Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

  Problematical as Kael’s review was, she did zero in on some of the picture’s weaknesses, mostly having to do with its sexual politics, like the emergence of the hoary double standard. We learn from conversation between Reed and Bryant that he has apparently had numerous flings, but they’re never dramatized because, as he argues, they don’t mean anything, while her one transgression with O’Neill is all important. Reed is invariably portrayed bringing Bryant armfuls of white lilies—her favorite flower—when he returns from his various trips, only to find her in a snit over something or other, or worse, in O’Neill’s arms. In other words, Reed is the victim in love, much as Beatty liked to portray himself in life.

  In the first half of the picture, Bryant is fiercely independent and ambitious, but as the plot unfolds, she devolves into a dutiful wife, ending up, finally, in that most traditional of female roles: a nurse. She has to learn not to be such a fierce feminist, competitive and careerist. The public life that exercises such sway over her husband is not supposed to be for her.

  On February 11, 1982, the Motion Picture Academy announced that Reds had scooped up twelve nominations, two more than its nearest competitor, On Golden Pond, three more than Heaven Can Wait, and the most any picture could boast of since A Man for All Seasons in 1966. Beatty’s four personal nominations matched his four for Heaven Can Wait, setting the bar so high that it has never been matched. (Welles was nominated in this quartet of categories only once.) Also nominated for Best Picture that year were Raiders of the Lost Ark, Atlantic City, and, in what seemed like a footnote, Chariots of Fire.

  As it turned out, it was a tough year, with both Beatty and Keaton drowned by a wave of nostalgia for Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn, who won Best Actor and Actress for On Golden Pond on March 29. Dick Sylbert lost to Raiders of the Lost Ark, to a big rolling stone, as he put it.

  In the end, Reds won only three Oscars: Storaro for cinematography, Stapleton for supporting actress, and Beatty for directing. In an otherwise generous speech Beatty thanked almost everyone—except the editors, reopening the wounds of postproduction. Recalls Craig McKay, “Dede was in shock, she was furious.” Later at the Governor’s Ball, she lit into Beatty, said something like, “You’re ungrateful. With all we did for you, the least you could do is recognize us.” Beatty made an excuse, saying that he was so sure that he was going to win Best Picture that rather than repeat himself, he intended to acknowledge her then. But he never did anything without forethought, and those who knew recalled the bad blood between the two and rolled their eyes. Says McKay, “I saw a friend of mine out in the hall, he turned to me, and he said, ‘Man, what a slap in the face.’”

  If indeed it was Beatty’s intention to thank Allen and the rest on his second trip to the stage, it was thwarted. As Loretta Young tore open the envelope, Spielberg, who knew Raiders didn’t have a chance, squeezed Puttnam’s shoulder, saying, “It’s going to be you—I know it’s going to be you.” Indeed, it was. Reds lost Best Picture to Puttnam’s feel-good soufflé, Chariots of Fire. It was 1978 all over again, only worse. Beatty suspected that Reds might have been a victim of endemic anti-Communist sentiment in the Academy. “The character who had the clearest anti-Communist message in it was Emma Goldman, and Maureen won the Academy Award,” he says. “It also won cinematography and direction, because those things were separable from thinking, Well, Jesus, we’re endorsing a Communist movie.” (Of course, by this argument, Nicholson, whose O’Neill sneered at his friends’ politics, should have won for Best Supporting Actor, instead of John Gielgud, for Arthur—another vote against death.) A more likely explanation is that Puttnam’s attempt to portray Chariots vs. Reds as a David and Goliath contest had worked. “I went out of my way to get it seen in those terms,” he admitted. “I played up the cost of Reds, which at the time Beatty and Diller were desperately trying to play down. I crazed both of them.” Beatty and Puttnam “hated each other,” says Dick Sylbert. And, of course, as one source puts it, “A lot of people in Hollywood did not want to see Warren succeed. He just had too many fingers in too many pies. Actor, producer, director, writer—they were out for him.”

  But there were consolations. Beatty screened the picture for Lillian Hellman, who by that time was nearly blind. She didn’t see it, she heard it, but she liked it enough to sit through it. (Hellman would die at the age of seventy-nine on June 30, 1984.) He also showed it to Elia Kazan. Kazan had not, apparently, liked Shampoo, and had told Beatty at the time, “You know, Warren, you should have talked to me before you made that movie.” But after Reds, he called Beatty and said, “You really are a good director.”

