Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

  There’s a scene at the end of the movie where Joe Pendleton, now in the body of Tom Jarrett, is in the locker room, cleaning up after the Super Bowl with his trainer and friend, Max Corkle, who is in on the secret. But Mr. Jordan has wiped Joe’s memory clean, and he no longer recognizes Corkle. It’s a sad moment, a death of sorts, and for anyone who knows Beatty, has felt the warmth of his attention, and then experienced the cold as it is withdrawn and turned elsewhere—the Liebermans of the world, the old flames, former friends—this scene has extra poignancy.

  “Warren was always calculating exactly what he wanted to put out,” Lieberman says. “There were those moments when he would hug me, but not many of them. My takeaway when I was done with Warren was that he was the loneliest person I’d ever met. He was able to disengage so easily, he was so detached.”

  Beatty evidently overcame his aversion to Keaton’s gold fillings, because he started seeing her in the spring of 1978. Oscar night often marked the debut of a new flame. Keaton had won the year before for Annie Hall, when she beat Jane Fonda (Julia) and Shirley MacLaine (The Turning Point). Even Beatty—especially Beatty—was not above wanting a trophy girlfriend.

  Slender, pale as porcelain, radiating an air of nervous intelligence, and displaying a quirky talent for comedy, Keaton was an original. She had an elliptical way of speaking in which sentence fragments bumped up against one another like cars in gridlock without ever hooking up into sequences that made a whole lot of sense. The eldest of seven children in an Air Force family from Southern California (her mother was once a “Mrs. Los Angeles”), Keaton came to New York as a teenager, got a part in the original stage version of Hair in 1968, and was the only member of the cast who refused to take off her clothes for the naked climax. She appeared in Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam and The Godfather, both in 1972.

  Keaton was adorable as Woody Allen’s neurotic girlfriend in Annie Hall, and singlehandedly started a fashion craze with her genderbending mix-and-match wardrobe of men’s ties and trousers with women’s skirts. “I remember the first time I ever saw Warren—I must have been about twenty-six—at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel,” she recalls. “They used to have a bookstore there, and I was inside, and I looked out and saw him in the lobby. I thought, My God, he’s so beautiful. It was like there was a light. He looked at me for a second, and then [his eyes] passed me by. I thought, I’ll never know him. He’ll never be somebody in my life.” She was wrong. By May 1978, Time magazine was reporting they were an item. “I wasn’t the Warren Beatty type, but there I was,” she continues. “He was just so… overwhelming in every way. I remember looking at his face and just going, ‘How am I here with this?’ The brilliance and the talent, you get caught up in it.”

  To Woody Allen, it made a lot of sense. “Warren always liked bright women, and she’s pretty and very, very smart. She always had a weakness for guys who were beautiful. Warren certainly was beautiful and he’s smart too. I always thought they would have a lot to talk about.”

  Meanwhile, there was a film to market and release. Evans, who had an office across the way from Beatty’s on the Paramount lot, loves to tell the story about the one sheet in which the actor is facing the camera dressed in sweats and displaying a fine pair of angelic wings. Evans remembers, “I got a call. ‘Could you please come over to my bungalow?’ I walked in. He took out the one sheet, and said, ‘That’s it. Whaddya think?’

  “‘Warren, the crotch.’

  “‘Whaddya mean?’

  “‘You have sweat pants on. There’s no crease. It looks like you have a pussy.’ He picked up on it immediately. He grabbed the phone, and it cost Paramount $250,000 to make new one sheets with a crease in the crotch. It was the most expensive crotch retouch in the history of cinema. Paramount was so angry with me they almost threw me off the lot. Warren couldn’t have cared less.”

  Beatty was approached by Newsweek for a cover, but parlayed it into a cover for Time, which had a larger circulation, by playing one against the other. Time’s cover line read, “Mister Hollywood,” meaning that he had become far from an outsider, if he ever was one. Inside, Frank Rich wrote, “Having already produced two smash hits in his only previous tries, Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Shampoo (1975), Beatty must now be regarded as a major film maker as well as a star.” He predicted that Heaven Can Wait would “be the most popular entertainment of the summer.” Rich called his performance “likable and funny,” adding, “The movie has everything going for it… and best of all, a touching (but PG) romance between the hero and Co-Star Julie Christie, who communicate largely through passionate eye contact, the heat of which has not been felt since Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh met in Gone With the Wind.”

