Beatty first met May in 1964. May was attractive, but, as Paul Sylbert says, “There’s nothing sexual about Elaine. ‘I did that already,’ was her whole attitude towards sex. It was almost English.” According to May’s friend, Peter Feibleman, May and Beatty never had an affair. “If you were a female, and you were seen with Warren, it was just assumed,” he explains. “She liked him, but Elaine was too savvy to be one of those girls on Warren’s list. The minute sex got into it, she would have been dead in the water. She became the person he talked to. She was like a guy when the three of us were together.” He recalls once sharing a joint with Towne in Beatty’s kitchen. Towne said, “‘You know, I’ve got a little boat, a sailboat. Do you like sailing?’
“‘I love sailing. I grew up on Pontchartrain,’” Feibleman replied.
“‘You wanna come sometime, you’re welcome. But there’s one rule I’m ruthless about: If you come aboard, you have to bring pussy. Otherwise you’re gonna hit on the pussy that’s there, and there’s going to be unpleasantness, and a fight, and I won’t have it. I’ll leave you on the dock if you’re alone.’ He was stoned and he kept saying, ‘You have to have pussy, you have to have pussy.’
“‘All right, all right, what about Elaine?’ I was living with Elaine, which he didn’t know.
“‘Naaah, she doesn’t have to bring anybody!’ It was like that. Elaine was a guy!”
Beatty was well aware of her foibles, especially glaring when she got behind a camera. But he also recognized her gift, liked her, got her. As Paul Sylbert puts it, “Ideas fly off her like lint.” And he was only hiring her to write. He had asked her to polish What’s New Pussycat? back in 1964, but she declined. When he asked her again, more than a decade later, to work on Heaven, she accepted.
Beatty put her up at the Beverly Wilshire. One day his assistant got a call from the hotel, “Where is Warren? Elaine May has just left the hotel, we want him to see the room.” May was notorious for her slovenliness. Her lipstick was smeared. Whatever she had eaten that day was all over her clothes. She looked like someone else had dressed her, buttons mismatched with button holes. She smoked cigarillos and couldn’t be bothered with ashtrays, so the ashes just fell anywhere, usually on herself or the floor.
In addition to May, Beatty also hired Feibleman to work on the script. “All directors think they’re writers, but most are not,” Feibleman says. “The ones who think they are are usually the ones who are not. But talking to Warren was not like talking with a Hollywood director. It was like talking to another writer.”
Beatty set up Heaven at Warner Brothers. But once again, as with Shampoo, there was trouble. Business Affairs began to nickel-and-dime him. Says Paul Sylbert, whom Beatty hired to design the picture, “Warren wasn’t happy, at Warners. Elaine couldn’t get the script finished. She had a draft, and he was trying to make it work, so he was writing, plus whatever he got in from other people. Plus, Warners was bugging him to turn it in.” There were other issues as well. The estimated budget was reported at $6 million. “Perfectionist” is the scariest word on a studio lot, one that sends executives running for the hills, and Beatty’s reputation for getting things just right just didn’t sit well with the Warners front office. CEO Ted Ashley felt, in his words, that “Warren, who was among the most finicky, obsessive people, might take a picture that we thought was commercially marginal, and bring it to the point where we’d lose a bunch of money.” According to one source, Beatty wasn’t coming up with a budget for the heaven scene. President Frank Wells pressed him, Beatty procrastinated. Wells pressed him again, Beatty put him off again. Wells and Beatty were both tough negotiators; they pushed each other’s buttons. Finally, Beatty met with the Warners brass shortly before they were scheduled to begin production. Wells asked him again for the numbers on the heaven scene. Beatty was evasive. When the star looked away, Wells mouthed “asshole” for the others to see. Irritated, Beatty said, “Do you want to make a budget, or do you want to make a movie?” Characteristically, Wells, an attorney and a numbers guy, wanted to make a budget. Recalls Beatty, “They just kept irritating and irritating me, finally they wouldn’t let me have a water cooler, and I said, ‘Look, if I can’t have a water cooler, lemme try to make this picture somewhere else, and if I can’t make it I’ll bring it back. Give me one day.’ They did, and I made a deal somewhere else.” Wells appeared happy to let him go. He and Towne had gone to the same school, played water polo. Wells had been the goalie. Towne quipped, “He’s still a goalie. He won’t let anybody score.”
