Warren Who?

This review ran, in an edited version, in the Washington Post. 

STAR: How Warren Beatty Seduced America

By Peter Biskind

Simon & Schuster, 627 pp., $30

It's bad to get a sinking feeling at the start of a book, but Peter Biskind gives the reader just that in the introduction to his new book.

“Why Warren Beatty?” Biskind asks. “It's distressing to have to make a case for his importance just because no one under forty (maybe fifty?) knows who he is.”  Beatty made his last movie, Town & Country, nine years ago. And it has been 19 years since his last major film, Bugsy, which was a critical success but a box office disappointment.

Since Beatty left the screen, his friend and contemporary Jack Nicholson has made half a dozen films. His rival Robert Redford is still acting on screen, as is Dustin Hoffman, with whom Beatty shared the ignominy of Ishtar.  His older sister, Shirley MacLaine, is still a working actress. Woody Allen, two years older than Beatty, continues to write and direct at the film-a-year pace he set three decades ago, and Clint Eastwood, seven years Beatty's senior, is perhaps the most successful actor-turned-director of our time. In 1994, former studio executive Robert Evans said, “How many pictures has Warren made in his career? Twenty-one? How many hits did he have? Three! Bonnie and Clyde, Shampoo, and Heaven Can Wait. That’s batting three for twenty-one. In baseball, you’re sent back to the minors for that.”

But Biskind is determined to persuade us that Beatty was “one of the foremost filmmakers of his generation.” Biskind’s earlier book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls was a chronicle of American filmmaking in the 1970s, an era heralded by Beatty’s breakthrough movie, Bonnie and Clyde, and he has been trying to get Beatty to agree to cooperate on a book for years. For this book, Biskind agreed to leave Beatty’s current life, as husband to Annette Bening and father to their four children, “off limits.”  And many of the people who know him best, such as MacLaine and Nicholson, as well as many of Beatty’s more famous ex-lovers, such as Leslie Caron, were “all afflicted with a contagion of silence.”  Biskind also refuses to psychologize, telling us almost nothing of Beatty's childhood and youth, other than that he remained a virgin until he was “19 and ten months.” That leaves a 600-plus-page biography with some rather large biographical gaps.

“Even the promiscuous feel pain,” Beatty once said.  If he had gone on to add that obsessive perfectionists cause pain, he would have summed up the twin themes of Biskind's book. Much of it is a chronicle of fighting and fucking. Biskind opens with a scene in 1959 at a Beverly Hills restaurant where Beatty, dining with Jane Fonda, gets his first look at Joan Collins. And so the account of Beatty’s already well-chronicled sex life begins, and the reader who is so inclined can find plenty about what he did and whom he did it with, including not only the usual suspects – Collins, Natalie Wood, Caron, Julie Christie, Diane Keaton, Madonna, and so on – but also some unusual (and questionably documented) ones: Vivien Leigh, Brigitte Bardot, Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

But Biskind clearly intends the sexual escapades to be a sideshow. For him the main attraction is how Beatty’s movies got made. And so he gives us behind-the-scenes accounts of the making of not only Beatty’s best films (among which Biskind includes Splendor in the Grass, Bonnie and Clyde, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, Reds, Bugsy, and Bulworth) but also disasters like Ishtar and Town & Country. The trouble with behind-the-scenes stories is that there are a lot of rumors to sort through, and the sources have memories clouded by time, resentment, pride, and occasionally illicit substances. For every allegation there’s almost always a denial.

Biskind makes it clear that Beatty, “a self-described obsessive-compulsive,”  could be maddening to work with, even on his best films. Trevor Griffiths, hired to write the screenplay for Reds, which Beatty took over from him, calls him “a brute” and “a bully.”  On Reds, Beatty shot what one source estimates as 3 million feet of film – enough for a movie two and a half weeks long -- and he worked a team of editors nearly to death.  There are those who blame Beatty’s flops on his extravagance, his meddling and his sometimes indecisive ways, but Biskind prefers to focus on directors – Elaine May for Ishtar, Glenn Gordon Caron for Love Affair, Peter Chelsom for Town & Country – who were unwilling or unable to collaborate effectively with Beatty.

