Little David was friendly with Michelle Phillips’s daughter, Chynna. “Once, when Chynna was about twelve, we called Warren from Shanghai,” Phillips recalls. “I had to go east from Beijing, and she had to go west through New York, back to L.A. I asked him, ‘Is it okay if she stays in New York overnight, and then you can put her back on a plane to Los Angeles?’ He said, ‘Yeah, send her, I’ll take care of her.’”
Taffel picked Chynna up at the airport and drove her to the Carlyle. “Chynna was wearing a blue Chinese shirt,” she recalls. “She was stunning. Little David met her in the lobby, took her up to her room.” According to Taffel, when Beatty arrived at the hotel, he asked, “Where’s Chynna?”
“She’s upstairs in her room getting settled.”
“Where’s David?”
“He’s up in her room with her.”
Taffel recalls, “Warren went nuts. Started screaming, ‘What are you doing letting them up in the room together? Are you crazy?’” She wasn’t certain that Beatty’s concern was strictly paternal. Angrily, she told him, “It’s your own fears about yourself that are at play here. Not everybody is the way you are. David is fine in the room with Chynna.”
Despite a sizable contingent of smart, ambitious women—even the apprentices were documentary filmmakers—the culture of the editing rooms sharply contradicted the feminist politics—such as they were—of Reds. Beatty may have been in heaven, but Louise Bryant would not have been happy there. According to Wenning, during her interview he asked her, “Do you want to fuck?” She answered, “I don’t think so,” and he “just moved right along, and that was the end of that.”
Kane remembers an incident that happened one day when she was sitting in her office, legs crossed, wearing a skirt. “He came by my desk and slipped his hand around my inner thigh. It really flipped me out. I was like Road Runner in the middle of the air. He was not coming on to me, just playing. There was this long hallway of editing rooms, and sometimes he would just go down the hallway from room to room to room, and he would do something like that to each woman.”
There was a cultlike aspect to the whole thing. The Reds cutting rooms were about as close as it was possible to get to Big Love’s Juniper Creek, in midtown Manhattan c. 1980, although with Studio 54 next door, that’s perhaps not such an exaggeration. Suffice to say that Beatty’s playfulness, and his deeply held belief in his own entitlement, would lead him routinely to do things that today could get him brought up on charges of sexual harassment in the workplace, if any of the women wanted to press charges, which is unlikely. Adds Kaplan, “He was very flirtatious. Sometimes we’d be in the editing room, me, Dede, and Warren, supposedly watching a scene. He’d just pick me up and start laughing, while she was working at the Moviola. He thought it was funny, while everyone else was rolling their eyes.”
Kaplan was involved in hiring personnel. “Warren complained to me that the women I was hiring weren’t pretty enough,” she recalls. He was joking—sort of. Recalls Hirson, “Once one of the temps was Xeroxing something, and Warren came up and just stood behind her, like, Notice me, notice me, notice me! She looked up, and she said, ‘Uhh, did you want something, sir?’ She didn’t have a clue who he was. When he realized that, his face dropped, and he walked away. It was a typical Warren moment. He was just relentless in his focus on a young apprentice on the picture side, in this very predatory way. Wherever she was, he would track her. We were all waiting—how long was it gonna take before this poor girl gives in? Then finally he wore her down. He just did it ’cause he could. I was very offended by it.”
But a lot of the women on the staff either overlooked Beatty’s behavior or appreciated it. Says Lazarus, “He really loved women. He loved talking to women, he loved working with women. You didn’t feel he was exploitive, even though you knew he would jump into bed with anybody.” Adds Wenning, “I had a great time with Warren. He was always interesting, he knows so much about so many subjects, and when you got past his nonsense with women, he was just fun. And, he gave great neck rubs.” As researcher Judith Evans, who was often at his side during postproduction, points out, flirting was almost therapeutic for him. “He had this overwhelming responsibility on this movie,” she explains. “The flirtations were a relief in this context. He needed that kind of response from women. Men like Warren who seek power are only alive when someone is looking at them with admiration or desire. It’s almost a chemical thing. And that became more true as the film was coming to an end and becoming very difficult.”