Wells would live to regret it. Beatty always had a backup. He hadn’t forgotten that Charlie Bluhdorn had been a stand-up guy when Beatty was trying to get backing for Shampoo. He had devoted his considerable charm to wooing Barry Diller, whom Bluhdorn had just installed as the head of Paramount. Beatty knew that few were immune to his charm, and most often it got him what he wanted. He had known Diller through Democratic campaign politics since the executive’s days at ABC. Diller had assembled a team of exceptionally able young Turks, some, like him, recruited from television—Michael Eisner, Don Simpson, and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Beatty understood that Diller, like David Begelman when he got to Columbia, would be desperate for product.
Bob Evans was in Atlanta with Diller and Eisner, at a test screening of Black Sunday. According to him, Beatty called, said, “‘I got in a big fight with Warners today, fuck’em, I’m not gonna make the picture there.’ I told this to Barry, right after the preview, he took the corporate plane, and flew back. He was with Warren all day Saturday, all day Sunday, and by Monday morning, Heaven Can Wait was a Paramount film. That shows how hungry Diller was at the time.” The studio agreed to give Beatty $3.5 million, payable in three stages, plus a percentage of the gross, with escalators at specified levels of profitability. The picture was announced in the trades on March 4, 1977. The budget was about $9.5 million, excluding Beatty’s fee.
By July of 1977, Beatty had squeezed as much out of May (and Feibleman) as he could. To him, no script was ever finished, every script needed work, and this one wasn’t any different. He also needed a director. He had still never directed himself—officially, at any rate—and even though he was edging up to it, he was still not his own first choice for the job. “I just think Warren didn’t want to try this first one all by himself,” says Paul Sylbert. “Maybe he thought that the studio would be happier with a directing team.” He approached Arthur Penn and Mike Nichols. Both declined. He gave the script to Peter Bogdanovich, who also turned it down.
In a flash of inspiration, Beatty realized that Buck Henry might be able to do both, rewrite the script and co-direct—and even do some acting. “I wanted a writer on the set, and I didn’t think it would be rewarding enough for him to follow a number of other screenwriters, and so I said, ‘Come in and co-direct,’” Beatty recalls. “He was very smart in the way he dealt with me. Because when I would obsess about certain things, he would be amused by it, tolerate it, not get upset by it. He’d sit there reading The Nation or The New Republic.”
Henry was a military brat, believe it or not, the son of an Air Force general. He went to Dartmouth. “Buck was into every scene imaginable,” recalls a friend. “He was incredibly funny, very repressed, very prurient, almost like an adolescent. He was always interested in fringe people, strippers and weirdos.” He lived in a basement apartment on 10th Street in the Village that he shared with a life-sized stuffed gorilla that made its home on the living room floor. Henry never took off his pajamas, simply flinging his street clothes over them when he went out.
Henry had a dry and unforgiving wit that he wielded like a rapier. It cut so fine his victims didn’t even know they’d been sliced until well afterward, when a gout of blood gushed from the wound they didn’t know they had. He quickly made a name for himself on The New Steve Allen Show, That Was the Week That Was, and Get Smart, with Mel Brooks.