Beatty holds an Oscar record for having been twice nominated as producer, director, writer, and star, for Heaven Can Wait and Reds. To date, the only other quadruple-threat nominee in Oscar history is Orson Welles, for Citizen Kane. Beatty won only one Oscar, as director of Reds, but the Academy also gave him the Irving G. Thalberg Award as a producer, even though all but two of the films he produced were those he starred in. And in the end, it may be as producer that Beatty deserves the most recognition. Richard Sylbert, the production designer who worked on many of Beatty’s films, claimed that Beatty made the people who worked for him “dramatically better.”

One problem with this book is that it’s too early for a definitive assessment of Beatty and his career. Cultists have been known to save films from scorn and obscurity before, and there are even those who love Ishtar. Some of his hits, including Bonnie and Clyde, Shampoo, and Heaven Can Wait, are beginning to look glossy and tricked-up. Reds has suffered from the current distaste for historical epics. Ten years from now Bulworth may look a lot better, and Bugsy may look worse. Or vice versa.

Beatty himself may yet be seen as either a visionary who deserves more respect or a man who never fully developed his talent. Jack Nicholson became perhaps the most successful of any actor of his generation by working with Roman Polanski, Milos Forman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Stanley Kubrick, John Huston, and Martin Scorsese. But after his early movies with Elia Kazan (Splendor in the Grass) and George Stevens (The Only Game in Town), the only director of the first rank that Beatty worked with was Robert Altman, on McCabe & Mrs. Miller. They fought bitterly, but it’s one of Beatty’s best performances and one of Altman’s best films.

And Beatty could still choose to make Biskind’s book premature. He’s 72, not too old to make a film he has always planned about Howard Hughes, or at least Hughes in his old age, which Biskind tells us “Beatty considers more interesting than the first half of his career.”  And much of Biskind’s book deals with Beatty’s political activities. He worked for George McGovern, who called him “one of the three or four most important people in the campaign,” and Gary Hart. Arianna Huffington urged him to run for president in 2000. He wisely declined, but one wonders what might happen if Dianne Feinstein decides not to run again for the Senate. It’s not like California is averse to actors going into politics.

The Proust Project, Day 59

Where this began
Day 58

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 391-404.

The narrator gets drunk at Rivebelle and gives us a tipsy view of the dining room with its waiters dashing about, at first seemingly chaotically but then, as he mellows, "turning into something nobler and calmer" with "a soothing harmony." He sees the tables as little planets "as depicted in allegorical paintings from earlier times," or as a "planetary system, designed in accordance with the science of the Middle Ages." There is something in the passage reminiscent of Dickens or Twain when they adopt the Martian view of a familiar setting. 

I felt rather sorry for the diners, because I sensed that for them the round tables were not planets, and that they were unpracticed in the art of of cross-sectioning things so as to rid them of their customary appearance and enable us to see analogies.

But what follows is unmistakably Proustian, an analysis of the effect of music on his intoxicated mind: "each musical phrase, though as individual as a particular woman, limited the secret of its sensual thrills not to a single privileged person, as she would have done -- it offered them to me, it ogled me, it accosted me, it toyed with me in seductively whimsical or vulgar ways, it caressed me, as though I had suddenly become more attractive, powerful, or wealthy.... I felt endowed with a power that seemed to make me almost irresistible."


Moreover, the alcohol liberates him from past and future: "I was trapped in the present, as heroes are, or drunkards." It makes him reckless: 

In fact, what I was doing was condensing into one evening the unconcern that others dilute in their whole existence: every day they take the needless risk of a sea voyage, a ride in an airplane, a drive in a motorcar, when the person who would be stricken by grief if they were to die sits waiting for them at home, when the book, as yet unrevealed to the world, in which they see the point of their whole life, still lives only within their fragile brain.

For the moment, even the quest for Mlle. Simonet seems "a matter of indifference, since nothing but my present sensation, because of the extraordinary power of it, the euphoria afforded by its slightest varations, and even by the mere continuity of it, had any imporance.... [D]runkenness brings about, for the space of a few hours, subjective idealism, pure phenomenalism; all things become mere appearances, and exist only as a function of our sublime selves." 


When he gets back to the hotel, he crashes into a sleep that lasts until the afternoon, and is filled with dreams. "The difficulty of digesting the Rivebelle dinner meant that it was in a more fitful light that I visited, in incoherent succession, the darkened zones of my past life, and that I became a creature for whom supreme happiness would have been to meet Legrandin, with whom I had just had a dream conversation." Awake he remembers a woman he had seen the night before: "the young blonde with the wistful look who had glanced at me at Rivebelle. During the evening at the restaurant, many other women had seemed just as nice, yet she was the one who now stood alone in my memory."