. What do you have to tell me about how to do the story of John Reed?’ I couldn’t imagine two less likely people to have an effective collaboration.”
It was clear to Griffiths that Beatty identified closely with the subject. “Warren spoke as if he was the reincarnation of Jack Reed,” Griffiths says. “Reed was a golden boy, and I would get the sense as we talked, that he thought he’d been born to play him. Or, Jack Reed had been born so that Warren could play him!”
Jerzy Kosinski, whom Beatty would cast as a Soviet official, Grigory Zinoviev, said the same thing. “Warren saw himself as John Reed.… Beatty’s Bonnie and Clyde was like Reed’s book about Pancho Villa—gangsters shooting at one another. And Beatty’s Shampoo was about the morality of the middle class, like John Reed’s little articles about the minor failings of America. Political fellatio.… Warren looked for a big subject, just as Reed also looked for something big to report.… The project of making a movie about John Reed became what going to Russia was for Reed. It would affect his life.”
Beatty courted Griffiths, offered him a ride (with Candice Bergen) up to Connecticut for Nichols’s wedding to Annabel Davis-Goff, an Irish-American writer. “He asked me in the car if I knew anything about John Reed,” Griffiths recalls.
“‘Well I know a bit, what do you want to know?’
“‘I don’t want to know anything, I know everything about Jack Reed.’
“‘Oh, you’re Warren Beatty, I’d forgotten.’”
Beatty understood why Griffiths might be sarcastic and was undeterred. He called Griffiths again at Nichols’s place a week or two later. “We were sitting down to dinner,” Griffiths continues. “Mike answered it, and said, ‘It’s Warren Beatty, he’d like a word with you.’ I said, ‘Jesus Christ, I’m eating.’ Mike said, ‘If I were you I’d talk to him.’ I went to the phone, and Warren said, ‘Now look, I actually started making a movie about this guy ten years ago. And people tell me that I would be an idiot not to ask you to do it.’”
The two men huddled in New York a couple of weeks later. Beatty says he showed Griffiths everything he had written. “He could tell that I was somewhat willful, that is to say, not as malleable as many screenwriters maybe are,” Griffiths continues. “So he was very careful in suggesting that there was plenty of room for my own creativity. That was the wooing stage, where [he] said, Listen, you’re the writer. There was never any question of co-writing, it was just a question of my doing it.”
Beatty wasn’t exaggerating when he told Griffiths that he knew all there was to know about Reed. Before returning to London to work on the script, Griffiths made a pilgrimage to Widener Library at Harvard, which housed the Reed Collection. He opened the visitor’s book. “And there, ten years previously, right at the beginning was ‘Warren Beatty,’” he recalls. “It was a bit unnerving that he had done that kind of research.” Indeed, Beatty loved researching his pictures, especially one like Reds, probably because he dreaded actually starting production. (He also picked the brain of historian Robert Rosenstone, who was writing a biography of John Reed. When Beatty first met him, he opened with, “Let’s trade John Reed fuck stories.”)
Beatty was devoted to making his life and his work appear effortless, and he would rarely admit that it wasn’t, but one stressful day a few years later when he was preparing Dick Tracy, screenwriter Bo Goldman recalls him doing “this strange kind of—it was almost balletic—cave-in as he twisted himself downwards until he collapsed on the floor. I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ He told me how depressed he would get when he was beginning to shoot a picture, and he wanted to lie down and die. He said, ‘There’s a hundred people out there who think they can do it better than you.’”
Griffiths and Beatty started work on the script in the fall of 1976. The playwright didn’t know how to type, and Beatty did, sort of, so the star sat at the typewriter pecking out dialogue. The playwright explains, “It wasn’t the best way of working in my view. But it was the only way we had. He certainly didn’t want me to go away and do it myself. He took scene after scene and used another argot, the language of Manhattan, 1977, ’78, ’79, employed by certain sorts of stylish intellectuals, very much of our time, nothing at all to do with the 1910s and the 1920s. What he finally wrote was what he wanted.”
One day, Goldman spied Beatty and Griffiths having tea at Rumplemeyer’s on Central Park South in the dead of the afternoon. The two men did not appear to be speaking, and Goldman thought, That poor sonofabitch, I’m never going to work with Beatty. I’m never going to be in Griffiths’s shoes, and of course soon I was.