THERE WAS enormous pressure to finish and release the film because of the hefty interest payments Paramount was making on the loan. As head of the whole operation, Allen bore the brunt of the pressure. Her relationship with Beatty was fraught. His practice of bringing his friends around to look at the film and offer suggestions rubbed her and the editors the wrong way. From their point of view, they were hardworking professionals, while Beatty was rounding up amateurs and outsiders to gum up the works.
The visitors ran the gamut from Michelle Phillips to George McGovern. Says Wenning, “What would be frustrating was not the visitors, but the people who came around and hung out. Towne and Caddell occupied a lot of Warren’s time, and it was during periods like that that he ignored Dede. He’s a towering intellect and artist, and I was surprised that at his age, he’d still be a kind of a high school locker room type guy. He’d get with these guys and it would be like Animal House. There was a lot of talk about girls, and Dede being an older woman, was really cut down by that.”
The kibitzers often confused more than they clarified. Says Judith Evans, “People were pulling him in all directions. He would have these screenings with Nicholson et al., and everyone had different things to say. He would come in the next day and say, ‘Why did I do that?’”
Keaton was a frequent visitor as well, dubbing her dialogue, or just there. She was always early to the looping sessions, Beatty was always late. Recalls Kane, “We’d go through a session, and they would leave, and half an hour later they’d still be standing in front of the elevators, arguing, walking away from each other, and coming together again. Then we’d go back to Trans-Audio, and there they’d be in the lobby still arguing, and it would go on all the time.” One day Beatty and Keaton got into a screaming fight in the lobby of the building that lasted for what seemed like hours, while people just brushed past them pretending not to notice. According to Judith Evans, “A lot of time was spent waiting around while Warren and Diane were involved in some ‘Where is our relationship going?’ discussion.”
To Allen, Keaton was just another distraction. Her left-wing history seemed to give her a personal—even proprietary—stake in Reed and Bryant’s story. Possibly she was competitive with Keaton for Beatty’s attention as well. In any event, she disparaged the actress, patronized her as a lightweight, a Valley Girl whose histrionics diverted Beatty from his work. From Allen’s editing room, she could hear or watch Beatty, one office away, talking on the phone—often several phones at once—flirting with various women. The tenor of Allen’s feelings could be judged by the fact that, when Beatty’s office was being furnished, she dourly suggested a Naugahyde couch, “so we can just hose it off.”
More than anyone, she was flummoxed by Elaine May, the most influential of Beatty’s pals. He felt that she was one of the few people in the inner circle who didn’t have her own agenda, and he wanted her at his beck and call. Once she hurt her ankle, couldn’t walk without a cane. It was late, and she wanted to go home. He grabbed her cane, while she screamed, “Give me back that cane, I want to get out of here.” Phillip Schopper was a young editor who played the role of a gadfly on the film, a sort of roving critic who evaluated other people’s work, which didn’t make him too popular. (He would later become romantically involved with May, and remain with her for thirteen years.) He says, “Elaine is probably the best editor there is. She has an amazing ability to go from the beginning of the project to the end of the project, and watch it every time as if she i
s seeing it fresh.”
But to Allen and the other editors, she was just an irritant. The editors couldn’t understand why Beatty excluded Allen from the very conversations with his friends in which important decisions were made that crucially affected her work. When May (or Towne) was in with Beatty, Allen knew they were fiddling with her work. She paced up and down the hallway outside his office, muttering to herself. In some sense, if Beatty was the Lenin of Reds, Allen was the Emma Goldman of postproduction.
