It was true. Instead of Heaven Can Wait, The Gary Hart Story had turned out to be Ishtar.
PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY had begun on February 27 on the Universal lot, with scenes between Beatty and Sean Young. In the script, Tess and Tracy more or less adopt the “Kid,” an orphan, which meant that the actress who played Tess had at least to pretend to have some feeling for children. According to Goldman, after reading with one of the boys trying out for the part, she turned to Beatty and said, “Oh, this kid can’t do anything.” He thought to himself, This is just so rude and so ugly. This woman is never going to understand this part. She hates children. Warren knew he was in for big trouble. Indeed, the dailies were terrible. Both actors were wooden. Beatty knew he needed to fire her, but he procrastinated, worried that he’d ruin her career if he dropped her. Replacing Young also meant a delay, and the overages were coming out of his pocket. A few weeks into production, he called Goldman, asked, “What do you think of Sean Young?”
“I never liked her. I think she’s a creepy creature.”
“I’m thinking of firing her.”
“Good.”
“What do you think of the dailies?”
“They’re terrible. But dailies are like first drafts.”
“I’ll tell you who I really ought to fire.”
“Who’s that?”
“Myself!”
Beatty did fire Young. “It was the only time I ever heard Warren say, ‘I fucked up,’” says Goldman. He replaced her with Glenne Headly. Young stated publicly that he let her go because she wouldn’t sleep with him.
Beatty’s close-ups were confined to a window of time during which he knew he looked best, usually between 10:00 AM and 2:00. As Marty Katz, VP of production puts it, “Warren was a genius about himself.”
Reds and Ishtar had earned Beatty a reputation for extravagance, and he was determined to rein in costs. “Warren had to limit his normal number of takes,” says Dick Sylbert. “He knew that this picture had to be done under certain financial constraints.” Still, he reportedly sent Madonna flowers every day and had a masseuse on call for her. And where he needed to take time, he took time, so much so that Madonna and others voiced complaints that had a familiar ring. “Warren pisses me off by taking such a long time to make up his mind,” she said in 1990. “He does lots of takes, and once he’s got what’s in the script, he says, ‘Okay, let’s fuck it up. Do anything you want.’ He likes to push you, to exhaust everything in your head that you want to do.” Which is the reason his method, however frustrating and exhausting for the actors, paid off, as it did on previous pictures. Mandy Patinkin says that Beatty “is a guy who spent his life learning everybody’s tricks in making accidents happen. We were shooting a scene where Big Boy’s banging on me, and Breathless has to defend me. There was no reason to think we hadn’t gotten it. Everyone was tired, and I couldn’t tell why we were doing it over again. Finally, Al started improvising. He really laced into Madonna, and all of a sudden she just broke down. It was unlike all the other takes. Warren said, ‘Cut’ and gave them hugs. That wouldn’t have happened unless he gave it the time to happen.”
“I was pissed,” says Madonna, referring to the same scene. “Al kept slapping me in the stomach, being really rude. He made me cry, and Warren never really stopped him.”
In May, Beatty was shooting Madonna performing onstage at the Club Ritz, singing a torch song called “I Always Get My Man.” Her every move was followed by three cameras tracking her like bloodhounds. She was wearing a black gown that clung to her every curve like Saran Wrap. The decor was whorehouse deco: a glossy blood-red vinyl padded door, red rug, and milky-white ceiling. The lights bounced off her blond ringlets, blistering her lipstick. Behind her, Patinkin, his hair slicked back and playing a character called 88 Keys, was accompanying her on the piano. Beatty, wearing jeans and a black T-shirt and swaying in time to the music, watched her on the video monitor. He cried, “Action!” but a second later yelled, “Cut!”
“Shit, I turned on the wrong line,” said Madonna.
“Madonna, will you kiss that shoulder? Ready? Let’s roll it.” They did it again. Madonna ducked her head into her shoulder, caressed it with her cheek.
