Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

  As hard as they tried to keep their relationship under wraps, there are few secrets on a movie set. The Teamsters, along with Hair and Makeup, are always the first to know. “The Teamsters told us, the first night they were together,” says Mark Johnson. “If you have a trailer, even on a studio lot, the driver assigned to it can’t leave until whoever’s trailer it is leaves. So some driver told the transportation coordinator that when Warren and Annette were going over lines, they were there for a long, long time, and the rumor came back the next day that something significant had happened. What neither Barry nor I knew was that Annette was pregnant.” No one else knew either. Says Albert Wolsky, “I didn’t know, and I made a terrible gaffe. The very last scene she does, she was in a very unforgiving dress because it was all bias. I said something about, ‘You see a little bulge in her stomach?’ to the girl who was dressing her. Annette overheard, and she said, ‘We’ll have to live with that.’”

  Beatty and Bening announced the news to the world in a press release. But before they did so, they called their respective parents. Beatty had brought his mother, Kathlyn, who had suffered several small strokes, to Los Angeles the year before. “She was really in decline,” he says. “So I said to her, ‘Mother, Annette and I are going to have a baby.’ She was in and out of compos-mentis-dom, but she said, ‘Oh, that’s wonderful.’ I said, ‘And I think it’s probably better that you don’t tell anybody because we haven’t told anyone.’ But, of course, I figured she would not know it in another five minutes. About a week after that, I talked to the lady who was taking care of her, and I said, ‘How’s my mother today?’

  “‘Well, she’s not in very good shape.’

  “‘Why?’

  “‘Well, she thinks you’re having a baby.’”

  On July 16, 1991, they announced the news to the world. The cynics’ view, of course, was that having kids would keep Bening busy, in the nursery and off the screen. Says Dick Sylbert, “He had no intention of living out A Star Is Born.” Indeed, Bening dropped out of Batman Returns.

  Two months later, in September, Toback found himself at the Toronto Film Festival, where he ran into David MacLeod, who had been on the lam for more than a year and a half, in the lobby of his hotel. Back on December 8, 1989, acting on a tip that a man had set up a meeting with two boys, twelve and thirteen, in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, the police staked out a supermarket. MacLeod spotted them and sped away in a rental car. After a fifteen-block chase, he got mired in traffic and was arrested. He told them he worked for Beatty, and gave Paramount as his address, the home of his cousin’s production company. He was charged with seventeen counts of endangering the welfare of a child, as well as an equal number of counts of criminal solicitation for luring a minimum of ten boys aged twelve to sixteen out of projects in Brooklyn and the Bronx to motels in New Jersey by flashing wads of money and promising them new clothes and sneakers. According to the police, he paid them $30 or $40 for the pleasure of fellating them.

  At a Bronx courthouse on December 14, after learning that detectives from Queens were on hand to arrest him on like charges, MacLeod took advantage of a break in the hearing to leave the courtroom for the ostensible purpose of making a phone call. He disappeared.

  Toback feels that MacLeod was penalized for behavior that is a lot more common in Hollywood than anyone cares to admit. Either those with his predilections are never detected, or they buy their way out of it. That day in Toronto, he says MacLeod “told stories as if nothing had happened. He was making references to how great Spain was, as if he’d just been traveling, which he had. But there was no context for the travel stories.” Around midnight, they ended up at a Thai restaurant. Toback asked, “‘How long are you going to be in Toronto?’

  “‘Just briefly, it’s just in and out.’ Obviously everybody was looking for him.”

  Nevertheless, they spent a leisurely two hours eating. “There was no sense of depression or despair,” Toback continues. “No one would have known there was a problem. No one knew there was a problem originally.”

  But MacLeod must have seen somebody he didn’t want to see, because suddenly he jumped up from the table and said, “I have to go.” Toback recalls, “He vanished into the night. I never saw him again.”