“They drove each other crazy,” recalls Wenning. A source who knew Allen well explains, “The way she functions in the dynamic with the director is that she’s the dutiful daughter. But Beatty would not let her be the dutiful daughter, which totally short-circuited her. At the beginning, she went out and found apartments for him, tried hard to find the perfect one, to make him happy, and he wouldn’t even look at them.” But the apartment hunting, eventually delegated to others, went on throughout postproduction and became a way for Allen to keep him preoccupied and out of the editing rooms.
By the end of postproduction, Beatty and Allen were barely speaking. Says Kaplan, “It was terrible. She was just coming apart. There were days when she just sat down on the floor and put her head in her hands.” Occasionally, he even reduced her to tears. Says Hirson, “There was a lot of anger and bitterness and unhappiness on both their parts. It was like when your parents were fighting. It was a dysfunctional marriage. But however much they fought, for Dede, whatever Warren wanted, Warren got.” Adds Kaplan, “She would eat herself up inside, but she would never say anything because that would be disloyal to the film and the director.”
LIKE HIS relationships with Christie and Phillips, Beatty’s with Keaton flickered on like a guttering candle. To torture a memorable quote from The Godfather, Beatty kept his friends close and his ex-girlfriends closer. Says Bo Goldman, “Diane loved him desperately. Yes, there’d been a falling out, but then there was a rapprochement. She’d seen an assembly of Reds, and she said, ‘Well, this guy, he had this insane notion to make this movie about Reds, and you know something? There’s a movie there. Who would have believed it?’ Her admiration for him was rekindled. Like he’d pulled the rabbit out of the hat, when she thought that there was no rabbit and no hat. Even after her horrible experiences with him, romantically and sexually, whatever, she respected him.”
Still, Beatty drove her crazy by making dates and either breaking them or being unconscionably late or casually neglectful. On her thirty-fourth birthday, January 5, 1980, he was interviewing Judith Evans for a job, happily chatting away, oblivious to the time. Keaton kept calling, saying, plaintively, “Where are you? You’re supposed to be here. We’re going out. It’s my birthday!”
It didn’t help that Beatty was seeing other women, plenty of them: Charlene Gehm of the Joffrey Ballet, as well as models Bitten Knudsen and Janice Dickinson, not to mention Mary Tyler Moore. Dickinson first met Beatty at a party thrown by photographer Ara Gallant in New York. He was with Knudsen. She invited the two of them back to her place, where the women drank Cognac and did blow while Beatty fell asleep. On another occasion, she was in his suite when he was on the phone with Keaton. “I could imagine Diane on the other end, feeling deeply loved,” Dickinson recalled. “Then the second line rang and he had to ask her to hold and it was the other woman in his life, Mary Tyler Moore. He made her feel deeply loved, too.” He hung up, and “rubbed his hands together like a man about to sit down to a good meal.” But Dickinson didn’t sleep with him that night either. By the time she went to the Caribbean on a photo shoot for Elle, she still hadn’t had sex with him, but she said she “spent the entire shoot thinking about him.” When she returned, she called him from the airport.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“At JFK,” she said. “You sure nobody’s there? You’re not juggling calls again, are you?”
“Why don’t you come over?”
“Bitten’s not there? Can it really be—Warren is all alone?”
“I won’t be if you come over.”
She made a beeline to the Carlyle. What followed was right out of the Warren Beatty playbook: “He sat down and played the piano for me—what a delight—then ordered room service. We ate by candlelight. He asked me about me. Hung on my every word. Made me feel like the center of the universe. Of course I slept with him. He knew where everything was and what to do with it. But of course he’d had lots of practice. I tried not to think about just how much.
“I woke up a few hours later, at around three in the morning. Warren wasn’t in bed. I looked across the room and found him admiring himself in the mirror. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked in a sleepy voice. ‘Nothing,’ he said. But he couldn’t take his eyes off himself. He ran his hands through his hair, staring at his reflection in the mirror. I went back to sleep. In the morning, when I woke up, he was standing there again, playing with his hair, mussing it; trying to get it just right—going for that just-been-fucked look.… I saw Warren for the next eight months. He made me feel loved and important. I knew he was making half a dozen other women feel the same way at the same time—sometimes on the same day, even—but it didn’t matter. I needed lots of nurturing, and I was getting it from Warren Beatty.”
