Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

  “No, there’s no point.”

  “C’mon. What’s the worst that could happen?” Hyser gave in. She thought, My therapist is so strong and powerful and smart, there’s no way Warren will be able to sway him. She recalls, “Within ten minutes Warren had completely taken over the session. My therapist was saying to me, ‘Why do you feel you have to leave?’

  “‘Are you fucking kidding me? I don’t get this. You wanted me to leave him!’

  “My therapist was totally in love with him.”

  Hyser continues, “There were times when I was just so frustrated, I’d sit with him for hours and hours, going, ‘What am I doing in this relationship, why am I here?’ It wasn’t that I thought he was fooling around or I caught him in lies. We were together all the time, so it would have been hard for him.” It was an accumulation of factors. “He couldn’t move or he couldn’t go out or he couldn’t or wouldn’t do something I’d asked him to do,” she explains. Hyser too thought he was depressed. “What else is it that makes somebody unable to leave the house? One reason it’s hard for him to start something is he knows how hard it is to finish. He could develop a movie for the rest of his life. With Dick Tracy, it was never right. It was during that period of time I understood that I had to get out of there.”

  Indeed, by New Year’s 1988, Hyser realized that she had to make a move. “We were supposed to spend it together, but I didn’t want to start a new year in a relationship that wasn’t going anywhere. Warren does manipulate, does create situations that are impossible for you. [Then] he’s the one who gets left. I called him and said, ‘I’m not going to do this. It’s time for this to end.’ I’m the one who said the words. But I would never say that I left him. It had been a long time coming, and we got there together.”

  Beatty’s serious lovers, the “heavyweights,” often discovered that it was easier to bring him into their lives than to get him out, and Hyser’s relationship dragged on until late July, when she finally moved out and into David Geffen’s guesthouse on Rising Glen. And even then it sputtered on. Nicholson became increasingly attentive. She accompanied him to his tennis lessons at Bob Evans’s house. “I’m guessing but I don’t think Jack was happy when Warren started going out with Michelle,” she says. “There are plenty of women out there in the world. For him to go after your former girlfriend? That may have created a little distance between them at that point. They’re competitive. I got the sense that it was a little hard for Warren when Jack and I got so close. After I moved out, he was a little jealous. It’s hard to trust anybody when you don’t trust yourself. But we were just friends.”

  Beatty remained close to Hyser for some time. “He’s a foul-weather friend,” she says, echoing a host of others. “I went through a tough time, serious female problems. He dropped everything, completely took over. He sent me to Johns Hopkins, set me up with one of the top doctors over there. We weren’t even together at that point. He’s incredible that way.”

  Looking back on the relationship, she says, “He gave me some sage advice in my life, about my career, and he was right about so many things. I didn’t have the ambition to really make it in this business. I would have learned those lessons much earlier in life if I really listened to him and didn’t treat him—especially at the end of our relationship—like a very controlling person. But I was just young and stubborn and I didn’t want some man telling me what I should or shouldn’t be doing.

  “Warren doesn’t know that I just started writing now. People say, ‘Why don’t you take your stuff to him, he’d be so proud of you.’ Part of the reason is that even if I were so lucky as to have him say, ‘I want to get involved with this,’ I don’t want Warren anywhere involved with that, because it would never get done. That to me is one of the saddest things about him.

  “The thing about him that I adore is that he never stops loving anybody. Warren is not a woman hater. I know that he’ll always love me. I know that he will always love Isabelle, he will always love Diane. I know I love him. I miss his friendship.”

  MONTHS BEFORE the Tracy draft was done, Beatty entrusted Goldman with the family jewels, that is, asked him to write the Howard Hughes script. He told the writer that he was contractually obligated to turn in a Hughes script to Warner Brothers by December 31, 1990. It made perfect sense. Having written not one but two Hughes scripts, Melvin and Howard, and one called Sonny for Universal, never produced, Goldman knew the territory better than anyone. In Goldman’s words, “I was the world’s greatest living expert on Howard Hughes.” Beatty must have had this in mind from the beginning. In fact, if he was the “master manipulator,” as Buck Henry et al. say he was, he likely hired Goldman because of Hughes, used Tracy as a trial run. But Goldman was sick of Hughes and didn’t want to write yet another script about him. Besides, he didn’t want to become Beatty’s in-house writer, as Towne had been. Beatty persisted, and as usual, he got his way.

