Despite his extraordinary difficulties with May, Beatty never complained about her—except once. He and Hoffman were in the desert, along with 150 odd extras. He took his co-star aside and started venting. “Warren was going off about how painful it was to make this movie with Elaine,” Hoffman recalls. “He said, ‘I was going to give this gift to Elaine, and it turned out to be the opposite. I tried this and I tried that… ’ He was so passionate, but in the middle of it—it’s like he had eyes in the back of his head—because there was some girl walking by, maybe fifty yards away, in a jallaba. He turned and froze, just watched her. I mean, this was while he was producing, and everything was going in the toilet. But he couldn’t help it. Finally, he turned back, said, ‘Where was I?’
“‘Warren lemme ask you something. Here everything is going wrong on this movie that you planned out to be a perfect experience for her, you got her this person and that person, you got her the budget she wanted, blah, blah, and here’s a girl that you can’t even see a quarter of her face because of the jallaba—what is that about?’
“‘I don’t know.’
“‘Lemme ask you something else.’ He’s much taller than me, so I was always looking up, I said, ‘Theoretically, is there any woman on the planet that you would not fuck? If you had the chance?’
“‘That’s an interesting question: Is there any woman on the planet’—he looked up at the sky—‘that I wouldn’t fuck… Any… woman at all?’ He repeated the question. ’Cause he took it very seriously. This problem with the production was now on the back burner, and it was like he was on Charlie Rose.
“‘Yes, any woman.’
“‘That I wouldn’t… fuck. No, there isn’t.’
“‘Theoretically, you would fuck any and every woman…’
“‘Yes.’
“‘You’re serious.”
“‘Yes.’
“‘Why?’
“‘Why?’ He was thinking. He was searching for the right words. ‘Because… you never know.’ I thought that was the most romantic thing I’d ever heard a man say, because he was talking about spirits uniting. He was not talking about the cover of the book. ‘Because you never know.’ And then it was, ‘Where was I? I just don’t know what to do about Elaine… ’ But this took precedence.”
Hoffman was right. Beatty was searching for perfection. It was the same passion that fueled his prodigious appetite for takes: “… because you never know.” Unlike Jim Toback, he was not a gambler; he was not going to risk everything on one throw of the dice. Were he to gamble, he’d be a card counter. Beatty was an empiricist. There was safety—or at least opportunity—in numbers.
ISHTAR WAS originally scheduled for about ten weeks in Morocco, but the studio was so concerned about the runaway production that it was willing to trade economy for control. “They really hate it when you’re too far away from them,” Sylbert explains. “Warren has got to be held responsible to some degree for the scheduling. The glacial part of Ishtar is probably as much his responsibility as hers.” The cast and crew arrived back in New York just before Christmas, on December 23, 1985.
Fay Vincent, later the commissioner of baseball, was then executive vice president of Coca-Cola and chairman of Columbia Pictures. Vincent recalled, “Halfway through the movie, Warren came to me and said, ‘We have a big problem. Actually, you have a big problem. Elaine can’t direct.’
“‘You’re the producer. Fire her.’
“‘I can’t. I’m a liberal Democrat, a progressive on women’s issues. I can’t fire her. But she can’t direct at all.’
“‘Well, then, I’ll fire her.’
“‘Then Dustin and I will walk off the picture.’”
Vincent said that Beatty proposed that they shoot dual versions of every scene—his and May’s. When they got into the editing room, where Beatty could exercise more control, he would simply consign May’s footage to the cutting room floor. Vincent, his eye as always on the bottom line, replied, “So we’re paying for two movies and only getting one?” Beatty nodded.
Sets for the unfinished sequences in Morocco were built at Astoria Studios in Queens, New York, where Woody Allen was shooting Radio Days. Production resumed in the third week of January, after a one-month break. Production manager Mac Brown had not been in Morocco and had never been on a Beatty set. MacLeod warned him, in his words, that when the star was “acting, I had to be very careful when I talked to him about problems, because acting was hard for him, he took it very seriously, and he got tense and nervous, even though he never wanted to show it.” Brown quickly formed the same opinion of May as everyone else. He realized that he had his hands full. He recalls, “It was the big movie stars who did what they wanted and Elaine, who was just nutty.”