  Despite the film’s failure to win Best Picture, Reds put to rest precisely that question: How good a director was Beatty? One day, by the pool, during the Heaven Can Wait shoot, Julie Christie confided to a friend, “Warren doesn’t have an aesthetic bone in his body.” Paul Sylbert, for one, disagrees, but he understood what she meant. “I sent him some sketches, and he called me up and said, ‘Paul, they brought tears to my eyes.’ He was dead serious. Elements of his responses are genuine, but they’re not aesthetic. Warren may be in some sense what Mervyn LeRoy was—he said it himself—‘I’m not a director, I’m a selector’—which means you let the camera run a lot, get a bunch of stuff, sit with the editor, and you pick the best stuff and figure out how to work it. He takes in information endlessly, processes it, sifts it, and something finally pops out, and it pops out for a lot of reasons that he’s calculated. But artists do not calculate. They work from other sources. He does calculate. He’s a processor.”

  But of course, there is more than one kind of artist, and if Beatty was indeed a “selector,” or a “processor,” as opposed to an intuitive artist, that didn’t necessarily make him any less an artist. Raised on the films of the postwar Italian neorealists, studio directors like Stevens and Wyler, the naturalistic theater of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s via Inge, Williams, and Kazan, and even the improvisational looseness of Altman, Beatty tried to leave few fingerprints on his work. He effaced himself stylistically in the same way that he did as a writer, as Buck Henry points out, and as an actor, playing against his image. Distinguishing himself from the activist directors, Beatty always compared himself to the “passive” ones, like Hal Ashby. Dick Sylbert puts it this way: “Film schools gave us guys—Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola, Scorsese—who were much more interested in moving the equipment than in moving the audience. They loved the mechanics. On Cotton Club, Coppola said to me, ‘This is going to be the Kurosawa shot.’ I had never heard anybody say that in my life. All their references were to other movies. Nobody I ever worked with would ever have thought of doing that. They came from the theater, and their references were to real life. Behavioral. Emotional. The Fords and the Hawkses and the Wylers, and the Stevenses, that whole generation, as well as the Kazans and the Rittses and the Lumets—they all wanted to disappear so you could watch the movie.”

  Unlike most of the New Hollywood filmmakers of the 1970s, Beatty did not aspire to be an auteur in the European sense; his headliner’s regard for commercial success saved him from that trap. (He would say things to novice screenwriters like, “Get rid of all that Antonioni crap.”) Deriding the auteur theory, Beatty strove for directorial transparency, avoiding the flashy flourishes that called attention to themselves, the jittery camera and long tracking shots that Scorsese favored, or the signature 360 degree tail-swallowing pans so dear to Brian De Palma. Like Kazan he was an actor’s director, and the heart of his films lies in casting and performance. He discovers his films as he goes along, which is one of the reasons he does so many takes, excessive as that may seem. And yes, in the editing room, he combs through those takes looking for the sparks, the happy accidents, the flashes of inspiration. Beatty is at the opposite end of the spectrum from painterly or pictorial directors for whom the look of the film is all important, and who keep their shooting ratios down by storyboarding every shot. He is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the visionaries like S
corsese, who carry their films in their heads. His movies are less aesthetic objects in themselves than windows on the world. But he is no less an artist or auteur for that. It’s the difference, to borrow from Isaiah Berlin, between the hedgehog and the fox. If Scorsese is the hedgehog, exploring a singular vision, Beatty is the fox, who allows the material to dictate the aesthetic of the movie. It’s the difference between regarding the world through one lens, and looking at it through a kaleidoscope. The logical extreme of his kind of naturalism is documentary. Beatty tiptoed up to the edge in Shampoo, with his use of TV news clips as source music, as it were, and went even further in Reds, with his use of the Witnesses and nonactors like Kosinski and Plimpton, but he always pulled back—saved, again, by his commercial instincts.

