“Let’s go out to dinner.” The three of them left the screening room, heading for the Four Oaks on Beverly Glen. Beatty led the way in his chocolate Mercedes 450, driving fast, so fast that Toback thought he was trying to lose him. Over dinner, Toback read him and MacGraw the script, called Love & Money. Beatty told him, “I’m going to buy it.”
Beatty couldn’t decide whether or not to produce Love & Money. His relationship to Kael was prickly; he resented the condescending way she treated him in her reviews, and privately he disparaged her and the Paulettes, referring to them as “Ma Barker and her gang,” but he flattered her by asking her advice about Toback. He recalls, “I thought he was off his trolley, and I was going away to do Reds. She said, ‘Do Love & Money. Forget Reds. Why make a film on the Communist Party?’”
A lot of Beatty’s friends couldn’t understand what he saw in Toback, and why he, who had never produced a film for someone else, and took years to get his own off the ground, suddenly decided to launch Love & Money. “Jimmy made him laugh a lot,” says Henry. “I think that’s mainly what it was about. I’m not convinced Warren thought Toback was as skillful a director as Toback thinks he is. But then nobody could be.”
Moreover, Beatty liked bad boys. Toback was someone with whom the star could share the joy of cruising, reveal his dark side, if that’s what it was, someone to whom he could expose the unsanitized Beatty, the part of himself that he took great pains to conceal from all but his closest male friends, like Towne, Nicholson, Evans, Polanski, and Dick Sylbert. Overweight, slovenly, and profane, Toback was Falstaff to Beatty’s Prince Hal.
Toback worked out of Beatty’s office at Paramount with him on the script intermittently for a couple of months through the production of Heaven Can Wait. “I got to hear the endless spieling about what this secretary or that would allow him to do,” recalls Henry. “‘If I could just come on her leg, that’s all I really need, is to play with my nipples and just… ’ Hilarious.” One day, Toback picked up a young woman and talked her into coming back to the office with him. According to him, he had her up against the wall and was jerking off on her, when he sensed someone behind him. Turning his head, he discovered Henry, watching him. Henry met his gaze without embarrassment, and calmly said, “Proceed.” (Henry has no recollection of this episode.) In this three-ring sexual circus, Beatty’s act, however impressive, seemed positively mundane, even boring.
NEEDLESS TO say, the script work on Heaven Can Wait continued into and through production. “The script was Elaine’s, but it was doctored, changed, fooled with, rewritten, all of which went on for the entire production,” recalls Paul Sylbert, who had a novel under his belt and wrote a couple of scenes himself.
Like others, Sylbert registered Beatty’s vanity with amusement. As he puts it, “When Carly Simon writes a song called ‘You’re So Vain’ about him, you have to accept the fact that he’s vain! He didn’t pussyfoot around it, he just said, ‘I’m what’s important!’”
Beatty was a student of the camera. He understood the impact of different angles and lighting on his looks. Early in the movie, he clashed with Fraker—they later became fast friends—because he didn’t think the DP was showing him off to best advantage. “He was tough on Fraker,” says Henry. “It always came down to the same thing: Warren asking for a little more, a little more, a little more. Their fights would end in yelling. They were ‘Fuck you,’ ‘No, fuck you’ fights.”
Sylbert recalls, “Warren would see the dailies, and if there were kicks of highlights off the banister rail when he was coming down the stairs, like Joan Crawford he got very upset. Because it took the attention away from him.”
There is one scene, after Pendleton has been reincarnated as Farnsworth, where Beatty is standing in front of a triple mirror in Farnsworth’s dressing room, he is getting into his polo gear. The door out of the dressing room is to the right. He’s looking in the mirror, the camera is slightly behind him, off his left shoulder. You see him in three quarters figure, and you see his reflection. He has to say, “Okay, I’m leaving.” Recalls Sylbert, “Any human being would turn to his right and go towards the door. Warren, on the other hand, turned to his left, made a complete pirouette, a circle into the camera, and then went out the door!”
But says Henry, “The dividing line between vanity and camera understanding is thin. You do things for the camera that you wouldn’t do in real life. It’s like when you’re on stage, you’re trained, if you’re facing the door, to turn to the audience on the way out. Warren knew that his success was at least partly due to the fact that the camera really liked looking at him. It’s the same thing Cary Grant knew.”