“Cut! I want to delay that move, where she kisses her shoulder. I want an intermediate move.” Madonna raised her eyebrows and gave him a fuck-you look, but did it again anyway, following his instructions.
“War-ren, I’m losing my hard-on,” she shrieked impatiently. “I’m here Warren. I’m here now.”
“I know, and we’re the better for it.”
“I’m going to start singing now.”
“Sing.” She swiveled on one heel, her back to the camera now, as she stroked her hips with her hands like a lover.
“Cut. Great. Print that.” The crew started to disperse. “Don’t break up. I want to do one more.”
“Why?” She was getting upset, didn’t want to do any more takes. Beatty took her off to one side, started to put his arm around her. She spit, “Don’t touch me!”
Sighing, Beatty said, “Okay. We got it.”
Dick Tracy wrapped on June 28.
Interviewed a short time later, Madonna had a lot of complaints. “Warren wanted to pour me into my dresses. He insisted I get fatter. I gained ten pounds. We were at Western Costume, and he’d say, ‘Tighter, tighter, cut it down lower.’ I felt like a mannequin, a slab of beef. He would walk around me like a vulture, making me feel like the ugliest thing in the world. I was treated that way on the set—the lust factor.”
Beatty’s friends still failed to fathom the relationship. One day, he was driving up Coldwater Canyon with Mike Medavoy, who started ragging on him about her, saying, “Ya know, you and Madonna is the worst matchup I can think of. Why don’t you just get serious with somebody?” Beatty began to rail against marriage, the boredom, waking up to the same face every morning, thinking, Oh, it’s you again! Missing the ineffable pleasure of falling in love, depriving yourself of the ultimate narcissistic delight: unfolding your petals in the warmth of a new admiring gaze. And then there was the sex, the delight of doing all those kinky things with casual partners that were impossible to do with your wife, the mother of your children. Finally, Beatty gave him his standard reply, the one he always gave when the subject came up: “Do you know anybody who’s married that’s really happy? Who is going to be married forever?” Medavoy thought about everybody he knew, himself included. He was stumped.
Madonna didn’t trust him, was convinced he was cheating on her, but had nothing to back it up. Indeed, it was true. Beatty had resumed his relationship with DeLauné Michel, now in her early twenties, after a break, during which she had moved from New York to L.A. When she called him, he said, without missing a beat, “Get over here.” The platonic affair quickly became a thing of the past. He began to have sex with her again. He explained why he had stopped: “You were such a scared little bunny. Big eyes caught in the headlights,” he said. “I couldn’t. You were so innocent. That was rare. I knew you weren’t like all the others.” Indeed, she had, in other words, seemed like a daughter to him.
Michel started going up to the home at night. No matter how still the air in the flats of Beverly Hills, a breeze, fragrant with the astringent scent of eucalyptus, rippled through the trees around his house. When she knocked on the big wooden door, he was there immediately, ushering her in. William, the German shepherd, was invariably at his side. He would sniff her, then lose interest, lie down and go to sleep. The TV was always on in the kitchen with the news. She noticed that he had thoughtfully put a bidet in the bathroom.
“Warren was just very generous, always thinking about the other person,” she recalls. “That’s why he’s just a really great lover. He lets you come first, many times before he comes. If every man did that, the world would be a much happier place. But they don’t.” There were things he wanted her to do with which she was uncomfortable, still deep down a young Catholic girl from the South. She refused to do anal
sex. When she demurred, he asked her, “‘So do you think I’m a sleazebag?’ The word was shocking, such a horrible word. I said, ‘No, not at all.’ I think that part of him felt that way about himself, and he thought that I now viewed him that way. He also needed me to see that—You think you love me, let me show you how disgusting I am, and then you won’t. But then of course I still did.”
Sometimes Madonna would call while she was in bed with him. His half of the conversation consisted of, “Okay, okay, okay,” punctuated by “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.” It seemed to Michel that he was constantly shoring her up. Madonna rarely spent the night with him. He would call Michel on his way to see her, and say, “‘What are you doing later? You want me to pick a fight with her so I can leave?’ And that’s what he would do.”