  Heaven Can Wait opened on Wednesday of the following week, June 28, 1978, in New York and L.A., going wide on Friday. Presumably, enthusiastic word of mouth would drive the picture into the all important July 4th weekend, then considered the best slot of the summer. Recalls Koch, “I was there opening night in Westwood, when we were at the National, and the Ali MacGraw, Kris Kristofferson movie, Convoy, was down the street. There were lines around the block for us, and nobody at Convoy. We did a huge opening weekend. And the movie just played and played.” Heaven Can Wait grossed $3.7 million the first weekend on 540 screens. (By way of contrast, Grease, the box office pacesetter that year, grossed about $9 million in its opening weekend on nearly twice as many screens.) In total, its domestic gross was $82.1 million, with rentals of $49.4 million. The trades reported that Beatty walked away with $15 million-plus for himself.

  The picture got generally good, not to say, enthusiastic reviews, but Kael, who buried it in a longer piece entitled “Fear of Movies,” a defense of violent films that must have made Crowther turn in his grave—how much things had changed!—was unimpressed. As damning as Christie, she compared it invidiously to Bonnie and Clyde and singled it out as an example of “safe” cinema. Mocking Beatty for being a credit hog—he’s “the star (who is also the producer and the co-director and even takes a co-writing credit),” she derided it as a “prefab” film. “It wasn’t bad,” she continues. “Why, then, does it offend me when I think about it? Because it’s image-conscious celebrity moviemaking; Beatty… wants to be a nice guy, the same way Burt Reynolds does in Hooper. They go soft on themselves and act on one cylinder. They become so dear—Beatty the elfin sweet Jesus, and Reynolds the macho prince who hides his saintly heart—that they’re not functioning as artists; they’ve turned into baby-kissing politicians.”

  Kael was ridiculing what she considered Beatty’s inclination as an actor to pander to his audience. But from his point of view, he was just playing to his strengths. He knew his limitations and stayed within them. He wasn’t a character actor like Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman or Robert De Niro. He was a leading man, and leading men play themselves, or versions of themselves. As Henry puts it, “There are certain actors who never stray very far from a central figure that they create. There are certain things either he doesn’t want to do or he knows he can’t do, or shouldn’t do, and he stays away from them. If you listened to Warren’s voice in half a dozen of his major performances, from Clyde to Joe Pendleton, and in between, he is always this quiet, stumbling guy, who uses a basic vocabulary of maybe a thousand words at best, kind of like Henry Fonda. It’s a quiet, middle-class, Everyman voice. And that’s been his strength. But in some cases it has been his weakness, making him unavailable for certain other things. To my ear it makes all his dialogue sound like it came out of the same writer.” Future roles like Bugsy Siegel would show that he was smart enough to know that as an actor he had it in him to do more and better.

  But Beatty wasn’t there yet. He was still doing very well with his aw-shucks shuffle. As Paul Sylbert puts it, “He was good in Heaven Can Wait, because he was doing that side of him that’s boyish and innocent, eager and honest. He has a lot of those qualities.” Heaven Can Wait does tug the heart strings—it’s virtually impossible to watch the last scene with a dry e
ye. The film dances on the edge of mawkishness, but pace Kael, never stumbles. It is poignant, not smarmy.

  In retrospect, it’s not so puzzling that Heaven Can Wait connected as well as it did. It is, as Rich pointed out, about love, death, money, sports, success, and idealism, all subjects close to the hearts of boomers. So far as Beatty himself is concerned, at least on one level, the film, again, is about himself. After all, he started as a football player—in high school—and ended up a millionaire, the way Pendleton does when he enters the body of Farnsworth. And Betty Logan influences Pendleton (she radicalizes him) in much the same way, we have to imagine, that Christie affected Beatty. She’s Christie the activist, all sharp elbows, frumpy and aggressively political. Pendleton even plays the clarinet the way Beatty played the piano, which is to say, like the star, he’s a sensitive soul, an artist in a jock’s body, which he used to say about himself: he was too susceptible to play football.