But out of the blazing sun in the safety of darkness—the interiors of Manhattan clubs—May did seem energized while the others were just drained. “By the time they got to New York, they just wanted it done,” Brown continues. “Storaro had given into the insanity of it. It was easier to say, ‘We’ll do it your way, Elaine.’ Warren would say, ‘Oh, she’s a fuckin’ pain in the ass, she’s just impossible, what the hell is she going to do next? If she wasn’t so goddamned brilliant, I’d… ’”
By February 28, May was directing Beatty and Hoffman on the premises of the defunct, dungeonlike Upper West Side club Trax, renamed the Song Mart, where Rogers and Clarke, were premiering their first song together on an open mike night. May was nervous. She was trying to give up smoking (for the nth time), and constantly pacing the floor, munching on rice cakes, or ferociously chewing gum. “Do what you do in a place like this,” she instructed the audience of extras, “which is to kill yourself trying to get a waitress’s attention.”
With their spiked do’s, Day-Glo mohawks, and studs-’n’-leather accessories, the extras looked like refugees from the set of The Road Warrior. An effects man torched a spectracookie, which is used to make smoke, with a Bic lighter, and indeed, smoke filled the room. Spectracookie smoke is vile; the Screen Actors Guild contract called for a bonus of $14 a day for extras when it is used in a scene. “Dustin and Warren are on their way,” announced a PA importantly, while three cameras were rolled into position. Beatty glided onto the set so smoothly he looked like he was on Rollerblades. He paused briefly to confer a few friendly kisses on available female lips. After fourteen takes and at least twice as many rehearsals, May wanted more. She was still refusing to turn the camera off, routinely shooting thirty thousand feet a day. (At that time, a director would shoot three thousand to five thousand feet a day on an average picture.) Although Beatty was preternaturally patient with May, he was all too familiar with her buttons, and sometimes he’d play head games with her. For example, it was sometimes difficult just getting her to say the words that made it possible for the cameras to roll. In a scene where he’s asleep, and wakes up to see Adjani for the first time, believing her to be a boy, he needed May to cue him to open his eyes. He asked, “So what are you going to say?” She replied, “I’ll say, ‘Wake up.’” Instead, on the first take, she said, “Awake!” Beatty knew perfectly well that that was his cue, but he refused to open his eyes. She said it again: “Awake!”
“You said you were going to say, ‘Wake up.’ We just had that conversation. Thirty seconds ago. And now you say ‘Awake’?”
The production moved into an Upper East Side club renamed the Ad Lib Club, aka the Comic Strip. The shooting continued to be exhausting—twelve-hour days. It would be hard to mistake a spectracookie for a real cookie—they’re metallic-looking, flat, with regular edges, like a silver dollar, charcoal-colored—but May found a way. “She picked up one of the smoke cookies and ate it,” Sylbert recalls. “I was right there. Nobody in their right mind would put one in their mouth.”
May shot for just under two and a half months in New York and wrapped on March 30, 1986, which also happened to be Beatty’s forty-ninth birthday. The production was originally scheduled for ninety-four days, but it lasted ab
out five months. In April, Ishtar claimed another casualty. If Beatty couldn’t bring himself to fire May, Fay Vincent had few compunctions about firing Guy McElwaine. He replaced him with David Puttnam, who had endeared himself to Coca-Cola with his highly publicized crusade against the financial sins of the industry. As the L.A. Times put it, he “oozed integrity.” But placing Puttnam at the head of a studio was like making Jerry Falwell the mayor of San Francisco.
Puttnam was a magnet for the press, which, in the go-go business climate of those years, was increasingly eager to heroize executives and cover the business end of the movies. He had a history with Hoffman as checkered, if not more so, as his with Beatty. The two had had a bitter falling out over Agatha (1979). Neither Hoffman nor Puttnam had forgotten. Hoffman recalls. “After he went to Columbia, I looked at the front page of the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times, and he was quoted as saying, “‘Dustin Hoffman is the most malevolent person I’ve ever worked with.’ Being the intellectual that I am I had to look the word up.”