With sex came circumspection. He no longer left messages on her answering machine. She imagined that he was afraid of being blackmailed. He just grunted or made a huffing sound, enough for her to know it was him. And every once in a while she was reminded of her second-class status, like the time she asked to stay the whole night, and he refused to let her, explaining, “I don’t want anyone to think I’ve gotten married,” as if, she thought, there were paparazzi camped out around his home. She realized that only the “girlfriend” spent the night.
Meanwhile, his relationship with Madonna was spiraling downward. He had accommodated her party habit when he first took up with her, but it was growing tedious. As Hyser said, he would have been happier at home watching CNN. One night, in the spring, she dragged him to Catch One, a black gay and lesbian disco on Pico near Crenshaw in South Central L.A., replete with a drag queen room. Looking uncomfortable in a three-piece Versace suit to her hoodie and shorts, Beatty as usual refused to dance, declining her invitation. Making herself heard over the music, she shouted, “Hey, Pussy Man, come on out here.”
“I can’t even breathe, let alone dance,” he replied, giving himself a shot of nasal spray.
“Oh my God. Quit your whining, will you? I shoulda’ come here with Rob Lowe.”
Cinematographer Nicola Pecorini, who happened to be there, recalls, Madonna was doing her faux lesbian business, dancing with Sandra Bernhard. “I’d never seen Warren like that, sitting there, this gray man in the corner,” he recalls. “He just could not keep up with Madonna and whatever games she was playing.”
Says Bernhard, “We would taunt him, saying things to make him feel uncomfortable. In a loving way. He was a perfect target, because he played the befuddled old man with her: ‘Wha?’ ‘Huh?’ ‘What’s all this craziness?’ The whole relationship was a performance.”
Beatty was by no means blind to the obvious. One day he was in the car with Mike Nichols on his way up to his house. They were talking about Madonna, or Cher. Beatty said, “Women with one name, they’re all pretty much alike.”
“Are you nuts? What are you saying?”
“Well, think about it, it’s the ultimate patricide.”
Nichols thought, “Oh my God, he meant something. He can do that, startle you with a real insight and a deep observation, arrived at apparently as casually as he arrives at everything. I’m sure it wasn’t that casual, but the process is hidden.”
Beatty, a man who was accustomed to being worshipped by women, to being completely in control, was on dangerous ground with Madonna. Why he sat still for this kind of treatment remains a mystery. Chances are, he was taking his own advice. He would tell director Glenn Gordon Caron a few years later, “Never, ever fuck your leading lady. And if you do, don’t stop until the picture’s finished.” He grumbled to his friends that he was too old for this. She was too volatile, too combative, too unpredictable. Nevertheless, it was reported that he bought her a six-carat diamond and sapphire ring, for which he paid $30,000, and in the middle of May asked her to marry him. Or, asked her to agree to marry him at some unspecified time in the future. She agreed to do so, after she was free of Penn.
The proposal was also reported by Madonna’s brother. “One morning, when we [were] in the kitchen having coffee, she [told] me Warren has asked her to marry him.” It certainly appears that Madonna believed it to be true, and who knows what darkness lurks in the minds of men.
Goldman’s relationship with Beatty remained the same—“I always say about Warren, I love him and I hate him”—and just when the writer would reach his breaking point, Beatty would do something that moved him deeply. He invited Goldman to the wrap party at a big catering hall on Wilshire Boulevard. “Warren was standing around looking lonely,” says the writer. “He’s not a guy who’s gonna dance.” Suddenly, Beatty turned to him, gave him a hug, said, “You got me through it, and I want you to know that.” Says Goldman now, “He would do things like that. It wasn’t artificial. He could be very warm. It was touching.”
Goldman handed in the Hughes script in the early summer of 1989, a few weeks after Tracy wrapped. The script was long, about 150 pages, but that didn’t bother Beatty, who was used to lengthy scripts, and told him, “This is really good.” He was so happy with it that during a scoring session at MGM, the actor asked him to write Bugsy. After six years, Toback still hadn’t turned in a script. But Goldman declined. “All I knew was that I wanted to get away from him,” he recalls. “There was no way I was going to go through this experience all over again.”