  By this time, Beatty’s Hughes project was the stuff of myth, something he had been talking about since 1973. Says Goldman, “It was like his Birth of a Nation, this great thing that one day was going to come out.” Adds Bill Bradley, “I was under the impression it was going to be his crowning work. You look at Hughes, theoretically, that could be a movie that really explains power and money in America. And the attraction-repulsion of fame.”

  Beatty’s friends speculated about his fascination with Hughes, and it didn’t take Freud to notice the affinity between the two men. They were both tangled up in movies, and used Hollywood as a sexual sandbox. “Warren Beatty is Howard Hughes,” says Goldman. “He felt Hughes was a guy who mastered the three F’s—‘the filmmaking, the flying and the fucking,’ as Warren called it.”

  In his conversations with Goldman about Hughes, Beatty repeatedly mentioned that Hughes would never ejaculate inside a woman’s vagina, but only in her mouth. “He was terrified of insemination,” the actor explains. Goldman pondered the significance of this factoid, both for Hughes and to Beatty. He thought, That way he can’t have children, and disease is less likely. And if you enter a woman, you’re liable to end up in court with her.

  Both Beatty and Hughes were students of human nature, shrewd at getting others to do what they wanted. “Hughes would never answer the phone himself,” Goldman continues. “He always questioned his assistants about the timbre of the callers’ voices: ‘How did he sound when he said that?’ He was able to interpret every little nuance. Warren did the same thing. Once he said to me, ‘Let’s have dinner. I’ll call you as soon as’—he always had something else to do. I’d be waiting for him for nine fuckin’ hours. I’d fall asleep. The phone rang for our dinner rendezvous. I picked it up, acting hyper-alert, so he wouldn’t know I had been asleep. He said, ‘You remember where the restaurant is? Because you’re a little slow right now, you’ve been asleep.’”

  Since he had been hearing about Beatty’s Hughes project for so long, Goldman assumed there was something on paper, that Towne had written a script at one time, or May, or somebody. One day he inquired, “Okay, where’s the script? The famous script.” He recalls, “Warren made some excuse, like, ‘Oh, you don’t need to see that.’ I realized there was nothing, not a page.” He suspected there had never been, that the Hughes script was no more than a bogeyman Beatty had invented to scare off anyone who dared tread the sacred ground.

  Beatty made several suggestions. “Warren was in love with the Witnesses idea from Reds—‘it helps cover ground,’ he said—and asked me to use it,” the writer recalls. “It was like priming the motor. Because it had primed him for Reds. Knowing Warren, Reds might very well not have been made, it might have drifted away just like Hughes did, if he hadn’t had this stuff in the can.” Beatty also decided that he wanted to focus the script on the latter half of Hughes’s life.

  UNLIKE TRACY, where Beatty sat across the desk from him while he wrote, with the actor otherwise occupied, Goldman worked alone on Hughes. “It was a completely different deal,” he says. “I was off on my ow
n. He made no contribution at all, none whatsoever.” (Beatty disputes this, saying they worked on the script together in the mornings, and then he went off to work on preproduction of Tracy, “while Bo wrote up what we discussed in the afternoons.”) Goldman says he never wrote characters with Beatty in mind—neither Tracy nor Hughes—but the similarities he noted between his friend and Hughes were always in the back of his mind. In the script there’s a phrase Goldman repeatedly puts in Hughes’s mouth at the end scenes: “Fire him but keep him on the payroll.” He explains, “That was a Hughes watchword, how he kept people close—with money, even though he didn’t want to have anything to do with them. It’s the sense of disposable people, and that everybody has a price. Warren was like that too. He would use people for what they were worth and then somehow find a way to keep holding on to them through either his power or his money. It’s the rare Don Juan who stays in touch with ex-girlfriends and lovers—it was sometimes out of kindness, but with Warren so powerful at the time, they were always afraid to go against him. It’s like being a lover of the president. The whole vision I had of Hughes was of this lonely soul who had never gotten over the infantile fear of the chaos of the world. He’d conquered that chaos, but what had he won? At that time, that’s how I saw Warren.”