  The star’s aesthetic conservatism—his belief in transparency, in naturalism, in letting script and acting inform the film—makes it difficult to identify a Beatty style, a Beatty film, except in the negative: his refusal to move the camera, his reluctance to break up performances with quick cuts. But what can be said of Jean Renoir’s signature? Or Coppola’s? No one would deny the auteur label to either of these filmmakers. If one key element of film artistry is the amount of control exercised over what is essentially a complex industrial process, as a quadruple hyphenate Beatty’s sensibility permeates his movies as fully as any of the more readily acknowledged auteurs of his era.

  Oddly, Reds might have done better had it come out earlier or later. Earlier, because the dumbing down of the smart, early 1970s movie audiences brought up on European films and the likes of Nichols, Altman, Scorsese and so on was already in full swing, and later, because Reds was eerily prescient. It’s a picture that almost has to be read backward, in the light of events that occurred subsequent to its release. It anticipated both the breakup of the Soviet Union and the rise of Muslim fundamentalism. Beatty adds, more in sorrow than in anger, “In the subject matter and the willingness to gamble, Reds marked the end of something. What moved the late ’60s and ’70s was politics. Reds is a political movie. It begins with politics and it ends with politics. It was in some sense a reverie about that way of thinking in American life, one that went back to 1915.” But it was also, he says, a reverie about the two decades just past, about Beatty’s own generation. “We were those old lefties that were narrating this movie,” he continues. “We, me, the people who were interested in politics. Reds was a death rattle.”

  AFTER LOSING Best Picture to Chariots of Fire, Beatty was burned out and exhausted. He talked openly about quitting pictures. “I think there was something in me that quit after Reds,” he says. If anything, his fascination with politics had been heightened by his immersion in Reds and the parlous times in which he found himself when he emerged from the Russian Revolution to contemplate the brave new right-wing world of Reagan’s America. Like a dog coming in out of the rain, Reagan tried to shake off the damp residue of defeat left by the Vietnam War by militarizing his foreign policy. He picked safe targets—bombed Libya, and overran Grenada. Domestically, he made a shambles of government, staffing agencies with corporate lobbyists from the very companies they were intended to regulate. “It was said that government doesn’t solve problems, government is the problem,” Beatty recalls, paraphrasing one of the president’s slogans. “So you wind up with no government. And so what happens? You’re governed by the rich, you’re governed by money, you’re governed by advertising.”

  Congenitally upbeat, Beatty barely paused to mourn Jimmy Carter, for whom he had no use, saying, “You can mark the end of the politics of the ’70s with the election of Carter. There’s nothing that can destroy the Democratic Party like a Democrat.” In fact, he regarded the electorate’s repudiation of Carter and romance with Reagan as an opportunity to revitalize the Democratic Party at a time when the old-guard New Deal, Great Society Democrats—think Ted Kennedy—were bloodied and bowed. Enter the New Democrats, the generation of younger politicians that included the likes of Bruce Babbitt, Dick Gephardt, Joe Biden Jr., and Chuck Robb, who would soon find happiness in the embrace of the Democratic Leadership Council, which would be founded by Al From and fellow travelers in 1985 in response to Reagan’s burial of Walter “Fritz” Mondale in the previous year’s presidential race. The DLC’s strategy—later implemented by Bill Clinton—was to co-opt the Republican program, that is, dump Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in favor of free market economics, deregulation, and small government.

  Prominent among these born-again Democrats was Beatty’s old friend Gary Hart, now a Colorado senator. Hart liked to say that the contest wasn’t between left and right, Democrats and Republicans, but between the past and the future, with himself, of course, incarnating the future, while he tarred Mondale with his old-fashioned Midwest and Eastern industrial base as a backward-looking “soot and smokestack” Democrat. Hart voters were the big chillers—baby boomer yuppies, the hind end of the Vietnam generation about to become dot-com millionaires, the “Atari Democrats” or “Quiche Corps” as his staff liked to call them with not a little contempt. Hart cast himself as a nonideological technocrat intent on steering the Democratic Party away from traditional “interest group” liberalism. He advocated creating jobs by growing the technology sector. That having been said, however, Hart had one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate.

