Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

  BEATTY AND Hoffman were an odd couple, occupying parallel universes. Where Beatty was tall, powerfully built and WASPy, Hoffman was short and Jewish with, he was fond of saying, “acne so bad my face looked like a rifle range.” But they had things in common besides arriving in New York around the same time—Beatty from Virginia and Hoffman from L.A., where he was raised. They were the same age (Hoffman was also born in 1937), both played the piano (at one point Hoffman wanted to be a singer), and each dropped out of college after a year to pursue acting. Both were nominated for Best Actor Oscars in 1967, for Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, respectively. They were nominated for Best Actor in succession in 1981 and 1982, for Reds and Tootsie. And neither had made a picture since, although Hoffman had enjoyed success on Broadway playing Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman.

  Hoffman first met Beatty in an ice cream parlor in Beverly Hills shortly after The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde had made them both supernovas in the celebrity firmament. Beatty was with Julie Christie. “I was sort of self-conscious about being a new movie star, and he looked very comfortable with the role,” Hoffman remembers. “He was wearing sunglasses, sitting on a bench. He made some kind of sexual double entendre, something about sixty-nine flavors, and I just kind’a looked at him. He said, ‘You don’t like that flavor, huh?’ I told him later I thought he was hostile.”

  Although Hoffman couldn’t know it, this was vintage Beatty, catching the contradiction in the man. By exploiting his boyishness, Beatty would make a career playing naïfs, innocents, all variations on small-town Bud in Splendor in the Grass. For this version of himself, ice cream was his best prop; he loved to eat it, and wherever ice cream could be found, so could he, licking a cone like Archie Andrews. But the double entendre hinted at another Beatty, and suggested a coarseness that qualified the innocence, both complemented and contradicted it. The two together comprised the whole package. Forget the “ghost in the machine”; it was the satyr in the creamery, cavorting among the dairy maids.

  The next time Hoffman ran into Beatty was at Aware Inn on Sunset. Hoffman was eating a salad at an outside table when Beatty sat down. Hoffman recalls. “He kind’a leaned forward, saying, ‘You and I should work together. I just want you to know, if you come upon anything—I thought he was gonna say, ‘I’ll be in it with you.’ But he didn’t, he said, ‘I’ll direct it.’ Then he left. He hadn’t done any directing then, and I said to whoever I was with, ‘Can you believe that fucking guy? Like he’s telling me something I want to hear? The conceit! Oh yeah, like, I’m going to go to Warren Beatty? He’s my first choice to direct?’ And then he turned out to be a brilliant director. We’re friends now and I can’t get him to direct anything. I always say, ‘You should be directing, Warren, there’s nobody better than you.’ He always answers, ‘No.’ I say, ‘Why?’ And he says, ‘I gotta be in it, I gotta star in it.’ I say, ‘Why?’ He says, ‘Because I can’t make enough money just directing.’”

  Beatty gave Hoffman May’s script, now entitled Ishtar. “When I read it, I had misgivings about it,” he continues. “I turned it down.” Beatty persisted, requested a meeting. Hoffman recalls, “It was a hotel room in New York, and he had a toaster oven, and he was toasting some kind of German pumpernickel bread. I said, ‘What’re you doing?’

  “‘Are you allergic to wheat?’

  “‘I don’t know…’

  “‘If you get tired, you may be allergic to wheat.’ He started in by being a Jewish mother.” Indeed, as was his custom, Beatty wooed Hoffman, deployed his considerable powers of seduction. One day, he dropped in on him and his wife, Lisa, at their apartment. “He said to my daughter, who was two years old—she’d never met him before—‘C’mere, gimme a kiss.’ He was sitting on an ottoman. She walked up to him, and put her arms around him, and kissed him on the lips, and didn’t stop. And it went on and on and on. It was an astounding moment. She had never done something like that before. Even he was a little taken aback. There was something about Warren—he gives off something.”

