Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

  Pikser recalls, “Warren was always trying to please Diane. Which was not easy. Which is why he wanted to do it so much. It’s no fun for him if it’s easy. He really likes women who kick his ass. He always moaned about it, but I think that’s what drew him to her. It was a very contentious, volatile relationship. He bought her a pair of handcuffs, as either a Christmas or a birthday gift. I took that as an ironic comment on her feeling that he wanted to constrain her. Or, maybe they were just into that!” Says Beatty, “God help me, I’ve never been into that. The idea of handcuffs as sexual paraphernalia has always made me laugh. There would be about as much chance of Diane Keaton being into that kind of stuff as there would be of her becoming interested in skydiving.”

  “Warren didn’t have an easy time, because of Keaton,” says Peter Feibleman, who observed them together. “Any woman who’s in love with him enough to be at his mercy will be angry with him the whole time. Not because he hurt her, but because he could hurt her. And Diane was. She’s the opposite of what she seems to be on the screen. She used to slaughter Warren. She’s a very unpleasant lady when she is angry. She’s a rage rat. Unspeakable stuff. She had a kind of nasty flounce. She was the original snotty girl. She just clawed at Warren.

  “Warren did the movie for her, but nothing he did seemed to please her. She was princessy enough that if you acknowledged her throne then you became her vassal. But he had to deal with a great number of other people. All she saw was that his attention wasn’t on her. She lost sight of the fact that the whole fuckin’ thing was being done around her. With great love. And it got worse and worse and worse. So many, many, many women would have been grateful for ten minutes with Warren, so he picked the one who was running away. There’s a certain attraction in that. Julie was the opposite. She was out to please. When they fought, it was different, a sort of lovers’ quarrel. You could sense the love with Julie, you could not with Diane. It was playful with Julie. It was hostile and awful with Diane.”

  Says Keaton, “I don’t think we were much of a couple by the end of the movie. But we were never, ever to be taken seriously as one of the great romances. I was mad for him, but this movie meant so much to him, it was really the passion of his professional life, it was the most important thing to Warren. Completely, absolutely. I understood that then, and I understand it now.” Translation: Reds was more important to him than she was.

  Some people close to Reds thought that the relationship between Reed and Bryant echoed the off-screen relationship between the two stars way more than it reflected the historical couple. Says Caddell, “It was sometimes hard to tell the difference between what you’re seeing on the screen and what you’re witnessing in real life.” In the picture, Reed and his circle—especially the heavyweights, like the anarchist Emma Goldman—don’t take Bryant seriously. She’s writing an article about the Armory Show—by then three years old—at a time when the world was going up in flames.

  While Reds was in preproduction, Keaton was putting together a book of photographs of hotel lobbies. Pikser speculates, “Diane wanted to be serious in ways that Warren was ambivalent about. To really have been a partner in Diane’s quirkiness, the singularity of her pursuit of the obscure and the avant-garde, which to me was a product of a restive and intelligent mind, for him would have been heavy lifting. There was a way in which he wanted to pay obeisance to her intellectual pursuits, but at the same time there was a sense on her part that he didn’t really respect or appreciate them. So when Warren says in Reds, ‘You’re writing about the Armory Show, why should I take your work seriously if you don’t take it seriously yourself—can you imagine what Warren really thought about her taking photographs of hotel lobbies?” Beatty rarely accompanied Keaton to gallery openings and would rarely visit her sets.

  Says Buck Henry, “I don’t think he understands the motivation for knowing about something or really loving it when it has no practical connection to oneself. The idea of Warren standing absorbed in front of a great painting or being in an opera house and being carried away, or even the theater—he could never understand how I could waste my time being in a play. We had mutual friends who were in the art world, who used to talk to me about art. I know Warren was suspicious of the conversations. Why would I really be interested? I’m not going to get anything out of it. For him, it’s not about being overwhelmed by anything outside of himself. It’s about how you get other people to respond in that way.”