  Heaven Can Wait is a movie about acting as well, inhabiting different roles. But more interestingly, it is about acting in a larger sense—trying on identities, looking for the right fit between inner and outer. It may have seemed perverse in the extreme for Beatty to snipe at his good fortune, gripe about his perfect features, and he didn’t, exactly, but like Pendleton the poet-quarterback, Beatty was an intellectual born into the body of a movie star. He was always trying to prove, as a young college dropout, that he wasn’t just a pretty face, that he was more intelligent, more sensitive than his good looks might indicate.

  Beatty called Heaven Can Wait a comedy of reincarnation, but it’s actually a fantasy of incarnation, of becoming. Beatty, remember, was the star before he was a star, the celebrity before he was a celebrity, and his struggle had been to fill the vessel. The historical Clyde Barrow was known as “the phantom of the Southwest,” just as Gary Hart called Beatty “The Phantom” for his peek-a-boo, now-you-see-him-now-you-don’t dance between presence and absence in politics. It was the same with movies—he couldn’t commit, couldn’t or wouldn’t pull the trigger, and the same—dare we say?—with his relationships, sexual and emotional. The latter were always the hardest. He had shown that he could play every role—actor, producer, writer, director—and play them well, just as it all comes together for Tom Jarrett—sort of. Jarrett can win the Super Bowl, but can he reconnect with Betty Logan? The film suggests maybe, leaving unresolved the question of whether or not Jarrett (or Beatty) can find his way back to who he really was. Paradoxically, Heaven Can Wait, a light comedy, a remake no less, an “entertainment” in Arthur Penn’s term, is at the thematic heart of Beatty’s work.

  But regardless of the buttons it pushed, there is simply the fact that, in Paul Sylbert’s words, “Heaven Can Wait is very well made. Warren is a good director. Most directors don’t have a grasp of what it is they’re making. He does. He doesn’t always explain it, but there is something going on in his brain that is telling him that this is right and this is wrong. He does have an idea of what he’s doing, and why he’s doing it.”

  That same summer, while Beatty was getting serious with Diane Keaton, he started to see Jacqueline Onassis. Uncharacteristically, his loose lips sank that ship. He reportedly boasted to Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, and others, among them Studio 54 owner Steve Rubell, who allowed as how Beatty had told him “that he’d fucked Jackie O.” When it got back to Onassis, she dropped him. At an old boyfriends party she threw on December 20, 1978, the two reportedly had an argument, and she was overheard telling him that he’d done something “disgusting.”

  When the Oscar nominations were announced on February 20, 1979, Heaven Can Wait cleaned up with nine, including Warden and Cannon for supporting, Paul Sylbert for production design, and Fraker for cinematography. Beatty himself was nominated for four Oscars: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Screenplay, and Best Director. He was the first person to be nominated in four categories since Orson Welles in 1941 for Citizen Kane. But it was a tough year, and ominously, Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter also got nine nominations, while Hal Ashby’s Coming Home got eight. (The other Best Picture nominations were Alan Parker’s Midnight Express, and Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman.)

  The Awards ceremony was held on April 9. Beatty took Keaton, and the two were observed holding hands. But they were upstaged by demonstrations against The Deer Hunter by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The expectation was, not unreasonably, that the two Vietnam-themed movies would cancel out each other, leaving the way open for Heaven Can Wait. “Warren was sitting in the aisle,” recalls Deer Hunter producer Barry Spikings. “He actually had his leg out—ready to go.” But Heaven Can Wait was virtually forgotten. When all the envelopes were opened, The Deer Hunter won Best Picture, Michael Cimino won Best Director, and Best Actor went to Jon Voight for Coming Home. Heaven Can Wait won only a single Oscar, Paul Sylbert’s for Best Art Direction. Explaining why Heaven Can Wait didn’t win, L.A. Times critic Charles Champlin quipped, “All the joking references to Warren Beatty’s celebrated romantic swath raised the possibility that some voters may have felt that the man who has everything can get by on nominations and large grosses, while heaven waits.”