  It was no secret that Hart had designs on the presidency, which made it almost inevitable that he would turn to Hollywood for cash. Reagan’s success had dispelled much of the stigma that clung to Tinseltown activism since the blacklist, and it seemed that what worked for Reagan might work for Hart as well. In no time at all, Hart became the darling of the Hollywood left, people like Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, Danny Goldberg, Lorne Michaels, to whom he seemed like a breath of fresh air compared to the stiff, standoffish Democrats they were used to. Hart was more than ready to return the favor. He “was excited by being with celebrities, that gave him a thrill, a kick, and he wanted to emulate their lifestyle as far as drinking and nightlife and women and all the rest,” said former Kennedy staffer Ted Sorensen. But it was, as Ron Brownstein calls, a “fatal attraction.”

  Political consultant Bill Bradley met Beatty for the first time in November 1982 at a planning meeting that preceded a Hart fund-raiser on the studio lot thrown by Fox owner Marvin Davis. Beatty headlined the $5,000-a-plate event, which raised $100,000 for his friend. Bradley started in politics in the late 1970s working with Hayden and Fonda’s Campaign for Economic Democracy. He would become Hart’s Northern California coordinator, as well as a close friend of the actor’s. He says, “Maybe if Reds had been a huge hit, which it was not, maybe if it had won Best Picture, Warren would have acted differently, but he was pooh-poohing movies: ‘I’ve done movies, this is more important, we can make history here.’”

  Remaining aloof from Hart’s network of entertainment industry supporters, Beatty operated behind the scenes. He monitored the campaign by phone. Said Hart press secretary Kathy Bushkin, “He was disruptive to my sleep. He was the kind of person who called you at three in the morning and just wanted to know what was going on.” He intervened directly only when he believed it couldn’t be helped. More a traditional Democrat than his friend, the star kept Hart from going too far down the neoliberal road. Beatty was the only person who could calm Hart down, focus him. He was often the last man to leave the room before a debate. Hart would take criticism from Beatty that he would not take from his staffers because he feared they might be trying to forward their own careers at the expense of his own. “Warren has that manner that makes you feel very confident about things,” says Bradley. “You can get off the phone with him and think, Well, if Warren believes that, then of course. He’s very good with politicians, and he’s very good with actresses, and there are similarities between the two.” But according to Brownstein, Hart believed that Beatty could never quite accept the fact that he wasn’t running for president himself. Still, Hart’s candidacy was the next best thing, maybe even better. Had Hart won
, Beatty would have been the power behind the throne, in the role he liked best: the “phantom.”

  Hart, then forty-five, announced in February of 1983. Like McGovern, he was an underdog from the outset, and initially stumbled badly. He made a poor showing in the straw polls that ranked the Democratic hopefuls, barely breaking 1 percent against a field that included heavy-hitters like Mondale, Ohio senator and former astronaut John Glenn, and California senator Alan Cranston. Too often Hart seemed like he was doing little more than channeling JFK. When he orated, he chopped the air with his forefinger like his sainted predecessor, while borrowing his rhetorical flourishes. But they served him poorly, calling attention instead to the dissimilarities between himself and Kennedy. Rather than inspiring, his speeches were soporific. Dishing out policy wonk rhetoric in a monotone, he sounded as if he were addressing the Council on Foreign Relations. He rarely smiled, and consequently came off as aloof and distant, John Kerry before John Kerry.

  Beatty urged Hart to rid himself of the inside-the-Beltway locutions. “If Gary was using language in a speech or a debate that was too lawyerlike or Washington-oriented, Warren could remind him that [that] couldn’t sell,” explained Bushkin. “He was trying to get Gary [centered] on… making his points in graphic, effective ways.”

  But more problematic than Hart’s style was his message, which was vague and unfocused. First he was the environmental candidate. Toward the end of the year, Hart’s advisers abruptly announced that Hart would be the candidate of women. What they meant was that he would promote women’s rights, but those who were close to the candidate snickered, because even in those days rumors of his infidelities were rife. When he was running the McGovern campaign in 1972, he had a life-sized cutout of Candice Bergen in his office, and he liked to play a game called, “Who’s Attractive?” “Certain campaigns have a buzz about them, a sexual charge,” explains Bradley. “They attract a lot of women who are very open to suggestion and often make the suggestion themselves. There’s a lot of availability.”