  There was no real reason why the couple’s on-screen relationship shouldn’t have reflected their off-screen one. If Beatty saw himself as Reed when he started, his identification with him only intensified as the shooting progressed. He even took to wearing the clothes—wide wale corduroys and custom-made shirts—worn by his celluloid avatar. Likewise, Keaton felt she had an intuitive understanding of Bryant: “I saw her as somebody who really wanted to be extraordinary, but was probably more ordinary, except for the fact that she was driven. I knew what it was like not to really be an artist. I knew what it felt like to be extremely insecure. I knew what it was like to be envious.”

  Beatty merely did what all auteurs—even reluctant ones—must do, make an intensely personal film, in this case with a chunk of history that in other hands could easily have remained lumpy and undigested. But sensitive, perhaps, to the imputation of self-absorption, both Beatty and Keaton deny that the Reed-Bryant relationship mimics their own. Did Keaton feel she was in Beatty’s shadow the same way Bryant felt she was in Reed’s? “No,” he responds. “She had just made one of the great, great movies, Annie Hall, she had won the Academy Award. She was very much in demand.” Adds Keaton, “It was completely different. I didn’t find myself dead in a stairway, drunk. Also I don’t think that we’re that important, historically. Warren and I. Sorry to say.”

  The simmering tensions between the two seem to have boiled over the day they shot Reed’s death scene—he succumbs to typhus in a squalid Moscow hospital—with Bryant at his side. Says art director Simon Holland, “It was at the time when he and Diane were about to split. He couldn’t concentrate on what was happening around him. He couldn’t even see how Diane was acting. After it had been going for quite some time, Warren wouldn’t say ‘Cut,’ he would just start again. Eventually, he stopped and he sat up and he looked at script supervisor Zelda Barron. He said, ‘How was that, Zelda? Was she all right?’” Beatty says he was most likely concerned with continuity issues, but some on the set interpreted his question as an invitation to evaluate Keaton’s performance, a breach of protocol. According to Holland, “Diane just went, ‘W-a-r-r-e-n B-e-a-t-t-y, you’ll never do that to me again!’ And she walked out. And that was it.” Adds location manager Simon Bosanquet, who was also there, “She went to the airport, and left. It was a real exit and a half, a wonderful way to end.”

  Of this anecdote, Keaton says, “Yes, it rings a bell; no, I’m not going to talk about that.” According to Beatty, “It’s completely not true” that he asked Barron to critique Keaton. “I have never asked that question of anyone. It’s just not something you do. When we were shooting that scene, there were other matters between me and Diane that were personal. Nobody knew what was transpiring between us. No one knows what’s going on between me and any of the actors. And often I don’t know either.”

  According to Beatty, Reds finally wrapped at the end of February 1980. (According to Variety, it wrapped the last week of July.) When it was all over, Beatty described himself as a very tired man.

  POSTPRODUCTION WAS a saga unto itself. It had already been underway for some time in London, and in the early spring of 1980, it moved to Trans-Audio on West 54th Street in Manhattan, next door to Studio 54. Cutting Reds was a factory operation that spilled out onto several floors, and virtually cannibalized the company. Rooms filled with editors and/or boxes of film branched off long hallways that bisected or trisected the spaces.

  In those days, the editing of an average feature took a few months, at best. Reds was a long film, but postproduction last
ed for over a year and a half, enough time to start and finish a picture, and then some. The size of the job required a veritable army of editors and support staff, some seventy people. The assistants had assistants, so that it seemed like every editor in New York who could walk and talk was hired. The structure of Dede Allen’s army was strictly hierarchical, with Allen at the top, then co-editor Craig McKay, then Kathy Wenning, who was in charge of the Witnesses, on down to the assistants, apprentices, interns, and drones. Most of the staff was thrilled at the prospect of working on a Warren Beatty film, working for Allen, and getting a steady paycheck that might come in forever. But it quickly became clear that everything has a price, and Cindy Kaplan, Allen’s first assistant, spoke for many when she says, “It was the greatest thing and the worst thing at the same time.”

  The most immediate problem Allen faced was organizing the vast amount of footage that Beatty had shot. “I was overwhelmed with film,” she says. The party line, Allen recalls, was that Reds had not exceeded the benchmark recently set by Apocalypse Now: 700,000 feet of exposed film, or one hundred hours’ worth. Allen continues, “It got to the point where I never discussed it with anybody. That was verboten. [But] I know it was more than 700,000 feet. Are you kidding?” According to Wooll, “We went through over 2.5 million feet of film.” One source in a position to know claims Beatty shot three million feet, roughly two and a half weeks of screen time, with about one million feet actually printed.

