Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

  When Hart’s campaign hoisted the “candidate of women” flag, Beatty’s attitude was, “You’re floundering—‘the candidate of women’—give me a break! We need strategic direction. You’ve got to bring Pat back in.” Bradley continues, “Pat Caddell and Gary had always had a prickly relationship. Gary thought that Pat was a difficult guy. Pat thought he was bigger than Gary, even though Gary was a senator running for president. A fair amount of what Warren did in the Hart campaign was patch up things between them.”

  Beatty brokered a fragile truce between the two men, perhaps facilitated by the fact that Mondale had been quoted in the Boston Globe calling Caddell “crazy,” which infuriated the pollster. Caddell became Hart’s chief strategist and “message doctor,” as Newsweek called him.

  BEATTY WAS looking for a project to do with Elaine May, who would write and direct while he would produce. “He owed her for Reds,” says Peter Feibleman. “And for Heaven Can Wait. He did it out of gratitude.” Beatty had not been able to shake the idea for a film about a director who goes to Latin America to make a picture about a revolution, during which a revolution actually breaks out. The more he thought about it, the more it appealed to him. He thought maybe this was the picture for May. “I wanted the director to be played by Orson Welles,” he recalls. Beatty knew Welles the way he knew everyone. He occasionally used to join him and filmmaker Henry Jaglom at their weekly lunches at Ma Maison on Melrose. Like others of his generation, he shared Jaglom’s veneration for the orotund auteur of Citizen Kane.

  But by the early 1980s, Welles was virtually unemployable. “Orson couldn’t get a movie done,” Jaglom remembers. “So I said, ‘Orson, there’s nothing to be done except for you to write a new script. Tell me some stories.’

  “‘I can’t write anymore, I’m no longer capable of doing it.’

  “‘That’s bullshit. Just tell me the stuff.’

  “‘I can’t, I know what I can do, I know what I can’t do.’

  “After a series of lunches. he told me one story about this old Roosevelt-type guy and his protégé, a young senator, a Kennedyesque character. Three weeks later, I got called at four in the morning. ‘I don’t know what the fuck you’re making me do this for, I can’t sleep, but I’ve written three pages.’

  “‘Read them to me.’

  “‘They’re terrible.’

  “‘Read them to me anyway.’

  “Of course they were great. I got him to write this entire script called The Big Brass Ring, about America at the end of the century, the way Kane was America at the beginning of the century.” Jaglom was thrilled. “I couldn’t fuckin’ believe it—I’ve got the bookend to Citizen Kane!” He continues, “But I couldn’t get anyone to do it. Then Arnon Milchan agreed to $8 million if I got one of eight stars. We opened a big bottle of Cristal, because Orson always thought that actors would never betray him. One by one these actors came up with reasons—including my two friends, Jack and Warren. But Warren behaved better than anybody. He was very honorable, and Orson never blamed him. He had just come off of Reds, and he said to me, ‘Oh, God, tell Orson it’s like coming out of a whorehouse into the sunshine after being up all night fucking, I’m exhausted, and there’s Marilyn Monroe with her arms flung out, ready to embrace me, I look at her and I say, “I would love to, but I can’t,” and that’s the way I feel about this movie. I would love to do it, but I can’t.’”

  In April 1983, looking for places where revolutions were in fact breaking out, Beatty, along with May and Feibleman, took off to Central America, where they had many strange and wonderful adventures that don’t concern us here. But, Beatty continues, “Elaine wasn’t interested in Central America, she was interested in the Middle East. Besides, she doesn’t like to be given an idea and then go do it. She decided, I’m going to do my own thing.”

  That fall Beatty was honored by the Toronto International Film Festival, then trying to put itself on the map by showcasing Hollywood stars. David MacLeod, a Toronto native, was known to the organizers of the festival as “their man in Hollywood,” friend to Beatty, Nicholson, and Christie, all of whom he promised to deliver to the festival. But it was easier said than done. The festival organizers were not novices at managing celebrities; they had already staged tributes for Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, and Robert Duvall. But, as Brian D. Johnson wrote in his history of the event, “In Warren Beatty, the festival met its match. After the tributes to Scorsese and Duvall, honoring Beatty in a manner that would make him feel comfortable required an entirely different order of diplomacy. Scorsese was a great director, Duvall was a great actor and Beatty was a bit of both. But he had something that was beyond their reach: the glamour and power of Hollywood royalty.” Said theater manager John Allen, “There was a feeling that we were doing God’s work here. There was the Normandy invasion, and then there was putting on the tribute.”