  THE GOOD news was that Bugsy was slated for a Christmas 1991 release. The bad news was that so was Hook. From one point of view, that put TriStar in an enviable position. With two potential holiday blockbusters, it was faced with an embarrassment of riches. But, as things turned out, “embarrassment” was the operative word. Almost immediately, the Bugsy gang and the studio were at each other’s throats. Beatty knew that Medavoy didn’t have much experience with marketing, and he also knew that it is difficult, if not impossible, for a studio to release two big pictures at the same time. Inevitably, they end up competing for the same resources. Common sense told him that if TriStar had to choose between Hook, the $100 million family-friendly, feel-good Spielberg fantasy based on a children’s classic that was tailor-made for the holiday season, and Bugsy, a $40 million dark, nasty, violent gangster picture, it would favor Hook.

  Ironically, the co-heads of TriStar’s marketing division, Buffy Shutt and Kathy Jones, had a long history—much of it not good—with Beatty that went all the way back to his Paramount productions, Heaven Can Wait and Reds. Shutt and Jones were tough; they had to be to have thrived in what was essentially a male world. Jones denies that Hook got special treatment. “I know Warren felt that,” she says. “But Hook was pretty straightforward. We didn’t do anything extraordinary. We always had Bugsy in mind for the Oscars.” Toback simply brushes this off: “Despite protestations to the contrary, it’s absurd for you to claim that you have two equally important Christmas movies that you’re trying to push against the other studios’ Christmas movies. The question becomes, Which was the Christmas movie? Hook!”

  The principals—Beatty, Levinson, and Toback—were convinced, with good reason, that they were working on something special, with a stellar script and remarkable performances from Beatty and Bening, as well as an array of fine character actors in supporting roles. “That movie was everything for Warren,” says Johnson. “He felt he had a lot on the line. Obviously Dick Tracy informed a lot of that. He was driven to make Bugsy a success.” Adds one participant, “We were dealing with two guys—Warren and Barry—who were obsessed by Oscars. There was a lot of talk about the nominations—‘Are we gonna get this one, are we gonna get that one.’ This wasn’t, ‘This is just a movie, let’s see how it does’; this was a movie that had to win Best Picture. That was driving many of our decisions. So that just added to the pressure.”

  Medavoy made no bones about the fact that he thought Bugsy was a hard sell, which just fueled the paranoia. As far as he was concerned, Beatty was no longer a big enough star—on the order of Harrison Ford or Mel Gibson—to open a movie on the basis of his name alone. Worse, Billy Bathgate, also a gangster movie, this one starring Hoffman, who was Beatty’s age, had opened in November and lost a bundle for Disney. Worried, Medavoy wanted to downplay the mob element and sell the picture as a romance, like The Great Gatsby—also, incidentally, a flop.

  Neither Beatty nor Levinson was shy about pressing his case with the studio. Beatty in particular went into high gear. He had fought this battle in the past and knew all the tricks. In his memoir, You’re Only as Good as Your Next One, Medavoy wrote, “He called me constantly over the smallest things. If a story about holiday movies appeared in the trades or the Los Angeles Times and Bugsy was not prominently displayed as an important entry, Warren would call and read me the riot act.” The star didn’t hesitate to berate Medavoy in front of his staff, and once interrupted him in the midst of a marketing meeting at his home on a Sunday to discuss an article tangential to Bugsy that had appeared in Variety. When Medavoy confessed that he hadn’t yet read it, Beatty chided him, snapping, “How can you be in the business? You are lazy.” Medavoy adds, “He cussed me. It was painful.” Says Jones with
a sigh, “Would he pick up the phone about the smallest thing and try to push that in Mike’s face? Sure. And practically speaking, could Mike have read everything that was in the papers? No. Finally, instead of arguing, you just said, okay.”

  Medavoy says Beatty was involved in every decision, down to the size of the fonts on the posters. He continued, “Warren obsessed over every detail. He spent hours trying to figure out which quotes from the reviews to use and in which order they should be listed. Every photograph, every still, and every trailer had to be perfect, or Warren would order it redone—no matter the cost.”