6
ORSON WELLES, C’EST MOI
How Beatty directed his first film, Heaven Can Wait, hustled the cover of Time, began dating Diane Keaton, and embarked on Reds, the greatest challenge of his career.
“When he discovered that he could direct, he didn’t need Buck Henry anymore. Warren pushed him into the background and just took over.”
—Paul Sylbert
WHILE GRIFFITHS WAS working on “The John Reed Project,” Beatty’s mind wandered. But he kept returning to the idea of a romantic fantasy, because that’s what he wanted to see himself. He was depressed at the time. A couple of his friends had died. Appropriately enough, the romantic fantasy he kept returning to was a comedy of resurrection, namely, a remake of a 1941 picture, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, with Robert Montgomery, Evelyn Keyes, and Claude Rains. Montgomery improbably played a prizefighter named Joe Pendleton, who is nearly killed in a plane crash. An overly zealous heavenly gofer harvests his soul prematurely, but his body is cremated before the error can be rectified. Joe’s soul is temporarily parked within a shady millionaire named Farnsworth, who has just been drowned by his wife, Julia, and his male secretary, her lover. Eventually, it moves on to a more appropriate home in the body of another boxer, enabling him to win the big fight at the end of the picture. “Something about the theme didn’t seem small,” Beatty said. “It was dealing with death and reincarnation. That made me want to see it particularly.” Beatty bought
the rights from producer Jed Harris for $25,000, and hired Elaine May to write the script.
Albeit a much more gifted writer, May was in some respects the East Coast Carole Eastman. Or, more accurately, she was to Beatty what Eastman was to Nicholson. “They were very different,” says Buck Henry, who would polish the script and co-direct with Beatty. “Carole was scared of everything; Elaine was fearless. But they had some of the same problems in their writing, an inability to condense and get it organized.”
May was best known for being one half of Nichols and May, the celebrated stand-up comedy team that had performed An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May on Broadway from October 8, 1960, to July 1, 1961. She was a full-blown eccentric, brilliant and wacky in the extreme. Someone once said of her, “She knew the subtleties of Scandinavian drama, but she didn’t know if Mexico was north or south of the United States,” and it was true. She could get lost in a closet. Richard Burton is reputed to have remarked, “Elaine May is the most fascinating, maddening girl I have ever met. I hope never to see her again.” Screenwriter Bo Goldman remembers May from the early days of live television: “She was very, very difficult, very crazy. I was associate producer on a Playhouse 90 thing called ‘A Pane of Glass,’ about a mental institution, and she was playing a catatonic. Elaine was supposed to say one word, but she refused to say it. John Frankenheimer directed it, had enough of her meshuggena behavior, and fired her.”
In 1969, May directed her first movie, A New Leaf, with Walter Matthau, Jack Weston, and herself. She went over budget and tried to remove her name from the picture. She followed that with a modest hit, The Heartbreak Kid (1972), from a Neil Simon script, with Charles Grodin and her daughter, Jeannie Berlin, but in 1973 she shot a disastrous caper movie, Mikey and Nicky, with John Cassavetes and Peter Falk. Mikey and Nicky proved fertile soil for the full flowering of her looniness. The film went way over schedule and over budget, and ended in a series of lawsuits. Paul Sylbert, who worked for Elia Kazan (A Face in the Crowd), and Alfred Hitchcock (The Wrong Man), was her production designer, and likes to tell a story that has become the stuff of legend. “It was two o’clock in the morning, and we were still shooting on South Street in Philadelphia,” he recalls. “She’d already fired the cameraman, and the operator was now the new cameraman. We were shooting a scene between the two guys, and we were shooting for an hour, two hours. Finally John went off this way, Peter went off that way, and the camera was still running. And running, and running. Finally, the operator figured, I gotta call ‘Cut!’ Elaine hit the roof. ‘Whaddya mean, “Cut?” I’m the director, I’m the one who says “Cut”! ’ The operator said, ‘But there’s no one in the frame.’ She replied, ‘But they might come back!’” As one wag put it, “Elaine May is a woman of many words. However, the word ‘cut’ does not happen to be among them.”
Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America Page 29