  There were so many dailies that Jill Savitt, an assistant editor, had trouble finding places to screen them. Adds Wenning, “I had a quarter of a million feet of the Witnesses alone. You would look at some simple shot, and there’d be fourteen takes. And that was just one angle on a given scene. My eyes would glaze over. I could see tiny differences, but eventually they stopped registering. We had to keep records of the infinite permutations of every scene, with everything duplicated so we could go back, and that alone kept assistants going forever.” There was one person whose sole task was to transfer film to tape so that Beatty could look at it at the Carlyle Hotel, where he was staying.

  Allen was famous for her memory and her work ethic. Despite the vast amount of footage, she knew every frame and where it was. To only exaggerate slightly, she would say, “Give me Diane saying ‘and’”—one word. The editors groaned and began to scurry about in circles, mice lost in a maze, until Allen would suggest, “Try reel 3, scene 34,” and so on. She threw herself into the editing, worked harder than anyone, and demanded that everyone do as she did. She even worked on Christmas Day. As Kaplan puts it, “She saw her role as being in service to the film 100 percent, and to the director, and anticipating everything that he needed. Her attitude was, whatever it took, it really didn’t matter how hard it was, you just did it. Dede would be talking, and I would go to the bathroom, she would come running after me and stand outside the stall and continue talking.” The mother of postproduction supervisor Terri Kane, who left before the film was finished, invited her for Thanksgiving.

  “‘Are you kidding?’

  “‘Just tell Warren it’s Thanksgiving!’

  “‘No, I can’t do that.’ I wasn’t told I couldn’t, I just didn’t imagine that I could. I didn’t even ask.”

  Yvette Nabel, an assistant sound editor, recalls, “I had a gallstone attack, and I was lying on the floor in agony, and I said, ‘Can I go home?’ The answer was, ‘No, we may need you!’ Either you worked on Reds, or you didn’t work on Reds. You weren’t allowed to have any kind of a life.”

  Kate Hirson, a looping editor, was a single mother. “Being a woman and having a child while working in film was just not okay,” she recalls. “There were no allowances. And no sympathy. At seven at night, I would say to everybody, ‘I’m just going to go out and grab a quick hamburger.’ I’d jump in a taxi, race home, and kiss my son, jump in a taxi, and rush back. Although I couldn’t mention that I had to take my kid to school, nonetheless there was this huge amount of leeway about seeing a therapist. ‘Kate? Four times a week? No problem, just go!’”

  Morale was terrible. “People were very angry,” says apprentice sound editor Susan Lazarus. Recalls Hirson, “Dede was such a crazy person, you always had to be on call in case Warren needed you. He was a night person, so he would work from eleven to two. Everything was about Warren. Anything he wanted, any whim—he would cancel anything at the drop of a hat. He was the king. It was slavery. We were in Reds prison.” Wenning adds, “According to Dede it was absolutely essential for one of us to be in the editing room on weekends to baby-sit Warren in case he came in. He’d show up late, or never at all. That’s what I got paid for. Overtime.”

  The postproduction pressure cooker took its toll. “It was one of the hardest years of my life,” Wenning continues. “I got divorced.” One assistant editor tried to commit suicide with sleeping pills. Says Lazarus, “When it was over, I had to go to therapy because I felt that I’d lost my sense of self.” Hirson gave up editing features and moved over to documentaries. So did Kaplan. She says, “I was working really hard, night after night, and one night I looked up at around 3:00 A.M., and I thought, We’re not curing famine in Africa here. I realize this is going to be a good movie, but who cares? After a year and a half, you start to wonder about your own priorities.

  “Making this film was like Fitzcarraldo, dragging a ship over a mountain. The thing wouldn’t have happened without someone like him, and I have great respect for him for that. But on the other hand, he just wasn’t a very nice person. Is it worth being inhuman to be able to get there?”