Adds Sylbert, “Cary Grant and Warren were pretty close, and he learned from Grant too, picked up these do’s and don’ts from hanging around these people and seeing how they operate. Like, he was using mascara on every movie. It accented his eyes, made them prettier. My ex-wife, Anthea, had to talk him out of it on Shampoo.” Another trick involved putting the camera twenty-five feet away, and shooting his close-ups with a long lens, which supposedly took four years off his age. While Sylbert was working on Heaven Can Wait, he was moonlighting on a project for Marlo Thomas, who was a friend of Beatty’s. He recalls, “He gave her a list of the Ten Commandments for Being a Movie Star—how you deal with interviews, what you do with makeup, how you act in this situation, questions about appearance—and he stuck to them.”
Beatty’s hair, which was thick, long, and dark, was one of his best features. He washed it with a six-pack of beer every morning to make it glossy, give it luster and body. But male pattern baldness prevailed among the men in his family, and he had a bald spot on the crown of his head the size of a silver dollar. His hair was so thick that he was able to conceal it for the most part, but if anyone alluded to it, it made him crazy. Losing his hair was one of his worst nightmares. For Hal Lieberman, it humanized him. “He was an unbelievably great guy,” he recalls. “The fact that he was a human being made him a greater guy. Who wants to be absolutely perfect? But maybe he did.”
Beatty suffered from hypoglycemia, which made his face swell. Lieberman kept ice packs ready to calm the pouches that popped up like toadstools under his eyes every morning. The cameras couldn’t roll until they subsided.
“There was a lot of waiting around,” Henry says. None of the actors appreciated it. Grodin explained, “Warren Beatty believed in having everybody made up and in costume for what seemed like just about every day. He had worked with Robert Altman, and Altman did it because he might at any moment decide to put one of the actors into a sequence where the script didn’t have them. Warren, on the other hand, never did anything like that, but had us all made up and in costume anyway because of the possibility he might.” Years later, when Grodin was in the Bay Area and trying to decide whether to visit Filoli, the scene of all that waiting, or San Quentin, a high-security prison, he quipped, “I’ll take San Quentin… maybe because Heaven Can Wait was filled with so much waiting, that the estate is scarier than the prison.”
David MacLeod tended to Julie Christie, driving her around, doing her errands. Says one source, “David used to bring around all these pretty boys.” Christie brought a group of friends with her from England, and they rented a house near Palo Alto, played a lot of volleyball, topless, except for her, although Grodin remembered going to a pool party there where she was “walking around bare-breasted.” The rumor was that she and Beatty weren’t speaking. “The worst battle I ever saw was between Warren and Julie,” says Sylbert. “God! Ranting. Screaming. He finally walked out [of her dressing room] raging, He said to me, ‘I just raised my voice in there. I hate that.’”
“Warren took the position of slightly ignoring her,” says Feibleman. “Once he was looking at something on TV in his trailer on the Paramount lot. There were six, eight people there. He picked up the TV and put it where everybody could see it except Julie. She was sitting with her face to the back of the set. She just giggled, and got up and moved her
seat. Their fighting was playful. And sullen. He was like a child whom you’ve displeased.”