Henry was smart and levelheaded, a gregarious man who had to be at every gallery opening, every new theater
piece, every concert, every party. Best of all, Henry was needy. After being profiled as “the hottest writer in Hollywood” in The New York Times Magazine in 1970 for The Graduate and Catch-22 (he also wrote The Owl and the Pussycat, and rewrote Peter Bogdanovich’s hit What’s Up, Doc?), Henry was marking time. Once a year he hosted Saturday Night Live, then in its heyday, and did some occasional writing for the show. Despite the fact that Hal Ashby had been extremely unhappy on Shampoo, Henry, knowing that his days as flavor of the week were over, had no qualms about co-directing with Beatty. “I knew Warren a little bit, liked him,” he says. “Except for actors, everybody [who works with him] ends up so bitter that they have a skewed vision of what actually takes place, and you never can quite piece it together. Much as I loathed some of the script—because I don’t believe we come back—I knew that it was going to work.” He added, “Warren gets me real cheap all the way around, because it was my big chance. I accepted immediately.” There was no discussion of ground rules, what to do if they disagreed. As Henry puts it, “We both knew that he had final say, that was a given, and as Warren said, quite sensibly, ‘It doesn’t matter who says “Action!” Or who says “Cut!” Anyone can do it.’”
The day Henry set foot on the Paramount lot, he was flattered by a banner draped over the front gate that said, “Welcome to Paramount, the Home of Buck Henry.” He continues, “Of course, a few days later, there was a sign that said, ‘Welcome to Paramount, the Home of Charles Grodin.’ Warren seduces the actors. He is a master manipulator.”
Henry did not share Feibleman’s high opinion of Beatty’s skills as a writer. “My sense is that Warren orchestrates,” he says. “He doesn’t like writing that sounds like writing. He thinks that it has to sound like behavior. He doesn’t like subtext in dialogue. Let the actor provide whatever subtext there is. So he’s very big about scenes where people say, ‘I feel like having a hamburger.’
“‘Well, I don’t.’
“‘Okay, then we can eat later.’”
As Beatty began to cast the picture, he thought of Muhammad Ali for the role of the boxer, and first Cary Grant, then Eugene McCarthy for Mr. Jordan, the heavenly host. Dyan Cannon turned down the role of Julia Farnsworth three times, but Beatty wouldn’t take no for an answer, and accompanied by Henry paid a call on her at her home, where they finally persuaded her to take it, despite the fact that she referred to something Henry had done, he recalls, as “that piece of crap.” Elaine May persuaded Beatty to hire Charles Grodin to play Farnsworth’s secretary, Julia’s co-conspirator and lover. Jack Warden, whom Beatty had used to such good effect in Shampoo, played the trainer, Max Corkle. Ali’s schedule apparently precluded his participation, and both Grant and McCarthy declined the role of Mr. Jordan, which eventually went to James Mason. Henry was cast as Mr. Jordan’s assistant, aka the Escort, and Beatty played the lead himself, now a quarterback instead of a boxer. The big fight became the Super Bowl.
Beatty hired William Fraker to shoot the picture. Fraker had shot Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Bullitt (1968), and had recently finished Looking for Mr. Goodbar. He also asked Bob Jones, who had cut Shampoo, to edit this one as well. He called Howard Koch Jr., who had been first AD on Parallax View, and since then had worked on Chinatown. Koch told him, “Warren, haven’t heard from you in a couple of years. What’s goin’ on?” Characteristically, Beatty replied, “Um, nothing much. But I want to talk to you about something.”
Koch met with him at the Hideaway, a little bar on El Camino tucked into the Beverly Wilshire, where, along with the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset, Beatty liked to hold meetings. According to Koch, he said, “I’m gonna do a remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan, and I’d like you to work with me on it.” Beatty asked him to be first AD and executive producer.
“Why me?”
“Because I don’t think there’s anybody else in town who could put together the Super Bowl the way you could. I want you to be the AD and the executive producer on the movie.” A little flattery does wonders, and such was Beatty’s gravitational pull that Koch overlooked his reservations. “Warren was a great producer,” he says. “He had taste, style, and power within the studio system. In 1977, as tough as Diller or any of those guys were, Warren could walk into any studio head’s office, and they wanted to be seen with him, they wanted to do a Warren Beatty movie. No one could say no to him. So he was able to squeeze more out of tight-fisted executives than anyone. And not only could he talk to studio executives, he could talk to people all the way down to the lowly guy in craft service, and get him to do the job the way he wanted it done. That doesn’t necessarily mean you come in on schedule and on budget. It means you deliver a great movie, and then nobody cares. And he really wanted to make great movies.”