  What made things more difficult is that Beatty ran hot and cold. There was a short list of people whose calls had to be put through, including certain women, close friends, and his parents. Recalls Kane, “Once his mother called, and I said, ‘Do you want me to find Warren?’ ‘Oh, no, don’t bother.’ And when I told Warren, he got upset. MacLeod told me, ‘You have to remember how Warren is with his parents, you always have to find Warren and put those calls through.’ If Stephen Sondheim called, you’d better find Warren, because he was on the list. It was Sondheim, Sondheim, Sondheim. Then, all of a sudden, it clicked off—‘I don’t want to hear from Sondheim.’ Very abrupt. It was like he had broken up with a girlfriend.”

  Beatty held this tinker toy assemblage of editorial talent together with the glue of his personality. He could inspire such dedication that some people didn’t mind the long hours. “He had that charisma that just makes people want to do things for him,” says assistant editor Billy Scharf. “You’ve been there all night long, and then you’re asked to do it again, and you know you’re being used in some way—you felt like a schmuck—but you do it. That’s why he’s a great producer.” Eventually they got used to him, and relaxed.

  The star was fully aware of his effect on the assistants, and wielded his charisma with intent. Wenning recalls, “All the women were trying to look good for him. One Sunday, I was in his office, the snow was coming down, and Warren was pacing back and forth in front of the window. It was like a scene from McCabe & Mrs. Miller. I was sitting on the couch, he had his back to me, and he was talking. I said, ‘Warren, I can’t understand you.’ He said, ‘When the film’s over, go get your hearing checked.’ He said it gently and kindly, not, ‘Are you deaf? There’s something wrong with your ears.’ Sure enough, I had otosclerosis. It could have gone on undiagnosed. I thank him for that.”

  Beatty was full of contradictions. At the time he was arguably the biggest star in the world, just two years out from his Time magazine cover. Yet he didn’t have an entourage, didn’t insist on being treated like a movie star, knew people’s names, invited them out to dinner. Kane recalls, “You didn’t have to handle Warren. He did a lot of things for himself.” She was impressed that he didn’t require limousines. “I was a nobody, and he was Warren Beatty, and I’d be getting into a car I’d ordered from the service, while he would walk to the corner and hail a cab,” she remembers. “It was always extraordinary to me”—until she r
ealized he didn’t want anyone to know where he was going.

  Beatty was deceptive. He scored points for not requiring star treatment, but at the same time, he didn’t because he didn’t have to. Allen was savvy enough to create an environment in which he was treated that way regardless. Kane recalls, “One day, I sent a kid, a production assistant (PA), out for Chinese food for Warren. The kid came back, empty-handed. I freaked out. ‘Where is the food?’

  “‘I ran into Warren in the elevator and I gave him the bag.’

  “‘You just handed him the bag? Of Chinese food? You can’t just hand Warren Beatty a bag of Chinese food. You have to put it on a tray!’”

  Every Beatty film is shrouded in secrecy, and Reds was no exception. Editing changes within scenes were recorded on continuity sheets so that there was a record of them. Once, an errant breeze coming through an open window carried some of these sheets of paper out the window down onto Eighth Avenue. Kane recalls, “Dede made us go down to the street and look for the sheets, because someone might find one and breach the secrecy.”

  MacLeod was an island of calm amidst the chaos. He had an office across the street, and people found excuses to hang out there and decompress. He was accessible and funny, and dispensed advice about how to deal with Beatty. MacLeod was sharing a loft belonging to actress Blair Brown with Little David. Recalls Kane, “Little David didn’t know how to relate except sexually. He was extremely provocative. He’d sit on your lap and lick your neck. He’d always say, ‘But I’m just a kid.’” MacLeod told people that Little David came from a poor family with many children. They credited him with helping a kid out of a bad situation. Little David always said that MacLeod was like a father to him, took care of him when nobody else would. But after work, the two Davids would go clubbing. “It seemed odd, and you kind’a wondered, because MacLeod was taking this boy out every night,” says Kane. Adds Sherri Taffel, also a post-production coordinator, “You felt there was something slightly inappropriate, but you didn’t exactly know what.”