  According to Jones, “The studio spent way over $1 million” just on photo shoots for the publicity materials. “Name any important photographer, and we went to him or her to shoot Warren, and Warren and Annette.” They used Herb Ritts, and even the legendary George Hurrell, who was well into his eighties, and in poor health. (Hurrell died shortly thereafter, and the “joke” going around the studio was that Beatty had killed him.) Photo shoots at that time cost about at least $300,000 a session, and included fees for the photographer, hair and makeup, wardrobe, catering, and even rentals of architecturally distinguished homes where the photo sessions took place. Occasionally, Beatty would kill an entire shoot. “There were lots of good ones that we probably could have gone with, but it just went on and on and on,” says Johnson, who was alternately impressed by Beatty’s attention to detail and dismayed by his perfectionism. “He would take a simple photograph—not that I was inclined to say, ‘Oh it’s fine, let’s go with it’—and he would find things in it and make changes and changes and changes, to the point where we were just defeated by it. There was a sense that, We can’t do anything good enough for him.”

  Bugsy was not testing well, which surprised no one and alarmed everyone. It was one of those movies that caught it coming and going. Either audiences were totally repelled by the characters, or, reflects Jones, “Even if you fell in love with Bugsy and Virginia, and bought who they were as a couple, to have one of them die was difficult for an audience. Would you recommend it? That was a marketing challenge.” The data indicated that Bugsy, like Billy Bathgate, skewed old. Beatty would say, “But when the kids come to see it, they like it.” Marketing would retort, “Great, but they’ve come to a free screening. Are they leaving their homes to see it? Probably not.”

  Beatty was unhappy with almost every aspect of the campaign. Says Toback, “We had total control over the making of the movie, and we ended up getting it just the way we wanted, but then came marketing and distribution, where it was one fiasco after another. The trailer was atrocious. It was a trailer that made you say, ‘That’s the movie I know I’m not gonna see.’ I kept saying to Warren, ‘We’re really in trouble, people are literally nauseous at this trailer. We’ve got to get rid of it.’ Finally, Barry cut a trailer that was terrific. The bad one had already been attached to three thousand Terminator prints. We were gonna get all these trailers back and put the new one on them. But that didn’t happen.”

  Beatty had an adversarial, accusatory style. He was a blamer, a finger pointer. “He can be a bully,” says Jones. He grilled Shutt about the trailers. The conversation went something like this: Beatty said, “I saw the wrong trailer in a theater in Las Vegas.”

  “I guess they didn’t take that trailer down. We sent another one to replace it.”

  “So you knew there was a wrong trailer up?”

  “Yeah, we told you it would take a while to replace them.”

  “So, are you saying someone in the trailer department isn’t doing their job? Who is it?”

  “Am I on the witness stand? Am I the enemy, suddenly? Okay, it’s my fault.” Shutt was so angry and frustrated, she burst into tears. In her long career, he was the only man who ever made her cry. Even Beatty was shocked and backed off. “It wasn’t personal,” says Jones. “He has tremendous affection for Buffy, but when he’s grilling, he’s grilling.”

  Once the shooting ended, and Beatty resumed the role of producer, Johnson’s position became tenuous. Says Medavoy, “Warren wouldn’t talk to him. He thought he was useless.” According to Johnson himself, Beatty repeatedly questioned his loyalty to the production. “It bothered me a great deal, especially when he would do it in front of Barry,” he recalls. “If I would say, ‘Gosh, I wish so and so’s part had been a little bit stronger,’ he would spin it in such a way that it sounded like I was fundamentally critical of the movie. He was so clever, he was able to twist words and make them sound like they meant something I would never have intended. It was very hard to defend against it. I found myself on guard the whole time. There was a lot of worrying about what Warren was going to think, how do I keep this from becoming an issue with Warren.” To Johnson it seemed as if the pressure to succeed was so great that Beatty was dueling with phantoms. “Part of it was his flailing out,” he says. “Everybody was really anxious. It was not, ‘Let’s see if I can screw with Mark.’ Whatever it was, he really believed it. It was one of those situations where you wanted to say, ‘Let’s deal with something that’s relevant,’ but he was dealing with everything, he was consumed with the movie.”