  In those days, Hoffman rarely made a creative decision without consulting his guru, playwright Murray Schisgal. Excited, Schisgal told him, “You gotta meet with Elaine. Elaine’s a great director.” The two of them got together with May and Beatty. Both Hoffman and Schisgal still felt that the action plot—the intrigue, the chases, the explosions—overwhelmed the smaller, more delicate story at the heart of the drama. “We felt that the movie should not have left New York,” Hoffman recalls. “That whole Hope and Crosby thing in Morocco, was [a distraction]. Just stay with these guys who think they’re Simon and Garfunkel, and play that out. They disagreed.” Hoffman was also uncomfortable with the idea that “I was the guy who gets all the women, while Warren had to pretend that he couldn’t get girls. It was a conceit that did not ultimately work. And you didn’t need it. But Warren deferred, deferred, deferred to Elaine.”

  Hoffman could see that May was proprietary and inflexible, foibles with which he was all too familiar. “I couldn’t get any movement on the things I didn’t think worked,” he continues. “Murray said to me, ‘They’re not going to change anything.’ I replied, ‘That’s my feeling. They as much as said it.’” May just wanted to shoot her script. But Beatty took Hoffman aside and told him, “You saw those movies that Elaine did. You know she’s never had a good producer? You know that they never surrounded her with the right people? I’ve got Fellini’s guy, Giuseppe Rotunno as the DP, I’ve got Tony Powell, the costume designer, he won an Oscar, and I’m going to be there, and I’m going to make sure that she has the room to do her best work.” Hoffman continues, “He was saying, ‘Don’t worry about the script, go with her talent, go with us’—he wasn’t wrong, you do go with the talent, and you do go with the synergy of what’s gonna take place. What he didn’t predict—what no one predicted—was that he and Elaine were going to clash. And Elaine was gonna clash with Vittorio Storaro,” who would be hired to replace Rotunno.

  Like Beatty, Hoffman was far more inclined to say no than yes. But that meant there were long stretches where he didn’t work, at least in movies. He thought to himself, God, I can’t wait another three years before I make a movie, I’m getting too old. Either I say no, like I always do, or I decide to work and just be a color on her palette. As he and Schisgal were walking out, Schisgal turned to his friend and asked, “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m probably gonna take it.”

  “Why?”

  “Partly as a favor to Elaine, and also because Warren is so persuasive. I’ve had good success with Tootsie, with Salesman, I deserve a flop!” He explains, “Because my resistance was so fundamental, in terms of keeping it in New York, that once they disagreed with that—it was, let ’em have their vision and let’s hope for the best. I’m just going where they want to take this.”

  Beatty and Hoffman got about $5.5 million each for acting in the picture. Beatty got an additional $500,000 for producing, and May $1 million for her original script, plus directing, which adds up to a good chunk, $12.5 million above the line before a single frame of film went through the gate. In addition, Beatty and Hoffman were each rumored to be getting 5 percent of first-dollar gross.

  Nailing down the budget is more difficult. There were several. According to Beatty, the original below-the-line budget was a spare $26 million. The Los Angeles Times reported that according to Columbia, Ishtar “could perhaps be made for $34 million.” With above-the-line and p&a added on, the total price tag could well have been at least $65 million, which meant that the picture would have to gross well over $130 million for the studio to see any profit.

  There was nothing unusual about the size of Beatty’s and Hoffman’s salaries, approximately equivalent to what Tom Cruise or Leonardo DiCaprio would get in today’s dollars. At the time, they were the two brightest stars in Hollywood, and as McElwaine pointed out, at that point Beatty had never stumbled on a picture that he produced. “I was always aware of the fact that our salaries were hefty salaries
,” said Hoffman. “I knew that could not help us—it could only hurt us. I remember saying, ‘Why take all that money?’” The three principals offered to defer their salaries, but the studio declined. (According to Fields, Columbia had a deal with HBO that covered a chunk of the budget. The more it paid out, the more it got back.) What was unusual was putting two such highly paid actors in the same picture. And what was even more unusual, although Beatty denies it, was that he, Hoffman, and May apparently had the equivalent of final cut! McElwaine was blithely sailing his ship into a perfect storm.