  Somewhere along the line, Beatty told Goldman that he wanted co-screenwriting credit on Tracy. Goldman’s heart sank. Beatty’s request, or demand, depending on how you want to look at it, presented a problem. The Writers Guild rules favor the original writers. Coming to the party late, Goldman had to show that he had written 50 percent of the script in order to dislodge Cash and Epps. A director who claimed a writing credit had to show he had written 67 percent of the script to dislodge the original writers. As the writing partner of the director, however, the 67 percent rule raised the bar for Goldman as well. He told Beatty, “You know, as a hyphenate, if you’re gonna try to take co-writing credit, because of the 67 percent rule, I’m not going to get any credit at all.” He adds, “It meant nothing to him.”

  How much did Beatty in fact contribute to the script? Goldman continues: “He never wrote anything. He was sitting across the table, pretending to be working. I’d show him the scene, and then he’d start marking it up. It was like doing a sitcom. He was like the show runner. He knows what the show is, and he’s responsible for it. I’m not saying I wrote the whole thing, but what I had originally in many cases probably was better. He’d fuck it up. It’s not that he’s bad. He’s not a writer. He just isn’t.”

  In any event, Goldman and Beatty eventually finished Tracy. The script is spare and funny, fairly crackling with Chandleresque repartee harking back to the great Bacall-Bogart noirs of the 1940s, The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not. Madonna got most of the best dialogue, glossy with double entendres. She vamps, “What I’m looking for is a driver, preferably one with some mileage.” When Tracy arrests her, she cracks suggestively, “Aren’t ya gonna frisk me?” And again, to Tracy: “I know how you feel. You don’t know whether you want to hit me or kiss me. I get a lot of that.”

  Disney green-lit the script. Beatty plunged into preproduction, while Goldman worked on Hughes.

  BEATTY WAS never long without female companionship, and Madonna was waiting in the wings. She was about Hyser’s age, thirty, while Beatty was fifty-one. According to Sandra Bernhard, “Madonna and I were in the back of a limo driving to some concert in L.A., and she said, ‘Sandy, did you fuck Warren Beatty?’ I said, ‘No.’ And then a month later she started dating him. I always thought, What if I had said yes, I’d fucked him, would that have meant she wouldn’t have wanted him? The deal would have been off? I guess she was just testing the waters.”

  Beatty began seeing Madonna in January 1990, shortly after Sean Penn famously tied her to a chair, which didn’t prevent the younger man from phoning her to point out that Beatty was “old enough to be your damn father.” According to a friend of his, Penn “would follow her at night and, always, they would end up at Warren’s.… He’d sit in front of Warren’s gate, waiting for her to leave. Often, she wouldn’t do so until the sun rose.”

  As Madonna reportedly recounted to a friend, Beatty called her from the car, said, “I’m half a mile from your house. Take off your panties.” A few minutes later, he called again: “I’m four blocks from your house. Take off your bra.” And again, when he pulled up outside her Malibu home: “Now I want you to go downstairs and unlock the door. Then I want you to lie on your bed and wait for me to come to you and make love to you like you’ve never been made love to before.” Apparently that wasn’t good enough, because she said she didn’t have an orgasm. She complained the sex was better with Penn, and wondered why she was with Beatty. But high maintenance at the best of times, she was in particular need of an island of calm. The actor supplied it. Moreover, her interest in him was piqued by rumors from the Inge-Williams days that he was bisexual.

  At that time, Madonna was racking up column inches by teasing the envelope of gender ambiguity with her friendship with Bernhard, who was a lesbian and proud of it. During a dinner with Beatty at the Sushi Cove (sushi was his food of choice), Madonna was offered a selection of vanilla or chocolate ice cream for dessert. She chose both, which got him thinking. He asked her, “You seem to like to try everything. Have you ever made it with a woman?”

  “Have you ever done it with a man?”

  “Do you want a woman?” he replied, ignoring her. “Because if you do, it will be my present to you. I’ll get you a woman… if I can watch.”

  “All this, just from ordering two kinds of ice cream?”