  MacLeod, who micromanaged the Beatty event, had plenty of friends in Toronto. “We got high together,” says the festival’s David Gilmour. “We did Mandrax and went skydiving—he and one of his little Indian boys, Ronnie, a real pretty-boy Indian.… [Mandrax is] a major tranquillizer with a kick to it. David was a serious pill boy.”

  As is customary on these occasions, the festival prepared a montage of clips drawn from Beatty’s films, all of which had to be approved by the star. “They wanted to control the images,” said Bill House, who produced the tribute. “They made us cut a scene from Splendor in the Grass, the scene near the end of the movie with Natalie Wood against the lockers, the prelude to a kiss. They didn’t want that because of whatever notions there were about Beatty and women.

  “We had plainclothes cops all through the venue. I couldn’t quite figure out why that had to be. I was thinking, this is Toronto, what are you guys talking about? Then when I met him, there was this sense of fear, as if there were people who hated him because he slept with a lot of women, because his politics were left, because he was so good-looking—whatever. It was like you were guarding against some kind of attack or assassination. And I don’t think I’m being dramatic.”

  The afternoon of the tribute, they did a run-through at the University Theatre. Preoccupied with how he was going to extract himself from the premises at the end of the ceremony, Beatty was leaving nothing to chance and bombarded theater manager Allen with questions about the exit route. “We’ll take you down these stairs, and then we can go down the alley to your limousine in the back,” said Allen.

  “How far is it?” Beatty asked.

  “I don’t know. About 30 or 40 feet.”

  “Let’s find out.” Beatty hopped off the stage, and placing one foot before the other, paced off the distance to his limo. Returning, he informed Allen, “It’s 47 of my feet. But I think my foot is not quite a foot. Let’s call it 40 feet. How long do you think that will take me?”

  “Will you be with other people?”

  “Let’s do it two ways, one with me walking by myself, and one with other people.” He retraced his steps while Allen timed him. Then he did it again accompanied by several other people, determining that indeed it took more time.

  Beatty was a reluctant participant. He sat in the audience next to MacLeod and Diane Keaton. Even at that late hour, the organizers of the event weren’t sure if Beatty intended to go up on stage and deliver a speech. Much to their relief, he did. Johnson thought, This must be the Big Time. Finally, the festival had made it. We could all relax, because this was as good as it gets. Warren and Jack—Hollywood’s Mick and Keith—made the dream come true.

  Before he left Toronto, Beatty paused for a few moments to make out with Sandra Bernhard in front of the elevator bank of their hotel. “I didn’t know if I should have taken that as an insult or a compliment—but it was fun kissing him,” she says. “He used to call me late at night, and be kind of sexy, say, ‘It’s Uncle Warren. What are you doing? What are you wearing right now? What’s going on?’

  “‘Well, I’m laying in bed, I’m wearing my flann
el pajamas, nothing too sexy. Kind’a cozy.’ It was like he was going through his phone book and said, ‘I’ll give Sandy Bernhard a call.’ It was just a shtick. That’s as far as it ever went. But I have a lot of affection for him. He’s an amazing man.”

  Diverting as the Toronto tribute may have been, there was still the issue of May’s picture. One night, Beatty was having dinner in New York with her and attorney Bert Fields, who represented both of them. During a lively discussion about who would play opposite Beatty, Dustin Hoffman’s name came up. Beatty and Hoffman didn’t really know each other, despite arriving in New York around the same time, but Fields represented Hoffman as well, and had brought May into Tootsie three years earlier to replace writer Larry Gelbart. Hoffman had loved her work. At the end of the dinner, Beatty and Fields walked May home along Central Park West. The story goes that they were having a good laugh at the idea of May directing the two stars. How better to bust a studio?

  May began making up scenes. The idea was to riff on the string of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby “Road” movies that were big in the 1940s. Beatty and Hoffman would play two schlemiels, a pair of hopelessly bad, sub–Simon and Garfunkels a decade and a half late, staggering from one tacky venue to another. Unable to make a cent in the U.S., the two get a gig in Morocco, where they stumble into the crossfire between left-wing guerrillas and the CIA. May had the bright idea of scrambling the casting, which struck her as funny: Hoffman would play the Crosby role, the suave ladies’ man, while Beatty would assay Hope’s, the klutz.