Needless to say, neither of Ishtar’s two stars welcomed Puttnam’s arrival. Says DeLauné Michel, who would shortly resume her relationship with Beatty, “Puttnam was on his most hated list, and he went into long rants about him.” Beatty told Columbia, “I don’t want to deal with him. He’s going to torpedo my picture.” In an attempt to head off controversy before it started, the studio announced that because of his prior history with the two stars, Puttnam would recuse himself from personal involvement with Ishtar. But that just made things worse. He gave the impression that he was hands off Ishtar because it was radioactive, which just angered the stars more.
The editing began in earnest in the spring of 1986, at 1619 Broadway, with Steve Rotter (The Right Stuff), Bill Reynolds (The Godfather), and Richie Cirincione (Reds) wading through at least 2.6 million feet of film, 108 hours or four and a half days’ worth, according to The Hollywood Reporter. (At that time, an average director shot 200,000 feet for a 10,000 foot release print for a shooting ratio of film shot to film used of 20 to 1. May arrived at a shooting ratio of 2600 to 1.)
The strains among the principals, already battered and bruised, continued into post. May, who was supposed to direct the actors when they looped their dialogue, often didn’t show up at all, leaving Beatty or Rotter to do the honors, especially with Adjani. “If your director’s not there at a looping session, that’s horrible,” says a source. Whatever the reason, it was interpreted as a snub. Rotter muttered, “God, is this gonna be frosty.” Since Adjani was disguised as a boy, she was always being told to drop the register of her voice to make the ruse convincing, especially in a scene where she’s being tackled. Beatty said, “Lower your voice, like you’re being squeezed,” and proceeded to demonstrate. She snapped, “I’ve been squeezed enough on this film already so remove your hands now!” Adds Schopper, “Towards the end of the shooting, they weren’t talking to each other. Isabelle was tired of Warren and his shenanigans. You felt her attitude was, I’m not putting up with this stuff anymore. It was the same as it was with Diane at the end of Reds.”
Beatty was staying at the Ritz-Carlton. Across the hall from his suite was the lair of notorious, abrasive former cokehead Julia You’ll-Never-Eat-Lunch-in-This-Town-Again Phillips, in New York producing her comeback indie, The Beat. She would run into him here and there, most often at Columbus, the hot Hollywood hangout on the Upper West Side, where she saw him with young Molly Ringwald and wondered, “How does this guy avoid jail?” One day she spotted him at the Jockey Club discussing PR for Ishtar with publicist Lois Smith. As she told it, he asked, “‘So tell me, Julia, don’t you ever have an inclination to knock on my door late at night?’
“‘Not in the least. Not ever.’
“‘Well, what would you do if I knocked on your door?’
“‘I’d send you away… ’ Lois asks how Kate is.
“‘Oh, you have a daughter?’
“‘Yes, she’s just about 14…’
“‘Well, what about you and me and your daughter… ’”
DURING THE Morocco shoot, Beatty walked into Sylbert’s trailer one day and said, “You gotta do me a favor.”
“Yeah?”
“Will you do a picture for me? A small one. It’s not a big picture.”
“Sure, what is it?”
“The Pick-up Artist.”
The story focused on a man named Jack Jericho, who hits on every girl he runs across, until he falls in love with Randy Jensen, a museum tour guide whose boozy father is up to his neck in debt to the mob. Jericho becomes her devoted slave. This was a story line that obviously had some appeal to Beatty, as the future would prove. The film stars Robert Downey Jr. and Molly Ringwald. Just eighteen, with curly red hair and a fresh, insouciant look, Ringwald was the flavor of the moment, having starred in two John Hughes teen hits, Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club. She was shooting another that he’d scripted, Pretty in Pink. According to Toback, Ringwald was not his first choice. She had come across the script among a pile on the coffee table in Beatty’s living room. She wanted to do it, and so it was. Rumor had it that Ringwald had told some PAs on The Pick-up Artist, “You think he wasn’t fucking me?” But, says Mac Brown, who was the unit production manager on the picture, “If they were having an affair during Pick-up Artist, it never showed.”