“I’m not sure Julie ever wanted to make this movie,” says Sylbert. “Through the whole thing she was not happy. She had no great regard for him as a director. She didn’t trust him.” Adds Koch, “She didn’t like the character, she didn’t like anything. And then she broke her arm roller-skating right near the end of shooting, which really pissed him off, ’cause he wanted to finish the picture. There was this great moment with Julie and Warren, where they were at the limousine. It’s goodbye, because he knows James Mason’s gonna pull him away. He was saying to her, ‘Look, somebody might come up to you someday, it may even be a quarterback, ya know, but give ’em a chance.’ He gives her a kiss. Well, in the first rehearsal, it was just a peck. And Julie said, ‘Warren, you’re supposed to be in love with me, goddammit, what kind of a kiss is that?’ He said, ‘All right, Julie,’ so in the second rehearsal, he gave her—I mean, a kiss. Julie said, ‘You don’t have to fuck me in front of everybody, just give me a kiss like you love me!’ With that, Warren broke out in hives. I swear. Because nobody could get to him the way Julie could get to him. And we couldn’t shoot. But he got back at her, with the famous close-up of her at the end of the picture, where the quarterback, Tom Jarrett, says, ‘You wanna get a cup’a coffee or somethin’?’ And she recognizes him, and replies, ‘You’re the quarterback.’ Eighty-five takes. It was, Warren going, ‘One more.’ ‘Whaddya want, Warren?’ ‘One more.’ ‘One more.’ ‘One more.’ To the point where she was crazed.” According to Michael Childers, whom Beatty had hired to take stills, “She was crying, she was in hysterics for days. Warren would never tell her what to do, what to change, just, ‘Do it again, do it again, do it again’”
Christie complained to Henry about having to look Beatty in the eye, ironic in that looking Joe Pendleton in the eyes, seeing into his soul, into his essential self, no matter the material husk in which it is hidden, was essential to the plot. He’d ask Henry, “Would you please tell her to look me in the face when we’re saying this stuff, and not look off into the corners.” She, on the other hand, begged Henry, “Pleeease, don’t tell me to look him in the eyes. Pleeease don’t make me have to.” Henry recalls, “I said, ‘You have to. You have to look in his eyes to see who that person is.’ They displayed this peculiar sort of affection, but at its best it was like Beatrice and Benedict.”
Indeed, there is a scene in the movie in which Beatty and Christie are walking through the rose gardens of the Filoli estate. He is wearing a stylish leather jacket, and she the haircut she hated, the one she sneeringly called her “dolly girl” hairdo, which made her look like Little Orphan Annie, at best obscuring her face, and at worst making her look foolish. In the film, romantic music is swelling up on the soundtrack, drowning out their conversation, wherein Christie was saying, in her clipped British accent, “I can’t believe you’re still making these fucking dumb movies when, I mean, there are people all over Europe making fabulous films, about real things, Fassbinder and so on, and you’re still doing this shit,” and then she’d smile at him as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Beatty just laughed, but there it was again, the old itch that needed to be scratched: Was he a serious filmmaker?
“EVERY NOW and then in my life, I would run into a woman—particularly in foreign countries—someone I’d always dreamt about, and very often, one of the first things they would say is, ‘How’s Warren Beatty? Have you seen him lately?’ And a deep depression would fall over me,” says Henry. “I know dozens of women that [Warren had sex with that] nobody knows about. One of the reasons we had such a good time, in between the times we didn’t have such a good time, is that, I would say a name of someone, from maybe twenty, twenty-five years before, that I knew in New York that no one else I knew knew, and Warren would either say a word, or do a physical thing that allowed me to know that he knew exactly who I was talking about and knew her as well as I did. And these were not movie stars. These were strange people. He is the Pro.”
While the production was shooting at Filoli, Henry won a football pool worth around $500. He was friendly with the Mitchell brothers, notorious San Francisco pornographers best known for their film Behind the Green Door (1972), with Marilyn Chambers, the former Ivory Snow girl (it was made for $60,000, and grossed $25 million). Henry, who took sex seriously, or as seriously as he took anything, had a girlfriend who worked at their theater, the O’Farrell at 895 O’Farrell Street. “I rented a couple of buses and took a few cars, and almost the whole crew on Buck’s Magical Mystery Tour,” he recalls. “The Mitchells gave me their theater, girls included. Everyone had a great time, watched fifty or sixty girls doing live shows, really spectacular stuff.”
Dubbed “the Carnegie Hall of public sex in America” by Hunter Thompson, a longtime patron, the O’Farrell contained five different rooms, in Henry’s words, “the famous Wall Dancing Room where you stood in little glass booths and looked at an arena type stage in which girls would whip each other, play with toys, and perform various unspeakable acts.” In the famed Kopenhagen Room, about twenty people would sit at tables arranged around the perimeter, drinking, snorting coke, and smoking dope. The girls would hit the deck, performing at the feet of the spectators, who were given flashlights to shine on them. The girls backed up onto the tables, bent over, and offered up their butts to the guests. “I was surprised Warren came, because he was very careful about public stuff,” Henry continues. “But he did, and he enjoyed it very much.” Recalls Lieberman, who was sitting next to Beatty, “The music was blaring, the booze was flowing, and there was probably some blow as well. The girls were all over us, and you could eat them as well. Warren was egging me on like crazy.” Henry goes on, “Some of the girls came back to Palo Alto with us. Several days later, my girlfriend told me that the clap was running through the theater, and that any of us who cared to might do well to take a shot of penicillin.” Recalls Koch, “Warren came up to me about a day and a half after our visit to the Mitchell brothers, and said, ‘You gotta find me a doctor and get me a penicillin shot, and fast.’ He was already sick.” (The brothers went out of business in 1991 when one killed the other.)