  Beatty took the story idea to his old friend Guy McElwaine, then chairman of Columbia Pictures, which had been purchased by Coca-Cola in 1982. The star’s high opinion of May was evident in the marching orders he gave his attorney: “Bert, anything she wants. Period. That’s my negotiating position.” It was submitted as a Beatty-May collaboration, with the possibility of Hoffman coming aboard. But McElwaine was wary. May had not directed a movie since Mikey and Nicky, in 1973, and her reputation preceded her, as did Beatty’s and Hoffman’s, perfectionists all, for whom nothing was ever good enough. In Beatty, Hoffman, and May, the project featured three people who loved to argue. That may have been just the thing to stave off Alzheimer’s by burnishing the gray matter, but it wasn’t good for the budget. With the exception of Stanley Kubrick, May was the only director who shot as much film as Beatty. Columbia’s “nightmare was having a trio of Hollywood’s most uncompromising talents working on the same project somewhere in the Sahara Desert,” says a source close to the film, who adds that the studio wanted the desert sequences shot in California or Arizona, not Morocco, where they finally ended up. (Coca-Cola went along with Morocco, because the company had frozen assets there that could only be spent within the country.) “Months before we started shooting, people were willing to lay down substantial amounts of money that there would never be a first day of shooting, let alone a last day. Columbia’s other nightmare, however, was passing on a project that included Warren, Dustin, and Elaine, having it go to Fox or Universal, and watching it be a huge hit.”

  “You have to be very careful if you’re going to say no to something of Warren’s, because his record as a producer,” McElwaine explained at the time, “is 1,000 percent in terms of just recouping on a per-picture basis, cash.” The executive knew full well that Shampoo had brought Columbia $24 million in film rentals and four Oscar nominations, while Heaven Can Wait had earned nearly $50 million in rentals for Paramount, not to mention nine Oscar nominations, and Reds had scored 12 nominations. He also knew that Hoffman had made two of Columbia’s biggest hits, Kramer vs. Kramer in 1979, and Tootsie in 1982. Nor was the studio afraid to spend money, witness its then recent comedies: Ghostbusters at $33 million and Tootsie at $35 million, both of which made their money back and more—much more. Said McElwaine, “I spent a lot of time with Elaine, talking about this project. And she assured me she was not going to misbehave.” But this was like asking Amy Winehouse to go into rehab. Still, on the basis of Beatty’s persuasiveness and May’s assurances, McElwaine committed without a script.

  But Beatty did not intend this to be his next picture. As always, he had other irons in the fire, and he couldn’t decide which to do next. As he puts it, “What happens sometimes when you have too many choices, you can’t make any.” He continues, “Kazan asked me if I would star in a remake of A Face in the Crowd. I told him I didn’t think that he should be remaking his own movies. But if he remade it, that I would do it.”

  At the same time, Beatty announced that he would appear in Towne’s Tequila Sunrise. Towne was also working on a script called Mermaid, in which Beatty was to star, with Arthur Penn directing. But Beatty and Towne were so dilatory, it was rendered redundant by Splash. Paul Mazursky offered him the part of the filthy, unshaven, homeless bum in Down and Out in Beverly Hills, which would become a hit for Disney in 1986. “I originally went to Jack Nicholson,” he recalls. “Jack wanted to play the part. But there was one little problem: ‘I owe a favor to Bobby. Bobby Evans. Gotta do Two Jakes.’

  “‘I don’t want to wait.’”

  So Mazursky went to the next guy, Beatty, who was also interested. Mazursky knew that Beatty always said he was interested, but he waited by the phone anyway. Having been down this road before, the director gave himself a deadline: three days. Three days came and went, and no call. He gave him another three days. That brought him into the weekend, a few more days. Still no call. Another four days passed. Finally the phone rang: “What’s your address,” a soft voice whispered. Shortly thereafter, the doorbell rang. Mazursky’s two teenage girls were there with their fourteen-year-old friends. They were extremely striking, and the director well knew that teenage girls “made Warren tremble.” They shrieked with delight when Mazursky told them who was at the door. Somewhere in the back of his mind he was uncomfortably aware that he was pimping his own girls in exchange for a commitment to the picture. Idly examining a framed photograph of Mazursky with his pal Federico Fellini, Beatty smiled and murmured, “You want Jack. I know you do.”