MacLeod was to produce, his first film out from under Beatty’s shadow, while the star was undecided about whether he would take a producer’s credit as well. According to Toback, MacLeod was a terrific producer. “In terms of preparing the movie, he was almost fanatic about detail,” he recalls. “At the end of every day he would say, ‘What else? What haven’t we done? What haven’t we covered? What are we missing?’” In addition to Sylbert and Brown, Beatty brought on Gordon Willis, who had shot Parallax View, as the DP.
The day before production was slated to begin, a bombshell exploded. MacLeod was arrested in front of the Fox production office on 57th Street for soliciting three runaway boys in Times Square. Beatty called Toback, said, “I had some bad news about MacLeod.”
“What?”
“The worst.”
MacLeod “was like a brother” to Beatty, says Toback. “Warren was devastated.” He added, “MacLeod basically ran his life for 20 years. The only person who knew exactly what was going on with Beatty was him.” Losing his cousin left him with “a sense of tremendous frustration. Beatty does not like failure. Not that it’s his failure. It’s just that the whole thing was a disaster.”
Beatty circled the wagons. He phoned Brown, told him, “You’re gonna get called by the press, ’cause he was arrested right in front of the office. [You should say,] ‘It would be inappropriate to comment on a matter that was still before the courts.’” According to Sylbert, “We all got called to send letters to the judge. Character things.” Television news crews captured Beatty and Hoffman visiting MacLeod in jail.
Of course, the questions of the moment were what did Beatty know and when did he know it. According to Sylbert, “Morocco was where all the boys are. That’s what he loved about it. Look at movie sets. Somebody always has a dame on their arm. Never with David. That was very unusual. But no one ever gave it a second thought. He always kept his room locked in Morocco. There was always a sign on the door, ‘Do Not Disturb.’ David fooled us all. Including Warren.”
Toback agrees. “We were in constant contact,” he says. “David never once admitted to me that any of it was true. On the surface, it appears to have been, and he never said it wasn’t, he just never talked about it. He was immensely secretive. He could keep things to himself in a way that very few people can—like Warren. And I’m sure he didn’t tell Warren.”
But some people had noticed MacLeod’s fondness for young boys at least as far back as Reds. Little David, probably in his early twenties by 1986, MacLeod’s favorite then, was still with him on Ishtar. Says Toback, “There was no ostentatious, or even vaguely conspicuous display of anything” between the two Davids,
and Little David always denied that there was anything of a physical nature between them.
“I spent two years with this guy, and I never put it together,” recalls Dick Sylbert. “Warren had him for four years. He was closest to him, in terms of the secrets; he was family. He must have known. Warren will never speak his name.”
Says Sherri Taffel, who was friendly with both Davids, “Warren really loved David MacLeod. It’s really hard to see people you love clearly. Something did feel not right, but I never let myself go there because I liked them so much. You protect people you like. I think Warren did know. But even if he did know, it was tragic. David was a good guy, with an illness, I don’t know what else to call it. His life was undone by it and yet he continued [to do it]. If you know something like that about somebody you love? I don’t know what you do.”
Regardless of what Toback and Paul Sylbert say, it seems virtually impossible that MacLeod, who was Beatty’s shadow, lived in his pants, managed to fool his cousin, a man who noticed everything. Perhaps Beatty just looked the other way for the aforesaid reasons, or because his cousin was a sexual outlaw, a species with which he was all too familiar, and not unsympathetic. If Julia Phillips is to be believed, not to mention Cher, Beatty had had his own encounters with teenagers, albeit of the opposite sex.
In any event, MacLeod was out of the picture, pending the resolution of his case. According to Brown, who was unit production manager, Beatty, who had his hands full, what with the postproduction of Ishtar, was uneasy in the producer’s role and “he distanced himself from [The Pick-up Artist] completely. When David got arrested, he made it very clear, ‘I am not the producer.’
“‘Who’s gonna produce the movie?’
“‘Tell them you are.’”
On the other hand, Toback says, “Warren was basically in effect the unnamed producer. He was on the set every day, and intimately involved.” So intimately that he directed Ringwald while Toback directed Robert Downey.
Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America Page 46