  THE FACT that Beatty had no use for Jimmy Carter and was personally friendly with Reagan may have taken some of the sting out of the new right-wing hegemony, but he nevertheless threw himself into Hart’s campaign, albeit still operating in the shadows.

  When the primary campaign finally got going, Hart began racking up impressive numbers. On February 20, 1984, he came in a strong second to Mondale in the Iowa caucus, with 16 percent of the votes. Eight days later, in a stunning upset, he bested Mondale by ten points in New Hampshire. The Colorado senator went on to trounce Mondale in Maine and Vermont. According to a Gallup poll completed in the third week of March, Hart led Reagan by 52 percent to 43 percent.

  But the relationship between Hart and Caddell started to unravel, beginning with the candidate’s loss to Mondale in Illinois on March 20. Hart blamed Caddell; Caddell blamed Hart. “Warren knew there was real trouble,” says Caddell. “That’s when he told me that he was there to put Gary and I back together again.” Caddell told Beatty, “You gotta be kidding! Warren, even you cannot do this.”

  “Oh yes I can. You have to come with me to New York, and I’m going to intercede for you with Gary.”

  Caddell continues, “They considered him God. Gary was now only speaking to Warren. They were having dinner every night. It was very strange.”

  Beatty and Caddell stayed at the Ritz-Carlton in New York for two weeks. Every night Beatty came down to Caddell’s suite, and the two men talked into the wee hours about Caddell’s relationship to Hart. “Warren was trying to make me understand what kind of pressure Gary was under,” Caddell recalls. “Which I sort of understood, but I can’t say I was that sympathetic to. The first thing that Warren always wants to do is understand [the issues]. He puts you right to the fire. He would grill me upside and down for hours about my strategy, why it was gonna work, why this, why that, every painful inch of it. He did what he should do—he went in there with the idea of, ‘Prove it!’ Which I could do. But it was still a problem convincing Gary. Gary would immediately contradict me, and I would think, I don’t wanna be here! I was there because Warren made me be there. It was very frustrating.”

  Rumors about Hart’s extracurricular activities, hitherto confined to his staff, had begun to circulate beyond it. Debra Winger had a “provocative encounter” with Hart during the 1984 campaign that made its way into the pages of People magazine, which described the actress as disappearing into Hart’s room one night at 10:00 P.M. and emerging the next morning at 3:45. It was also widely known that he had an affair with at least one woman who worked in the campaign. As reported in Newsweek, “An airport-limousine driver, noticing the Hart button on the lapel of a fund-raiser in from California, said, ‘Oh, I know Senator Hart. I took him to his girlfriend’s house last night.’ To convince doubters, the chauffeur had kept the woman’s name and address.”

  In those days, which seem oh so long ago, the press considered the sexual peccadilloes of politicians off limits. “We were still in that post-JFK thing, where you had to be dead before this stuff would come out,” adviser Bill Bradley explains. “Still, we were concerned that might change, because there were rumblings. We were aware that there was a potential critical mass of stories about Gary with women who were not his wife. People in the media warned us. Gary started getting questions about it. And little things would start finding their way into the tail end of the story, like, ‘Gary Hart, who was named by Playgirl as one of the sexiest men in America’… ‘Friends with Warren Beatty’… It was, ‘Oh, this is not good.’” Added John McEvoy, a key adviser in the 1984 campaign, “He [was] always in jeopardy of having the sex issue raised if he [couldn’t] keep his pants on.”

  Recalls Caddell, “[I had] my problems with the weirdos, the Indian dancer who I used to call Princess Winter-Spring-Summer-Fall.” Bradley was detailed to “manage” her, told, “You’re in charge of this woman,” a Native American named Marilyn Young-bird who, according to Gail Sheehy, writing in Vanity Fair, styled herself Hart’s soul-mate. Says Bradley, “Gary bonded with her in a tent in Colorado. She was a spiritual healer. When Sheehy got wind that Gary had a friendship with this woman, she tracked her down, and got her to say all these things about Gary having to do with rocks and trees. Stupid things. And when she mentioned her to Gary, his face lit up.” Hart called her his “spiritual adviser.” Described as a “radiant divorcee,” she told Hart that the “Great Spirit” had chosen him to “save nature from destruction.” She suggested that he “hug a tree,” but worse, during one of several separations from his wife, Lee, she persuaded him to attend a “sunrise ceremony,” which she described as “so romantic”: “They brushed the front and back of our bodies with eagle feathers. It was sensual, oh yes.”