  “He’s perfect for the part. But he can’t do it. He has to do The Two Jakes first. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t.”

  “Yeah, but you want Jack.”

  “Just think of a dirty, filthy Warren Beatty, lying in the gutter, who gets all cleaned up and gives it to Bette Midler. It can’t miss! It cannot miss!”

  Beatty said, “I’ll call you,” and left.

  After waiting a month or so for Beatty’s call, Mazursky went to Nick Nolte. “I got him,” he says, “and it turned out great.”

  In addition to sniffing the picks of the current litter, Beatty had his own pet projects lined up. He had promised Jim Toback that if he did not produce, he would at least launch his next film, The Pick-up Artist. He was also noodling a remake of An Affair to Remember. The press reported that that Beatty’s next project would be Howard Hughes. Then there was Bugsy, the true-life tale of Benjamin Siegel, the gangster who charmed Hollywood and built the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. Beatty had hired Toback, who seemed to be ideally suited to the subject, to write the script. He paid him an advance of $150,000, against $350,000, or $500,000 if the movie went into production.

  But first on the runway waiting for takeoff was Dick Tracy. Beatty had grown up on Chester Gould’s comic strip, which had first appeared in the Detroit Mirror in 1931. He explained that his father had read it to him, and then, at the age of four, he learned to read it himself by parsing his way through the speech balloons. From the outset, it was distinguished by Gould’s idiosyncratic style, infected by Weegee and Samuel Fuller. Colored by tabloid yellow journalism, it was characterized by its brutal primitivism and populated by sideshow grotesques with names like Flattop, Itchy, the Blank, the Brow, Pruneface, Rodent, and Shoulders.

  Beatty had been noodling the idea of making a Tracy movie for many years. But he was beaten to the punch by producer Art Linson (The Untouchables) and director Floyd Mutrux (American Hot Wax), who had acquired the rights from t
he Tribune Syndicate in 1977. They brought it to Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg at Paramount. In the days before Star Trek and Superman, there were virtually no tentpoles, and the two men pitched it as the studio’s answer to James Bond, “a series—a Dick Tracy every summer,” recalls Mutrux. According to him, Eisner, virtually jumping up and down, got so excited he said, “Shut the door. Close the deal right now. It’s an annuity!”

  The project went through many permutations, and by 1985, Linson and Mutrux were out, and Beatty took control of the project. Mutrux was bitter. “Warren has a reputation for using people,” he says. “‘Yes’s’ turned into ‘maybes’ which turned into phone calls going unreturned. Warren kills projects. Movies die at his feet. We’re talking an epidemic jerk-off here—you’re playing with other people’s dreams. Warren is the most flagrant violator. How come I decided on him? I guess my brain was damaged.”

  Meanwhile, in late 1984, early 1985, Beatty put in a series of 3:00 A.M. calls to G. Mac Brown, a young unit production manager, telling him, “I’m tired of Hollywood, I want to work here in New York, maybe you can help.” He said he was planning to do a slew of movies there, and that he was looking for a production person. Brown was excited at the prospect of working with Beatty; he had married Sherri Taffel, the postproduction coordinator on Reds, who revered the star. “The people I knew loved him, adored him, thought he was a genius,” Brown says. He met Beatty at his suite in the Ritz-Carlton. It was four o’clock in the afternoon; he was wearing a bathrobe as if he had just gotten up. “For the first thirty minutes he didn’t say a word,” Brown recalls. “He just wouldn’t talk. A sentence would be three words. He was very mysterious, so I never knew what movies he was talking about.” Finally, the star said, “Thanks for coming,” and dismissed him. Then MacLeod called him, saying, “You’ve got the job.” Brown found production offices at 110 West 57th Street, the Directors Guild building. He had the impression he was prepping The Pick-up Artist, but he wasn’t sure. “It was the most secretive group of people I’ve ever been around,” he recalls. “Doors were always shut and locked, filing cabinets locked, everything kind of in code. I liked MacLeod. He was clever, and always very fair with me. But you could work with him day in and day out and have conversation after conversation, and he would never give you any information.” Abruptly, The Pick-up Artist turned into Ishtar, then known as “Two Star Movie,” that is, untitled, with the two stars being Beatty and Hoffman. Three months after McElwaine gave Beatty the green light, May came up with a script entitled, Blind Camel. The picture was slated for a Thanksgiving 1986 release.