Biskind - Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America

A LSO BY P ETER B ISKIND

Gods and Monsters:
Movers, Shakers, and Other Casualties
of the Hollywood Machine

Down and Dirty Pictures:
Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls:
How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock n Roll Generation
Saved Hollywood

The Godfather Companion

Seeing Is Believing:
Or, How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying
and Love the Fifties

How Warren Beatty
Seduced America

PETER BISKIND

Simon & Schuster
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Copyright 2010 by Peter Biskind

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D ESIGNED BY K YOKO W ATANABE

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Biskind, Peter.
Star: how Warren Beatty seduced America/By Peter Biskind.
1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Beatty, Warren, 1937
2. Motion picture actors and actressesUnited StatesBiography.
I. Title.
PN2287.B394B57 2010
791.43028092dc22

[B] 2009022225
ISBN 978-0-7432-4658-3
ISBN 978-1-8473-7839-2(ebook)

To Betsy and Kate with love

You know what I think about these histories that we do on DVD, it makes me think of what Winston Churchill said, History will be very kind to me, because I intend to write it.

Warren Beatty

F INISHING THIS BOOK was like recovering from a lingering illness, although admittedly one that I had brought on myself. I had wanted to write a biography of Warren Beatty since I met him in 1989, when he was shooting Dick Tracy. I had admired his films for a long time. Like everyone else, I was undone by when I first saw it in 1967, vastly entertained by Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait, and stunned by Reds. A veteran of the antiwar movement and a documentary filmmaker myself for a time, I was used to ragged, 16 millimeter black and white agitprop and was astounded that the biggest Hollywood star of the 1970s had given the Gone With the Wind treatment to the Russian Revolution and the formation of the American Communist Partyand gotten a big studio, Paramount, to pay for it. During the reign of Ronald Reagan, yet.

Then came Ishtar, but I was unfazed. Everybody, even Beatty, has flops. As editor of American Film in 1987, I wrote about it myself, and even put him, Dustin Hoffman, and Isabelle Adjani on the cover, in costume, all looking impish, as if theyd just gotten away with something, which, as it turned out, they hadnt. I was besotted, even though he refused to talk to me while I was working on that piece, delegating his cousin David MacLeod to do the honors, and only later, when it was too late, did he say he wished he had. Very Beatty-ish, as I would learn.

I first met Beatty in person, as opposed to the characters he played, to the ability to look at a movie and have your own feelings about it, because its obliterated by all this chatter that comes from us about our work, andI always say its like somebody coming into a kitchen where there is a seven-thousand-pound souffl, and stamping their foot. The next day, I returned to New York. Eventually he was ready to talk to me about Reds, for Vanity Fair, some fifteen years later! Beatty is not a man who likes to be rushed.

After the movie had wrapped, I went back to L.A. and spent a good deal of time with him, again trying to draw him out on the subject of Tracy. It was almost impossible. He would parry questions, change the subject, make a joke, lapse into silence, or answer a question with another question. In those rare instances when he did respond, he insisted the answer was off the record. Sometimes he would tell me two thirds of a story but withhold the punch line, so it made no sense. In 2008, at the American Film Institutes Life Achievement Award ceremony, his oldest friend, screenwriter Robert Towne, locked eyes with him and complained, , he is saying something. What she didnt say is that the reverse is equally true; even when he appears to be saying something, he is saying nothing.

Still, his evasions were orchestrated with a light touch. It became a kind of game, with me asking, and him not telling, in a million different ways. It was frustrating, even infuriating, but it was also kind of fun. As writer-director Paul Mazursky once put it, and shrewdest guys I ever met. Strange only in that hes [so] close to the vest. If youre in a relationship with Warren, hes running it on some level. But he makes you feel nice.

By that time in the course of my work I had met a lot of stars, but never met anyone quite like him. Indecently gifted, he acted, he wrote, he directed, he produced. A brilliant mind. Tough. Analytical. Inquisitive. Hoovered up everything and gave back nothing. Funny. Self-deprecating. And good, or reasonably good, politics. And he was classy, had style to burn. Nothing and no one ruffled his feathers. He was Captain Cool, Mr. Natural. It cost considerable effort to present a lacquered exterior like his, but he pulled it off with seeming ease. Grace. That was the magic of it: you never saw the gears grinding. Norman Mailer, when he wrote about Beatty in Vanity Fair, called it charm, tried to define it, and gave up.

I had never been a big believer in vaporous concepts like charisma, which I filed away with karma, vibes, and auras, but Im embarrassed to report that when I was in his presence I felt an almost palpable sense of well-being, as if I were a better person because Warren Beatty liked me, or pretended he did. When he came to New York, he would call me up, and we would have dinner. I never quite understood it, thought, Im not even writing about him now. Why isnt he hanging out with Dustin, or Mike Nichols, or Elaine May? Why me, a mere journalist? Because I reminded him of Leon Trotsky, which he once told me?

Going to a restaurant with him was a sobering experience. We were often alone, because he never ate until nearly midnight, and the place would be kept open for him. The matre ds were all over him. It was Mr. Beatty this, Mr. Beatty that. Occasionally we would go earlier, mingle with ordinary mortals. There were always women at the next really close together at a cocktail party talking out of the sides of our mouths, somebody will actually ease in between me and him, and Im looking at the back of their head. It might even be a guy. He flirted mercilessly. I remember eating with him in a joint in the Valley (San Fernando), when he started a conversation with one such woman, cute, with one of those pert, Southern California noses, and asked her what she did. She gazed at him with a glassy, doe-caught-in-the-headlights look and said, in a small voice, Im an organizer. I could see his antennae go up, as he smelled a kindred spirit, maybe a union organizer, or at the very least, someone like him, a political junkie.