  Still, there were people in Hart’s camp who were leery of the candidate’s friendship with Beatty; they thought it a mistake for him to stay at the actor’s Mulholland Drive home when he went to L.A., drive his Mercedes, and so on. Caddell dismissed the concern about Beatty as a nonissue: “It was bullshit,” he says. “Gary didn’t give a shit what people said. And I knew Warren was important to him.” But it wouldn’t go away, and it colored everything, even the theme music for the campaign. Initially, it was Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again.” But that made some of Hart’s staffers uneasy. They said, “You know, people might say that maybe he likes to be out on the road for other reasons, so maybe you should use a different song.” It was replaced by the theme of The Magnificent Seven, one of Hart’s favorite movies. That made some sense; the picture is about helping people help themselves. It had the added virtue of being a western, underlining the candidate’s regional appeal. But after he broke out, his advisers started to worry that it was too regional, and they adopted the theme song from Chariots of Fire, which was played over and over at Hart’s rallies. It is not hard to imagine what went through Beatty’s mind when he heard it, and indeed it wasn’t long before Chariots of Fire was gone, and The Magnificent Seven was back.

  In any event, Beatty succeeded in convincing Caddell to remain with the Hart campaign. After Mondale beat him in Illinois, the New York primary became very important. Mondale had countered Hart’s “new ideas” mantra with an all too effective riposte of his own: “Where’s the beef?” a slogan borrowed from a popular Wendy’s hamburger commercial. The clear implication was that Hart was all style, no substance.

  Mondale beat Hart again, in New York, another stunning defeat. Again, Caddell blamed Hart. Hart blamed Caddell. Hart called a meeting of his principal advisers, saying he wanted a consensus on the direction of the campaign by the next morning. Says Caddell, “I didn’t want to be there, I was so furious. I didn’t give a shit. I was out the door. Warren was the person who ramrodded this meeting. I didn’t say a word. So Warren took me outside, and said, ‘You’re not saying anything.’

  “‘I have nothing to say.’

  “Warren was annoyed as hell. He knew I was sitting back and letting the thing fall apart, and he kicked my ass to go in and say what I believed. So I somehow managed to swing everyone around, which was the one thing Gary never expected. Warren was doing his best to bring it together, and that night I think he thought he had. Gary said he would do whatever we came up with, and of course he didn’t.” To no one’s surprise, Caddell and Hart quarreled again. Says Bradley, “Even Warren couldn’t pull it off.” Caddell walked out, taking a final shot at Beatty: “It’s your campaign, you take care of it.”

 
Says Bradley, “Warren, to his discredit, by constantly encouraging and patching up the Hart-Caddell relationship, contributed to some of the craziness of the campaign. Caddell was enabled or empowered by people like Warren to continue this disruptive behavior, because he was a super-hot political consultant. Everyone agreed that Caddell had gotten out of control. He had that ability to create havoc in the campaign.”

  In the aftermath of the disastrous New York primary on through the Pennsylvania primary, Beatty was the strong presence in the Hart campaign, according to Brownstein. He understood the Hart effort was in shambles. But after Beatty recruited John McEvoy, a seasoned politico, to run Hart’s campaign, he evaporated, reverted to speaking to Hart on the phone. McEvoy brought order to the campaign, but it was too late. The Democratic convention in San Francisco nominated Mondale in mid-July. Caddell believed that Hart was not temperamentally suited to run for president. “Gary was a lot better behind than as a front-runner. Every time we were ahead, he would do something to destroy himself. He had a death wish. Warren thought it could have been strategic, that Gary thought it was better not to win. He didn’t really want to beat Mondale because he never thought he could beat Reagan. He preferred to be a strong second, and the odds-on nominee in ’88. Warren would voice those speculations—without ever articulating them quite that way, or attributing them to Gary.”