  TREVOR GRIFFITHS’S wife had been killed in a plane crash, requiring that he return to London to look after his three children. He sent his first draft to Beatty from there at the end of 1977. “Warren rang me up and said, ‘I’ve got to read it again, but this is wonderful. This is just terrific,’” he remembers. Griffiths was not used to dealing with producers and didn’t know that this was Kid Gloving Writers 101, the Praise Stage, and therefore he put a sinister interpretation on the follow-up phone call. He continues, “When he rang me again a week later, there was a completely different tone to his voice. He told me he had shown it to Bob Towne, and gave me the sense that Towne had declared that the American people would say, ‘How could John Reed get it so wrong, spend his whole adult life following a corrupt and lousy experiment in revolution. You simply cannot make a movie about a man who dies a Communist. America will not accept this.’” It was indeed a dilemma, because if Reed, disillusioned, recants at the end, Beatty would be stuck with a movie that says, in Jeremy Pikser’s words, “Everything you’ve just seen has been a big, stupid mistake. The guy’s life has been pointless. Where’s the movie in that?”

  Griffiths continues, “Warren wanted to keep the outline, keep the shape, keep some of the characterizations, but start over. And indeed, that’s what we did.” Griffiths returned to New York in the early summer of 1978 to hash out the rewrite with Beatty. Pikser met the star at this time, shortly after Heaven Can Wait had come out and Frank Rich had profiled him for the cover of Time. “Warren was huge, he was king,” recalls Pikser, continuing, “The first draft was tendentious. Humorless. It was much more historical, in that the relationship between Reed and Bryant was not nearly as modern. And Reed was more of a character than a vehicle for Warren. In one scene, Reed embraced Louise and said, ‘Your hair smells like damsons.’ Damsons are a kind of plum. They do exist in America; Reed might have been familiar with them, and as a poet, in a flight of fancy, might conceivably have compared them to the smell of her hair, but Beatty’s reaction was, ‘What the fuck is a damson? I sure as hell would never say that about a woman! What kind of an idiot is this guy Trevor Griffiths? It must be some sort of English thing.’” He adds, “But I don’t think he hated Trevor’s draft any more than he hates other first drafts. He never has a draft he likes. It’s never, ‘Okay, now the script is done.’ It’s like, ‘Let’s work on it.’ You go into a film rewriting while it’s being shot.”

  According to Beatty, “That draft had two serious problems. One is that it seemed too British, and the other was that both of these people were idealistic, committed Marxists who more or less drove off into the sunset on the back of a tractor at the end of the story. There was no tension between Bryant and Reed. What I needed to do was pit her feminism against his chauvinism, turn a woman who was in love with a man against that man. And for me, this movie had v
ery much to do with the tug-of-war between an artist and a politician. The life of an artist is one that we say is uncompromised, while politics is the art of compromise. The constant conflict was, What can you do in art? versus, What can you do in politics?”

  Beatty and Griffiths struggled with a new draft. “It was really painful, really unpleasant,” Griffiths recalls. “I was sitting in a room for six or eight hours a day with a guy that I was increasingly growing to detest, and who was increasingly growing to detest me. That’s the Sartrean version of hell.”

  If Beatty in his everyday exchanges is invariably polite, soft-spoken, often displaying flashes of dry wit, rarely allowing himself to get annoyed or irritable, script meetings are free-for-alls, extreme, no-holds-barred combat. Of his notion that the best work comes from the clash of “hostile intelligences,” Pikser quips, “It’s often more hostile than intelligent.”

  Pikser recalls that Griffiths told him Beatty once threw a chair across the room, but the playwright doesn’t remember it that way. “Absolutely not,” he says. “Halfway through our time at the Carlyle, he started taking his coat and shirt off, and began doing upper body exercises with these huge chairs that the Carlyle has. He would do curls, set them down, do curls on his back so his stomach would get some of it. I asked him what all this was about, and he told me he had a dream in which he had started filming Reds, and suddenly I appeared on the set, picked up a million-dollar camera and threw it at the wall. Smashed it to pieces. His subconscious was telling him a lot about the dangers of working with a guy who was as wild as me. So he was showing me that he was a big fella, a BIG FELLA.”