Beatty had lined up Stephen Sondheim to write the score to Tracy. The writer continues, “That was the perfect thing, that he’d corraled Sondheim, who was the flavor of the century on Broadway and who doesn’t do movie scores. I know this is homophobic, but he could get homosexuals to do what he wanted because he was so seductive.”
It was during a scoring session that Beatty may or may not have made a strange call to Goldman’s wife, Mab. “It was the most peculiar call I ever had,” she remembers. “It was as though he were drunk or overdosed on something. He got on the phone and pretended to be on drugs and said the kinds of things that you could get away with saying when you were on drugs. He said that he wanted to be embraced or held by someone with wonderfully big breasts. I said, ‘I don’t have wonderfully big breasts. What you need to find is a nursing mother. They’ve really got big boobs.’ I don’t know why he did that, because I’m totally—I’m older than he is, I’m not a beautiful thing, but it was a sexual call. He said, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ I said, ‘Warren, just call Jack. Jack knows what to do when people have too much.’ He said, ‘Uhh, I don’t have his number.’ I said, ‘Well, if you want, I’ll call you right back, I’ll give you the number.’ Then he got off the phone.
“I spoke to him about it later, and he just denied it. I know that it was he, I’d bet my life on it. Nobody had the phone number except for our children and Warren. He’d called hundreds of times over that year, there’s no way you can mistake his voice. His patterns, and everything about the way he speaks are distinctive. He has that kind of slightly halting way. It’s as though he’s censoring himself almost with every syllable. He’s not spontaneous, he’s careful. He’s like a panther, a predator.” Later, Goldman, who was at the scoring session with Beatty, told her, “He was just having fun. He was bored.”
One day, Goldman got a call from Jeff Berg, who told him that somehow Warners had obtained the Hughes script. “The ax had fallen on Warren,” recalls Goldman. According to him, Beatty had been having unaccustomed trouble with Terry Semel, half of the new team running Warners. Semel seemed to be one of the rare executives who was immune to Beatty’s charm. The star complained, “This guy doesn’t return my calls.” Explains Goldman, “Warren was really bewildered by that. Because people at one time in the ’70s would pray for a call from Warren Beatty.” The star told Goldman that “the emanations from Warners were making him feel ‘rubbery.’”
Then Goldman got another call from Berg telling him to report to work for Steven Spielberg in New York, who was now directing Hughes. Goldman was dumbfounded. How could such a thing happen? He told Berg, “I couldn’t do that to Warren. He’s going to go nuts i
f I go work with Spielberg.”
“You have to.”
“Whaddya mean I have to?”
“You’re not under contract to Warren, you’re under contract to Warners. You’ve got to work with whatever director they tell you to work with. Otherwise they’ll sue the pants off you.”
“Oh.” Goldman called Beatty, said, “I’m going to New York.”
“That’s good. What are you gonna do there?”
“I’m working with Spielberg.”
“Terrific. On what?”
“On Hughes.”
“You can’t be serious.”
According to Goldman, Beatty “went absolutely fucking crazy, ballistic—of course, he had a right to.” He felt that Goldman had betrayed him and hung up on him.
“I believe at this juncture Warren knew he was in difficulty with Warners over Hughes, because he had brazenly put Tracy first. He wasn’t ready to start Hughes.” Goldman speculates, “When Semel realized that Dick Tracy was green-lighted, they finally threw up their hands. Warren would not be honoring his contract. They said, ‘You’re out,’ and took it away from him.”
Meanwhile, Spielberg had somehow gotten a look at Goldman’s script. According to Goldman, Beatty had never liked Spielberg. “Long before this happened, when his name would come up, he’d say something like, ‘They may call me the Pro, but he’s really the Pro. He plays this nerdy kid with the Super 8 camera, but he’s the most vicious infighter in the business.”
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