  Madonna called him “Old Man,” but grew to appreciate his attentions in bed. “He knows a woman’s body better than most women,” she said. “He can pinpoint the day of your cycle. He has no restrictions. He says to me, ‘If you misbehave, I’ll just have to spank you.’ I love that. Everything to him is living out his sexual fantasies.” In The Advocate, when asked about the size of his member, she said, it is “a perfectly wonderful size.” Madonna did complain that he didn’t take enough time with her. Once he took her, creatively enough, on the piano in his living room, after dousing her with bottled water. But she said it was over so quickly it reminded her of the Minute Waltz.

  The pair fought a lot, often in public, which she seemed to enjoy. The fights would go on for days, over several meals. One reportedly started at Club Nouveau, when she invited him to work out with her, after observing that he might well benefit from liposuction. He declined, suggesting that she keep her comments about his body to herself. She said, “You older guys are too sensitive. I’m just being helpful. If you want to be fat and flabby, Warren, fine with me.” He was not amused. The next day the spat continued at another trendy restaurant. To the amusement of the other patrons, she was overheard to say, “Keep your stupid remarks to yourself.”

  “Oh, Christ, grow up.”

  “No. You grow up.” She pulled a Snickers bar out of her bag and threw it at him. And the beat went on.

  To cynics, it seemed like a marriage of convenience, a calculated bid on the part of each to capture a new audience—a demographic romance. “I sense that my sister isn’t truly in love with him,” recalls Madonna’s brother, Christopher Ciccone. “She like[d] him, admire[d] him, and they ha[d] fun together, but love [didn’t] come into the equation.” He rarely saw them hold hands, cuddle, or kiss, even so much as touch. Adds Bernhard, who hung out with both of them, “Their relationship was very odd. One-on-one, Madonna is not the kind of person who goes super-deep or really opens up. Madonna likes hot young guys, and I’m not sure that was the reason they were together. I didn’t see a lot of intimacy going on. If there was sex, it was probably sex, and boom, over. She was always complaining that Warren was a pain in the ass. It was never, ‘I really love Warren Beatty’ or even, ‘Shaddup Warren, shaddup, you’re an asshole.’ She didn’t really take him down, but I thought she was pretty dismissive. It was just more the way she is in general, which is the real tough ch
ick, she’s gonna be the toughest guy in the room.” Instead of a mutual exchange of bodily fluids, “it could have been a mutual exchange of status,” she continues. “It upped her ante as an actress, and it youthified, if that’s a word, Warren, made him feel young and hip.”

  On the other hand, actor Marshall Bell, who is married to Milena Canonero and became quite friendly with Beatty, says, “I was there for the beginning of that. There was a lot of spark. They were having fun together. It’s too easy to say that everything he does is calculated. Everything he does is not calculated. Warren is a very giving person. He’s genuinely sentimental.”

  Jim Toback went to one of her concerts with him, in the Meadowlands, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. “When we walked into the arena, and people saw him, they started screaming, War-ren, War-ren!,” he recalls. “It was not because he was Warren Beatty, but because he was Mr. Madonna. He was sort of touched by the idea of her being alone on the stage with thirty thousand people. He was impressed at her ability to take charge.”

  Indeed, with regard to Madonna, Beatty adopted an attitude of bemused detachment, as if he were baby-sitting a troublesome child. “I couldn’t understand the relationship,” said one Disney executive. “I figured he could rationalize it as the ultimate sacrifice for the picture, that you have to sleep with her to keep her in line. ’Cause he thought there was a lot at stake if she went off. I knew the minute the picture opened, it would be over.”

  Three months into 1989, March 30, was Beatty’s fifty-second birthday. Madonna threw him a surprise party at her home. Goldman was there, Al Pacino, and a handful of close friends. Easter was just around the corner, and unsuspecting, Beatty walked in with a chocolate bunny for her. She gave him a large portrait of a World War I flying ace in the cockpit of his plane, done in Art Deco style, saying, “Don’t you think it’s like you?” She saw him as an adventurer, a loner, a Charles Lindbergh, or, closer to home, a Howard Hughes. Which isn’t far, after all, from how he saw himself. Dustin Hoffman walked into the party with his wife, Lisa. He noticed, as he recalls, “this guy standing with his back to the wall, next to this modern fireplace, just kind’a watching. No one was within twenty feet of him. It was Gary Hart! Here was a guy who could have been president of the United States, and it was like—scary. In this town, when your movie’s a flop, people think they’re gonna catch it. If they get too close, it’s gonna happen to them.”