  Bugsy opened on December 13. For the most part, it got rave reviews. Janet Maslin, writing in The New York Times, said, “Warren Beatty… has found the role of his career.” She called Toback’s script “one of the film’s happiest surprises,” and praised Bening for “sauntering through her role with a sexy abandon that greatly enhances the film’s allure.” Maslin was right. Bugsy is a version of Beatty in extremis, a narcissistic and vain man who entertains a dream of some grandeur and originality, but micromanages it to death (he insists the already completed pool at the Flamingo be ripped out and repositioned, the same way Beatty moved his own pool at the Mulholland Drive house), recklessly incurring vast cost overruns that cost him his life.

  If every movie is self-reflexive, a metaphor for its own production, Bugsy is about a director-producer who courts his own ruination, by brazenly disregarding the budget—Coppola on Apocalypse Now, Cimino on Heaven’s Gate—or Beatty himself on Ishtar. The star was hardly oblivious to the resemblances between Hollywood folk and mobsters. In fact, it was one of the reasons he was attracted to the material. “I liked the idea of this relationship between gangster movies and Hollywood, and the psychosis underneath, and Bugsy’s wanting to be on the screen.” Beatty points out that “some of the studio heads patterned their mannerisms after these guys.” There’s one scene where Bugsy hangs up the phone and turns to Mickey Cohen (Harvey Keitel) in disgust. Referring to his mobbed-up investors, he says words that might easily have spilled from the mouth of any director: “I’m dealing with a bunch of bloodless bureaucrats.… You ask Shakespeare what it cost to write Macbeth? Would they ask Michelangelo what it cost to paint the Sistine Chapel?”

  The first weekend’s grosses were $140,358 (on four screens), and then, after it went wide in 1,253 theaters the next weekend, $4.6 million. It quickly became evident that Bugsy was not performing up to expectations. Beatty responded by turning up the heat under TriStar. He scheduled a meeting with Shutt and Jones and their marketing department on Christmas Eve, and another one on New Year’s Eve day. Shutt attended the former, Jones the latter. They concluded that he was punishing them by tying them up on holidays. Jones recalls Beatty asking, “Can we do two o’clock?” She replied, “‘Yeah, if it really will be two,’ because he has a little issue with time management. I started calling him at three o’clock. It was, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m comin’, I’m comin’, I’m comin’.’ Finally, around 4:30 I called and said, ‘Okay, I’ll wait, but I’m letting the staff go, because they have New Year’s Eve plans.’ He has no concept about other people’s lives. He showed up around 5:30. And of course it was the same meeting we’d had a million times, nothing much got resolved at it, but it was about him wanting attention.”

  If true, attention was precisely what Beatty didn’t get from Medavoy, who inopportunely seized on the week Bugsy went wide to t
ake a cruise down the Nile with Patricia Duff. He told people he had no choice; it was important to his wife. People speculated that Duff pressured her husband into booking the cruise by threatening to leave him if he refused. (The couple divorced in 1994.) Medavoy denies this. “I know that Warren always felt that I was being forced,” he says. “But he’s crazy. I swear on everybody’s life, my father’s life, my mother’s life, my child’s life, it is absolutely bullshit.” Reading between the lines, it’s clear that one reason he left was to put 7,600 miles between himself and Beatty. Says Duff, “That was one place he could get away from Warren. Warren needed a lot of handholding, and he was relentless. Brutal. He’s a true narcissist.” Medavoy adds, “Frankly I’d had enough. I’d had enough of all the junk that went along with trying to keep the movie going, and not getting thanked for doing as good a job as we knew how to do.”

  Beatty reportedly urged him not to go and to pay more attention to his work. When he went anyway, the Bugsy gang went ballistic. “It wasn’t that Mike was just away,” Jones admits. “He was literally unreachable. It might not have been the best choice of a place to go.” Asked Toback, rhetorically, “What studio head is on the fucking Nile the week that a movie like Bugsy that was getting sensational reviews, opens?” Beatty wondered, “I don’t know whether it’s his heart condition or his wife, or his being bored with the business or frozen with uncertainty about how to proceed, but it’s literally like not having anybody home. Nothing is going to get done if I deal with him.” Medavoy responds, “Warren flipped out because I’d left after the picture opened, but there was nothing else that could have been done. And there was nothing I couldn’t do on the phone. You can look at that as an excuse or you can look at it as a dereliction of duty or whatever the fuck it is. What was I supposed to do, sell more tickets?”