Heaven Can Wait wrapped, after about eighty-five days, running just a little over. It cost about $11 million. “I vividly remember the very last night of the shoot,” says Henry. “We were back in L.A. on a set at Paramount, it was late, two, three in the morning, the last scene, everyone was saying goodbye to everyone, and Warren was sitting at an editing machine over in a dark corner of a dark stage, looking at takes. He stayed there as everybody drifted out and went home. It was like a movie, the artist in the gloom, looking at take after take, not saying goodbye, just letting everybody just sort of walk off into the night and dissolve. Of course it kept him from having to be sentimental about anything. I think he likes to avoid those moments. For me, it was a telling tableau, about his reluctance to fit into the kind of friendly set culture of it all. Although when he wants to he can be more charming than French presidents.”
Knowing how angry Henry was at the time, people always asked him if he would work with Beatty again. He once said, “I can’t imagine that anyone would ever direct him twice,” but, having mellowed (or needing work), he also said, “I know that he can make one miserable, but it doesn’t matter in the long run because the work is usually interesting, and that makes up for it.” Christie, on the other hand, returned to England and didn’t do another film for several years, devoting herself to “de-celebritisation.” She recalled, “I’d rather talk to my ducks than some of the freaks I met in Hollywood.” She added, “I thought I was going mad there.”
Again, Beatty left some people feeling shortchanged, not only in regards to money, but in the credit department as well. According to a source, Koch’s contract stipulated his name and title had to be displayed on the ads and the poster. He saw early in-house mock-ups of the posters, and his name wasn’t on them. He asked Beatty, “Warren, where’
s my name?”
“Oh, it’s a mistake, I’m sorry. It’ll be on the next ones.” The next version appeared, and he said, “Warren, my name’s still not on the poster.”
“Don’t worry, it’ll be there.” When the poster was finally off the presses, his name wasn’t on it. Beatty didn’t return his calls. Koch had his attorney call Paramount. The studio said, “Warren Beatty told us not to put your name on the poster. The only name on the poster is supposed to be his.” Koch was so desperate that his father, who was then president of the Motion Picture Academy, asked Lieberman, “Kid, I need you to get this done for my son, I need you to get into Warren’s head.” Says Lieberman now, “I couldn’t fathom that Howard Koch Sr. would come to me, the gofer. Talk about going down the scrotum pole! But he knew I was with Warren all the time.”
Heaven Can Wait was the first movie Koch had a piece of, and Beatty paid him the money he was due. Time passed. Koch was getting ready to do Greystoke with Towne. One day, he was in a bedroom of Towne’s house at the beach, talking to Shirley MacLaine about something or other, and Beatty walked in. According to someone who was there, when he saw Koch, his face turned red. He said, “Oh, hi.”
“Warren, why did you fuck me?” Koch asked. “Why do that to someone who worked so fucking hard for you, and why did you lie to me and say, ‘Don’t worry, it’s a mistake?’”
“I never planned to have your name on the poster!”
“Why would you do that? Why did you want me on the film?”
“Nobody else could have done the Super Bowl like you did it.”
As the production drew to a close, Lieberman’s responsibilities grew weightier. “He was having me read scripts for him, do coverage,” he recalls. “One day, he came back from New York grumpy, and he said, ‘I want you to write down what you did last week, and I want you to write down what you’re going to do next week.’ I said, ‘I’m not doing that, I know what I do, and you should know what I do.’ So I walked out, and literally cried on the ride home, ’cause it was over. I thought I was special to him. He was like an older brother.”
Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America Page 32