Koch knew that Beatty was famous for his parsimony. He had a habit of inviting people to lunch and forgetting his wallet. Says Paul Sylbert, “Warren never spends a dime. His secretary, Helen Feibelmann, said that in twenty years he had never given her so much as a birthday card.” So Koch was encouraged when Beatty picked up the check.
With all the other parts cast, only the female lead, Betty Logan, the earnest, ecologically minded feminist with whom Pendleton falls in love, remained. Every actress in town wanted the role. Beatty and Henry tested them all, including Diane Keaton, who was hot off Annie Hall and had Goodbar coming up. “She was my idea for the part,” says Henry. “I thought we needed an all-American non-glamour-puss who should be able to do bits of comedy, which she can do. Warren barely knew her when she came into the office. His first remark about her was, ‘Did you look into her mouth? Fort Knox’—meaning, a mouth full of gold fillings. Which was very Warren-like, peremptorily rude. It’s not intentional, and it’s not unintentional, it just is what it is.”
After every test, Beatty would turn to Henry and say, wistfully, “She’s no Julie.” He and Christie were not on particularly good terms. She had no interest in acting in the picture, but Beatty wanted her. Recalls Henry, “We did this pretend search for a lead actress, and I didn’t realize this was a pretend search until late in, after hearing, ‘But she’s no Julie’ for the fiftieth time.” There were two months of, “Is it going to be Julie or is it not going to be Julie.” Beatty had to send David MacLeod, whom Christie liked and trusted, over to Wales, where she was living in a farmhouse in Cefn-y-Coed, Montgomery, to intercede for him.
Continues Henry, “It was part of David’s job to pacify Julie, keep her happy. Eventually, she gave in. I know I’m ascribing master mechanics to Warren, but I think he always knew it was gonna be Julie. But they were so edgy that he also knew—he’s so weirdly smart about this kind of shit—that at the end of this movie, he wasn’t going to be able to say, ‘Julie, I want you to look me in the eyes in this scene,’ without her getting irritated. He needed a buffer, a go-between with her, somebody who could take the place of the director, and say, ‘Just stare at him while he’s talking.’ That was me.” (It didn’t hurt that Beatty is said to have secured her services by making her a very rich offer.) Adds Koch, “When he finally got her, he was ecstatic. He thought she was the right person for the movie, but he wanted to get back with her in the worst way, so it was also, ‘Do I have a chance to get her back?’ And she was the one he could never get back.”
Once Christie had been cast, her character had to be rewritten as a Brit, which was Henry’s job. He also wrote dialogue for himself, James Mason, and the servants. “I think he had more confidence in Elaine than he did in me,” Henry remembers. “Perhaps rightly so, because Elaine’s stuff was brilliant, off-the-wall brilliant. Warren was always yelling at me, ‘Will you finish the fucking scene and stop writing jokes!’ Then we’d tear it up. I would write a scene, and then Warren would say, ‘This is just a joke, isn’t it?’
“‘Yes. It will make the audience laugh.’”
In May 1977, Beatty had hired a twenty-three-year-old bushy-tailed assistant fresh out of the University of Chicago graduate school named Hal Lieberman. Lieberman was about to
wed, and Beatty, whose opinion of the institution of marriage had not improved since he had split up with Michelle Phillips, tried to discourage him, saying things like, “I’m not going to let you do that, it’s worse than a funeral, you’re an idiot.”
Rubbing his eyes, as if to make sure he were fully awake, the young assistant instantly found himself transported from the musty stacks of the Regenstein Library to Beatty’s inner circle, which consisted of MacLeod and Helen Feibelmann. Lieberman, who later became president of Universal Pictures and is now a producer (Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines), recalls, “I’ve never met anybody so fuckin’ self-involved. I liked Warren, but he was the sun, and everything around him was a satellite. Everything, everything—was all about Warren Beatty, whatever his needs were, minute to minute, day to day, whether it would be a cup of tea, or whatever—your needs, other than illness needs, were secondary. He did have kindness in him, but he had a side of him where you didn’t really exist in his world. He meant everything to himself.
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