Mary Tyler Moore was in the process of divorcing Grant Tinker. She was up for an Oscar—always catnip to Beatty—for Ordinary People (1980), which she lost to Sissy Spacek the following April. At Christmas of that year, she reportedly gave him a piano. Keaton had bought the twenty-fourth floor in one of the twin towers of the San Remo, a landmark building on Central Park West and 74th Street. She turned it into a big white-on-white loft. The chairs were white, the sofa was white, everything was white, including a long white table surrounded by a dozen or so white oak school chairs that swiveled. She had an extensive art collection, but very little of it was on the walls. Nor did she display her photography. Just a few floors below her, in the other tower, lived Moore, who always left the blinds up. Keaton could see into her apartment, and would point it out to friends, hissing, “Look, that bitch lives over there. You don’t even need binoculars. He was due here, he was late, I saw him over there! And all he could come up with was some lame excuse: ‘I’m sorry, honey, I was busy.’”
Keaton had a close friend named Robert Younger, who was a gifted graphic designer—record albums, posters, and the like. He accompanied her to gallery openings, movies, concerts, the zoo, everywhere Beatty couldn’t or wouldn’t go with her. Through her, he and Beatty became somewhat friendly, and the star impressed him by helping him out with a medical problem and paying his bills. One day, Beatty invited him to the editing room. Over Chinese take-out, Beatty praised Keaton extravagantly: “She’s a peach, Diane can do anything, comedy, drama, anything.” Younger had the feeling Beatty knew he would report back to Keaton, and that he was being used as a go-between. Then, out of the blue, Beatty said, “Diane says you have a great eye. I have all these stills, I can’t find one that’s right for the poster. I’ve had Milton Glaser looking, Dick Sylbert, nobody’s been able to find one. Do me a favor, look through them for me? It needs to be of me and Diane, and it needs to say ‘love story.’” Beatty never offered to pay him, and the designer didn’t ask. There were a dozen or so loose-leaf books stuffed with proof sheets. After days of culling the stills, Younger found one of Reed and Bryant embracing at the train station after he returned from Baku. Younger circled it in red with a wax pencil. He showed it to Beatty, saying, “Warren, look at this. This is the one.”
“I missed that one. Let me think about it, show it to some people.” Emboldened, Younger explained that he’d had a lot of experience designing album covers, and asked to be considered for the poster. Beatty didn’t say yes, didn’t say no. Paramount was involved, he’d think about it, be in touch, etc., etc. Says Younger, “That was the last time we spoke.”
Cut to a month or so later, Younger and Keaton had just come out of a movie, and were walking across 57th Street toward Central Park West. As he r
ecalls, he asked his companion, “What’s up with the poster?”
“Oh, gee, Warren found the most beautiful shot for the poster, to die for. He’s got such a great eye.”
“Di, can you describe it to me?” She did so.
“Did you notice that it was circled in red?”
“Yeah, that’s the one.”
“That was my select. That’s my circle!”
“That cocksucker. That cheat…”
Younger could sense she was spoiling for a fight. She had the bit in her mouth, and ran with it.
“He’s not going to get away with this. I hope he paid you well.”
“As a matter of fact, he didn’t pay me at all.”
“That filthy motherfucker, stealing from you…”
“Diane, there’s no sense getting into a huff, because we didn’t discuss money. I didn’t ask him for any.”
“Well, you should have. And what about him grabbing credit for it? He always does that shit.”
“It’s all right. He’s an auteur. He’s allowed to do what he wants. Calm down.”
“I’m going to call him right now!”
“No, Diane, there’s no issue here. Don’t make one where there isn’t one. Did you see the poster?”
“There is no poster. You’re damn well gonna do that poster, I can tell you that right now. You’re hearing that from me. You’re gonna do that poster.”
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